Hey all! This month’s update will be a bit of a downer. :(

First off, the site’s been down for an incredible 4 days. Root cause: fatcow randomly decided to change the ip address of the hosting server. This would have been fine, except they didn’t update DNS to match. I don’t know why they did this. _They_ don’t know why they did this. They didn’t even have any alerting on this. Luckily I had an external monitoring service setup (uptime robot FTW!). This isn’t exactly a high traffic site, so I figured I’d be patient. Unfortunately, their much advertised 24x7 is a bit disappointing. The night shift wrote very good English in the ticket updates, but really had no clue at all what to do or what could be wrong. Finally I called up during my lunch break, and had to insist that the issue be escalated. Once there, the root cause was identified quickly, but in doing that fix, somehow a dozen other things broke. Rather than sit around trying to figure out what all that was, I had them just completely wipe the site content and I restored from a local backup. Couple tweaks later and everything was all set. I like that their servers are 100% wind powered (I’m a big fan of renewable energy sources), but quick searches around the internet tell me this particular issue is not unique to me. Thus, the site will be moving to something a bit more reliable once I can get it all set up.

More bad news. Leaving Lucerna’s monthly updates are suspended until further notice. It’s a lot of work trying to run all these things by myself, and I just don’t have the time. Honsetly, it was going downhill in quality cause I was rushing it anyway. I’d rather be able to put out good stuff less frequently, than post trash that no one will read cause I have a deadline.

As for new things to look at, there isn’t much. I’m still plugging away at the video game project, but it’s slow going right now. I’m mostly working on infrastructure. I’ll post it as soon as there’s an actual game that can be played, even if it’s terrible.