Divine Lunacy

The last 1.x ( 0 < x ≤ 9 ) months can't be summed up in just one post; though most of my time was spent doing mafia stuff, mafia is not the only thing I did. In early February, I took a qualification test for the AMS's "Who Wants to be a Mathematician?" Several weeks after taking the test, I was informed that I, out of all the other people in the state who should have done better than me, was selected to participate in the game. I was one of eight students selected. The game was held on π day at Providence College. There were two rounds, each with four students. I came fourth in my round, and fourth out of the eight competitors. There were no losers; we all received prizes and free AMS gear :D. After the game, Mr. Horne gave me a tour of PC. It's a nice campus. It would be even nicer if they didn't put me on a waiting list :p. The last Math League meet of the year was in Lincoln immediately after vacation. Bested only by KFC, a freshmen and I tied for second place this year. (out of the school) That makes me the top senior. Yeah. PWNED. ( I know there's more, but my memory doesn't span that far... ooh.. wait.. one more thing...)

Oh, and I’m going to the semi-formal with the aforementioned chicken restaurant. (/me skips away.)

It’s been well over a month since my last entry (valentine’s day). While I do tend to blog less during the school year, this large period of silence can be mainly attributed to Mafia [Returns]. One cloudy day in August, I got bored and decided to begin a recreation of what mafia.org was in the old days. (it’s horrid now. Makes me puke.) Through the remaining four months of 2005, I managed to write more than 2000 lines of php; the game was far from complete, but in January of ‘06, it was released for public beta. Advertisement on Hitmen brought a fair amount of users. With the influx of users, I was pressed to develop at a rapid rate. The code base quickly doubled in size, but was still far from complete. Come late-January, I ‘took a break’ from the game.

On the first day of February vacation, word of Mafia Returns leaked out to a group of old Mafia.org players who still hung around on IRC (irc.jaundies.com #divinelunacy, #mafia). News that “the old world had returned” spread quickly across Jaundies, and within a day, 100 new members registered. Again, I was forced to code rapidly. After playing the old mafia, these users had expectations; my inbox was flooded with feature requests, support requests, (thank you)s and the like. Development continued a heightened pace and within a few weeks, the game grew by 3000 lines of PHP, and about 100 lines of Perl. The game is far from done, and will be such for a long time to come. (we need more users. Advertise. Join. Make your friends join. Make your boss join. Make your teachers join. make your mother join.) The game is currently 7146 lines worth of .php files and about 100 lines of Perl.

With the increase in users came a very large increase in bandwidth usage and SQL disk usage. During February vacation, the game began consuming about 2 GB of bandwidth a day, more than half of which was images. This posed a problem as my account is only allotted 20GB per month. This problem was partially conquered by IzzyCreamcheese who offered to host the images on his own server until a permanent solution could be arranged. (he’s part of the permanent plan as well.) Even with the images on izzy’s server, I still lack the bandwidth to last the month. Unless the host gets back to me about upgrades by tomorrow, Mafia will go down for a time. (either until the end of the month, or until I have another chat with izzy.)