AccentedTouch

“While searching for an obscure tome of forbidden tax code incantations, I knew I’d have to bury my fear and visit the Dimensional Library, Gaia’s most complete– and dangerous– repository of knowledge. Each book therein is a gateway to another dimension, and it’s far too easy to get stuck forever inside one. The Librarian is a masterful caretaker of the stacks, but he’s got a short fuse when it comes to visitors– if you whisper one word out of line, he’ll shove you into the pages of one of his books. I narrowly avoided that fate myself, but many noisy visitors have been lost forever inside strange fictions.” -[NPC] GRS Accountant Ivan (http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/community-announcements/search-for-the-lost-chapter-and-find-amazing-rewards/t.68663947/)

A few months ago Gaiaonline released an exotic rig item called Lost Chapter which features items like The Librarian, Ian, Sasha, Old Man Logan, Johnny K. Gambino, Edmund, Ruby, Brennivin, Kanoko, Radio Jack, Nicolae, Sam, Liam, The Overseer, and The Sentinel. The item is worth 999 gaia cash per bundle and is available for 149 gaia cash for each. When the player bought a Lost Chapter, they would be transported into a chapter in a book, and only by finding the legendary Lost Chapter could was the means to escape, however, the player could stay in a chapter or continue on at any moment until they succeeded or failed.

One of the most featured item on this exclusive rig item is The Librarian. It is a masterful caretaker of the stacks, but he’s got a short fuse when it comes to visitors and if you whisper one word out of line, he’ll shove you into the pages of one of his books. To escape, you must find the legendary Lost Chapter.

According to Fayren Pickpocket, One of Gaiaonline’s Lead artist who made the Lost Chapter set of items that her list is absurdly small but she prepared for it and hopes that everyone will enjoy the amusing classic literature.

“By law, every male American must either register with the military when he turns 18 or forfeit the right to certain social benefits provided by the government. Imagine how your life would change if you were drafted immediately after high school for service in your country.” -Wikipedia.org (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_Service_System)

According to Mandy, a very known Omni Moderator that goes by with the name of Elindranyth, that her life would be completely different in at least one major way. She wouldn’t be married to Steve. She would likely have never met Steve. She would have never done anything that she did on account of knowing Steve (*cough*joingaia*cough*)

Aside from that big thing and everything it entails, she’s not sure what else would be so different for her. She knows that being in the army has changed her brother, mostly for the better. She added that his brother did have a phase where he seemed to be starting down the path towards becoming an alcoholic, but he probably would have had that phase had he gone to a normal 4 year college as well. But overall he’s definitely matured.

She added that probably would not have been able to handle such things as well as he did. For one, Mandy may be a small person, but She’s by no means physically fit. Also, Mandy emphasized that she’s easily stress out when things get rough and become overemotional and sometimes irrational. Although she’s better at handling these sorts of things now, but she’s also 24 now. At 18, she was not as good. Mandy, certainly would have thought about deserting but she implied that the sort to think empty threats.

That aside, She’s really not sure what else would be that different. She implied that it feels that there are other things in my life that have made her the sort of person like my brother has become. She would still have probably met people similar to those She know now and might not be such a computer nerd. She’d probably be living in a different area of the country.

All in all, She’s just happy that things went like they have, and that there was no forced draft 90% of the time, she’s happy with her life, her friends, all the experiences she have gone through to get to where she is right now. And because of that, Mandy don’t like to think about how different they might be had something in the past been different.

“I’m not going to go into details because I’m going to take the high road. I’m not going to talk about how disorganized and effed up this whole thing was. I’m not going to be bitter about it and I’m not going to let myself cry. I’m not going to rant about the new direction the company is taking. I’m not going to dishonor myself by disparaging the management. ” -Derlaine, Gaiastaff (http://gaia.wikia.com/wiki/Gaia_Staff_post:_April_Fools_2k11)

Last April 1 2011, the Gaiaonline community celebrated April Fools together with the world and started an event for the special day. Upon signing into the site, Gaians were redirected to the My Gaia page, there they were greeted with a blue themed page and cat heads occupying their friends thumbnail box. In the my stats box their avatar was also seen with a cat head. The event header also contained various cat heads and the clickable logo brought to you by Meowbook. Within the header was a tabby striped Wing Sticker and flying around the screen was a Pink Giftbox. Upon clicking these three links, Gaians would receive event items.

According to PRlSM, One of the Lead Developers of Gaiaonline, that there were a lot of great news that has been spreading out. She added that as many of us may have heard that Gaia has recently been acquired by Meowbook, the social network just for cats. Also, PRlSM stated that she is a long time user of Meowbook and she can’t tell and express how exciting it will be to work for this great company. Unfortunately, Meowbook has some policy about “keeping on the bipeds” or needing to meet a certain ratio of abyssinians to domestics, but the point is most of your current art team will being saying goodbye to Gaia. I will miss them very much, but I am looking forward to working with my new all-cat team of artists. We have a lot in common already, so I’m sure it will be a smooth transition.

“It’s all about the numbers. Take 150 webservers. Each of those webservers are processing about 60 page requests per second. On average, each page load requires anywhere from 3 to 30 queries, depending on the complexity of the page. All of this starts to add up. Now, distribute your data out across a farm of database services — say around 20 different databases. In PHP’s share-nothing architecture, persistent connections to your databases simply aren’t efficient. I have crunched the numbers a hundred different ways. If all of my webservers used persistent connections, that would mean as many as 40 connections to each database from each webserver. multiply by hundreds, and you see what i mean.” -72squared

The developers carefully open and close connections to the databases on servicing each page request. This has worked well for them so far, believe it or not. Their database servers can actually keep up, and at any one time we may only have couple hundred processes open on our databases at any given time. The whole trick was to release the connection as soon as possible. It may sound counter-intuitive, but they bench-marked it both ways, and non-persistent connections were way faster than persistent connections. But this kind of approach has it’s trade-offs. They found out that it could get greater performance out of their databases by dividing them up into discreet sets of services. Unfortunately, this means that the average page load may need to open more and more connections to databases to do its processing. According to 72squared, Gaiaonline Developer, that he found himself trying to find a way to get true database connection pooling while still maintaining the integrity of PHP’s share nothing architecture, they found out that an answer for it is to connect a pooling server.

Squared added stated that its Ok to call him crazy but it works. What he did was built a farm of database proxy servers that maintain persistent connections to a selected pool of databases. Then instead of connecting directly to the database and executing his query, he passes the query through the socket server that accepts the query and passes it off to the correct database. The database processes Squared’s request and returns its response. In turn, the proxy server passes that result back to the webserver and moves on to handle the next incoming request. Now, his webservers never need to open a connection with a multitude of databases and instead they connect to a random database proxy server that will relay all incoming data requests to the database and return the response. Taking this approach requires a well developed database abstraction layer in place. Fortunately, such an infrastructure was already in place. He specified that he was able to place his new theory into production in only a day or so of work. The result? Gaiaonline’s databases only had to handle a few connections and passed all of the information through these processes. The overall speed of the queries increased without the overhead of establishing multiple connections to datasources, and our total connections to the database dropped to a mere fraction of what it was before while still maintaining the same volume of data.

“Happy St. Patrick’s Day, Gaians! ‘Tis never a bad time, celebrating our patron saint of snake-slaying. Back in the old days– you wouldn’t remember– I once saw young Patrick drive a whole pack of the legless buggers into the sea with nothing more than a cobbler’s broom and a prayer! Ah, those were the days.” -[NPC] Odanodan (http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/community-announcements/st-patrick-s-day-event/t.70266137/)

The Gaiaonline community together with the world worn green shirts on there avatars and celebrated the annual event called St. Patrick’s Day last March 16, 2011. The moderators prepared events for everyone who are present on the celebration that lasted for almost a week. The moderators added [NPC] Odanodan on an event forum called “Shamrock” and everytime you post on the a thread. The NPC gives a reply and you’d be able to get an item called Astra-XI: Lucky Clover that enables the avatar to turn green.

The name Odanodan means of the red earth in Ireland. Odanodan first appearance was as a companion item. There is also the SDPlus #270 Odanodan released from the Crystal Overdrive rig item. A unique feature for this NPC was being able to blink and hold an animated rainbow in his palm, the number of frames was 147. This is the third time for the Quote Transmitted Disease to appear. However, this one seemed to functioned by use of a transparent animated PNG. Theories were that Odanodan could be summoned into a thread by typing keywords in relation to St. Patrick’s Day or by typing his name. A few bugs were the QTD not rending some avatars green due to certain skins and I’am poses.

Also, while your avatars are under the green spell from the npc other animated items including the one granted by the npc you have equipped will not show. This is temporary and is not a bug but simply a restriction of the way the green effect works. Animated items will display normally when you un-greenify yourself or when the event ends, whichever comes first.