Hey Everyone,

The network serving our fancy new banner ads asked us to help show off a new game called Ninja Blade, coming in April for XBox 360. To this end, we are going to be posting a new chapter of their comic in our blog every Tuesday for the next five weeks.

Obviously, we want to know what we’re promoting, so I checked it out. Now, I don’t know much about this game, but it looks like it may possibly be the awesomest thing ever. To just give you some idea, all the following things feature in the trailer:

1. Upside down ninjas
2. Completely unnecessary motorcycle usage
3. Skydiving without a parachute
4. Building-sized Giant monsters
5. Extensive property damage

Not bad for a trailer only a minute long.

Ninja Blade Comic – Chapter One:

Click to download pdf

Ever since we switched over to having paginated video archives (300+ items, each with a thumbnail image was getting very large) I have been trying to figure out a good way to make the videos just as accessible as before. When they were all on one page, you could just use the search function of your browser to find any video you wanted, so I figured adding our own search function would solve the problem.

It was a great search function too: You could use boolean operators (like +, -, AND, OR), you could search for a specific phrase “using quotation marks”, and you could even you wildcard characters to find parts of words (like cheese*). To top it all off, it was backed up by a super fast fulltext index that was all set to scale up to hundreds of thousands of records without any slow down. The problem is that it wasn’t very useful. Turns out when you only have 500 records, no one cares about boolean operators, full phrase matching and wildcards and that specially optimised index that can scale up to 500,000 records, does so by excluding any words smaller then four characters. Back to the drawing board.

LoadingReadyRun’s new search function is the simplest possible system. Type in your search term and it will find every video that has that word anywhere in the title or description. No AND, no OR, no quotation marks. Type in the and you are going to get a whole hell of a lot of results. It will even find partial words. Doing it this way is not only less flexible, it is also way less efficient, but with the number of videos we have,  it seems more useful. In 10 years, when we have a couple of thousand videos in the database, we may need to revisit the problem but at the moment it seems to run just as fast as the old system.

The LRRcasts use the same system, BTW.

As always let me know if you experience any problems or wierdness.

As some of you may have noticed, LRR went offline for a couple of hours last month because we exceeded our bandwidth limit. At the time, that limit was 700GB. Now, granted, about 300GB* of that went to Desert Bus, but considering that we no longer host most of our videos, I was perplexed as to where the rest was going. Are we serving over 400GB worth of images and text files a month? After doing a little bit of digging through the server stats, it became apparent that the problem is that you guys really like to hear us talk. About a half of our monthly bandwidth goes into serving the LRRcast mp3 files.

Since our new video host also works with audio files, we have decided to move the LRRcasts over to Blip.tv. The LRRcasts should work just the same as before since the actual files are the same, but they will probably load a little faster, what with Blip’s CDN and whatnot. I also took this opportunity to spruce up the LRRcast player window a little to bring it in line with the new site layout (the popup LRRcast window hasn’t been updated since we started podcasting 2006)

As always, please let me know if there are any problems or glitches.

*Of that 300GB, >100GB was used by 5 stupid bmp imges that were submitted as milestone pics. Turns out WordPress doesn’t scale bmp properly, so everytime the front page of the site loaded, it had to load ~3MB worth of full size MS Paint drawings. Grrrrr. Live and learn.

As of around 1:00pm today, Revver seems to have gone offline. Revver.com, their blog and forums are all unaccessible and, worst of all, all Revver video embeds seem to be broken. We don’t have any information about the cause or duration of this outage, but for the moment, a lot of our old videos are offline. Videos from the last couple of months are hosted on Blip.tv, and should still be working fine. In case this is more then a small glitch on their end, we have move up our migration schedule to move more videos over to Blip.tv in the next couple of days.

I will update this post if the situation gets resolved or if we get any new information.

UPDATE – 5:30PM PST: Revver seems to be back up now. Still don’t know what the problem was, though.

The LRR blog is now running on WordPress 2.7!

You guys probably won’t see any difference, but trust me, this is good. Look at how pretty the new admin interface is!