Tag: news

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Site News

Site News #7: Routine Changes

Hey guys, it’s been way too long since the last site news, but better late than never?

To start off, you’ve probably noticed the new theme. This will definitely require some more work, as right now, it’s far too stark for my tastes. As with any new theme, it’ll require a bit of a learning curve, as I’m not sure what the best way to liven it up is… However, it was designed to coexist well with WordPress’s new editor, which also has an uncomfortable learning curve.

All this is to say: I need to learn CSS.

Next, the privacy policy has been updated to include some new verbiage and to accommodate some new plugins that are being used. All links should be up-to-date now as well.

Finally, some additional security measures have been put into place.

It really surprises me how much people are determined to break into any site, big or small. It just goes to show that security by obscurity is nothing to lean on. Using the new security measures, I’m alerted to any potential tomfoolery anyone tries, and can take steps to mitigate it.

That’s about all there is for now. I just thought I’d let you know that we’re still here… we have to say that far too often.

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Site News

Site News #2: SSL and Creamery

Hello again, everyone.

As you may know, this site has suffered from the lack of SSL encryption since the first day it was online. In those early days, I didn’t really know or understand the importance of encryption in general. As I gained more and more experience, it became disturbingly apparent that encrypted connections were imperative to not only my own security, but the security of all our subscribers.

However, I still hadn’t the motivation to both generate a key and have it signed (although I did generate an unsigned one for my storage use). Finally,

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Site News

Site Outage 8/30/16-8/31/16 && Site News #1

Hey, Daniel here. I apologize for yesterday’s outage. Obviously I should have warned here ahead of time, but it was intended to be a quick patch and upgrade, but it quickly became much more of a nightmare than that. Luckily, I had the site backed up but it wasn’t easy restoring original functionality.

We have some additional services running in the background that are used internally. One of them was falling out of maintenance, but upgrading that required an upgrade to the web server software. While I was well aware of the config changes I would need going ahead, something unexpected happened

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Summer 2016 Update

“Rando posts.  I’ll get around to it reeeeaaaal soon.” – me, January 1, 2016

As it turns out, college tends to take more time than high school.  I would normally start working on summer projects in April, but this time I couldn’t until finals week (at the beginning of May), and even then, I couldn’t do much because it was finals week.  But, now that I’ve had a couple of weeks to rest, it’s time to start Summering.

So here’s the deal for this summer.  I don’t plan on releasing anything new, and have no immediate plans for announcing anything new, either.  However, I began looking at Unity over my Winter Break (using this book to start out with, but it’s turned out not to be especially useful for anything beyond the absolute basics – just an introduction to the editor and the kind of things you can do with it), so we may see some terrible Unity games (or hopefully, some good ones) in the not-so-distant future.

On the other hand, I plan on having a new post here every Sunday over the Summer, and probably beyond.  Most of them will be rando posts, but there will also be occasional news updates.  If there’s news.

Speaking of rando posts, I have a plan for them.  I will make three of them pertaining to a certain topic (the topic of the current set is education, for instance), then do a follow-up post with any new information or further comments that I may have, as well as what the next topic is going to be.  I plan on the third education post for this coming Sunday.

Until next time, enjoy this little gem I found while I was doing research for the next rando post.  The Paulding County GA schools probably don’t really want this out in the wild, but I figure if Google can find it, then it’s fair game.  If nothing else, I at least think page 25 is worth looking at [link]. I’ll be back Sunday with the lowdown.

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Good news

Ever since I added support for game controllers, Electric has had horrible frame rate problems; on the Asus Transformer I’ve been using, I have been consistently getting frame rates below 20 frames per second.  WELL.  Earlier tonight I fixed the problem!  I had been trying different things to optimize it for months* with little impact before I finally figured it out.  It was trying to load the controller every frame, even though it was already loaded before the game starts.  I made a goof when trying to optimize controller inputs.  I deleted the erroneous line, and all is well.

RC1 will be out soon (Valve time – trends suggest that school causes a dramatic decrease in productivity).

*Months of school time is more like weeks/2 of summer time.