I is sad. Dr. Steel retired.

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Dr. Steel (album)

I was wondering why I haven’t heard almost anything new coming from Dr. Steel ever since I learned about him 2 years ago or so, and now I found out he’s gone into retirement ever since 2012 🙁

 

Nobody seems to know exactly why, but a facebook posts attributes it to personal reasons and possible a rabid fan experience or two. Sure, the kind of image Dr. Steel created could possibly attract some unstable people, but to get so bad as to force him to retire as his persona was taking off? Wow! Things must have gotten really out of hand to make him give up 12 years of efforts like that >_<

 

That was a very sad turn of events 🙁

 

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Intense Debate comments deactivated

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Image representing IntenseDebate as depicted i...

I’ve been using intense debate for the longest time, being a very active proponent of their comment system, hell, even getting a gift T-shirt for my efforts; but now I find myself having to disable the comment system and go back to the default wordpress comments.

 

The reason for this is that for some reason their comment system has somehow been compromised by spammers, and blatantly obvious spam comments are coming in constantly, and that is even though they are supposed to be going through Akismet which is excellent at catching this kind of stuff.

 

I didn’t take this decision lightly, I contacted support who initially thought comments were coming through the internal comments, but once I pointed to evidence that it is coming through ID, they said they were going to “look into it” and that I should fight spammer with IP bans, which is a ridiculous idea.

 

In fact, another reason why I’m ditching ID is that they have completely dropped the community ball. I have no idea what is up, but I got all excited when they got acquired by Automattic, and was expecting to see ID comments start to get rolled out in WordPress.com and stuff which would have been awesome. Instead the ID people literally fell of the map. Their active blog pretty much died, making 1 post in a year, their support either doesn’t reply, or gives worthless suggestions like IP bans on spammers. And most importantly, their development all but stopped. I haven’t seen any improvements in ID every since the automattic acquisition and that’s just sad.

 

I was content to stick with ID anyway since it’s better than my theme’s built-in ones, but now that it has also become quite a lot of work to scrub my comments every few days, enough is enough!

 

Perhaps it’s time to look into Disqus whose developers seem to be actually interested in improving and making useful.

I’m ba-ack!

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front view of the cluster of Wikimedia servers...

Yea, baby, yea!

I have finally moved away from Dreamhost after 6 years of being a loyal customer. After barely being able to run a simple murmur server and 2 wordpress sites without multiple reboots per day due to lack of resources, even on a VPS, enough was very much enough.

So I have finally decided to make the jump into a different host which came recommended from a friend and until now I’m very glad I did so. Not only is my speed blazing fast compared to dreamhost, not only do I have 10 times the available resources, not only do I have full root access and ability to customize my sites fully, but I’m also paying less than 1/3rd of what I used to!

Now this is a significant difference and I really struggle to understand why I had to pay $15 extra a month just to get 300 lousy MBs of ram which was a also a hard limit that caused by whole server to reboot during each resource spike? Why indeed did 2 wordpress sites with no particular frills and a mumble servers with 5 users caused 1-10 reboots a day for years? Why couldn’t dreamhost support in troubleshooting this very worrying performance of their services?

In the end I really had myself to blame for a lot of it. I was far too lazy and a bit scared of going to fully rooted hosting and got very complacent and used to the user-friendliness of the dreamhost panel.  It is all kinds of awesome how easy dreamhost makes it to set-up and maintain sites, emails, DNS entries, cro

n jobs and so on. It’s such a pity that their performance has been in the toilet for the past 2 years for me.

I could even have lived with the 2-5 seconds per page load, or the visible lag I has in a simple ssh connections to their servers. But 20 server reboots in a day while dreamhost support were telling me it’s my own damn fault for running vanilla wordpress, was just too much.

All that was part of the reason why I’ve been so inactive in blogging lately as well, aside for my newborn child and my new hobby in octgn development that is; it was just so frustrating trying to blog in a server that took second to load each panel and literally went down every time I hit “publish”.

I hope that I’ll start writing a bit more now that my snazzy new system doesn’t seem to be making it a chore to put two words together on the net 🙂

Android: Netrunner on OCTGN really picking up speed

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I haven’t been blogging much lately because my interest has been mostly consumed in my development of the Android:Netrunner OCTGN game definition and its peripheral activities, mainly casting games, streaming, promoting and of course playing it 🙂

Just recently we finished the biggest tournament in the world with 128 international participants playing over almost 3 months (1 matchup per week), and as part of promoting the event and the game, I took to casting the matches so that we can later post them online for other to watch. Many many cumulative hours of recording later, and I’ve created a youtube playlist of a significant number of the top matches from the tournament, mostly casted by yours truly, along with my personal NBN of co-casters and video editors. Take a peek if you want 😉

Not only that,but once the tournament was about to finish, I decided to take it even further and livestream the final four matches, just to bring some extra excitement. About 20 people tuned in to watch the final matches and we had quite a bit of commentary and all around fun. Take a look how it turned out.

But other than that, I now regularly stream my games online as I play them, just so that I may raise interest in this great game and also inspire others to do the same. And in fact I’m glad to say it has worked brilliantly. Already we have almost half a dozen players who stream their games regularly, and we even had some cultural complaints about the practice. All this is great news, as it shows a healthy community that will only keep getting larger and more active.

And we already have plans for new leagues and tournaments and people keep inventing more ways to enjoy this game and spead the joy around. The more interest all these generate, the better the actual game will do in sales, which is just great for everyone involved. The future looks bright!

PS: Feel free to follow me on twitch.tv or youtube. My games might not be as well commented or edited as some others, but I make up for it in quantity. 🙂

Making Android:Netrunner videos

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Just thought I’d throw this out there. I’ve recently started recording my Android:Netrunner games played with on OCTGN in the very vibrant community that has formed around it. To make things easier for me, I’ve been streaming directly to twitch.tv and afterwards, for the more interesting games, also exporting them to youtube.

This is what it looks like for now

If you’re interested in catching a look when I’m playing, my twitch.tv channel is here, and if you just can’t get enough A:NR from me only, do a search for “Netrunner” and you’ll find that a few others are starting to do the same as well. I do hope this catches on 😀

If you are interested in doing the same thing yourself, it really quite easy. Simply download and install the Open Broadcast Software which is free software and thus has no limitations on streaming (I initially tried with some of the things they suggest on twitch.tv, but all of them cost or are limited in some way). To stream OCTGN correctly, make sure you record the whole monitor (trying to record just the OCTGN window doesn’t work in my experience) and also set it so that it catches layered windows. Record at exactly your monitor’s resolution to avoid resizing artifacts.

If on the other hand you’re interested in just seeing the more interesting of my games, you can subscribe to my Youtube channel.

Apropos youtube channel: In case you haven’t yet gotten into Android:Netrunner on OCTGN, I’ve also made a tutorial video on how to use OCTGN to play, which should take you through all the basics you’ll need to use the engine efficiently and comfortably to play. If you take a look at my games, you’ll notice that there is very little fiddling around the engine, which makes playing online very pleasant compared to the usual card game experience.

Now go forth an run streaming!