GPF News Archive

Another Quick Update: I could have sworn I posted a News item about this earlier, but I guess I didn't. Well, I did make a blog post, but I know everyone doesn't read the blog. My day job is sending me to SIGGRAPH 2007 August 5-9 in San Diego, CA. SIGGRAPH, for those who don't know, is one of the largest gatherings in the world for artists and computer scientists to join forces and discuss the digital arts, including graphics hardware and software, computer animation, 3D modeling, and plenty more. Technically, I will not be there in any capacity to promote GPF, and I realize that the conference's hefty registration price probably prohibits the attendance of most folks without a corporate sponsorship. However, I'm only on the West Coast at most once ever couple years or so and as I won't be there for Comic-Con this year, this might be an excellent opportunity for an ad-hoc, informal gathering of Faulties.

Regardless of whether such a gathering takes place, I've decided to go ahead and document the conference as I would any other con I go to, and the pre-con report is already up and available. As usual, this sub-site will contain all public information regarding the trip, including my tentative schedule, information about any informal GPF gatherings, and hopefully some neat multimedia like our well-known photo slideshows and maybe some GPFConCam footage. If any Faulties are in the San Diego or southern California region and would like to chime in about a get-together, please e-mail me or, better yet, post to the forum where others can see. I'm also trying to push for an informal key signing party for any public-key cryptography nuts in the area (as my public key is severely lacking in signatures). As usual, updates about the conference and any informal gatherings will be posted to the pre-con report and not the News, so you'll need to watch that page for changes.

While I'm mentioning shows & cons, I should point out that this year will likely be another sparse year for me in this department. My son is still under a year old, so traveling with him would be extremely difficult and bulky, and traveling without him has negative effects on a new father's heartstrings. Thus, don't expect me to be running the convention circuit this year, except perhaps the odd technical shindig that my job sends me to. I'm hoping this will change soon, and I'll make sure to update you here if it does.

Quick Update: Just wanted to throw in a quick update to let you know that Tuesday night I was interviewed by John Wilkerson of Jesus Geek, "a Christian technology podcast hosted by a geek, amateur astronomer and homeschooling dad." John's been a Faultie for just about as long as there's been a GPF, and I've been following his podcast now ever since he sent the interview request. He asked a lot of insightful questions about the comic, and we discussed in depth Year Seven's Providence, compared and contrasted Nick and Ki's relationship vs. Fooker and Sharon's, and talked about my forays into blogging. You can find the pocast here, and if you like what you hear, make sure to leave John a comment or join the local discussion in this thread on the GPF forum.

Hey, gang. Sorry once again the lack of updates. Life has been incredibly hectic around here, but I definitely need to take a few minutes to break the silence and inform you of a few important items.

So what's been up with the site and especially PREMIUM? I've received a ton of mail recently asking just that question. (Well... maybe not a ton of mail... but I'll get to that in a minute.) A lot of you have noticed odd things going on with the GPF site these past few weeks, especially with our PREMIUM-exclusive content. If you read multiple Keenspot comics, you've probably noticed that all of Keen was affected, not just GPF. You may have even seen certain pages redirected to a "Working Man Software" site. So what in the blue blazes happened?

Here's the dice: Around the beginning of the month, Keenspot suffered a catastrophic server failure. No one knows exactly what happened, but a good guess would be a severe hardware problem, as the server absolutely refuses to boot. What made matters worse is the fact that this particular machine was responsible for a lot of centralized Keenspot stuff, including the Newsbox, Keenspot PREMIUM, mail, mailing lists, and worst of all, the DNS. Thus, many parts of Keen were failing left and right. Our valiant tech crew managed to restore the DNS quickly (since it's the most critical part), but various other parts of the Keen system are still being fixed weeks later.

At the time of this posting, it seems that almost everything has been fixed except for PREMIUM. PREMIUM accounts should still be active, but the central code that handles browser activation hasn't been restored. Thus all PREMIUM exclusives, like the High-Def archive and the Sketchbook, and various other features like ad-free surfing have been disabled. Unfortunately, as several of you have pointed out, this also means that the non-subscriber message on PREMIUM pages are also down, so all non-subscribers will see is a (relatively) blank page. We're aware of the issue, and we're working on it as fast as we can. Sorry, but I can't give an ETA on when it will be fixed. (And since there seems to be some confusion around the issue, I just wanted to insert a little reminder that the Wednesday Sketchbook Reruns are sneak peeks at our PREMIUM-exclusive Jeff's Sketchbook feature. If you click any of the links to see the Sketchbook archive, you will need to have a PREMIUM account to view them. And yes, they are reruns, so the date displayed for each sketch is about five years out of date. Please read the previous News item for all the details.)

The mail backlog is also worse than ever: One of the things affected by the server outage includes my e-mail, which has been spotty now for the past several weeks. My backlog was pretty bad before, but now I'm not even sure if I'm getting stuff reliably. If you've sent me general fan mail, please be patient and I'll probably get it eventually. If you've sent an important or critical message, please resend it promptly, just in case. I'll try and respond to those as soon as I get them.

More things waiting in the wings: I originally intended to make a couple more important announcements in this post, but various real life interruptions have delayed those. However, rest assured that you'll be seeing a few more News items coming out in the next couple weeks, as I should have some pretty big things to share soon. So keep your eyes on the News notification icon, or you might want to subscribed to our RSS feed to get notified when the next update occurs.