I’m back after taking the family to Cabo San Lucas for a week.  7 days of 88 degrees and sunny – after that, Seattle’s weather is all the more painful ;-) .

The place that we were staying at was very nice, but a bit on the gouging side – $25 (American) for a bottle of suntan lotion!  Even more egregious – $10 an hour for wifi, which is why I haven’t been posting here ;-) .

Made random bits and pieces of progress in various venues:

  • New Server (was: GoDaddy GoAway!)
    • In my desire to eschew myself of everything-GoDaddy, I purchased a dedicated server (no more virtual for me!) with softlayer.com.  So far I’m very happy with both the service and the machine (soooooo fast).
    • I completed moving all of my services and files over to it last night, and flipped the domain over to point at it yesterday.  Hopefully that’ll help a bit with mahjong stability.  7yrl’s file archive is there, so let me know if I missed anything…
    • I just checked off “auto-renew’ on the server with GoDaddy, so one step closer to being completely done with them!  Now I’ve just got a few domains that I need to transfer away from them to a different registrar (I’ll eat the cost just to get away from GoDaddy), and then I’ll be done with them for good.
  • Mahjong
    • The game continues to do well, it’s now the #20 game in the marketplace (both free and paid), which is great!
    • It sounds like there’s still some bug in there that I just plain can’t track down; repro cases are few and far between.  To counter this, I went through a whole bunch of the code and try/catch’ed it at very fine granularity – I report the exception up to my server (along with a code to determine which line it borked on).  While that won’t catch everything, it should help point in the direction of the most egregious issues
    • Speaking of egregious: I just fired an email to microsoft’s pubcenter support alias because two unexpected things happened last Thursday: (1) the number of reported ad impressions in mahjong jumped 10x in a 2 hour period (but based on the number of submitted scores, I’m not suddenly getting 10x users), and (2) the eCPM dropped by 100x!  So Mahjong is now pulling in 1/10th what it used to ><.  Given that my other apps (and other developers) aren’t seeing the same drop, I’m hoping that it’s a temporal thing.  Otherwise I’m going to have to rethink the server and even whether or not my next game uses the Microsoft Ad control. Ouch :( .
  • 3D Blocks
    • My definition of vacation is “switching between lazing about in the sun and taking a break from being in the sun by being inside programming some fun project.”  Over the last week, the fun project was a 3d version of the classic “Rush Hour” game.  Huge amount of progress on it, but a loooong way to go.  Here’s a few teaser shots (note that the name is a placeholder):

Unfortunately, tomorrow I go back to the real world.  I’ve got over 600 emails awaiting my return (and that’s after auto-filtering out the detritus!).  I’m learning that 6 business days is not quite enough ;-) .

Jeff