Avatara-y Goodess

Well, I'm an idiot. A couple months ago, I wanted my friend Jay to try out the Chess Avatara demo I had by moving the server and the client download to the Bite Size Studios Web site.

Unfortunately, since the server is a cheap, web-hosting server, they didn't allow the capability to run a custom process. The firewall stopped me. I was dissapointed, and the experiment failed.

Since that time, I've pined for the day when I could run Avatara onb a public server so friends and family on the Internet could try it out. It would not only be a testing opportunity to see how this puppy handles latency (a local process just can't truly replicate that), but it would just be satisfying and motivating to see it succeed. :-)

This morning, I was really itching to find a server. I was looking up prices for renting dedicated servers. The lowest I could find was $70/month.

Could I really justify that expense for another 6 months of development?! Michele would surely kill me. ;-)

And then it occurred to me...why haven't I just used my laptop?!

OMG - I was staring right at my solution. My laptop was a server. I guess in all the excitement of running my software on Linux to show Java's WORA (write once, run anywhere) abilities, I forgot to realize that my laptop was serving as a perfectly fine server! :-)

So, I got home today...changed a couple settings, and was already serving up Avatara! Unfortunately, I had a couple of people at work try it and they ran into trouble. First was a simple JNLP adjustment. Then, I was seeing "black screen" issues. Luckily, it was replicable on my machine....and after an hour or so of seeing the issue, and seeing the fix, but still having it fail -- I realized my brain had failed me and that my fix was a fake, and then I fixed it for real.

So now I sit here waiting to test it again, but no one is around. How sad. Well, either later tonight or tomorrow, Avatara will see it's first public usage. Very exciting. I'm not extra motivated. :-)