Remember the scene in The Great Escape where they were making their last-minute preparations for the big 200+ person escape when suddenly the unexpected happens? The allies attack and they sound an air raid. The potential escapers are about to panic when they realize an air-raid will force the prison to shut all of its lights off, thus allowing 'em the best possible opportunity for an escape.

Well, that kinda happened. It appears that my host, crazywebhosting, is subscribed to some kind of automatic update program that works a little like Microsoft Update. Early in the morning, it checks to see if anything's updated. If anything is, it grabs it precompiled and installs it. Saves the guys a lot of time from recompiling things themselves.

Anyway, Apache got updated this go-round and the version that got sent out was, to use the vernacular, boogered. It broke PHP pretty badly, thus rendering my games in a pretty sad state. Even after they got it somewhat working, it still had problems elsewhere that were keeping the games from grabbing their daily operating instructions.

So I did the Great Escape thing and took advantage of the downtime. The standalone games and commerce solution were 98% ready. And I knew the site would be down for a couple of hours at least with all of the changes I was making. So I figured that there wasn't a better time to pull the trigger than when things were down anyway. I put everything in place so that it'd all be ready when the site got un-boogered. About three hours later, the server-monkeys fixed their little problems.

Two immediate problems surfaced.

1. My new pop up ads were a mite overzealous in detecting mouse-clicks, and anywhere you clicked would send you to the "buy yourself some games NOW NOW NOW" page.

2. The download manager was failing thanks to the improved money-verifying code I added yesterday.

Both are fixed now. Sorry to the two people who immediately bought the games and couldn't download. Should be fixed now.



In a nutshell, the new commercialized game site along with version 1.0 games is officially live and working. It'll get bugs ironed out over the next couple of weeks, but it appears to be working reasonably so far. Congratulate me.



Oh, and I'm flattered. During the 2-3 hours of downtime I got messaged/emailed/blog-commented by approximately eight people who were jonesing for their daily ConFusebox fix. Thanks for the ego-boost.



Finally, Microsoft Virtual PC is now free. It's just what you need if you wanna verify that your shiny new games still run on crusty old versions of Windows. 102% recommended.