More Awesome Than You!

Anybody have a clue what happened to it?  Inge?  Anyone?  Bueller?

Dunno - Inge did say someting about it being broken in the SimPE testing thread.  It seems to have been down for going on for 24 hours now.  I tried to access it yesterday with no success.

downforeveryoneorjustme.com says that the domain sims.ambertation.de name is not registered.
Perhaps the registration lapsed. I don't believe Inge controls it and Quaxi seems to have been teleported to another parallel dimension.

Ahhh crap, I hope not.  That would massively suck.

Yup.  So far it does massively suck.

.de names probably aren't recognized by that DB. Plus you're checking a third-level domain. "ambertation.de" itself reports registered and operational.

A quick port-probe and banner-check reveals that the ambertation server is responding and operating normally on all other ports (and acknowledging status as ambertation), but that httpd is down. This happens from time to time, as apache is a piece of shit.

Conclusion: They crashed. This will be fixed whenever someone notices, but does not represent a significant cause for concern at this time.

I decided to leave it 24hrs in case he noticed himself, but at this stage I will see if I can dig out his email address...

Though apart from the GUID database I really wouldn't have minded the excuse to transfer support to a forum that actually has some features - such as "split thread" etc.

just for you amber :D I couldn't help myself

ROTFL!  Thanks kiki!  XD

Pescado assures me that even if the GUID database were to permanently crash and burn, the likelihood of GUID conflicts with just randomly-chosen numbers would be pretty infinitesemal, so I guess I won't panic.  Still, it'd be a shame to lose it...

Quaxi received his email and has got the site up again :)

I still don't like the idea of random GUIDs - no point in doing it a potentially clashy way when there is a way of avoiding the clashes in the first place!   The simplest way to have restarted a GUID registry would be a "postal" service attached to a forum thread, where a person who wants a block posts and they get a block by reply.   A record of the highest block allocated is simply stored somewhere.  There is no need to record GUIDs by creator.   The creators have to keep their own internal count of GUIDs used up.  That's how I do it.

We'd simply start at the next major number - which I believe is 1!  I think we're still on the zeroes.

Coolio.  No, I don't like it either, but you're right, it'd be simple enough to start over again if we had to.  Still, glad we don't have to.  XD

The problem with that plan is that is that, A: It would be easy for a malicious agent to deplete a large number of blocks this way with no record of who did it, and B: Contiguous blocks are more likely to promote accidental conflict when creators who don't understand hex overrun the ends of their block. Also, it appears EAxis themselves uses an apparently random system, as none of their GUIDs have any clear sense of rhyme or reason either.

Well there are pros and cons both ways I suppose.  In Sims 1 we quickly ran out, because every recolour needed its own GUID.  This time round we're really not getting through them as fast.