The enormous pile of Mass Effect 2 notes and illustrations in my work folders is getting daunting. So here’s a random Staff Commander Mandala Shepard picture among those prepared these last few days, so I can have the impression that I’m making progress by publishing something.
Second half of the marathon art session — additional illustrations by RonnieThunderbolts for :
Well, that’s one rather large thing that’s off my to-do list – and a bunch of poor illustrations were redone as a side effect. Now to see how many of the very old entries this unearthed we can revisit for quality.
We’ve long been using fan art by RonnieThunderbolts as additional illustrations, since his work features very clear depictions of the costumes – for some characters it’s the most illustrative art that exists. It’s not formally authorised, alas – I though I’d caught him on CBR but the PM went unanswered.
Here’s the first half a huge set of additional illustrations of his – basically everything that was left. I used to revise entries as I added the art but this is not going to fit on any realistic schedule so I just went in heavy like a good soldier. The older writeups in this set oughta be revised, though… Scheduling a few of mine for rework.
Entries now featuring more RonnieThunderbolts art — batch number one out of two :
Pfew. Looks like a lot… until you compare it to the size of writeups.org. Work is now ongoing on the second half.
After further investigation in the Java memory allocation issues, it is not financially feasible for us to run a decently-trafficked web site plus a large search app on a hosted server.
A deal has thus been hammered with the OpenSearchServer company to have them host our search databases on their new software-as-a-service platform, taking a lot of load out of our web server.
Things seem to be running well, and this has been the occasion to fully re-index the full-text search (the “Parse” button on the left). So we probably have a much stabler, more thorough and more frequently updated search solution now that we’re free of the constraints of our small web server.
Feel free to play with the Parse search. For instance it learns us that 35 people on writeups.org shoot Glocks, and 6 are metallurgists (or at least have metallurgy mentioned in their entry). And that Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev appears in four entries, though admittedly there might be different spellings. 
At this point the web server is in France, the search app server in Germany and the administration is done in Brasil. The entries are written in Brasil, the US, the UK, Sweden, France, Spain and a few other countries.
We’ve been testing lasting fixes to our Java memory leak problem using a brand-new JRockit installation, which entails occasionally bringing down the search engine, a few reboots, etc. to understand what’s going on.
When you get a “no results” from the search engine, particularly when you know that there’s something, remember to use the Alpha button to locate entries.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
There’s been a big round of improvements to existing entries – those things have priority for publication, so people don’t read old entries while we’ve hammered out a new and improved version.
Here goes:
No change whatsoever in the headcount.
We’ve run out of options about fixing the Java problems without a big intervention, which is currently being scheduled. The stability of the main search engine has been terrible for the last 4 days or so.
In the meanwhile, the search engine will keep being manually reset when it collapses (and the server rebooted when needed). That’s not ideal, so let me remind y’all of the “Alpha” button on the side, which is also a neat way to find something. Google can also help, though I don’t think they have the whole site indexed yet – do a search on Google with “writeups.org” added to the key words.
I started preparing this batch of profiles with the firm intent of catching up with the publication backlog, then realised that the backlog has already been caught up with. So this is a slightly abridged batch.
Roll call :
Furthermore, the guns have been spun out of our main Mass Effect 2 article since it was getting kinda big, and we already have a tradition of Weapons Locker articles. However, this is still work in progress.
Well, 4,879 entries now. Java leaks are becoming a problem though, we’re scheduling a review.
Some search engine difficulties during the past few hours as a re-indexation went weird. Should be good now, barring another JVM memory leak. Sorry ’bout that.
We’ve begun to use new surface blur application techniques to moderate the graininess of old comic book pictures – without adding a smudgy aspect to the image. These are the early stages and a few shots still look a bit forced, but generally illustrations from pre-1990s books will look better. In the best cases, you’d think it was a reprint.
Most old illustrations will not get revisited with this technique though, to avoid undergoing one more round of .jpg compression loss.
Anyway, roll call:
This brings us to 4,870 entries. Given the emphasis on redoing/rewriting older entries, the big 5K is still quite a distance away.
