More or less back to normal
Things are starting to get back to normal around here. It is funny how when you have one problem... you start having all sorts of unrelated problems that you never have had before. That has been this site lately.
Badges are back... entries are generating... replication seems to be ok after some radical changes. Tomorrow will be a big test given that we have altered a lot of stuff. All you can do is cross your figures. As much as you can test a dozen users here and there, it is a totally different ball game when you throw almost 80,000 at it!
As always we will keep you in the loop... and keep the emails coming. They really do help us track down specific issues. Thanks everyone!
You guys rock! 80,000, that's awesome, I'm glad to be on of them!
Posted by: Sean | March 04, 2007 at 09:22 PM
Great site! I appreciate the hard work, being a web master is a thankless job (I know).
One issue you may or may not be aware of, looks like some of the special characters in the blog text are messed up (Ascii/ISO/Server Codepage Issue?) (I.e the character for TM and the tilde N in Pinata show up as ASCII block special characterss.)
Posted by: Jerry Lees | March 05, 2007 at 12:15 PM
Jerry - Really? Can you send me a link to an example? The encoding should be correct.
Posted by: Trapper Markelz | March 05, 2007 at 12:17 PM
Sorry about that... I hate it when I get half information. (Even worse when I give it.) JLees is my gamer tag, the pass through link should be correct now to point to my Xbox's blog. The current entry (yesterday's entry) should show it for NFS Carbon and Viva Ninata.
Thanks!
Posted by: Jerry Lees | March 05, 2007 at 02:21 PM
Jerry - What is SUPER strange is that you had Viva in your 3/3 entry and in your 3/4 entry it is messed up... nothing was touched between those two days, so that is REALLY weird. This must be related to one of the other errors that we randomly started seeing. Thanks for reporting it.
Posted by: Trapper Markelz | March 05, 2007 at 03:26 PM
Huh, weird. Not a problem at all.
It appears I didn't play it during the data window yesterday. Looks like I'll need to "let my daughter play the 360" to get it (Viva Pinata) into the blogs tonight. ;-)
Dang... the horror of it all!
Posted by: Jerry Lees | March 05, 2007 at 05:15 PM
Alright I figured it out... beware technical information follows:
To help speed up the daily replication, we removed our largest table from the replication process, a table that isn't even used on the front end. We did this by deleting it from the database and putting an replicate-ignore-table command in the mySQL config. Turns out that using this command has a bug that breaks the encoding of the OTHER tables you want to replicate... strange but true...
So we created a blank version of the replicated table, removed the ignore command and now everything seems good again. I regenerated Jerry's entry and it replicated over with no issues.
Ahhh the fun. These are the things that kill you.. the "bugs" for completely unrelated things!
Posted by: Trapper Markelz | March 05, 2007 at 06:58 PM
Yeap! Looked like a encoding problem to me too! Glad I could help. Keep up the great work, and enjoy the "vacation".
Posted by: Jerry Lees | March 06, 2007 at 11:21 AM