I missed the Christmas.

Pissed off.

EDIT: I don’t intend to break the silence anytime soon but this was too funny:

I mean after all, 1.81c wasn’t a bad patch, It was a good patch, one of the best ones so far. Infact 1.81 so far is turning out to be one of the best patches ever introduced to DAOC, All because Scott Jennings took over as the head guy smacking Mackey down after Catacombs.

Jennings has done a great job since he’s taken over, We’ve gotten Argramon, DR, TOA fixes, Class Fixes, and Classic servers for those who didn’t like those things.

EDIT2: Ahaha! After becoming the producer of DAoC we also discover that Lum is now Internet Relations Manager for Mythic:

Scott Jennings, Internet Relations Manager for Mythic Entertainment, a.k.a. Lum the Mad, added his wisdom to our discussion of instancing in online worlds. He has joined our forums and linked his reply in response to Brad McQuaid and Raph Koster’s comments about the subject.

Really busy these days, huh? I’m waiting for the book as well.

EDIT3: Mythic pushed on the test server another huge patch.

Lots of changes in Ralm Points mechanics and classes. I wish I could comment but I don’t really feel I can contribute in a meaningful way. While I can understand some of these changes, some look rather obscure or I cannot figure out the reasons behind or what is the intended purpose. On the boards I’ve seen a bunch of players complaining but again I don’t think I have the competence to contribute with comments that aren’t just vague and imprecise assumptions.

Which brings to my critique. Here above there’s a quote from a player that again somewhat rants against Mackey. The one that the players saw as the responsible behind most of the radical changes to the classes in the past. In particular I remember all the drama when Mythic nerfed the berserks. I remember that I had also a discussion about that episode with Therrik (former wiz Team Leader). He said that Mythic couldn’t have handled it in a better way. The nerf was necessary and there wasn’t any solution to keep the players calm. Instead I had another opinion and I thought that the reaction of the players was adequate and a direct consequence of Mythic’s attitude. And with a different attitude that “trauma” could have been handled much better.

This is another occasion to undeline that old point. Right now huge changes are being pushed in the game. I see some of these as positive, some not incisive enough and some potentially bad. But the most important point is that for many of these I only have a really vague idea of the reasons that brought to these changes. I cannot suppose the line of thoughts that the devs followed to arrive to those changes and I can only wonder what they can be.

This is the critique to the lack of communication. Changes are pushed on the game, some rather significant. But we know nothing about the reasons behind these. We are just served with the patch notes and have to wonder by ourselves what is going on behind the scenes.

Again I don’t find this accettable, nor positive for Mythic. The players have all the rights to get mad if they feel so because they have no way to understand better what is happening and noone is caring to discuss these important changes with them. A two-way discussion, of course.

So I have this huge patch and I wish I could comment and discuss it. But right now I’m just puzzled about it and I have so many questions that won’t have any answers. I could go on with my assumptions, but the problem is that the players are left just with that: vague and imprecise guesses.

Quoting and reversing a comment about Eve-Online: “They surely aren’t making any effort to justify their decisions.”

I’m really not surprised if some players get mad.

EDIT4: Eve-Online introduces real I-WIN buttons. Ahah:

Titans
Bigger than life? These are the daddies of any fleet, inspiring its children with technical bonuses that even scare me a bit. They have the same abilities as Motherships; having a clone bay, corporation hangar and ship maintenance.
But there’s more…

* Jump Portal
Instead of just activating their jump drive, Titans are able to open a bridge to distant solar systems allowing gang mates to jump through. Opening this wormhole comes at a cost based on every ship that goes through, on the mass of the ships that enter and distance of the jumps. So Frigates will be cheap to send through but Battleships will not be. It won’t cost as much as not as dreads jumping on their own but it will be a number you won’t forget once you’ve tried it out for the first time.

Still not done…

* Doomsday Devices
You may have heared rumors of some superweapons that only titans will be capable of using. Some of you have even fallen victim to such a device destroying your ship. These weapons are true and they should not be tested when there are large numbers of friends around, unless you are as cruel as I am. What these weapons do is BIG BAAAAAAAAAADAA BEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeewwn and hurt almost everyone that is in sight, so be careful with your mouse when flying with your friends. These weapons are expensive to use and can not be used frequently (massive reactivation delay, recharge time is 60 minutes).

So the possibility to open portals and launch raid attacks to other system and weapons of mass destruction that finally won’t discriminate between friends and enemies.

Sounds good :)

Who cares if it’s so totally unbalanced :)

P.S.
The staggering possibilities make me squirm. I wrote on Corpnews some of my desires/expectations. I really hope CCP will go down that path. Because it’s so awesomely cool.

EDIT5: Well said.

EDIT6: Related to EDIT3. From the Grab Bag:

Q: How does (insert 1.81 patch note here) affect (insert game element here)?

A: Y’all, this is not a smart aleck answer, so don’t take it the wrong way when I say, “Beats me, log in to Pendragon and find out.” This material is on the test server so we can see if our conjecture and planning is close to Reality Land. That’s what the test server is for. We’re testing as best we can internally, but nothing beats real live player experience.

So go test it yourself because I don’t know your conjecture and planning and I cannot figure out if they are close to Reality Land.

Oh my god, this is hilarious.

I thought it was a joke but it’s on the Washington Post:

The FBI is joining the Bush administration’s War on Porn. And it’s looking for a few good agents.

Early last month, the bureau’s Washington Field Office began recruiting for a new anti-obscenity squad. Attached to the job posting was a July 29 Electronic Communication from FBI headquarters to all 56 field offices, describing the initiative as “one of the top priorities” of Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and, by extension, of “the Director.” That would be FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III.

Hey! I thought the FBI was just about conspiracies and aliens, I didn’t know they even surfed the web searching for pr0n.

“Anti-obscenity squad”? Wow, that “The Filth” comics (btw, a masterpiece) written by Grant Morrison isn’t anymore completely off.

“The Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s top priority remains fighting the war on terrorism,” said Justice Department press secretary Brian Roehrkasse. “However, it is not our sole priority. In fact, Congress has directed the department to focus on other priorities, such as obscenity.”

Obscenity? And who will watch the watchmen?

(comics, pr0n, computer games, rpgs, blogs. Do you need more geekdom today?)

George Clooney’s last movie (“Good Night, and Good Luck”) is simply awesome.

“The actions of the junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad, and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn’t create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it — and rather successfully. Cassius was right. “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

“The line between investigating and persecuting is a very fine one. The Senator from Wisconsin has crossed the line repeatedly. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason. We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.”

“We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we dig deep in our history and doctrine and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes which were for the moment unpopular. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of the Republic to abdicate his responsibility.”

It’s not a stretch saying that the speach is even more actual and strong today than how it was back then (1954). Just in a more subtle way.

We seem to never really learn anything.

For those interested in the argument I suggest to hunt down “Red Hollywood”, a movie by Thom Andersen made completely through “found footage” (some marginal infos here).

It seems working. I messed with the database, reducing its dimension by half, cutting some obsolete parts and editing here and there. If you find garbage text or odd question marks in the past entries it’s because the database got corrupted before I was aware of the problem. I don’t have better backups.

The search engine is brand new and just awesome. Morbus suggested me to try trip search and that’s what I did. It has a few quirks and bugs so you may see SQL error messages on top of the page (the highlight module is also buggy). But it’s still functional and millions times better of the other default, poor version.

I also finally enabled the mighty Spam module 2.0 which is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen (Jeremy is great, really). Hence everyone can now post comments without my approval. I also hacked the comment.module a little so that the titles of the comments default to “Re:” + title of the node. Which would make the “comment block” more usable.

Testing UTF8:

¥ · £ · € · $ · ¢ · ₡ · ₢ · ₣ · ₤ · ₥ · ₦ · ₧ · ₨ · ₩ · ₪ · ₫ · ₭ · ₮ · ₯

யாமறிந்த மொழிகளிலே தமிழ்மொழி போல் இனிதாவது எங்கும் காணோம்,
பாமரராய் விலங்குகளாய், உலகனைத்தும் இகழ்ச்சிசொலப் பான்மை கெட்டு,
நாமமது தமிழரெனக் கொண்டு இங்கு வாழ்ந்திடுதல் நன்றோ? சொல்லீர்!

काचं शक्नोम्यत्तुम् । नोपहिनस्ति माम् ॥

Μπορώ να φάω σπασμένα γυαλιά χωρίς να πάθω τίποτα.

ฉันกินกระจกได้ แต่มันไม่ทำให้ฉันเจ็บ

UnConeD: drupal passes a bytestream consisting of utf-8 data to mysql if mysql is set to a plain 8-bit character then it will be treated as such. if it is set to utf-8, then it is treated as utf-8. but regardless, it is stored in the same fashion

It makes sense. In fact if you convert the tables and columns from latin1 to utf8, the content does not change. In latin1 you see three characters representing one utf8 character. But if you convert the db in utf8 (without changing the content of the fields), the database assumes that the three characters are then three utf8 characters, representing EIGHT latin1 characters. The content remains the same. This is why he says that they are stored in the same way.

My database started more than a year ago without the character encoding. But it always contained utf8 data stored in the classic iso/latin mode. When mysql got upgraded, all my database was automatically considered as latin. But the content in the tables was latin1 representing utf8. And, consequently, the data was sent out properly by Drupal as utf8.

Morb: UnConeD: alright. another stupid question. in mysql 4.1, all the tables are defaulted to latin1 for a charset. likewise, when they are dump’d, the table defs are latin1. that shouldn’t have any corruptive effect on utf-8 data?

UnConeD: morbus: no because latin-1 means, each character is a byte. so the utf-8 bytestream enters and leaves as is. it just doesn’t get interpreted correctly. the only place where it has an effect is on column data lengths

Here you ask the wrong question, this is the point. He is right because he assumes the database is in latin1 and the dump is again in latin1. So the utf8 data is still preserved because always coded as latin1, so retained.

The point is that the curruption isn’t because the utf8 data is converted to latin1 as you assume in your question. But the exact opposite.

The corruption I have in the database is the result of this fucking option that I see if I do a mysqldump -?

default-character-set utf8

I believe that mysqldump, by default, reads my latin1 data (three latin characters for one utf8), taking it as utf8 (three utf8 characters) and dumping it in a ISO-8859-1 (latin1) file.

Basically:
In the web page I have one character of utf8: ( ’ )
In the database that single character is encoded as three latin1 characters: ( ’ )
As I dump the database, mysqldump defaults to utf8. This means that he believes my database data is ALREADY in utf8 ( “ ) so three utf8 characters to dump in a latin1 .sql file. Resulting in this following crap: ( ’ )-latin equal to ( ’ )-utf8.

Morbus: UnConeD: without –default-character-set=”latin1″ on the mysqldump, the dump is corrupted. WITH that –d-c-s though, the curly quotes are fine. where “dump is corrupted” means “the curly quotes are messed up”

UnConeD: cut and paste from a mysqldump WITHOUT -d-c-s: in their 20’s and 30’s. and with -d-c-s: in their 20’s and 30’

I WISH I had that type of dump. In my latin1 database those three characters in the dump are what correctly represent one utf8 character. So it’s all good.

The point is that it’s not what I have in my dumps. Without the latin1 option my dumps show: ( ’ )

UnConeD: morbus: but that’s just the literal utf-8 bytes, what encoding are you viewing it in?

Morbus: no idea.

He is saying that it’s the latin1 encoding of the utf8 character. So if you are viewing the dump in latin, the dump is correct. The point is that I was seeing ( ’ ) in utf8 already. And a friggin ( ’ ) in the latin dump.

UnConeD: there’s your problem. you’re not using a utf-8 locale most likely.

Morbus: so, without the -d-c-s, if I reimported those characters into a fresh db, they’d still be fine?

If the dump you showed him was set in latin1 (so three characters for one utf8) he is correct to say that the dump was working properly. But that’s not what happened in my corruption problem.

Morbus: UnConeD: another question. So, the reason I’m seeing the garbled curly quotes is my shell encoding, fine. So, if I import the what-appears-to-be-garbled stuff, it’d still import correctly? What about if I dumped with the default-character-set (so that it looked fine in my shell) and then reimported? would that too still be fine?

UnConeD: morbus: no because you’d lose all non-latin1 characters

Morbus: on which? the –default-char-set?

UnConeD: yeah the overriding one

Bad. He is wrong here. Because my goddamn database is in latin1. If I export a latin1 database as latin1 there is no conflict. What I override is a wrongly defaulted mysqldump.

Could you forward him this mail to understand if what I’m saying is correct?

—
Thanks to both, really.

Okay. I cannot get more tired than this. In the last three days I just worked on this problem.

All my backups are corrupted. I cannot get a dump of this version running currently because the dump corrupts the database. I cannot upgrade.

It’s fucked. I cannot do nothing, I passed an insane amount of hours on all this and the result is just my site completely broken and unrecoverable.

Thank you.

If you want to have an idea about what’s wrong look here. It’s a freshly installed version of drupal with the database set to utf8. As you can see it’s all completely broken, I even added a dump of the db.

I have no clue if it’s Drupal to be fucked up, or Dreamhost or mysql. I just know that I’m wasting my time in an unprecedented way.

Please shoot me in the head.

P.S.
Before going to sleep:
mysqldump -uuser -ppass -h hostname dbname –default-character-set=latin1 | perl -pe ‘s/\),\(/),\n(/og’ | gzip > dumpforthewin.gz

mysql -uuser -ppass -h hostname dbname < dumpforthewin.sql The perl part is to have break lines in the database to have it readable, since I need to mess with it manually. Goodnight.

I like Drupal (the engine running this site), but rather often they just don’t care about what truly matters. So, beside still not having decent forums, working trackbacks, configurable rss feeds, the archive module and a decent search engine, now we also get corrupted databases “by default”. How fun.

You know, I use to dump the DB in order to back it up for safety reasons. Well, the current Drupal install happily corrupts itself right as you try to dump it. Enjoy your backup.

—
This is a rather serious problem, from my point of view, that I foresee getting rather widespread if not solved quickly. After a few hours of research and an headache here’s what I discovered:

– Mysql 4.1.x adds the possibility to set a collation for the database. This seems a new feature that wasn’t there before.

– By default it seems that every database created or imported is automatically set to “latin1_swedish_ci”. The whole database is set with that collation as you install drupal under that version of mysql or import a previous dump.

– This is causing a serious corruption in the database while exporting it because accented and other utf-8 characters are just NOT COMPATIBLE with the latin1_swedish_ci set.

– This means that if you install drupal on mysql 4.1.x, the very first time you export the database for a backup or whetever else, you’ll finish with a corrupted dump because all the accented characters in the nodes, comments and aggregator items will get replaced with GARBAGE. As -> “Saturday’s Teen People” in the place of “Saturday ’s Teen People” This is taken from my now broken database and since I noticed this too late I now cannot do anything if not manually change every single entry. How fun.

– In the handbook, install.txt and all the other install guides for Drupal THERE IS NO MENTION of the collation. This means that it’s written nowhere how to set the collation and so everyone just follows the standard instructions and finishes with a “latin1_swedish_ci” as it happened to me. Including the text in the aggregator items, node and comment bodies.

– How the hell the DB must be configured now? Because from what I read here it’s not even possible to set Drupal to use utf8 because it’s still not compliant.

So, beside having my database now unrecoverable, how should I set it to have it working properly from now on and be able to back up it without getting unrecoverable garbage text?

Then I seriously suggest you to patch the guides and the drupal package to stop this or it would become a rather large problem considering that following step by step the instructions you unavoidably go toward this corruption problem.

– HRose / Abalieno

—
EDIT – I somewhat managed to obtain non-corrupt dumps. Or at least from now on since the database is still screwed. The “MySQL connection collation” field on the home page of phpmyadmin was set to utf8, conflicting with the database that was set to latin1. Now I have both set to latin1 and it’s better. But the database has still to store odd characters that are then converted when the page loads. Works for now.

Third time I try to build a good guild and third failure in a row, repeating the exact same pattern:

I try to grow it over time, start to see the first results, people collaborating and my ideas producing some good results. This while behind the scenes an infiltrated faction grows inside whithout me knowing anything. Then, with a perfect timing, the drama a-splode on one of the most stupid exuses used as a pretext. The faction that grew strong till that moment organizes a grand leave. It starts another guild and progressively lures in all the other players left, flaunting its now major strength and leaving the original guild laying on the ground, like a dead, empty envelope.

I think I cannot feel more deluded than I am today.

I swear. Last time I do something where I must rely on someone else beside me. People suck.