Is There Food

→ Diablo 3 Error Message Meanings

Tue, 15 May 2012 10:25:34 BST

Error 37 - The server is full. This is likely due to high login traffic. The only solution is to keep trying to log in.

Do we really live in an age where it’s acceptable to have such unintelligable, non-human readable error messages? Why even report this to the user as “Error 37” - the user should be told plainly and clearly, in their configured system language, that the servers are full.

And don’t even get me started on the root cause - the fact that Blizzard underestimated the demand for a game that had 2 million preorders, and forces every single player to be online regardless of their intention when they get the game up and running.

Maybe a DRM-free alternative is in order…

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→ Draw Something player numbers plummet

Thu, 03 May 2012 14:33:25 BST

Figures collected by US data tracker WebMediaBrands suggests that the game’s daily active user count has dropped from around 14.3 million to 10.4 million between 2nd April and 2nd May.

The problem with Draw Something is that when people started to first install it - and there were only a handful of people aware of it - it was a harmless bit of fun. Once it reached a certain critical mass it became a full time job to keep up with all the games that were on the go. Before you’ve responded to one round of drawings, another round has come in.

I think as a result, a lot of people are less active than they were, or have given up completely. I’ve certainly slowed down, so apologies to anyone reading this waiting for me to take my turn!

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Major Reboot

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 09:33:18 BST

A while back, this site got hacked. A vulnerability in a PHP script that was part of an older theme meant that the site was compromised and flooded with junk; spam content and links were injected into the current theme and database and I had to rummage through and clean them out. The entry point wasn’t even in the active theme, but the fact that the file existed on the server was enough to provide access.

The first I knew of it was an email from Google telling me the site was being pulled from their search results, because they’d detected all the gunk that had crawled its way into the inner workings of my blog.

That planted a bit of a seed: maybe I should rethink this WordPress thing. I have nothing against WordPress, nothing at all. And it’s not like the vulnerability was within WordPress itself. But the software has evolved, iTunes style, into something that’s a long way from what it started life as. There are vast amounts of functionality and overhead which I’m never going to touch upon. And then there’s the overhead of updating to newer versions of both the core software, and plugins. On top of that I’m a habitual fiddler, and so I like to learn new things and try to solve new problems.

So, I’ve totally rebooted the site. To say that it’s now running “on” Marco Arment’s Second Crack isn’t entirely accurate - Second Crack takes a directory structure full of text files, adds a soupcon of special sauce, and spits out a set of static html files - the old school building blocks of the web. So I suppose the correct description is that the site is now “generated by” Second Crack.

This has its perks: I can now post to the site using any text editor I like. Whether I’m on my iPad, iPhone, Mac, or PC, I can easily start to write a draft or publish. This should mean I post more - there’s no login involved, no pages to navigate through, no text fields to fill in. It’s just a case of opening a text file, and typing some words.

I’ve posted a lot in the past about writing again, about rebooting the site, and about changing the way the site looks. I know, because I’ve read them as I migrated everything out of a MySQL database and into text files. But I hope that this time it’s true. And I want to start to collect my thoughts and opinions on events, films, and technology with a view to look back on them later on. I’ll touch on this more in another post.

One casualty of the migration is the site’s comments. In recent months, the comments have become little more than abuse and spam, so I don’t think they’re a great loss. Historically though there have been some good points, and I intend to try to post them onto the bottom of older articles so they’re preserved. If you want to comment on a newer article, I’d encourage you to do so through Twitter, Google Plus, via email, or using your own site.

After 6 1/2 years on WordPress, it’s time to shake things up and try something different.