Rocky July

Two noteworthy episodes happened in the early part of July.

horst35 overtook quangntenemy to take the top spot. I had thought that was near impossible, but horst35 had done it, albeit briefly. quangntenemy reclaimed the title a couple of days later. And peace ensues :D

The other was a little hiccup in the short existence of Rankk. The server went down due to a faulty harddisk. It has occasionally gone down, so we thought nothing of it.

But the bad news came. Some data had been lost and could not be recovered completely.

It was not one or two days' worth of data, but four, which was pretty bad. Fortunately, there weren't a lot of activities during those four days, so the loss wasn't that damaging. But it was enough to drive a member away, because he had solved 18 challenges during that time and was unwilling to redo them.

We need knocks like that, don't we? That very day, we wrote a script to automatically backup the more time-sensitive parts of the database, such as points and hofs.

So that was rather happening...

Meanwhile, an interesting question was raised by shortbreak. He asked whether it was possible to enable SSL for Rankk's login. I had toyed with that possibility in the past but had never found out the cost and the how.

I was somewhat dismayed to learn that we would need an IP and an SSL certificate to have SSL enabled.

The IP costs S$10 per month and the SSL certificate costs US$140 per year, or about S$210. That's S$330 per year, which is a pretty hefty sum.

We would love to have it but at the moment it's beyond our means ;)

Does anybody know of a cheaper way to do it?