3 posts tagged “ccp”

Most of you have heard by now, but I thought I'd make an announcement here anyway: I have resigned from CCP Games and am returning to the Bay Area in mid-December.  Just about three weeks from now, actually.

I am not entirely certain of the future, but I expect the first few weeks will be involved in me trudging around the country saying hello to various elements of the various families that might have some interest in my presence for that unholy contraption we like to call the "Holidays."  After that, however, all bets are off as I try to get back into the groove after being in Iceland for the past year.

It has been a good trip.  Being out here for the past nine months has taught me a lot about myself, about my relationship with Janine, and about life in general.  I've learned more about what I can and can't handle, what is and is not acceptable in a job, and a bit of Icelandic besides!  Ég tala pínulítið íslensku.  (Okay; I'm not entirely sure that's right.  But it's understandable if you speak the language.)

The reasons for my return are many, but it basically boils down to being homesick and disagreeing with some of the decisions upper management has made regarding employees who actively play EVE Online.  C'est la vie, as they say.  Life moves on.

I am excited to be returning "home" - as much as the Bay Area is my home anyway - and am looking forward to catching up with everybody I've missed in 2007.  See you soon!

PS, those of you curious, Iceland has been quite warm so far.  I don't think the temperature has hit freezing except one or two days, and it's still raining out - no snow, no ice!  I know most places have succumb to the weather already, but Iceland is still chugging along, nice and warm(ish).  Of course, we'll say nothing about the daylight...currently the sun is coming up around 9:30 AM and going away at 4:30 PM.

Also, I saw the aurora the other night!  It was faintly visible in the city so I hopped in the car and drove out to my favorite spot by the lighthouse, but by that point the clouds had rolled in.  Shame.

It seems that IIS is single threaded.  Everything online says that it is not, but I know for a fact that my IIS will only serve one ASP request at a time.  Is this due to some configuration error?  I don't see anything related to this subject in the configuration screens I can find.  Or is there some underlying issue that I'm unaware of?

I found some IIS manager on MSDN, but it doesn't seem to have installed any icons so I don't know where it ended up.  I've got some sleuthing to do.  It has a readme that talks about what to do once it's open, but I can't seem to find where it went.  (Oh, dpkg -L, I miss you...)

Sleep.

So, most of you know I've been working for another company (CCP Games) for the past about a month and half or something.  Anyway, they are completely a Microsoft shop.  Windows, Exchange, IIS, etc.  No Unix or Macs in site, really.  Even the artists work in Windows.  It's pretty different from what I've learned at Six Apart/Danga.  In fact, you could probably call it the opposite.

All of the Microsoft software seems designed to make things easier at the expense of making it harder to actually dig in and find the things you're looking for.  Notably, I am sorely missing things that might tell me what is going on.  Right now IIS is sitting in the background spinning trying to serve a page.  I'm getting no output.  I'm very unsure as to how to troubleshoot this.

Sometimes when I hit the page it says remote procedure call failed, and sometimes it spins.  Further investigation reveals that it is every other time.  Okay, dig out the Event Viewer, which is Microsoft's way to show what's going on.  Ah, in the System log, there's an error that happens when the page spins:

The application-specific permission settings do not grant Local Activation permission for the COM Server application with CLSID
{0C0A3666-30C9-11D0-8F20-00805F2CD064}
 to the user ...snip....  This security permission can be modified using the Component Services administrative tool.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

Well, if that isn't helpful, I don't know what is.  It wasn't doing this before I went on vacation.  Well, let's take a short trip down the Google path and see if I can find anything useful.  Well, I found some info.  Dug through the registry and found that the above is referring to the Machine Debug Manager.  I pulled up Component Services and am trying to figure out why it can't launch?  It seems like it should work, the various accounts there have access to launch it.

In further exploration, it seems like this is caused by ASPCache expiring.  I had downloaded a demo version because I couldn't find the full one on the internal site.  So now I need to actually take the time to dig it out of the network somewhere and get the real one installed.  Then hopefully things will work again.  Hopefully.

Back to work... exciting!