Does anybody have an actual source for this? I've read the whole thread since the site went down, and as far as I can tell, here's what actually happened:
Someone mentioned he wrote a script that checks for an update once per minute. The site goes down. Various people assume that one person is actually between 100-8000 people, and have DDOSed the site. Another person claims that the "DDOS" has overloaded "the database", and everyone posting afterwards takes the whole thing as gospel.
I've got a couple problems with this story:
Nobody who is in a position to know is cited whatsoever.
DDOS attacks don't work that way - a real attack would result in the site being very slow or your browser idling for a minute before giving you its own "Coudn't find it, sorry" page. What actually happened was the site ran fine, then suddenly switched to a Database Error page which was still being served from Eloraam.com.
I'm no web developer, but how could excessive requests for information overfill a database which is necessary for a site to serve information? If folks can't put a more specific name to it than "The database" I'm going to have to dismiss it as grade-A technobabble.
Blogging software, including Wordpress installations, requires a database, generally a MySQL database, to store everything from user account information to blog content. The error displayed on Eloraam's site indicates that the front end Wordpress code can't communicate with the database server.
This can happen for several reasons, including a DDOS. MySQL is commonly configured to serve a maximum number of connections, and will drop them when there are too many. If the web server can handle the load, but the database server can't, the page will appear to load quickly but will return an error like on Eloraam's site.
Of course, the site's administrator could have just turned off the database server. This is a pretty unprofessional move; generally you'd want to put up a static maintenance page on the main site, but it is an easy way to turn off a blog. I'm pretty sure that's what happenend: other people in this thread have said as much, and focused DDOS attacks don't last this long. It's possible that the site was originally DDOS'd and someone shut off the database to stop it, and then never turned it back on. It's also possible that the blog has become so popular that the server couldn't handle it, and someone shut the db server off to save money. Wordpress databases can be pretty brutal on a db server.
Eloraam hosts her site over at www.linode.com (according to DNS), which means that she's sysadmining her own server. In my experience, developers don't like to sysadmin. In fact, pretty much no one wants to sysadmin unless they really like messing around with servers. I would speculate that she hasn't had the time to really tune a database instance, so she shut the db server off to save money and effort.
Of course, all of this is conjecture and hearsay. Maybe she's just sick of her fan base. Reading this thread, I wouldn't be surprised.
That would be the update to the game being able to create lava pools, and deciding to create them in the middle of a forest. Lava makes trees burn quite nicely.
After digging through the code I've learned that when you stick coal in a cart you can actually do it multiple times and it adds 1200 "units" of fuel each time, up to 32767 fuel units (the size of a short signed integer). So I won't have to hack the carts anymore at all.
Right, I didn't use autocart. I used powered minecarts. I also didn't explicitly add any motion blur; that's a consequence of speeding up the video so much.
Allow me to introduce the tenth week of my obsession: The Minecraft Intercontinental Railway. 19346 pieces of rail all laid out straight and delicious, with fancy bridges and tunnels. It's 103.6 megs of sped up goodness.
For its full glory, I recommend going to Youtube and watching this in HD:
Some details. Most of these structures were built by hand, and then duplicated using MCEdit. I also used INVEdit very extensively. I filmed this using powered minecarts: no boosters. This took a few days to capture, and during that there were updates to Minecraft. In the earlier versions I was able to modify the powered carts to not need fuel, during the later versions I simply used stock carts.
i haven't actually started trying to do so but i'm pretty sure that that could be greatly simplified in terms of the number of gates necessary. most minecraft gates can easily accept 3 inputs, so it should be possible to reduce the number of gates necessary by roughly 25% i should think?(at least)
You can easily create OR and NOR and XOR gates with 3 inputs, and *AND gates with an arbitrarily large amount. I'm sure it could be simplified; I didn't design it by hand: it was generated by a program called Logic Friday. I simply set up a truth table, told it what gates it was allowed to use, and it did the rest. It's rather unoptimized.
A redstone autorouter would also be pretty freaking awesome. Trying to implement http://imgur.com/19Gei.png is giving me a headache.
For those that didn't click, it's a 7-bit binary to 16 segment display driver.
Edit: I just read through the stuff from Baezon on page 7 about autorouting. This is probably why good autorouters for actual PCBs cost so freaking much. By using EAGLE, making redstone gate "packages", and greatly tweaking the autorouter, I was able to get it to work... sort of. But it only does one layer and craps out way to often.
This no longer works. Please don't apply it to your game.
One of the biggest questions I got asked when creating my was how I got a powered minecart to last forever. With the latest version of the Minecraft Coder Pack I am able to finally release my modification to everyone.
This mod will modify the mechanics of powered minecarts in game:
[*:eu8ur1lh]Interact (right-click) with a powered minecart to start it.
[*:eu8ur1lh]Interact with a moving powered cart to stop it.
[*:eu8ur1lh]Carts no longer require any fuel, and will keep going as if they had infinite fuel.
There are however, some caveats:
[*:eu8ur1lh]The actual powered minecart physics are unchanged. This means speed and momentum are all the same as the stock powered minecart.
[*:eu8ur1lh]This is a very minor change to the code, but I only spent about 5 minutes creating this mod and another 5 minutes testing it in single player. I'm not sure what will happen on an SMP server with this mod installed, and it could be riddled with bugs. Back up your minecraft.jar before installing. It shouldn't corrupt any save files or anything like that, but I make no warranties of any kind.
[*:eu8ur1lh]Back up your bin/minecraft.jar!
[*:eu8ur1lh]Open up bin/minecraft.jar with 7-zip or other suitable tool
[*:eu8ur1lh]Drop py.class into minecraft.jar
[*:eu8ur1lh]Delete META-INF/MOJANG_C.DSA and META-INF/MOJANG_C.SF from minecraft.jar. If you don't do this you will get a black screen.
Good luck and enjoy!
If anyone knows of a better way to distribute this, such as a patch instead of the entire .class file, please let me know. I don't want to step on Notch's toes with this.
That would depend on how good his implementation is, and how fast it makes the cart. If the cart travels too fast it just makes the video extra blurry when sped up. Then again, I'm very happy with everything Notch has done so far.
Boosters are ugly, take up a significant amount of space, make it so I can't easily measure the track length (I use Cartograph's statistics), and rely on a glitchy part of minecart physics that will probably be fixed.
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Blogging software, including Wordpress installations, requires a database, generally a MySQL database, to store everything from user account information to blog content. The error displayed on Eloraam's site indicates that the front end Wordpress code can't communicate with the database server.
This can happen for several reasons, including a DDOS. MySQL is commonly configured to serve a maximum number of connections, and will drop them when there are too many. If the web server can handle the load, but the database server can't, the page will appear to load quickly but will return an error like on Eloraam's site.
Of course, the site's administrator could have just turned off the database server. This is a pretty unprofessional move; generally you'd want to put up a static maintenance page on the main site, but it is an easy way to turn off a blog. I'm pretty sure that's what happenend: other people in this thread have said as much, and focused DDOS attacks don't last this long. It's possible that the site was originally DDOS'd and someone shut off the database to stop it, and then never turned it back on. It's also possible that the blog has become so popular that the server couldn't handle it, and someone shut the db server off to save money. Wordpress databases can be pretty brutal on a db server.
Eloraam hosts her site over at www.linode.com (according to DNS), which means that she's sysadmining her own server. In my experience, developers don't like to sysadmin. In fact, pretty much no one wants to sysadmin unless they really like messing around with servers. I would speculate that she hasn't had the time to really tune a database instance, so she shut the db server off to save money and effort.
Of course, all of this is conjecture and hearsay. Maybe she's just sick of her fan base. Reading this thread, I wouldn't be surprised.
Source: I am a Systems Administrator.
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That would be the update to the game being able to create lava pools, and deciding to create them in the middle of a forest. Lava makes trees burn quite nicely.
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Ask, and ye shall receive:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/148970/minecraf ... index.html
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/148970/minecraf ... al-day.png
It's too big to do in isometric mode.
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Right, I didn't use autocart. I used powered minecarts. I also didn't explicitly add any motion blur; that's a consequence of speeding up the video so much.
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For its full glory, I recommend going to Youtube and watching this in HD:
Some details. Most of these structures were built by hand, and then duplicated using MCEdit. I also used INVEdit very extensively. I filmed this using powered minecarts: no boosters. This took a few days to capture, and during that there were updates to Minecraft. In the earlier versions I was able to modify the powered carts to not need fuel, during the later versions I simply used stock carts.
Let me know what you think!
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You can easily create OR and NOR and XOR gates with 3 inputs, and *AND gates with an arbitrarily large amount. I'm sure it could be simplified; I didn't design it by hand: it was generated by a program called Logic Friday. I simply set up a truth table, told it what gates it was allowed to use, and it did the rest. It's rather unoptimized.
0
For those that didn't click, it's a 7-bit binary to 16 segment display driver.
Edit: I just read through the stuff from Baezon on page 7 about autorouting. This is probably why good autorouters for actual PCBs cost so freaking much. By using EAGLE, making redstone gate "packages", and greatly tweaking the autorouter, I was able to get it to work... sort of. But it only does one layer and craps out way to often.
0
One of the biggest questions I got asked when creating my was how I got a powered minecart to last forever. With the latest version of the Minecraft Coder Pack I am able to finally release my modification to everyone.
This mod will modify the mechanics of powered minecarts in game:
[*:eu8ur1lh]Interact (right-click) with a powered minecart to start it.
[*:eu8ur1lh]Interact with a moving powered cart to stop it.
[*:eu8ur1lh]Carts no longer require any fuel, and will keep going as if they had infinite fuel.
There are however, some caveats:
[*:eu8ur1lh]The actual powered minecart physics are unchanged. This means speed and momentum are all the same as the stock powered minecart.
[*:eu8ur1lh]This is a very minor change to the code, but I only spent about 5 minutes creating this mod and another 5 minutes testing it in single player. I'm not sure what will happen on an SMP server with this mod installed, and it could be riddled with bugs. Back up your minecraft.jar before installing. It shouldn't corrupt any save files or anything like that, but I make no warranties of any kind.
The file:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/148970/minecraft/mods/Infinite_Powered_Minecarts/Infinite_Powered_Minecarts_v0.1.7z
Installation:
[*:eu8ur1lh]Back up your bin/minecraft.jar!
[*:eu8ur1lh]Open up bin/minecraft.jar with 7-zip or other suitable tool
[*:eu8ur1lh]Drop py.class into minecraft.jar
[*:eu8ur1lh]Delete META-INF/MOJANG_C.DSA and META-INF/MOJANG_C.SF from minecraft.jar. If you don't do this you will get a black screen.
Good luck and enjoy!
If anyone knows of a better way to distribute this, such as a patch instead of the entire .class file, please let me know. I don't want to step on Notch's toes with this.
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There's another one at 3:07. I use these because an hour is way too long to walk from end to end.
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As I noted above, I used INVedit and MCedit extensively. Most of the structures were hand-built once and then duplicated.
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