Green Felt News

We hoped you enjoyed our reversed colored cards April Fools day prank (I know it’s getting old but I still enjoy it quite a bit). This year, though, someone out there decided to prank us back. I got a text message from Jim today that said, “Check the SHT high scores for [april] fools day!” So I pulled them up and had a good laugh. In case you missed the April 1st, 2010 high scores for Seahaven Towers, here’s a screenshot:

Looks like someone wrote us a poem! If we look in our records we can tell in what order the usernames were created and use that to untangle the poem:

YET THE CARDS THEY WERE STOCKED IN A WAY THAT I GRIEVE
THE CARD COLORS ARE PECULIAR
THAT FOR WAYS THAT ARE DARK AND FOR TRICKS THAT ARE VAIN
IT WAS APRIL THE FIRST AND QUITE SOFT WAS THE SKIES
WHICH IT MIGHT BE INFERRED SOLITAIRE WAS LIKEWISE
YET THEY PLAYED IT THAT DAY ON DAVID AND JIM
IT WAS SOLITAIRE. THE SAME HE DID NOT UNDERSTAND
WHICH I WISH TO REMARK AND MY LANGUAGE IS PLAIN
WHICH THE SAME I WOULD RISE TO EXPLAIN
BRET HARTE: THE HEATHEN CHINEE (September 1870)
WHAT A FOOL, WHAT A FOOL

It’s a riff on an old poem, and very funny . Hats off to kingfisher for using his mad replaying skills in a clever way. We both thought it was an great prank.

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You might have noticed we’ve been offline for a day or so. Here’s what happened:

That’s the result of a traffic accident (possibly a drunk driver, but that’s hearsay) that happened at about 4:30am on Sunday morning. The pole that was knocked down cut out power to the city block where the Green Felt server lives. We were waiting for the city to fix the power issue and get everything back on which happened at about 3:00pm today.

Sorry about the outage! It wasn’t our fault, per-se, though we should have had a back up server ready to go for strange unplanned cases like this.

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You may have noticed we turned the black cards pink today to celebrate Valentine’s Day. We think it looks nice and we hope you do too. Don’t worry if you really hate it, it’ll be back to normal tomorrow.

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You may have noticed the site was down today for an hour or so. We shuffled some disks around and it required taking down the computer temporarily.

The end goal is to fix the slowness and gateway errors that people have been seeing lately. We’ve basically doubled our popularity in the past 8 months and that is putting some strain on our current computer:

We’re not quite done yet–we still need to do a database upgrade which will be happening sometime in the next few days (our guess is this is going to be a low traffic week). During the database upgrade the site will still basically work but you won’t see any high scores until the upgrade is done.

Addendum (2011/11/24): The database upgrade is done (only took half an hour) and so the maintenance is more or less done for the time being. Let’s give it a week and then let us know if you’re still getting gateway timeouts and slow page loads.

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Sorry about the downtime and the confusing “migrate your DNS now” message that you may have seen when trying to play our solitaire games. Our DNS provider got bought by another DNS provider and wanted us to migrate to the new owner’s services. I had been putting off doing the migration but I didn’t know they were going to hijack our DNS and bring our site down for hours at a time. Needless to say, we probably aren’t going to be using that DNS provider any more.

Everything we can do to fix the problem has been done, now we can only wait for our changes to propagate through the internet. If you are reading this, everything is fine again.

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Our database is back up now. We’re now running off our shiny new PostgreSQL 9.0 database. It took longer than expected–sorry about that. Turns out pg_upgradecluster is different (and horrifically slower) than pg_upgrade.

All the games that were played last night have been imported into the new DB so the leader board should be accurate at this point.

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We’re doing some database maintenance tonight so the high scores tables and leader boards aren’t going to work. Any games you play will be recorded and we’ll load them into the database when it comes back up.

Don’t worry about any “internal errors” you see… They should probably say something about the database being down… but they don’t.

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Hope you enjoy our slightly late to the game Halloween themed cards. The normal cards will be back tomorrow.

Happy Halloween!

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Every time a game is played we store it in our master database. We like to go through our data and look at interesting things, like how many unique people play games and what games get played most, etc.

One thing we’ve noticed is that many players click “New Game” really fast, over and over. This is presumably because they are looking for a new game with the cards dealt in some specific way that makes the game look easier/harder/more fun.

If this describes you, we’d love to know what exactly you are looking for. We don’t mind that you do it—we are just wondering if there is some way that we can improve the site so the cards that get dealt are exactly what you are looking for, automatically.

So, serial “New Game” clickers, leave us a comment here and let us know what you are looking for. Also may sure you mention the game, since the criteria for a good game of Sea Haven Towers is probably different than that of Forty Thieves.

Thanks!

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We just found a bug last night that caused the card size auto-detect code to choose the wrong size in certain cases. In particular it was choosing the “ludicrous” size cards when the screen was much too small to support them. It seemed to only affect Internet Explorer (definitely version 6 and possibly 7 and 8 too) but it was intermittent so we couldn’t see it at first.

At any rate, the bug is now fixed and so if you were unhappy with how the “automatic” setting was working we invite you to try it again. Please let us know if it now chooses the correct size for your browser window.

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