Archive for the ‘shit happens’ Category

I’m sorry for the long silence, I didn’t have anything new to show really.

Tuesday was all about getting my new displays calibrated (it takes a couple of hours per display). Today, as I was assembling the textures I realised that there was overlaps that I could never fix so I had to scrap a bunch of the work to rearrange the UV clusters so they won’t be this tightly packed.

Which means I’m rendering textures, again.

On the flip side I added a few wooden materials for the heel spine, but I still need to recover this wasted time.

This is going to be a long night -_-.

There was a technical problem at the server farm, because of it, the KDC delivery and update servers went down for about two hours. If you tried to buy some KDC product and experienced failed deliveries today, please send me an IM in SL and I will deliver the missing products.

I want to apologise to everyone, I completely forgot to wish you happy holidays, but I was caught up in the preparation of my “Xmas family trip” from 23 to 26. And I came back with the flu (thank you for the gift, whoever you where but it really wasn’t necessary!)

I am now trying to recover, in order to be somewhat fit for new year eve.

I just spent most of friday and saturday fixing a problem with my web server. For the non tech savvy, most typical web servers are composed of 3 distinct parts that must work together to produce your average dynamic content website:

• The web server itself (Apache in my case): responsible for delivering and presenting the pages aswell as receiving the user inputs.
• The database server (Mysql for example): responsible of storing, retrieving and performing database operations.
• The script engine (PHP ): this vary from language to language, but in essence, it is producing most of the dynamic content on a website.

Those are essentially 3 completely independent pieces of software that are glued together.

Now back to my problem. I am running a multi site setup, which means several websites are running on the same machine, to do this cleanly, I was using an apache module called mpm_itk that allows me to neatly separate each distinct site on its own apache/php instance.

Since about a week we have encountered problems, with instances segfaulting (that’s the technical term for crashing 🙂 ). apparently the problem was due to the php module we where using, it is prone to crash when running in a prefork system like this one.

To overcome this we moved to php_fpm, which runs the php script engine separately from the web server, what’s even better is that we can run several “pools” of it, one for each site, all we have to do is to specify the socket for each site in each virtual host configuration file.

For those who are interested by this alternative to the regular php module.

I apologise for the long time without anything new, initially I thought that I was going to take a short break, waiting for my replacement display adapter to arrive ( it’s really hard to work without a dual display once you got used to it ), but I just received a mail of the company explaining me they had stock problems on this specific spare part and that I would be delivered as soon as they receive it.

I thought about putting another poll up but I think I will postpone that after I’m done with the next project.

I’m apologize for the long inactivity, it was completely independent of my will. My computer decided to commit suicide Tuesday and i only got the replacement parts today.

Stay tuned for something new very soon 😉

I was done. All the hoods where ready, and i only had to make the product pictures. And then as my avatar smiled at me between screenshots.

This is where  I realised that i forgot to alpha out the mouth and teeth section, I have to fix it and re upload everything…

Well… more work to do.

-EDIT-

Another issue with the ponytail hole alpha, this isn’t my lucky day 😀

I’ve started working on something that was bugging me for a while, i really want to have a better array of hoods available at my shop. So this is what I’ve been doing today, or more accurately: what I’ve been failing at today.

It looks bad, the texture looks fine, but it sucks when worn. I must have done something wrong somewhere.

Anyway, I’m not sure this is going to be the thing I will release next, maybe i will work on other things too. But i thought that after a week of silence, I should at least tell what I’ve been up to.

Sunday I came back from a little visit to my family and it was really hot. So I took a long cold shower and stood in front of a blowing fan. Today is the result, it’s the middle of the summer and I caught a pretty bad cold.

My time is spent sleeping , sneezing and trying to play a game or two. I hope everyone understand that, in my current state… I cannot work.

The last post was a bit… on edge, I want to thank the support team for processing my rollback this fast.