Goodbye Playdemic

Wow doesn't time fly.

Over 8 years ago I was a short nerdy student trying desperately to find a way into the games industry for my industrial placement year at university. I was about ready to give up hope when a certain "Starboy" (probably) fed up of my winging offered me a position at his company Rockpool Games.

Cannyshammy - feel free to drop me an email, my company is based in Manchester and there is a strong possibility of us taking on an intern.
alex.rigby@rockpoolgames.com
EDIT: Just seen you're looking to go abroad, guess Manchester is a little too close then eh?

(source: http://www.gamedev.net/topic/297068-breaking-into-the-games-industry-is-impossible/page-2#entry2882806)

Little did either of us know the long winding path that would unfold from that moment.

Fast forward 5 years. After their success with Rockpool Paul and Alex approached me with a new cunning plan. They were going to start a games company to make these new-fangled social games that Zynga were redefining the games industry with.

Join an exciting new company making cutting edge games with Starboy? How could I refuse...

Needless to to say the next 3 years were quite a journey. There were ups, there were downs, there were laughs, there were cry's there was even the occasional thigh-rub (still not sure how I didn't get fired for those).

Like all journeys however, they must some day come to an end. I decided that the majority of the world has yet to experience the emotional cocktail of disgust, fear and slight arousal induced by the thigh-rub. So before I reach "that age" I was going to take some time and bring this unique joy to the wider world.

So whats next? Well I have two months of preparation before I embark on an epic 7 month journey through Central and South America, but ill save the details on that for a separate post.

New York New York

Last week I took a trip to New York with my friend Becky. We had an awesome time exploring what the city has to offer.



We departed last Saturday and so fortunately missed the storm by a couple of days. I find it hard to believe when looking at the devastation that Hurricane Sandy has caused that we were there admiring the beauty of the place just a couple of days later.



My heart goes out to all those affected and I hope you guys can get things back to how we enjoyed them last week.

Try Harder 2012

The above is what it looks like from a speakers position at the try { harder } conference. (click to embiggen).

I had indented to write this post a couple of weeks ago, immediately after the conference but STRATO denied that. But oh well, here it is anyways.

This year was the second annual try { harder } conference / coder retreat / brain explosion. I have spoken about try harder in the past but it really is a uniquely awesome event. Its a rather intimate affair  where 10-15 people getting together and sharing ideas and knowledge in the tranquil forests of Center Parks Nottingham.

The format was largely the same as last year. Everyone gave a talk on a topic of their choosing, some were technical talks such as David Arno's on C# (NCrunch, MVC & Mono) or Mattes Groeger's on developing iOS social games. Quite a few talks were on non-technical things such as David Wagner's talk on 'the value of tinkering' or Stray's talk on 'Heuristics, collaboration special sauce'. Each talk was fascinating and the wide range of topics covered adds to the special feel of this event.

When deciding what to give my talk on I couldn't make my mind up. I have been through a lot this year from launching my first business then having it fail to exploring a great many new tools and technologies to creating and launching my first mobile game. Not to mention all the cool things I have had the pleasure to work on at Playdemic. In the end it was a tweet from David Wagner who suggested that I talk about an exciting tool I had been experimenting around with lately; Adobe Monocle.

Adobe Monocle is the new profiler for flash and mobile content from Adobe and really is very nice. It currently still in pre-release and hence under NDA so I had to ask for permission before giving the talk on it. I haven't had permission to blog about it get so if you want to find out more about it then check out this video that Thibault Imbert made a few months back:



I personally think it is a game changer for flash game makers. It makes development so much easier by giving better insights as to what is going on inside your game.

Try Harder is more about simply giving talks however. Each afternoon was set aside for pair programming sessions. Like last year we were given a deceptively simply problem then split off in pairs to try to solve that problem in a test-driven way. The kicker was that at the end of your hour with your parter you then must delete all your work and start again with the next person.

The problem we were given this year was "to find and score the palindromes with a length greater than 3 chars in a given string". Seems simple, but when you get into it, it is deceptively complex. Because of the varied programming backgrounds of the attendees there were many different tools and technologies used.

Of the 6 different partners I had I solved the problem using: Javascript, Actionscript3, Haxe, C#, Java and Ruby using TextMate, Flash Builder, FlashDevelop, Visual Studio and IntelliJ. It was fascinating to see the multitude of ways to solving the same problem

Try Harder is held in the heart of the forests of Center Parks Nottingham. This adds to a sense of "getting away from it all" and I found it to be a really helped with concentrating on what we were doing. In many of the evenings I enjoyed walking around the forests or swimming in the pool or sampling David Wagner's rather excellent scotch whisky that he brought with his all the way from Scotland (cheers Dave!)

   

So if you cant tell I had a great time at try { harder } this year. I think because I knew what to expect this time I could relax and enjoy the whole thing a little more. I also approached the event with a much more open mind which meant I could relax more and enjoy the format.

Bring on try { harder } 2013!

STRATO and the Customer-Support-Circle-of-Doom

Why is it so hard to find a good web hosting company?

About one year ago I announced that I moved hosting from WebFusion over to STRATO in the hopes for higher reliability. This was indeed the case for almost a year. I had no problems, until...

Three weeks ago my blog started to suffer problems, as is clear from my analytics data on one of the domains:



The traffic drops off from normal levels down to nothing in the space of about a week. I was away the start of the month (more on this in a later blog post) and thus wasn't checking the domain. Its only when I received an email from someone informing me about the fact my blog was down that I sat up and took notice.

I immediately tried to access the domains in Chrome but I got timeout for each one. I then tried to remote into my VM. Timeout there too. I then tried hard-resetting the machine from the Strato console, no luck there.

With no other options I decided to call my hosting provider STRATO. It turns out however that their call centres aren't open at the weekend *sigh* so I sent them a mail:

Hi

A visitor reported that my site was down: http://www.mikecann.co.uk/. I cant access it either. I have tried to remote into my VM but it wont connect. I have logged into the Strato backend and tried to reboot my machine. It says it has rebooted, but I still cant login or access my site.

Can you help please.

Mike

Two days later I get the following reply:

Dear Mr. Cann,

Thank you very much for your enquiry to which I am glad to respond.

I can see that the server is up and running , If you are using Plesk please check the domain setting in plesk. If you cannot reach plesk please  work through the following FAQ Article ID: 1360.

Your opinion about our Customer Service is very important to us! Please take some time for our questionnaire - so we can respond even better to your needs in the future. The completion of the form takes only about 3 minutes.

Link to the rating system: https://www.strato-mailcenter.com/quality?ident=bd391e7c-3c076f-13f18d-47938a-aaafba

With kind regards from Berlin,

Craig Laishley
STRATO Customer Care

Well clearly they hadn't actually read my mail and checked that the domain isn't up (this is the main domain associated with my account) they also haven't tried to login to the box else they would have encountered the same issue.

So after some email jousting back and forth and some experimentation with STRATO's non-functioning recovery console I get the following reply:

Dear Mr. Cann,

Thank you very much for your enquiry to which I am glad to respond.

I have taken your server out of the recovery mode for you .You server could also be slow as it is affected my some major maintenance
that is also going on at the moment on our windows servers, which could be causing your server to run slow at the moment  , I cannot give you a time frame when this will be completed as i do not have one myself.

Your opinion about our Customer Service is very important to us! Please take some time for our questionnaire - so we can respond even better to your needs in the future. The completion of the form takes only about 3 minutes.

Link to the rating system: https://www.strato-mailcenter.com/quality?ident=bd391e7c-39a316-13f846-44189a-8050db

With kind regards from Berlin,Craig Laishley
STRATO Customer Care

(Bold added by me)

Okay... I thought to myself... I have just been led round the houses for two days emailing back and forth when only just now they tell me they are having some major maintenance issues, why not tell me that from the start? In fact, more to the point,  why are you performing maintenance, without telling me, that has taken my box down for a week?

I decide at this point, its a good idea to give them a call and find out what is going on. Eventually I get put through to Lee. Lee at first tells me that he cannot give me the reason for the maintenance nor how long it will last. I get pretty insistent at this point that I should be told why the service that im paying for is not working. Eventually he relents and tells me it is to do with their licensing for windows.

Lee explains to me that when Microsoft license the Windows OS to hosting companies they create a child license from their master license. Strato as one of these hosting companies then creates further child licenses for its customers. Apparently something has gone wrong with the master license at Microsoft which has caused every single other license that has been created from it to become invalid.

Lee explained to me that every single Windows VM that STRATO hosts is down. Not only that, every single Windows VM in the world is down because of this master license issue. I was understandably dubious at this as I would have heard something in the tech-news or blogosphere. I decided however to give him the benefit of the doubt as he sounded honest and it took some persuading to get this information out of him that it must be true.

Before hanging up I pointed out to Lee that STRATO should have sent an email to its customers to inform them of the problem. At the very least there should have been a press release or something on their homepage to inform people of the outage. Lee agreed whole heartedly with this and suggested that I send in a complaint detailing all of what had happened thus far, so I do just that.

I get the following reply a day later:

Dear Mr. Cann,

Thank you very much for your enquiry to which I am glad to respond.

We're aware of the issue where users are unable to connect to their STRATO Windows Servers. Our technical teams has been notified and we expect this resolved by the end of the week. We have raise a credit amount of £10, and it will be paid to your credit card in the next few days.

I will contact you around noon to answer any questions you may have regarding this issue

We appreciate your patience, and apologize for the inconvenience caused.

Your opinion about our Customer Service is very important to us! Please take some time for our questionnaire - so we can respond even better to your needs in the future. The completion of the form takes only about 3 minutes.

Link to the rating system: https://www.strato-mailcenter.com/quality?ident=bd391e7c-a2fc8d-13fff2-44cee9-a53fb3

With kind regards from Berlin,

Seth Prince Dodoo
STRATO Customer Care

Okay so it will be ready by the end of the week. I decided to hang on and see what happened.

What happened? Exactly nothing, I was obviously a little angry at this point:

Hello,

So as its now the end of the week. You promised that my VM will be back up again but low and behold its still not up! Also have you decided not to reply to me any more?

I need a snapshot of my data so I can move my hosting from strato. I also would like the email address of your supervisor so I can speak to them about this.

Mike

Two days later I get the following:

Good Morning Mr. Cann,

Thank you very much for your enquiry to which I am glad to respond.

After looking at your contract, I have seen that your sever has been up and running since Saturday 13.10.2012.

If you would still like me to cancel the Server, this is not a problem. I would therefore need to you to confirm this for me in a reply to this e-mail.

If you do wish to keep your server, you will be able to start ordering your domains within the customer service area.

Once again, I would like to apologise in the setup delay that you experienced.

If there is anything else that I can do for you Mr Cann, please feel free to let me know!

I would therefore like to take this opportunity to wish you a pleasant and successful working day!

Your opinion about our Customer Service is very important to us! Please take some time for our questionnaire - so we can respond even better to your needs in the future. The completion of the form takes only about 3 minutes.

Link to the rating system: https://www.strato-mailcenter.com/quality?ident=bd391e7c-c8411a-140d93-40f3ee-9f18a5

With kind regards from Berlin,

Lee Anthony Welsh

WHAT?!??! Setup delay? Im not setting anything up! I have been with STRATO over a year! Its been up since Saturday, no it bloody hasnt! Its clearly not up now! WTF?

I realised that I was trapped in a customer-support-circle-of-doom.

Well that's about the point I decided this company really doesn't care about its customers so im going to move to another hosting provider.

So short of the long, my sites are now being hosted on 1&1 and everything seems to be fine and dandy. Sure it costs twice as much but hopefully that money will ensure a better level of service.

Oh one more thing, apparently STRATO have won awards for their customer service:



*sigh*

</rant>

Malaysia 2012

For the past two weeks I have been travelling about Malaysia seeing a very small chunk of what there is to see there.

We started in Kuching on the Borneo island part of Malaysia, we went Kayaking down the bang-bang river:





And checked out some Orangutans in the jungle:



From here we took a short flight to Singapore, where we explored the city for a couple of days:





From Singapore we took a bus journey to Mersing then a (horrific) ferry ride to the beautiful island of Tioman:





The island itself was beautiful with lush jungles, stunning waterfalls and pristine coral snorkalling:



To wrap up our short visit to Malaysia we headed over to Kuala Lumpur:







And that sadly was the end of our journey, what better way to spend the last evening then in the Traders Tower Sky Bar with a view over to the Petronas Towers:

Playdemic on the Northwest News

Yesterday at Playdemic we had a visit from Ed Vaizey the Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries. As one of the more successful games companies in the North West at the moment he wanted to come and talk to us.

Along with him were a TV crew for the Northwest News. It was a good opportunity for us to show off GourmetRanch abit. Anyways check out the video above. I cant believe they used the Playdemic timeline I wrote on whiteboard in the kitchen including the joke about world domination!

Spring Cleaning & Updated Bio

I have been meaning to do this for a while, but never gotten round to it. Well more precisely other projects have always been more interesting so I pursued those instead ;) This Christmas however I decided it was about time that I finally did it.

Anyways I have finally given my bio on the About page abit of a spit shine. I originally wrote it based on my CV a long time ago and thought it deserved a little bit of love considering that it gets quite a few hits. Its all written in the third person, im not entirely sure why I decided to do it like that originally, oh well.

I have also rearranged some of my earlier work so best to give the archive a more accurate timeline.

30 Days 30 Photos - 2011

For the last 30 days me and some friends have been taking one photo every single day.

Why? No reason other than we can really. We did it a couple of years back and it was good fun, so thought it would be worth repeating :)

You can see a rather nice slideshow of all the images which I have uploaded to my Web Album.

I took each one using Instagram for the iPhone so all of them can also be found on my Instagrid.

I really enjoyed it although I must admit it was hard to find something worth photographing each day. I also wish I was better at taking pictures, but perhaps now I have a good camera Ill learn.

Instagrid

I have just returned from a little trip to Germany.

While I was there I made extensive use of the Instagram app for iPhone. Its a great way to make normal pictures taken on your phone look semi good.

The only problem is that there is currently no web interface for the app, so all those great pictures you take cannot be shown off in a gallery format unless you "share" the image to a stream such as flickr or tumbr or something.

Third-party-apps to the rescue! Instagrid is one of many web apps designed to plug this gaping hole in Instagram. Its quick and easy to setup so I have done so:

http://instagrid.me/mikeysee/

Now all my instagram pics are easy to get at, splendid!

Only In America...

While over in California this month we saw some rather interesting things. Thought I would share them.

Only in America..

..can you buy 4 Litres of wine for less than $8

..can you buy a sandwich bigger than your head

..can you buy weed from a doctor

..can you drive to the shops in a Monster Truck

..can you buy gifts and guns in the same shop

Back From Outer Space

.. well California actually but im just listening to abit of Prodigy so I thought it appropriate.

Was over for just over two weeks, hired a car with Toni and went-a-road-trippin. First few days were down the coast from San Francisco down the Big Sur to LA. Then from LA accross to Vegas, then all the way back again.

Apart from a parking ticket (who knew you have to park in the same direction traffic is flowing?!) everything went pretty smooth. Toni is still over there, will be for the next 6 weeks, hitting the research with the very clever physics bods over at Berkly University.

As usual the holiday snaps can be found on my Picassa Web Albums page, but here are some highlights: