Just what do you think you're doing, Dave?

Yeah, or as my friend Hammerhead would say; "Boobies?". Well, the last weeks we've been doing a number of interesting things, not just playing with words. Ok, maybe a bit too much playing with words, but that's just because we have 39 new ships in Red Moon Rising.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

Lets start 3 weeks back when we were moving into our new offices. We had been in our old faithful office for almost 6 years now and it was painful to move. However, the new offices are much bigger, allowing us to finally start hiring more developers to work on EVE! Yeah, we think that's quite cool too :D

We're looking for members from the EVE community first and foremost, so don't hesitate to send in a CV/Resume even though there isn't an advertised position listed. Some of our new staff, like Ulfrr , have been hired for positions that were not listed. If you have gaming industry experience, that's even better.

Qualifying ISD personnel have first dibs on internships, Hammerhead, Redundancy, Valar and Mephysto being good examples of volunteers that became interns and/or staff. So I suggest that if you are considering an intership at CCP, you sign up for ISD. ISD is a thankless position but we certainly wouldn't be where we are without their efforts.

Yarrdware?

Oh, yes. Our Yarrdware plans are progressing, currently testing new 64-bit Blade Servers from IBM. We're doing performance comparison between the AMD and Intel blades and seeing which work out better in our cluster configuaration and for our software.

We're speeding up the testing and will very likely commence trials on Tranquility this month. We will replace two of the existing blades with one AMD and one Intel 64-bit blade in the proxy layer to see how each performs in it's native habitat.

Note that this is running on our current 32-bit server code, it's not a 64-bit version, so there is more room for improvement after the hardware arrives. We're also investigating more multi-homing opportunities with our network connections, and more internet backbone providers which can provide better alternative routes into Tranquility.

Depending on our testing and the results of the comparisons, we'll be in a position to order our needed upgrades to Tranquility. If the new blades are providing significant improvements on all areas, we are considering almost a full replacement of TQ! That sounds crazy, and it is, but we're allowed to be crazy, I mean hey, we live in Iceland, don't we? :)

Before you ask, no, you can't have our stuff!!!111

YARRRR EMMMMMM ARRRR-bq

OK, I couldn't find a cool heading for the Red Moon Rising part of my blog, so that'll have to do. We're now in testing mode so all our efforts are focused on that. Singularity is being upgraded with a fresh build daily where we're squishing bugs from all the bug reports coming in.

We'd like anyone who has spare time and is able to log on to Singularity to check out the various aspects of RMR. Some of the content hasn't been released to the market yet since we're still fixing bugs in them and Tech 2 will remain in closed testing.

To wrap it up, I'd like to formally introduce to you our mistress for the last months, Red Moon Rising. She's quite demanding but we think she's worth the effort :)

p.s. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is also one of Hammerhead's inventions. It's a cocktail which causes considerable hangover.