When it became evident to me that I was not getting the best deal on the block in terms of web hosting, I was amazed. Then I moved. I keep the domain name registered and hosted with my evil German henchmen so I can change where my domain points at a moment's notice so I have the constant threat of packing up and leaving any web host I don't like. Which I did.

Some of you might have seen the silly HTML page I typed up saying that FSDEV is moving. We have moved. Have you noticed how nice and snappy page loads are now? It's like there's a page cache in memory or something... plus it's a cheaper deal, too. How 'bout that? More memory, more CPU, more disk IO, less money. prgmr is my new hero for the next little while.

I have UNLOCKED self-registration for the site again because thanks to Khalsa I have discovered a way to add text fields to the registration form that need to be filled out in order to register. The trick is that I can write a regular expression so if the answer isn't the one I'm looking for... no joy.

So of course I'll be working on rotating through interesting questions which are both unguessable by bots and completely researchable by humans. Hint: Wikipedia is your friend.

If you're too lazy to do a few web searches in order to get on my site, then quite frankly I don't want you here - because you're probably a spambot anyways.

So happy times, come flood my site with traffic. That is all...

In order to cut down on the amount of spam and bot accounts being registered on this site, I have LOCKED user account registration. If you want to obtain an account, please contact the site administrator, cmiller (lordsauron) via email or on IRC

I apologize for any inconvenience, but I run a no-spam operation here. I will be working with the Redmine community to make improvements to the registration system that will make it better for everyone.

Most recently I looked at the registered users list and found 99 users. I know of maybe four that actually use this site. So I went through and locked out around 78 accounts or so. If I locked you account and you didn't want it locked, I'm sorry. Drop me an email and I'll fix it for you.

Additionally the registration method has been changed. All new accounts must be cleared by me - no more spammers simply mass-registering.

Although given the vast number of accounts registered by spammers, I wonder why there were no spam tickets, forum posts, or wiki edits. Just lucky I suppose!

Today is great, for I have upgraded the site theme! The site's theme is called Squeejee and is built and maintained by the one-man web force Mischa_the_Evil. If you run into Mischa in IRC (freenode network) give him our thanks! He deserves it!

Also new and exciting is that the site has remained up for almost a week now without my having to molest it back into working order! Granted, it restarts every hour, however it's a lot better than it was. It'll be on observe-and-report for a little while longer before I deem it cured, but it's showing great progress.

This being the first news item in almost 80 days, I want to re-iterate that FSDEV is not dead, we're still here and still writing code!

I added the option to use Git repositories for projects. You can access any FSDEV Git repository from !http://git.fsdev.net/reponame. In addition I also restored the traditional !http://svn.fsdev.net/reponame locations for Subversion, though I would suggest migrating towards Git, as I don't want to create any more Subversion repositories.

For now you can still access Subversion through !http://www.fsdev.net/svn/reponame, but this may be removed at a later date.

Some have noticed that the site has been acting up in the most rude of ways (it would randomly time out and refuse pages and Subversion traffic), I have reverted the change that seems to have precipitated this bad behavior: SSL.

This does mean that you'll have to switch your repositories to http://www.fsdev.net/svn/repo_name. I'm sorry for that, but I'm doing my best to bleep! this bleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep! piece of bleep! in the /dev/null.

Our sister company (well, rather our child company... FSDEV has been around since mid 2003) has successfully launched, and is now live, selling stuff! Firestorm Gaming Servers is a company selling low-cost, high-performance gaming servers. How can they sell more for less? They use the trick I use to keep my tiny site happy - virtualization. They rent really big, scary machines (quad-core Xeons, 16 GB RAM, etc.) and virtualize many smaller gaming servers on them. Unlike running a game client, where loading graphical and audio resources eats a fantastic amount of memory bandwidth, a game server needs some RAM, some CPU clockcycles, a network link, and that's it. I've run servers (I run servers) that don't have a mouse attached to them. In fact, the mouse just gets in the way, and the graphical system just takes up resources. A mouse is something you use to indicate which terminal you wish to type into, anyways.

So now you can go and buy cheap, fast gaming servers. This corporation is using the Firestorm name with permission, and was founded by a Firestorm Developer as well. So have fun, stay safe, don't smoke, etc.

-- Chris

In order to help make interactions with the FSDEV server more secure, I have added a self-signed SSL certificate to the site. When you log in or use the Subversion service, all traffic will be redirected to use SSL. This will provide better encryption, keeping your password and username safer from any potential theft.

This did, unfortunately, completely screw up the subdomains. All Subversion repositories have moved from their old location at !http://svn.fsdev.net/projectname to !https://www.fsdev.net/svn/projectname. All information is still intact, although you may need to make a unified diff file, delete your old working copy, check out another working copy from the new location, and then apply the unified diff file to the new working copy. In my testing I found that using a simple svn switch https://www.fsdev.net/svn/projectname did not work.

Thank you for your patience as I continue to tweak this site.

Through great heroism and doing epic battle with my webserver, I bring you upgraded software! Redmine 0.8.0 Release Candidate 1! The upgrading part wasn't terribly hard. The part where I fix all the darn broken Ruby packages wasn't. I had to install a manual build of Ruby and then a manual installation of Ruby Gems, etc. Took me three hours. At night. In bed on my laptop. That's why it was heroic: I sacrificed sleep to bring you better software.

I do that on a regular basis, actually, but that's mainly because I have bad sleeping habits.

And yes, I do have a halo in real life. ;-)

Original image credit: Blizzard Studios