This is my story. (Delayed post from Friday August 27th)
Last night around 12:30am I sat down at my PC to google search something, my homepage opened as normal (tdev.ca- the development website for my company). I continued to search whatever it was I searched and then I decided to work on Shorten This! When I opened up tncr.ws the page stopped with a "The remote server is not responding" message.
Right away I went over to my server to investigate what the problem was and it was completely frozen. Natural instincts told me to hard restart the server (as much as I hate doing that because of how hard it is on hardware), because nothing else was making it respond.
As it rebooted I continued back to my PC to carry on with other things and when I came back the server was frozen again, only this time it was during the boot sequence.
My troubleshooting instincts kicked right in, and I opened up the server, dusted it out and checked for any scent of burning.
Nothing.
Still freezing. Try one more time; I get to safe mode...frozen again. Okay now there's a real problem, so I try booting the system with a single drive to try and cancel out hardware failure...freezes again.
Now I pull out my POST card (Power On Self Test). It didn't reveal much since the system was in fact booting only it froze part-way through.
My next try at safe mode revealed that there was an event log entry in System showing an error with the perc2 driver (the SCSI redundancy controller), but I thought to try the motherboard battery first. So after a trip to London Drugs for a new 2032 battery, replacing it and then 3 restarts later (including some BIOS tweaking along with and update to the PERC2 controller firmware)....it finally worked.
Here's where it gets interesting, it worked for another day or so until BSOD-ing saying there was a Hardware failure, and again begins the freeze/retry process. I'm not sure why it worked at all in the first place if there was still an underlying issue, but needless to say I continued at it and eventually got a more insightful BSOD telling me "a secondary process did not respond in a timely fashion".
I had success after this when I pulled proc #2 put of the system (Dead Processor, great).
Problem solved, and during this ordeal I had managed to set up a temporary backup server provided by my website designer Tom.
So having a backup server in place and my main web server functional again, I decided to start over with the server while I had the opportunity.
This means setting up Windows Deployment services on a dedicated server, re installing Server 2008, and then reconfiguring a clean system. So far so good on that front.
I've also put an order with Dell for a new 2U PowerEdge 2970... to be continued.
Tensioncore Administration Services started just as a web hosting/game design company, and the legal business name was made as it is to allow for future possible business ventures/services.
As this year has un-folded, I've seen and had my business grow hundreds of percent over last year (2009 was my first full fiscal year), and I'm starting to mold what will be a company that lives up to it's legal name!
Project Bird Feed has been officially launched. It is still in "Beta" and it has been given a new brand: Tensioncore Web Services, a brand that will see a website develop into the ultimate URL services provider. tncr.ws
A prospective business partner has come to me regarding a new organization he wants assistance in developing (of which we've already named and branded), marking the way for Tensioncore Administration Services first official "Administration Service" and business partnership.
I've downsized them from their original sizes to hopefully speed up the gallery, however it may still be a little slow (because of huge pictures, or a slow connection to my server).
So I've had a recurring problem with Roundcube, in that certain email accounts will not delete emails, instead just show an error "Could not move the message", and return to the previous folder with the message still there.
This problem occurred as well when those certain email accounts tried to move a message from the main inbox to another folder such as Saved, Spam or a self-made folder (which sometimes making custom folders didn't even work).
So the solution is in config/main.inc.php:
Change THIS:
So, after a really intense month of work and the start of the summer in Vancouver finally, we are getting really involved in evaluating various Gsame Engines to be used by our Video game development.
Currently Blender 3D version 2.5 is being developed via re-developing the entire software, so it's given us time to look at the big picture and review our options.
The main pro's for Blender are that we have extensive experience developing/3D animation/3D modeling using it.
Cons, well our first con to date has come up following a meeting I had with a rep from NaturalMotion regarding using their product: Morpheme.
After a great hour and a half meeting with their rep, I feel this is the best possible solution to many issues we face at the current stage of development.
Firstly, we can slipstream development of numerous tracks into 1 track, secondly, they have extremely personal/professional support for their product, whereas Blender does NOT. Third, we have more options to comb through, as NaturalMotion prefers we use a game engine for which they've already created integration for their product.
The last fact being said, I WOULD in fact be happy to front a team to develop a new integration for Python and Blender 3D, it could be a goal/intention of our development project.
What I haven't been mentioning is my evaluating of XNA/XBOX's game kits. That is a whole other story; lets just say it's not out of the question, and will create another area for the team to expertise in.
In any case. The Dog Food Project moves forward and the Video Game is taking steps closer to real life!
This is a URL Shortening service which requires no sign-up, and offers great simplicity. Currently it shows you all of the URLs you've made shortened links for, based on IP.
The back-end functionality is in fact better than bit.ly, ow.ly as well as tinyurl. I can make sure the URL is real very accurately, it protects against anything other than HTTP, HTTPS or FTP addresses, it takes into account common url typos, and it also avoids duplication, by checking against already made Hashes as well as URLs that have already been processed.
My intended functionality which is in the works behind the scenes is to have a search engine to search for a specific URL's previously created Hash, and when found it will immediately show you the information on that link including total clicks and date created.
An API is in the design phase to allow developers to create and account in order to get API code to have their own applications and websites access the Hash making functionality of the website.
I have planned on buying the domain tds.ca for this website, and its hash lengths to start (for the first 40 thousand or so hashes) will be 4, therefor making all links made by the service shorter than any of the competition.
To add some punch to this I have a planned aggressive marketing strategy in place to promote it as inexpensively as possible.
5:27 pm - Post Category: Nickness Posted from my BlackBerry Storm
Alright so to start off my mid 2010 round of updates, I've added a few really handy scripts to my site (which I'll explain below), I've made the site navigation significantly better and I have a whole lot of ToDo's to get a better feel going on.
So the handy scripts I mentioned are 3 in total (to start); an AJAX web based Image Map generator, a Javascript shrinking tool (removes js comments and whitespace in js code) as well as a CSS shrinking tool (which accomplishes the same goal ad the JS counterpart).
As for my layout, I've widened the website to 1000px, because how many people actually use monitors with a resolution less than that anymore? Even the new netbooks output wider res!
I've finally had some inspiration for a nice looking navigation too! I felt there is no need for the links to Tensioncore and Tensioncore.org as they were redundant anyways since they are on my sidebar already.
Finally the dreaded list of things todo is getting more realistic and my blog is starting to fall into my vision for creating a freeware blog project.
I intend to add some core functionality as: multiple picture uploading, possible fckeditor/tinymce post composing, directory listing with file edit capabilities, a php code shrinking page, and lastly on the major projects is to make a Blackberry App allowing you to post right from your berry without the use of a web browser!
I've already added some good code such as Image editing, post editing as well as some nice social bookmaking links on individual post pages.
Yesterday marked our first (and very successful) formal business trip. The trip consisted of Tom (my business partner in Tensioncore Design Studios), Janice (girlfriend/contributor) and myself.
We did a day trip to Victoria, traveling via Pacific Coach lines from Downtown Vancouver to Downtown Victoria. The trip started at about 2am when we had to take a nightbus from New Westminster to Downtown Vancouver in order to be there for a 5:30am boarding.
The traveling portion of the trip consisted of the bus going to Tsawassen for the first ferry at 7am, then from Swartz Bay to Victoria by 9:30am.
The ferry was smooth sailing and we actually arrived in Victoria at 9:15am. After a detour to the mall for coffee we had officially started our day in Victoria!
The intention of the trip was to take photos for design reference, as well as to develop the main storyline/plot of the game.
Over lunch at the mall we essentially flushed out the entire storyline of the game including the 2 main characters (yes I said 2), including all of the major details of the game which will set ours apart from the competition.
By the end of our day the trip was hugely successful including me taking almost 600 photos, a tour of Parliament, all of our main characters main locations were idealized, and a few major points of the game had been established.
We took a personal detour around 4pm to Beacon Hill and the beautiful shoreline and some nice pictures.
By 5 we were very happy with our accomplishments and we decided to call the day 2 hours early and opt to take the 5:45pm Bus back to Vancouver instead of the 7:45pm.
Its time the unnamed proof of concept game I've been working on for years be developed.
The project has a new team (for now), and with this team I will make the game finally happen.
The project is being brought back from the dead as business with our Web Hosting is starting to speak for itself. Unlike previously stated, we will continue to use the Blender 3D game engine complimented with Python coding run on Windows.
It all officially starts today with what will be my master development plan and timeline.
Nickness