Thoughts on Pottermore

For some who are not aware, J.K. Rowling partnered with Sony to create an interactive experience for Harry Potter fans. Having been on for 48 hours, hear are my thoughts:

Pros 

• New material; there are a ton of new images to look at including some of Rowling's personal comments and notes. For example, it is revealed on the site that Professor MacGonagal was once married.
• Mouse and Button Listeners; i.e. the individual pages of the site. As you go through you see scenes of some of the chapters. Bits of the scenery moves when you move the mouse over it. You can collect Chocolate frogs, books, other stuff for house points and what not. With the up and down buttons you can interact with a different layer of the same page. It's cool.
• Nice layout, with how everything is displayed.
• There is some complex formula at work that sorts you into a house, and gets you a wand.
• At the moment you can only practice casting spells, basically following a pattern with your mouse and clicking on integral parts of the spell.
• Potions. You can brew various potions and they have to be exact or they go wrong. You add in the wrong ingredient, your cauldron could explode and you lose house points. Or it just fizzles if you are too slow. The wand shooting lightning at the potion to let it brew... that's kind of odd.
• House Competition; in the Great Hall you can see how many points each house has. Currently Ravenclaw leads Slytherin 54,974 to 54,866.

 Cons

• Server space. This is the biggest flaw at the moment. There are currently 477,385 people registered for Pottermore and that is only with limited registration. The IT guys at Sony or whoever maintains the back end failed to anticipate the inordinate amount of traffic the site gets. The site often goes down for minutes or hours at a time because there are so many people trying to get on and have fun. Pottermore is going to need to drastically increase the number of their servers so the site doesn't crash all the time.
• Commenting. It's limited to 150 characters or so and thus makes it hard to see if someone responds to you. Especially if 1000 others comment at the same time. Additionally, though I don't know for sure, I believe Pottermore employs some sort of selection sort method that checks every word you comment against an existing dictionary. While the upside is that everyone has to use proper English and there will be no l33t speak shenanigans, if you want to use words in another language or even a word like "Nazgul" (which some images of the book 1 chess pieces do resemble), it gets flagged for moderation. With thousands of people all commenting; it is sure to eat up a lot of processes. Great for ensuring no little kid sees swearing I suppose. Which could be their aim.
• Limited friend capability. Currently with those you friend, you can only send them an item as a gift and, when the dueling feature is up, engage in duels with friends. There is no direct communication. No way to say hi or whatnot. Again, probably protecting minors, but not so great for those who want to talk to those that send friend requests. Unless you know them outside of Pottermore.
• Feedback. It asks how much you like the site. It doesn't ask for comments or about problems. It just has you select how much you like certain features, like how the site looks. 
• The House Cup and points. With near half a million users and climbing, house points are going to become exceedingly large. There is nowhere saying when the House Cup will be awarded. It might be a quarterly thing, it might not. Right now it is just an arbitrary competition based on who participates the most on the site by either picking up random goodies or making potions.
• Potions: This problem is related to the site crashing. The potions made require over an hour of brew time where you let the potion sit. With site crashes and bandwidth issues, it means that a lot of potions go bad and you have to start over. Also, aside from giving potions to friends, you cannot do anything with them.

Conclusion; while the site design and interacting with the site is cool, especially with the inside details of the Harry Potter universe, the servers set it back. Yes, it is still in beta, but the IT side of things should have anticipated the need to have more servers. The limited communication I don't approve of, but Rowling and Sony may be restricting this to protect minors. And from what it seems, the goal is more to roleplay and interact with the site than others, except in magic duels. But... right now it seems like an attempt to take from some online fan rpg elements and make it into a semi interactive site. But it is still under construction. Currently the house point competition could go on forever, the potions are useless except as a way to get points. Reading new stuff is cool. So the main criticism is of the design and IT side of things. And sooner or later ads will be introduced. How else is this going to be paid for?

My piece of advice to J.K. Rowling though? Run from Sony and make a deal with Blizzard. Sony is great for hardware stuff, radios and computers and game consoles and whatnot. Not good at software. They have been hacked multiple times the past year and if security is anything like theirs, it is easy to hack. Blizzard on the other hand has worked with things like Battlenet for over 11 years, plus World of Warcraft. They have 12 million users, and thus know a things or two about server management. Switch to them and let them host your site. Things will go much smoother traffic wise. Plus, they are more creative than Sony in regards to games and challenges. They'd be able to have everything running smoothly and then some.

SQL Mafia Death Threats

"Transaction (Process ID 107) was deadlocked on lock resources with another process and has been chosen as the deadlock victim. Rerun the transaction."

It was the message he always dreaded, one he had only heard about in legend. He heard the rumors that the Mafia had infiltrated SQL, and that this sort of this was happening, but he never thought that the mafia would move from dead pigeons to deadlock sql messages on his computer. It was almost too much to handle.

Messages being lost, transactions disappearing. It was only a matter of time before such a thing happened to him as well.

Oh what to do, what to do. Not much to do but wait. Wait for the query window to appear. And then? No one knows. No one has returned o0nce they have entered the query window.

But enter he must, or else be lost as resources became deadlocked...

*Sigh*

"Reboot and Select proper boot device.
Or insert boot media in selected boot device and press a key"

Sigh. My computer just crashed. No bueno. No good at all.

The universe hates me today, crashed computers and weird Computer state machines.

Oh well.

Time to get a looking at it.

Dell Annoys Me

I may have mentioned in weeks previous that I have my sister's laptop cause it has been having all sorts of blue screen errors. Basically it was random errors that I think had to do with Norton and the memory. Anywhat they sent some replacement parts to her and I got them this weekend to install so the errors stop. Now it won't turn on. The blue lights flash for ten or so seconds and then turn off.

The annoying thing is that I was hung up on five times yesterday in trying to get the next step, in getting the laptop shipped to the warehouse. Apparently that's not in the warranty though and they're sending a tech to re-install the motherboard soon.

So you all know, don't buy refurbished Dell. They're hunks of junk.

Awkwardness Squared

You know how you have days where you just feel awkward, that anything and everything you do is awkwardly intensified by all normal expectations? Well without giving any awkward details to really implicate myself or cause others to pity or fear me by the sheer amount of awkward that was exhibited (I'm pretty sure if awkward could be tapped into as a fuel source, there would be no energy problems for the next twenty years); I'll just say that last night was one of those nights.

To those who may have seen my awkward fumbling; I apologize. There was no good reason for it.

And in other news, I don't like Dell at the moment. Not at all.

My sister is currently attending Snow college and got a lot of grants and school loans, insomuch that she (through our Father) bought a Dell laptop. Now about two or three weeks ago it started intermittently giving the blue screen of death and shutting down. Well the first logical thing to do was to scan for viruses and do a system rollback. After that happened, it still occurred, always randomly, and it hasn't stayed on the screen long enough to really see what it says.
Anywhat, after that we tried re-imaging the laptop back to factory conditions, thinking that would work. It didn't. As it didn't seem to be the operating system, and inexplicably lacking the operating system cd, we connected with Dell online. The online tech looked at some files, some debugger files and concluded that we should re-image the laptop. Again.
So we do it, and the problem happens again. This time we call, through a series of calls and annoying procedures just to get to an agent, to see what else they would recommend and to get them to send us the Operating System CD; which after tremendous hassle they did.

So with the Operating System CD that we got last Tuesday we tried reformatting the hard drive (well, there were two partitions, one for the OS and one for everything else), doing this over the phone with my sister. That didn't work, she still got the blue screen errors. Not to mention problems my sister had with installing the drivers, but that isn't exactly Dell's fault...

Now my family drove down to Ephraim, picking me up along the way to celebrate my sister's birthday (she's now 19. *Sigh* They grow up so quickly) and so while down there I reformatted the hard drive, deleted the small partition so everything is together (and hoping that doesn't invalidate her warranty) reinstalled windows and ran 'chkdsk /r' to check to see if the hard drive is the problem. Nothing popped up. So I installed the drivers. And it gave me the error again.

So now I am downloading some debugger utility to see what the dump file says and if nothing else, calling Dell and doing some major complaining.

So yeah, I am not pleased with Dell. Not pleased at all.