The Hidden Blade Assassin's Creed in Depth

Nice! Can't wait for faster loading time. This forum has been somewhat slow...

Will flapping our arms really hard help with the migration?

I'm doing it right now, just in case.

In spite of Lisa's vigorous arm flapping, the migration isn't quite complete. I've been testing the site on the new server group and it basically works but has a few cosmetic errors. Once those are fixed we will switch the site over. There won't be any down time during the switch.

I had to cancel the January stabby chat and this month's Featured Member column. stabgal and I are in our beautiful new house and need some time to unpack and get settled in.

Fear not! I will work harder!
I will flap my arms just as vigorously as Mom so that we may keep the site afloat, if not manage to shift its position to better servers! I will work harder!
All animals are equal. But some animals are more equal than others

I had to stop reading immediately I was laughing so hard.

I remember hearing that before in an old cartoon where some animals run a farm. Is that where you got the quote from?

It's originally from Animal Farm (1945), a novel by George Orwell.

Yeah, that's it. Can't believe I remember that after all these years.

Do you think a simple, FUS RO DAH. Would help?.

EA, one does not simply QWOP into Mordor.. So uh, I dunno. Might not work.

I find it amusing that you remember Animal Farm as an "old cartoon" rather than a classic work of satire. It's right up there with Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Candide.

I've read Animal Farm twice (both times before you were born) and remember it well. Here's another famous line: "Four legs good, two legs bad!"

You must read a lot then. I don't read much, and even then I'm a slow reader. It took me forever to finish reading Eldest (sequel to Eragon). I had to check it out of the library at least a few times, renewing it whenever possible.

High School killed my interest in reading. There were so many books I had to read for English class that I absolutely despised such as Catcher in the Rye, however I remember reading Animal Farm in middle school and I loved it. Since we had been learning about the Soviet Union in Social Studies I understood all the references to Communism and thought it was a very well written satire.

"Four legs good, two legs better."

i remember reading about Animal Farm in school, a basic summary.
don't remember if we actually read the whole thing though

The migration is complete. I've updated the DNS name servers to point to the new server group. It may take up to 3 days for DNS propagation to reach you. During that time, please do not update your user picture. If you update your userpic on the old server, everyone on the new server will see the generic blue and white placeholder. In other words, you'll look like Jack-Reacher.

Everybody should be on the new server group by now. I'm taking the old server offline. Please report any problems to me. I noticed a glitch with the Mediterrano color scheme not displaying the orange header this morning. That has been fixed. Feel free to change your userpics again.

Boring day. Saw this for most of it:

The top banner of the Mediterraneo theme is still blank when I view the Recent posts page on my iPod. It displays fine on the homepage and is not a major issue for me but I just thought I'd let you know, stab.

At least you saw something. I'm sure many folks couldn't access the site at all.

Today I'm angry at the support staff of our web hosting service. First they gave me the wrong information (DNS name server, it's a long story) and then when the site went down they didn't respond to my requests for help. They're just now getting back to me... the next morning. Never mind. I diagnosed your mistake and fixed it myself yesterday.

Okay, thanks. It happens to me sometimes too. I thought I knew how to fix it but it keeps coming back.

Okay, I've calmed down a little bit now. It turns out that they emailed me the correct info on January 24. I never received it because my email account was broken for a few hours that day due to the migration. This problem I could have anticipated and avoided with better preparation. So, my fault for dropping an important email.

Later when I asked for that important information they told me the wrong thing. That's an honest mistake, I guess. What still upsets me is that they didn't provide support when the site went down yesterday. I happened to find the correct solution by trial and error. If I hadn't, the site would still be down today.

Regardless whose mistake it was, it's a bad idea to deal with an angry guy with "stab" in his name.

I'm currently using Firefox. Its really fast now !.

Good! I hope Vesferatu is satisfied with the page loading times now.

For me the most exciting change is more disk space (over 13 times more than the old server). This gives me room to clone the site and test upgrades on the offline version before publishing them to the live site. We also have more space for locally hosted videos.

I love you stabguy.
I love you IanX04.
I love you Lisa.

I kind of love everybody. It IS pretty damn fast. I feel like, in this post, right here, expressing my sincere THANKS for the existence of this site.

So.

TheHiddenBlade.com.. Thank you. Thank you for being alive. You're such a good site. Everything about you is brilliant. You never cease to amaze me. Forever yours, DAZ.

I imagined the last lines in Ezio's voice. That voice can make anything better.

Yes indeed it can amico mio.

I'm pretty sure this is fixed now. Please test it again on your iPod and let me know if there's still a problem.

Lol I like how you mentioned iPod. Someone's done this before.

It was also an issue on my computer but it's working fine on both devices now. Thanks, stabby.

It rarely happened to me. The trick to finding the problem was waiting for you to log in, Patrick, and checking the error logs.

Haha, clever!

Does the site register somebody logged in when they open up the site in a browser then? Because I'm always logged in (other than when I randomly get logged out, probably due to cache being cleared) but I'm guessing it doesn't always show me as online?

Something like that. It considers someone to be online if they've loaded any page within the last 10 minutes. So someone who was here 5 minutes ago but closed their browser is still considered "online" while another person who has been here typing in a forum post for the last 20 minutes is considered offline. It's a limitation of the HTTP protocol. Websites don't know what a user is doing until they get a page or post some content.

Five years later... we are upgrading The Hidden Blade's web server again. It will still run on a Server Group setup. The biggest difference is that the new servers will have solid-state drives (SSD) so files will load faster from disk. I'm stoked about getting an updated operating system with the latest web development tools.

Again we are expecting minimal downtime. That didn't quite work out last time. If I get sufficient notice from the IT team, I will share the anticipated time of migration with you.

The migration will start this Thursday night at 9pm Pacific Standard Time, midnight Eastern Standard Time or 5am Friday morning Greenwich Mean Time. It may take up to two hours. The downtime should just be a few minutes within that two hour window.

Migration is complete. It didn't go as smoothly as planned. What a surprise. The site was down for about 3 hours. At least it was during overnight shift for most of us. I stayed up until the problems were resolved.

You may have noticed that the site was down today and that pages are now loading faster than ever. This was not a scheduled upgrade.

The Hidden Blade had outgrown its database server and was sluggish for the last month or two. Today it got so bad that the site failed to load at all. We did an emergency migration to a more capable database server. The site seems to be firing on all cylinders now.

I was thinking it was just me this entire time! Glad it got to working again.