Over a year ago, when the advertising sector of the Internet bottomed out and we had to change our business model, Aelyria faced an existential threat. A huge change to our business model was undertaken -- we implemented a society for philanthropy, we expanded subscriber benefits, and, as of last November, we evolved our hardware platform to the cloud infrastructure. As we approach the month of June and witness two consecutive quarters of stability and growth, I am pleased to announce Aelyria...

The past couple of months on the Internet have borne witness to an interesting development both frightening and exciting at the same time. The Web is being incrementally subjugated by the calculating moves of the world’s most popular social network, Facebook. This presents designers and developers like us with an exciting opportunity tempered by serious challenges, and while the traditional news media has been quick to lavish praises and submit to the new Facebook paradigm, it is important to...

Following the extended emergency server maintenance during the weekend of November 21, 2009, I re-evaluated our network infrastructure at the time given how it had created a series of risks. Our last major network realignment occurred in August 2007, and while the added stability has ensured that our uptime has been at about 99%, when we have had those couple of days every year when system downtime occurs, it has proven to be fairly catastrophic and costly for us as an organization. Since April...

I wanted to apologize for the last blog post that I made; I've been extremely stressed out and deeply saddened by the anguishing state of affairs that the global economic downturn has taken Aelyria. It was not my intention to belittle anyone's contributions to our community; it was my intention to try and vent a bit on a blog -- something which many of our users routinely do -- about the 80+ hour work weeks that I have been putting in to trying to find a way forward for our community. I guess...

Spore is an amazingly fun game. Its remarkable how a very simple formula can be so successful for games. So, I decided to share some personal thoughts about this game.

PREMISE

You play a series of mini-games, each of which taking anywhere between 30 minutes to a couple of hours to complete, to "evolve" your race. These "mini-games" are actually sophisticated tutorials, but they also allow you to fine-tune your species (especially their personality)....