Well, first off, a couple updates about the server:
I’ve added a small-ish UPS to the server itself, so if there’s a power outage, it doesn’t shut down and refuse to automatically come up again. Unless it’s a long-ish outage.

I’ve also fixed the random crashes that occurred from time to time, it ended up being a faulty stick of RAM.

I’ve also ordered parts to build a new router, which will replace the last weak link. After this is done and tweaked, everything should run very smoothly indeed.

In other news, the admin tool on this site was broken into yet again. As a precaution, I’m going to add some pretty drastic measures, either protecting admin.php with a .htaccess access limiter, or adding a self-healing bit of code, which will make it impossible to change the table without my permission.

I’m so tired of phpNuke. I might shuffle everything over to a WordPress setup and leave it as such.

Have fun.
-CCTSM

Edit: phpNuke does, indeed, have more holes than any swiss cheese. I’ll replace it with a WordPress setup soon, even if we lose some functionality.

The server decided to spontaneously reboot today - like most other days, heh - and apparently corrupted the news table here. I’ve restored a backup, but fishy’s story about the Andrew or whatever wasn’t included. It’s still somewhere in the gallery, of course.

Sorry for the hassle.

-CCTSM - Oh god, I hate phpNuke.

Edit: Some dork tried hacking the site again, heh. The patch I applied works just fine, so just quit it, morons.

Heim theory predicts that FTL could be achieved with a sufficiently large magnetic field. This is in the capability of near future spacecrafts. This can provide a realistic model for FTL in our game, but I don’t know enough physics to argue for or against it.

could potentially allow a spacecraft to travel to Mars in three hours and journey to a star 11 light years away in just 80 days, according to a report in today’s New Scientist magazine.

Can someone with extensive knowledge in physics provide some help?

The New Scientist Article

More links

I have managed to build and skin a model. The result immediately triggered complaints from CCTSM. One way or another, I present you with our first skinned ship:

The missile frigate.
The Missile frigates are equipped with 2 THEL (Tactical High Energy Laser) turrets as well as 192 Fire-and-forget High explosive missiles that can be launched at an instance. They are mainly built to deal with crafts of frigate size or smaller.

“We will not go quietly into the night! We will not vanish without a fight!” We’re going to live on! We’re going to survive! Today we celebrate our Independence Day!” - Independence Day

The SSNT project welcomes its second birthday today. We are not dead, in fact, we are very much alive.

Despite deadly professors, broken deals, unpaid jobs and stolen computers and other hardships, we move on.

To prove this, I am giving an update on our progress, just click on the read more link below.

Read the rest of this entry »

The SSNT main page (this page) was hacked some time this morning, I’m checking the server logs as we speak. (If Mr. scriptkiddie is reading this, yes, the logs are veeery much there).

If you see anything odd, please inform me.Also, this was the mainpage - it was not a server-wide hack, or anything you could even call a hack. Mr. scriptkiddie who performed it just ran a little program on his end.

The SSNT page might become semi-static for the time being until modSSNT is implemented, which is 99.99995% hack-proof.

BTW: Restoring the site took approximately 38 minutes. Very impressive, Mr. Scriptkiddie, couldn’t you even have done something to the software? Changing a DB key is soo exciting.

Edit: The hacker made a superadmin account yesterday, at 18:41 GMT+1 w/ DST via a hole in the admin script. Which has now been sealed.He uses Windows XP, probably SP2, and Firefox 1.0.6. He found the site via a Yahoo! search for vulnerable sites. Then today, at 09:15, he changed the footer of this site to put a IFrame over the content of the site with his.. “message”.
The change was simply a DB entry which had been updated, nothing serious.
I was informed about the change at 11:10 this morning, and had it fixed by 11:35.

There’s a fairly high probability that I will report him to his ISP’s abuse department.

The account he created was named “Nelly”, which probably doesn’t have anything to do with his/her real name, and the ISP is Turk Telecom, where s/he apparently has a ADSL-2 line.

-CCTSMaster

Well, it’s been a while, haven’t it?
Anyway, I thought it was about time someone posted around here, soo.. I’ll just go ahead then.

Anyway, I hear that Firelance might be working on a new (short?) story. And Nerdfish is probably blobbing away in his writing bowl when he feels like it.

We all need some inspiration and motivation to actually get the job done, and it seems that it’s a precious commodity nowadays. Nevertheless, I’ve gotten some (ok, lots of) work done on modSSNT myself. Yea, it’s the same old modSSNT which was supposed to be completed one and a half year ago.

Stop looking at me like that.

Anyway, that brings me to my next point - SS&T is almost two years now! In just about a month it will be, anyway. I really doubt I’ll make the same racket as last year, it was highly stressful and not overly successful.

And now for a special request: If you have ideas, plans, wacky thoughts, etc, please post them on the forums - we need it!
And, of course, if you’re not a member of the team already, and feel you can offer us anything - anything! - please consider getting in touch with either me or Nerdfish. The best way is either posting a PM on the forums or e-mailing me.

Let’s hope the next year will offer us more motivation and a lot of modellers and programmers and other developers!

-CCTSMaster
PS. If you’re interested in some of my own projects, the servers, and other stuff similar to the weekly rants, consider popping by http://cctsm.ssnt.org/ every now and then. It’s updated whenever I feel like it, which isn’t often.

Happy B-Day Dragon. Hope you have a really nice day. Be sure to not fry any gifts.

I’d insert something vaguely funny here, but since phpNuke sucks monkey balls, it won’t happen.

God, i hate whoever coded it.

Edit: I hate them even more now.

-CCTSM

There’s been a number of server outages lately, mostly because I’ve been trying to set up a new router to see if A) My ISP is screwed up, or B) My server is screwed up, or C) My router just sucks.

This has been a real pain in the ass, and it’s not done yet either… So, if SSNT isn’t avaliable, it’s just me trying to fix stuff.

For the record: I absolutely HATE Linux. It’s one of the most annoying operating systems around.

-CCTSM

Fish is back. That’s right. Fish is working on coding again. if you have any problems drop him an IM @ cloudsoft@hotmail.com.

Blob