Yes, this makes *5* of them now. Every last one of them I've bought in the last 2 years now is dead or dying. I've already turned the previous 4 in for warranty replacement. This one will make the 5th.

After investigating the usual causes for blue screens of death - bad drivers, incompatible software, rogue code, etc - I've come to the conclusion the drive itself is showing the same signs my servers showed before. These things manifest more subtely on Windows boxes and if I hadn't suffered so many failures before I might have missed it entirely.

So once more, Hitachi will save my behind from another big fat mess. And to think, I just put the bloody drive back into a brand new motherboard and CPU and this is the thanks I get. At least the data is still readable so I can take the drive in and use the cloning machine at work.

And again, for the love of God, nobody buy Western Digital! This is just plain stupid!

Yet another Western Digital drive is on its way to the grave. Yesterday out of nowhere the other server that didn't get new drives began displaying signs that it's dying. It might have shown the first early warning last month when the CPU fan was replaced. The system rebooted and locked itself in a system wide file check that uncovered numerous disk errors, but it appeared to fix itself.

Obviously that was an illusion. I came home from work to check the box and found the system throwing all sorts of bad node errors, it refused to allow logins, and had to be forced off at the power switch. The filesystem went through another forced check after booting up.

So I get to spend part of this weekend on another drive replacement. For the love of God, don't buy Western Digital! Their quality has gone down the shitter in a relatively short time. This will be my FOURTH dead drive in a year. 

Finally after months of painfully slow changes that led to more changes that led to still more changes, I've gotten past the compiler! AFKMud 2.1 will now compile clean, launch with a relatively clean log, run for as long as I want it to, and shut down without reporting leaked memory.

This just leaves having to cleanup implementation decisions that didn't go quite as planned, like making the command table into a std::map. I hadn't counted on that wiping out the ability to set command priorities. So that will need to be undone. I apparently also broke one of the basic mob keyword lookup functions and the results of that are somewhat.... strange.

All in all, after all this time, it looks like the string converson has gone remarkably well. Things certainly could have turned out much worse. Of course, this is only the first stage. I still have many classes and structs to convert, but the bulk of it is done now. 

Attention Smaug Enthusiasts!

The new SmaugMuds.org site is officially open. The intention of the expanded site is to become a more generalized Smaug resource site for Smaug MUD admins, developers, builders, and players. With this effort we hope that more interest will be generated for Smaug and that the combine membership of the former AFKMud and SmaugFUSS sites will be able to interact more productively instead of splitting their time across two sites. We welcome anyone who has an interest in the Smaug family of codebases to join and bring their knowledge and experiences to the table.

The site covers Smaug, SWR, SWFOTE, AFKMud, and any other Smaug derivative you might be interested in. We have an extensive list of bugfixes for each of these codebases as well as a sizable collection of Smaug related areas, codebases, and snippets. So come on by, join the fun, and lets build the best Smaug resource site possible.

Any outstanding links to either the afkmud.com domain or the fussproject.org domain will need to be updated to point to the smaugmuds.org domain.

SmaugMuds.org - The Smaug MUDs Community Center

Spending some much needed time away from work this week. Getting some stuff done I've been putting off.

The Arthmoor servers are getting some nice new Zalman CPU coolers. Don't buy Thermaltake crap. The last *FIVE* fans I've bought from them have *ALL* blown their bearings already. After a lousy 6 months. The other blown ones were less hassle to replace because people seem to get upset when the servers are down :P

I'm finally getting off my lazy ass and going in to have my eyes checked and get some new glasses. Do you think maybe 4 years was a long enough wait? The eye doctor sure thought so when I called this morning. He booked time on less than a day's notice. How cool is that?

Going to be looking around for some new shelving to finally get all my dragon status up off the floor. Leftovers from having dismantled and replaced my old computer desks with a single new one.

If I have time after that, I need to shop for a new bed. The one I have just isn't cutting it anymore and should have been replaced a long time ago, but it may yet wait.

In between all that, I'm making some excruciatingly slow progress on converting AFKMud over to widespread use of std::string. Serious pain in the ass, that. This has taken weeks and weeks longer than I would have liked and I'm sure it's due to my rather limited knowledge of C++.

So I'm sure everyone has moments where they lack the motivation to do much of anything MUD related. But what do you do when that non-motivational feeling drags on for awhile and you find yourself looking for something else - anything else - to occupy your time with?

I appear to be running into this myself lately. Though I still enjoy coding, I find myself more and more simply not wanting to even though I've got things lined up I'd like to get done. I usually end up messing with the Sandbox code on my blog, or fiddling with something in QSFP, or even just sitting online for awhile BS'ing about stuff with others. Even pointless random surfing takes hold and before I know it half a day has gone by :P

Maybe I'm just being silly. I wouldn't say I'm burned out just yet, but it's certainly possible. So what all do people do to find that missing motivation? 

Alright. One minor victory for me anyway. I've managed to piece together the smoldering remains of my blog at http://www.iguanadons.net after almost a full week of backdating posts. I tossed in a couple of new entries during the effort since I wanted to get them down while they were fresh in my mind.

Don't ever let this happen to you folks. MAKE BACKUPS. Automate the process if you're lazy, like me, and force yourself to keep up on it. Complacency is the devil. 

Perhaps the server was mad. Maybe it was seeking to avenge its sibling that got its fans cleaned. Or possibly I just have the worst luck of anyone alive. Regardless, one of the Arthmoor servers decided to kill a harddrive. Dead. As in click of death dead.

The irony here was that I was just about to make a global backup of all of the MySQL databases. I think it sensed my intent. The command issued, all the files were created, and then nothing. The thing began clicking and seconds later the kernel panicked and the system rebooted. It became stuck at the BIOS screen, unable to reboot.

The timing on this couldn't have been worse. The middle of the night, on a Saturday. I've got a voicemail in to an emergency data recovery place that will not void the warranty on the drive but I'm not sure I'm too comfortable with the fact that the call went to voicemail. But as the last backups I took from the site are months old, I don't really see there being much of a choice. Damn life for not providing me the time to do this stuff properly.

I'm not particularly harsh on computers. It's not like I torture them to death with SETI folding or any of that other CPU-intensive crap. The servers lead decent lives as far as hardware goes. So why should a drive that's barely 6 months old just up and die? Is it too much to ask companies to make quality equipment anymore?

So anyway. Until I can get this resolved, the following sites will be offline:
www.arthmoor.com
www.smaugmuds.org
www.iguanadons.net
www.alsherok.net
Server02 for the MudBytes IMC2 network
My mud
And several other sites belonging to others.

Another 30 seconds was all I needed too.

So last night one of the case fans on one of the servers was making funky noises. It sounded like any other dirty fan I've had, so I broke out the air can and opened the case. The dust cloud was bad enough, bud once the fan was cleaned it started to rattle. So I did what I've always done. Tried to thump it on the hub. The fan apparently didn't appreciate it because it fought back, biting me on the pinky finger :/

Now I have this nice red gouge on the side of my finger next to the nail. It's a bit raw and makes typing somewhat less than pleasent. Which is a bad thing since my job requires so much of it. At least I didn't bleed on the server.

So the lesson learned here? Turn the blasted computer off before trying to clean the fans. And don't stick your fingers in where they don't belong. You're likely to get bit. 

Maybe my mind is parched. Perhaps I'm in a dream world. It could be God even made a mistake. But since when does water fall from the sky!? Water is supposed to come from those magical faucet things all over the house. Or from hoses and sprinklers and stuff. It's even bottled and sold in stores. But... from the sky?!?

In case you coudln't tell, it rained today :P Something we haven't seen in 150+ days here. It didn't last long though. Certainly didn't rise to the level the weather sites were saying. But it came, and we needed every drop.