121

Leaderboard Disputes / BS Call: S&A, LP1 Time

« on: August 03, 2007, 05:47:39 pm »

I call BS on sonicandamy's Lost Prologue 1 time. He got 0:11:06, while the best anyone else has gotten was 0:11:78. He claims it's because he managed to skip the dialogue at the beginning, but he refuses to say how. So, unless he decides to show proof (either with a video or with a strategy), I will call BS.

122

Wikkity! / Charles Nelson Reilly, dead at 76

« on: May 28, 2007, 01:14:02 am »

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/05/28/arts/NA-A-E-TV-US-Obit-Reilly.php

LOS ANGELES: Charles Nelson Reilly, the Tony Award winner who later became known for his ribald appearances on the "Tonight Show" and various game shows, has died. He was 76.

Reilly died Sunday in Los Angeles of complications from pneumonia, his partner, Patrick Hughes, told the New York Times.

Reilly began his career in New York City, taking acting classes at a studio with Steve McQueen, Geraldine Page and Hal Holbrook. In 1962, he appeared on Broadway as Bud Frump in the original Broadway production of "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying." The role won Reilly a Tony Award.

He was nominated for a Tony again for playing Cornelius in "Hello, Dolly!" In 1997 he received another nomination for directing Julie Harris and Charles Durning in a revival of "The Gin Game."

After moving to Hollywood in 1960s he appeared as the nervous Claymore Gregg on TV's "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir" and as a featured guest on "The Dean Martin Show."

He gained fame by becoming what he described as a "game show fixture" in the 1970s and 80s. He was a regular on programs like "Match Game" and "Hollywood Squares," often wearing giant glasses and colorful suits with ascots.

His larger-than-life persona and affinity for double-entendres also landed him on the "Tonight Show" with Johnny Carson more than 95 times.

Reilly ruefully admitted his wild game show appearances adversely affected his acting career. "You can't do anything else once you do game shows," he told The Advocate, the national gay magazine, in 2001. "You have no career."

His final work was an autobiographical one-man show, "Save It for the Stage: The Life of Reilly," about his family life growing up in the Bronx. The title grew out of the fact that when he would act out as a child, his mother would often admonish him to "save it for the stage."

The stage show was made into the 2006 feature film called "The Life of Reilly."

Reilly's openly gay television persona was ahead of its time, and sometimes stood in his way. He recalled a network executive telling him "they don't let queers on television."

Hughes, his only immediate survivor, said Reilly had been ill for more than a year.

No memorial plans had been announced.

:(

123

Wikkity! / lol @ SSR video

« on: April 08, 2007, 04:26:00 am »

Recently, while going through the media archives, some noticed a peculiar entry in the Secret Rings videos. Specifically, this entry submitted by knuckles_sonic8 a month ago and marked as Lost Prologue, Mission 1, Time:

http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-5565956676755128478&hl=en-CA

Yeah. It's lol. (The entry's been marked as OBSOLETE, so it doesn't show up anymore.)

124

News and Updates / TSC's Back Up!

« on: April 05, 2007, 06:24:15 pm »

I'm temporarily hosting TSC for a while until Rolken can find a new host (or host TSC himself). While attempting to run TSC on my server, I found that TSC's database structure was way too inefficient for my server to handle it, so Rolken and I spent the past few days optimizing the database.

Old Database Size: 1.6 GB
New Database Size: 660 MB
Saved: 1 GB :-)

Not only has the database size decreased substantially (without deleting old data), many of the queries have been optimized. The statistics processor has been improved to process stats much faster. (Before, it took around 125 seconds to process 200 stats. Now it takes around 10 seconds.) [Note that these stats include points and overall updates.]

That's it for the major changes. Stats updating is currently set to once every 10 minutes instead of 5 minutes as before, but I may change this if it doesn't seem to impact the server that much.

Also, if anyone encounters any weird bugs on the site, post them here or in the IRC channel. We're still fixing some conversions from SELECT * to SELECT `columns`, which improves performance but causes issues when the required columns aren't specified.

Status of various subsections:
- On-site videos: Up (partially)
- Off-site videos: Up
- Chat Statistics: Up
- CGI:IRC: Up

UPDATE: Apparently, Apache was causing massive CPU load. I switched to lighttpd, which uses less resources. Lighttpd is now configured for TSC and all directories are updated. :-)

UPDATE 2: There seems to be an intermittent problem where some submitted statistics generate an invalid queue entry. The invalid queue entry blocks statistics processing until it is removed. That statistic is then "lost" and needs to be resubmitted. We're working on figuring out the cause of the problem.

UPDATE 3: In case you're wondering what the downtime was from 12 PM to 2 PM EDT (2007/04/06), I accidentally unplugged the network cable. <_< (The cable in use is missing the pin, so it's easy to knock out. I need to replace it sometime.)

UPDATE 4: Enabled lighttpd's mod_compress module for compressing static pages (currently only HTML and plain text) for faster loading and less bandwidth usage.

UPDATE 5: The server doesn't have email capability, so anyone who registered today was unable to activate. I've turned activation off for now and activated everyone who registered.

125

Leaderboard Disputes / I call BS on Nelspike TX

« on: January 10, 2007, 03:22:00 pm »

Nelspike TX just submitted quite a few suspicious #1 scores:

Sonic 3:
- Angel Island 1: 130,700 (previous #1 was 65,700)
- Angel Island 2: 125,400 (previous #1 was 44,200)
- Hydrocity 1: 115,800 (previous #1 was 59,800)

I'm calling BS since these scores are pretty much double the old #1's, which is practically impossible (especially since Nelspike TX has only submitted a few other records.)

126

Information Kiosk / EggBot's back!

« on: October 23, 2006, 12:38:31 pm »

EggBot, the record-reporting bot on #soniccenter, is back! ...kind of. It's now GerbilEgg. :D I wrote a script similar to the old EggBot. It reports new #1 records and new fake entries.

Check it out at irc.surrealchat.net #soniccenter

- GerbilSoft