BioWare announces the final DLC for Mass Effect 2

Of course it has something to do with the imminent Reaper invasion that will be at the core of Mass Effect 3′s story. And it looks like it’ll have a lot to do with the mass relays as well.

Actually, I think that’d be a cool way to end the DLC and, by extension, the game: have Shepard and the team fight their way through a mass relay to stop someone from activiting the relay and allowing the Reapers to complete their journey. Of course, they fail in this regard, and the Reapers arrive, smashing the Normandy SR-2 to bits as they pass, leaving Shep and the team stranded on the relay.

I mean, what better way to open Mass Effect 3 with a training scenario then having Shephard fight her (I play as FemShep) way out of a relay?

The US isn’t ready to deal with a cyber attack

The head of the US military’s cyber forces warned the House Armed Services Committee yesterday that at best, America’s network defenses deserve a ‘C’ rating.

Comforting, no?

Ireland really is the Emerald Isle

So very green. And yesterday, the entire island was visible sans clouds (a rarity, and then a rather timely one!) from orbit. Naturally, NASA took an incredible picture of it.

Sony continues to find willing judges

Now they get to look at George “GeoHot” Hotz’s PayPal account records, to see who his donors were and where they made donations from.

Comforting, no?

Somebody turned off the Rustock botnet

You may have noticed less spam in your inbox since Wednesday. I know I have.

Tonight’s post brought to you by Dino Riders:

Remember these?

Many thanks to Fenyx4 from the Codex, who dropped some coin in the tip jar at the end of February to help offset the increased costs of running the site that I’ve lately been having to deal with.

Aiera has seen some tremendous growth in the last couple of years. Since I started tracking stats on the site, I’ve served up nearly half a million page loads to tens of thousands of unique visitors. This year, after only two full months (and a week), I’ve served up half the number of page loads that I served up in 2010; the count of unique visitors is at about 50% of last year’s total.

This after one sixth of a year. But let me put it another way: after today, Aiera will have seen more traffic in 2011 than it saw in all of 2009. In other words: 2011 is shaping up to be a huge year for the site, the best it’s ever seen. Unless I do something to screw that all up, of course. But let’s assume I won’t.

This growth comes at a price, though; for the last few months, I’ve been exceeding my “performance budget” on my server. Mediatemple are generous enough hosts; their (gs) hosting package has proven robust enough to survive a Felicialanche^[1], their management features are excellent, and if their uptime isn’t exactly “five 9s”, at least their support response is both personable and swift.

But everything has limits. With my (gs) package, I’m given 1000 “performance units” (what I call my “performance budget” above) — which equate to a certain percentage of processor time (measured per hour) on the servers Aiera is hosted on — every month. If I exceed that budget, I get charged $0.10 per additional performance unit consumed. And for the last couple of months, I have been consuming more than my performance budget, to the tune of between 800 and 1700 additional units.

Now, I’ve been doing what I can to try and curb the site’s consumption of that performance budget. More aggressive caching is in place, image sizes and qualities have been reduced where possible, and I’m just trying to figure out how to install the APC PECL extension on my (gs) package, which should help. But let’s face it: the site has grown, and is continuing to grow. And either it needs to expand into more robust hosting (which would probably mean a bit of an outage, since I would really only have time to do a piecemeal migration rather than an “all at once” effort), or I’ll need some help to offset the cost of maintaining the current hosting.

Do feel free to discuss. In the meantime, I’ve added Fenyx4 to the acknowledgements page, as a kind of permanent note of thanks for his support.

[1] The avalanche of traffic resulting from being retweeted by Felicia Day. See also: Slashdotted, Instalanche.

Kevin Fishburne dropped me an email to let me know that has changed directions a bit with his Sanctimonia project. He’s abandoned Kickstarter, for one, and has instead thrown up a dedicated site for the game on his company’s website. The project entry has been updated to reflect this.

He’s still fundraising for the game, now vial PayPal, but has also shifted his attention to getting his world-generation software, Littoral, fully completed and published. If you want to support his efforts, but can’t for whatever reason spring loose a few dollars to toss in his hat, he offers some other helpful options that you might try instead.