Squidpunch.com

Well Ymiris finally talked me into doing the podcast I always said I wanted to do for 360friendspot. head on over and check it out.

First episode, a pilot if you will, where Ymiris and Squidpunch get together to talk about gaming in general, some of the recent releases and gaming news. This is the first time I was actually running the recorder, doing the editing, etc - so hopefully it came out all right for you guys.

If you want to send us some feedback or be on the show email us at podcast@360friendspot.com

head on over and check out the show: http://www.360friendspot.com/2008/05/12/friendcast-episode-1/

Some of you know of Steve519 from the XBLRadio days and perhaps his video minute.  Or maybe you now know of him from Platform Nation, or perhaps the Gamers Pub Podcast - in any event his family as grown recently - Congrats to MR and MRS 519!

4/27 4:15am’ish 6lbs 11ozs 
 

So the UnlockTheAchievement.com contest is over - that turned out to be a pretty interesting little project to build - and it ended up being a pretty good success in my opinion.  As stated before it brought to light some issues on 360friendspot.com which I am looking into and moving some stuff around on the site, so if you see something funky that is probably why.

This weekend we recorded Episode #5 of the 360voice podcast.  It is a short and sweet episode, mostly just to officially release information on the big news releasing today about 360voice’s merger with gamerdna, on that same subject you can hear me speak a little on The Xbox podcast.  It is a great move for the site which will allow it to expand, flourish, and shine even more then it does today.  ChangeAgent and Fatty Chubs have all ready (mostly) moved up to Cambridge, and are rocking out as full staff at gamerdna.  No longer do they have the distraction of a day job in the way of working their 360voice (and other gamerdna properties) but the day job IS working on those sites.

I am sure there is more, but another post is just a click away when I remember what it could have been

Not 100% sure what is going on - I got an email from the host about high CPU usage and was attempting to look at the things they provided me as troubleshooting steps, but they seemed to have disabled the site for now.

I know the traffic was up more then it has been in quite some time, but it wasn’t high enough that it should have been affecting the CPU usage of the shared server (which is what they mentioned in the email from support).

So I am currently waiting for a response from support about the site, and if the site was going to be this active on a regular basis I definately would have to start looking into upgraded the hosting plan again - all though it really looks like there is some problem with one of the apps I have running on the site which is what is slowing it (and apparently many other sites) down.

I’ll post more if/when I know more to post!

Today was an interesting day to say the least.  For starters, I was in charge of a pretty big change at work - the task at hand was to change a single server which currently houses about 5 live websites, as well as the databases for those webistes and about 15 or so windows applications (and even an access 97 database ’application’) to be split into two brand new beefier servers.  One for those websites, and the other for the database server.  So that involved updating all those sites to run against a remote database and updating all of the applications to point to a new database server - and just for some extra spice we upgraded from SQL 2000 to SQL 2005.  Today was the fall out from that change this weekend - which actually had very little issues, so job well done i guess!

Next on the plate was this little site called UnlockTheAchievement.com - it seems to be a bit popular, maybe you have heard of it?  I knew it was going to do pretty well, but it has surpassed (at least my) expectations…I am just glad that the code all works - though the server has had its trouble off and on, I don’t think it is code related.  The server has been hit with a pretty good amount of traffic from, xbox360fanboy.com, xbox.com, digg.com as well as the 40 some community sites which are hiding the images as well as promoting the site.  From that site has been a pretty good amount spillage over to my blog here (I have never had this many visitors!) as well as 360friendspot.  Both of them are hosted on my shared hosting plan - which apparently is taking a pretty big performance hit from the new found traffic (oops!).

…If you code it….they will come

Yeah, the title of this post means absolutely nothing.  I just was having a hard time coming up with a title for a post about pretty much nothing [:)]  I haven’t blogged in a while, on any of my sites actually so I figured I should take a bit of time and change that.  Be warned, when I start thinking “I haven’t blogged in a while”, the posts usually end up just me rambling away, mostly about things you couldn’t care less about.  You have been warned!

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So I noticed some problems with my 360voice plugin when playing around with my 3FS blog (yeah thats right anyone can now have your very own blog at 360friendspot, go get one!).  I decided I better put together a quick fix (essentially the hyperlinks in your blog were not properly processed, and showing the actual html that creates them), while I was at it I put together a little 100% club type thing as part of the plugin.  If you didn’t know the 100% club images I built over at 360voice were done using the public APIs - and I once again used them here.

One word of warning - I used cURL this time (since my PHP knowledge has expanded a bit since the last time I worked on this plugin  (almost 1 year ago since the last update actually!)., and because my hosting actually does have cURL - I just didn’t know it.  I did not however modify the old functionality to be based on cURL or use my new way of processing the XML - maybe next update! 

So if you use my 360voiceAPI plugin for wordpress - please head on over and download the update : http://www.squidpunch.com/supported-services/360voice-plugin/

This is the time of year when it comes to food for me.  Just a few weeks ago was St. Patrick’s Day, which if nothing more means you can get Shamrock Shakes at McDonalds, oh how I love Shamrock shakes.

If that wasn’t enough, this past weekend was Easter, which means tons of candy random plastic eggs, and usually a big family feast.  My other secret obessesion is peanut butter eggs.  I probably gained 10 pounds in just peanut butter eggs this weekend, and I have a pretty good supply left - because everyone knows I like them, and feeds my obsession.

Speaking of obsessions, I picked up a copy of Lost Odyssey which i always seem to spell wrong (I looked it up to write this sentence) and I have been playing a bit of that lately.  I seem to be pretty bad at it though because every boss battle I make it to ends up taking me 10 or so tries, oddly I go back for more.  I have also been playing Super Mario Galaxies (up to 45 stars), since I felt the Wii wasn’t getting its full value of usage.  I never played the Smash Brothers series, so I don’t completely see the draw to that game, but I will at least give it a rent sometime soon - maybe it will be the game to make the Wii take over my main gaming focus…but I doubt it.

I have some interesting things in the works at 360voice, just doing some further testing and tweaking, my goal is to have it online this code night (tomorrow for those of you that don’t stalk the dev blog).  I also opened up 360friendspot to allow for each and every one of you gamers the ability to have your very own blog - for those of you that want that kind of thing.  You dont have to set up anything or manage it, thats mostly done by me - and I plan to provide themes and plugins that you guys request, so head on over and sign up for one, just another way to make the friend spot, a spot for friends!  User blogs was a pretty common request a while back, hopefully it isn’t too late and people actually use the feature.

So I had no clue what to title this post, hence the title above.  Normally it’s pretty easy “INSERT AWESOME GAME NAME HERE” COMING! or something to that effect, but with all the changes with 360friendspot, I am going to try and seperate my blogging duties.  What exactly does that mean?  Well I will probably keep this more of a personal blogging approach, about myself, gaming, coding, etc - kind of like the status report whenever the mood strikes.  Those of  you looking for news and such - check out 360friendspot.com, I (and my blogging buddies) will keep that kind of thing updated over there to the best of our abilities, over here you will see just ’Squid Stuff’, at least for now - lets see how it goes

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So I have to admit, normally movies based on games and games based on movies aren’t great. Some of the recent “kid” games based on movies look pretty good actually though, so maybe the industry is finally taking a turn for the better. I really hope so because these recently released screenshots of The Bourne Conspiracy are looking pretty sweet, and I have enjoyed most of the ‘Bourne’ movie series. The screenshots come to you from Sierra Entertainment from the upcoming High Moon Studios game ‘The Bourne Conspiracy’ - enjoy!

Click here to see all 9 shots in larger high res detail