My big news!

 I got married to Jenn on Easter Sunday!  It was a quick wedding, at the Little White Wedding Chapel here in Vegas, but we hope to have a larger ceremony sometime next year. :)

Ok, I rewrote some code on dndorks, and now the code is using roughly 65% less memory than it was before for displaying the comic, which has shown a large increase on performance. 

I've been testing some rewriting of the code that generates the list for TWC, if I upgrade to SQL Server 2005 I can cut the code down by 80% with some pretty hefty performance gains.  I'm pretty excited about it, right now it takes a lot of work to maintain TWC because the code is a bit ugly and I have to constantly fight the site from getting slowed down.  Speaking of, I rewrote the security engine when I updated it to use database-generated avatar images, and the code is "MUCH" simpler and MORE secure, both of which make me happy. :)  Not to mention the new security engine is much less code.  Of course people can cheat still, but according to my logs a good portion of cheating is being flummoxed by the avatar voter (which of course means 33% of the cheating is still getting through based on odds) which is going to have to be good enough for now...

I have SQL 2005 ready to install onto the server, but it will involve a few hours of downtime, technically none of the sites should be affected after the upgrade is done, other than maybe operating faster, but I want to do the upgrade on our dev server first and make sure.  This will involve me downloading a most recent backup of webcomic.net to the dev server, installing it, then upgrading to SQL2005 and seeing if anything broke. ;)  Lets hope. :)  if all goes well, maybe this Sunday webcomic.net will be down for a few hours while the upgrade takes place