I hope it helps some people…

Hope it helps :P

I applied to work for Pixiv, hopefully they’ll hire me?

Besides that, nothing else too interesting in my oh so very exciting life.

Sure you can argue that the western market was not intended for visual novels. However a quote from bamboo a year ago

But I am looking forward to releasing Dengeki Stryker to the Western market — it’s made a bit with the Western market in mind.

Shows that some companies are interested in the western market, however keep it up and all the “good will” that’s been generated so far to turn around in to a lump of poo on the ground.

Anyways don’t expect me to reply. Planning on tearing down this blog soon.

I didn’t have much success on finding how to debind a book and how to scan it until I ran across some guides for manga, I adapted it for the hardback and tore it up with a knife. I then started to experiment with editing raw scans, eventually I worked out a method to clean them up and I posted it on my old dovac.com blog. Sometime later I find that some minitokyo user reuploaded my scan and called it their own. I wasn’t too pleased at that so I created an account and uploaded some new scans. One of their moderators said that I should upload bigger ones, that didn’t really please me either since I didn’t know they had a ratio system. I figured that there has to be a better way of working together to get scans out on to the internet. Then I asked cyanoacry if he was able to get danbooru to work with my dedicated server, after many hours he got it to work. Now its near the end of 2006 and I find that danbooru closed its doors to the public but I was still serving images to them as a mirror, I didn’t really like that so I stopped that too.

That was when he had a HUGE explosion of users who tried to go with the danbooru idea of TAG FUCKING EVERYTHING POSSIBLE in a image.

Its now 2007, I don’t really remember much about it, we had some teething issues with the danbooru code base where basically we were using a pre 1.0 version and danbooru had its own 1.0 version with no migration plan. I manually adjusted the moe database to match danboorus schema and everything worked.

Its now 2008, I raged about being bad mouthed on shitty sites and thought of closing the site.

Its now 2009, I think I was really poor and shit. I remember begging for donations so I can afford food at the time.

Its now 2010, I swapped to oreno subdomain because we were way too popular and I couldn’t afford it at the time.

Its now 2011, I’m even poorer because I was neeting for almost 2 years.

Its now 2012, I like yandere so now its yande.re.

Why do I only really clearly remember the starting of the site and nothing in between?

Anyways the original goal was to get scans out to the world without papers or other shit like that and I think that goal is met. Maybe I should talk about why I hosted visual novel sites for so long, but I don’t really feel like it.

tlwiki, dakkodango, ammy, and novelnews (encubed) moved off.

whats left:

mirrormoon and ast2cd projects

not that anyone cares rite

All projects/sites hosted have 89 days to move.

I do not like what I see in the visual novel scene and I don’t want to be associated with it anymore. It is as simple as this:

1) I own the server
2) I choose who I host
3) I shoulder legal responsibility

I don’t want the legal responsibility anymore so that is why everyone is being kicked off.

As you’re aware we switched domain names (and servers too!), with that I decided the site and servers should get some updates in.

1) We were running on lighttpd + fastcgi deployment of Ruby on Rails, this was normal back in 2006, fast forward to 2012, and no one does it anymore. So it was decided we use nginx for frontend and unicorn as the glue between the app and webserver.
2) ssl support, lighttpd has/had poor ssl support so I wanted to move off that asap as well.
3) We had some sites hosted using PHP and I wanted to separate them off to different VMs. So thanks to Ac-town too for helping out setting up ganeti which allows us to provision VMs, now I can run PHP sites* that do not interfere with each other.

The move to nginx was problematic due to the fact that our download server had a custom lighttpd module that generated zip files on the fly, nginx has that too but required code changes that quite frankly I wouldn’t know how to implement at all since I’m not a programmer. Luckily (or THANK GOD) edogawaconan decided to modernize our code and had already gotten the zip generation to work with nginx. So I just had to pull in the change and then get nginx complied with the mod_zip plugin.

Then it got complicated, zip downloads just hanged there when ssl was enabled. Turns out it was a cookie problem after many hours of debug (again many thanks to edogawaconan)

So now we have a somewhat modernized stack which can be extendable in the future.

*Want free hosting from me? Leave a comment on how I can contact you and why you think you deserve the hosting and I’ll decide to host it or not.

it moved to a new url

I’m sure you can find it if you look around.

I’ve decided to do a Lease to Own program with a local colo, it’ll save me almost 300 bucks a month. I think this is worth the hassle of moving to a new server. Plus if I have any hardware problems its a quick 20min drive down the freeway with replacement parts.

This is also a big change as well, as some people are aware I host a few sites all on the same system (IQDB, TLwiki, Ammy, mirrormoon, and others). I’ve decided that moving forward I’m going to use Virtual Machines to separate the PHP and Ruby on Rail apps. Which software I will use to setup the VMs is undecided but I’m leaning to KVM. Originally I wanted to use Vmware ESXi but I don’t have globs of RAM to throw around on all the systems. If people have suggestions on which stack to use please let me know! (No cloud hosting stuff, I only have one server, so I don’t want to run openstack or something like that without multiple systems)

I also have another important announcement!….except I haven’t worked out all the details, so once that is done I’m going to write yet another blog post! Oh god I’m writing too much lately.