Yesterday the server hosting our Picky Picky Game suffered a hardware failure, and for some reason we have lost all additions to the object database since it went live. After discussion on LiveJournal, enough people found pictures cached in their web browsers that I have been able to reconstruct an archive of the completed panels (with only a couple of lacunae), and so we plan to start the game afresh, with the output of the previous game inserted as Page 0 of its archive.
There is also the problem that the ZEO server is not restarted automatically when the computer is rebooted, which is an especial problem since the CGI script just freezes if it cannot find ZEO. Need to rethink this when I have some programming time to spare.
Whatever went wrong, I think we did pretty well to assemble the
ersatz archive as quickly as we did. Of the things that made
this possible, one, ironically, was that I have so far failed to
enable the feature that permits SSH and SCP to opperate without
my typing in their passwords. As a result, I type the
password in a lot. As a result, I was able to type it from
memory when it came to logging in to caption.org
from work to attempt to fix things. (Don’t tell my boss.)
A couldn’t do that for the Alleged web server, because the
password is handled for me automatically... Curse my
unguessable passwords!
Having given in and acquired a LiveJournal account also turned out to be a life-saver, allowing me to fire up a discussion and assemble in short order a crack team of browser-cache spelunkers to fish out copies of the lost panels.