The Blog: June 2011

Several days ago, I was walking with my Agora Games t-shirt, which happens to bare the Major League Gaming (MLG) logo on the arm. Out of Dunkin Donuts, a young boy excitedly ran up to me. After catching his breath, he goes, “excuse me, do you compete in the MLG?” At that point I had gotten towed and was on the phone with the police so I simply shook my head no.
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Here at Agora we make use of dedicated hardware and virtual machines running on our providers’ respective clouds. In recent months, we’ve moved our RabbitMQ hosts onto hardware because we found that we could far exceed the CPU capacity of our virtual machines and it was far cheaper to run a small cluster of hardware hosts than a giant cluster of VMs. We used an existing, underutilized host for our primary traffic while awaiting delivery and installation of a new pair servers. Expecting a simple plug-and-play swap, I set out to test the new hardware before we made the transition. What follows is a harrowing tale into the deepest depths of modern hardware architecture.

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When we play video games, we are automatically transported into a world that stretches beyond the line of current reality. Within this world, you are granted complete freedom while omitting consequences. Many people play games because it’s a channel through which we can live out the impossible. While there are many other reasons, I question whether our attention spans are the only things being is injected into the games we play.
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Success pertains to anyone willing to grab it, however, the majority will experience it through different channels. A lot of people measure success by a person’s current status; what they have, who they know and ultimately where they are. Only, is this a correct scale upon which to measure a person’s triumphs? When measuring success, should you look at the point where a person has landed or consider the journey from where they made the initial jump?
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We’re pleased to announce the official release of haigha, our Python AMQP client library.

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My colleague @logankoester posed the following question in our team chat room: “Can the Github bot notify HipChat on wiki updates as well? I mean, wikis are just git repos, right? I am equally interested in documentation changes as in software changes.”

It is possible to do this in a little bit of a roundabout way. Read on to see how I did this with Hudson, our Continuous Integration server.

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Around this time last year, I was preparing to return to my internship with a fortune 50 company. However, the excitement that normally comes with such an accomplishment escaped me. The reason is because I knew exactly what to expect. I’d dress up in typical business attire and sit at my desk from 9-5, while waiting for the occasional computer crash or random fire drill. With so much to look forward to, who could complain, right?

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Do you use points or do you use pixels? I’ve fallen in love with points. If you know me, you might already know this because I talk about them all the time. So what is it that I like about points, or perhaps, what is it that I dislike about pixels?

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This weekend, MLG held a highly competitive, highly anticipated competition to test the strengths of pro gamers alike. The Pro Circuit, this time in Columbus, Ohio, included a number of competitors facing off for champion status in StarCraft 2, Halo: Reach and Call of Duty: Black Ops.  The three-day event concluded as follows:

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Did you ever think to use Cucumber to write scenarios to validate your infrastructure? Here’s a short guide to help you get started.

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