This has nothing to do with minecraft, but as you may know, I am a hobby photographer and I won a 3rd place in a photo contest of the largest German computer magazine!

The contest title was “City landscapes”. If you click through the images on the page you will see mine in b&w as the 3rd image (“username a-head”, should be uncovery but the user account there is more than 10 years old…). This is the image that won:

I am super-proud since this is the first time I participated in a contest and I am also winning a prize already :) Yay!

I am upgrading the server to 1.5.1. Since there are some unique resources that cannot be shared by a temp and the normal server at the same time, I need to shutdown the system to install additional plugins to test them. So please be patient while this is happening.

I have now had the time to catch up with the pending donations. Thanks a lot to the people who donated! I have sent each of you an email to the address quoted in the donation (which is the one you use for your paypal account).

If you re-login on the website now, you will get your donator status. If there is anyone still outstanding, please let me know so I can check into the matter.

I have been able to do initial tests with the 1.5 version of the server and at the minimum I can report that there are no obvious error messages from any of the important plugins. The next step will be to make a temp setup with random maps, using the current full configurations of the plugins. Once that shows up without errors, we can basically upgrade the server.

I then still I have to go through the custom plugins like the shop and make sure that all new blocks are accounted for etc so we do not break the shop.

I hope I can do it this week. The issue is that I will be on a business trip until Wednesday night and I am not sure how much time I will have to do it. I would hope that I can do it until latest this coming weekend. I will then also close the current contest and put it up for voting.

The server OS has been upgraded to the latest version, and to take advantage of the updates 100%, I restarted the server. The issue was that the server, on reboot, unexpectedly prompted for a disk scan – which shows up before the remote connection is enabled. Since the server is hosted at a provider, the server was unreachable to me since then. I contacted the provider immediately, but until they got someone to go to the server, check it, ask me for the password needed to do the disk scan, until I had time to reply, and then until they again got there to start the disk scan, some hours passed away.

So far so good, just some downtime. There should be only minimal loss of data/changes for people who have been working on the server until the last minute.

Tomorrow I will test the 1.5 setup and see if we can upgrade already with the minimum configuration necessary. Maybe some functions will have to wait until the plugins are updated, but I will try to get the main functionalities running on 1.5 ASAP.

I have just finished my last day diving here and will make my back home this afternoon. In the meantime, I thought I give you a look at the best pictures of the week diving I did.

You can see them on my photography website here. The top 3 rows of images are from this holiday. The ones before from previous dives over the last 4 years.

We will be setting up a new server for banned users so they stop sending me emails to get back in. The new server will have a full-access lot protection for easier griefing, cash rewards for swearing and and a help vampire setup that restores your health whenever you ask a question.

On top of that, you can buy op-level with cash, and we hired a group of elders to come over when your first dirt hut is finished to look at it and clap. I will give out my personal phone number and skype username to answer questions that people might have on how to join.

Hiosa will be the senior pixel art helper. You send him an image by email and he will come over to your lot and build it for you.

The joining-criteria are that you need to have been banned for at least 24 hours and that you are able to spell your name in large block letters across your lot, immediate op level if you can work a penis or a swastika into the text.

I have temporarily cleared the temp server map and started a new one. The old one seemed to have causing troubles. Until I can find out how to pinpoint them and solve them, there will be temp map running.

Also, you might have noticed that I have not been online lot recently. I had a couple of business trips and right now sitting in an airport again leaving for a week of holidays. If there is an update on Bukkit or anything else, I can react to it, but since I am going diving, I will not be connected 24/7.

Please consider that the temp server has VERY limited resources. While the main server has 16GB RAM, the temp server has only 2. Please make sure that you refrain from larger farms for food or animals, redstone functionality or other things that are known to cause lag.Remember that the temp server is made to test new functions, not to create mega-farms.

You can now connect to a temp 1.5 server on port 25564.

This temp server is 100% vanilla, so there is no protection, no commands etc. Whatever you build there visibly is likely to get griefed. Please be careful what you do where.

If you just whitelisted on the server, please be aware that the whitelist on the temp server does not update as fast.

The map from the temp server will be the new darklands. The nether from the temp server will be the new nether. So treat it with respect, it will be around for a while.

I have now created a new darklands so that we do not break a lot of other things. The darklands has the same protected radius so that new settlers will not break things too easily. Feel free to mine etc, but this one will be deleted when we upgrade to 1.5!

I have unloaded the darklands. There seems to be some corruption somewhere in the world files – just in time before the 1.5 update…From the files that have been changed recently, the issue seems to be somewhere on or around the spawn of the darklands. There is no backup of the darklands due to the huge size (2.5 GB) and it’s temporary nature. That leaves us with the following options:

• Reset the spawn area to virgin land and hope that the rest of the map is OK – risking more errors
• Reset the whole map and work with a temp new darklands until we upgrade to 1.5 and then replace that again with the temp map – as described
• Remove the darklands completely and work without one until we upgrade to 1.5

Opinions?

Since I am REALLY REALLY busy these days (only less then 50% of the time around, traveling for business a lot etc) I rely to a more active help of the users, specially the elders – in a productive way. So here some tips how you can help me manage the server:

• If there are repeated freezes that boot users off the server, tell me please, with date, time & timezone. Best of course if you can convert the time into Hong Kong time already.
• If you submit a ticket, and do not get a reply from me, please check the ticket system on the website. If the ticket is not there, it did not go through. Resubmit it on the website instead of in-game.
• If someone makes trouble on the IRC Chat or
• ANY BUGS AT ALL, please tell me ASAP, with date, time and timezone, possible with screenshots, user names involved etc. The screenshot help me search for the chat text in the logfiles. Do not tell me a day later if you can
• If you ban someone, send me an email with date, time, time zone and reason.
• Do not ban people for Xraying. Tell me if you suspect someone, I will then check in detail.

Thanks for your help!

I will be on a trip for the coming 2 weeks (Half business, half holiday), but I should have time to check in for any issues there might be. So while I might not be on IRC or in the game, if you open a ticket, I will be able to fix stuff within a couple of hours at least!

Also, I installed tapatalk for the forum, so it is easier to use it from mobile devices. On top of that, I did a couple of fixes to the website. Since I updated PHP to a new version a couple of days ago, I inadvertently broke some pages that new needed changes in the code with the new version. I fixed the code and moved stuff back where it belonged. If you find any other glitches, please let me know.

I have now setup the requirement to be registered before you can type in the IRC channel. Of course, if you are in-game, anything you say will be visible in the IRC channel, no matter if you are registered there or not. Sorry that this was neccessary.

Here is again an instruction how to do that.

I got a request to make an alias for /suicide since some people did not feel like killing themselves virtually. So now you can also use /respawn instead. Same effect. Just a different command for it. You still get a message that you killed yourself though.

Since I promised it, here are the photos from my holidays. All images on page one are from this holidays, if you click “Next” you can see some older diving images. Some of these images are quite rare from my point of view, and I was really lucky for some of the animals we see, that we could see them so close or at all.

Since we had some banned people harassing players via IRC, I will set the IRC channel to require registration. You will have to be registered with the freenode network to talk in the channel. You can do so by typing:

/msg nickserv help register

and reading the manual or by typing directly

/msg nickserv REGISTER password your.email@address.com

after changing the last two items in the line above to your password and email address. So far everything works as usual, but

FYI I will make an attempt to reset the contest to the state it was on 24th Dec to fix all the damage done to the contest entries.