Pending final discussion and approval by the Fleet Commander, Mell will be appointed as the new Training Officer. I've made it clear that I'll hurt Mell...a lot...if he screws up, so hopefully he'll have a long and productive tenure as TO. Also, I have selected LC Tomaas Banys for my Command Attache. I'll be running him for a trial newsletter or two and if we're both happy with the results, he will formally take the position of CA:XO. This means the Episode 2-themed Newsletter will be coming out soon, so get your reviews, articles, etc in for it. ICQ and Graphics professor are open for applications, details are on the TIE Corps news page.

In the past, the EH has had problems with people abusing power. In recent times, with the adoption of online databases, this has taken a new form, with those entrusted with maintaining our rosters abusing their power whenever they see a decision they don't like. This happened in the DB a couple times. In addition to this, we also have problems with an outgoing SGCOM pulls the plug on webhosting, leaving his/her replacement floundering. In order to address this, all SGCOMs will now be sending me monthly database dumps of their rosters. They want our precious ASP/PHP people don't have to get their panties in a knot about us seeing their l33t c0d3 (or how bad that code might be) and we have the raw data in case someone wants to be an idiot. Considering the fact that subgroups are supposed to submit rosters weekly, I think everyone comes out pretty okay in this arrangement.

I posted a little rant about "responsible computing" on one of the message boards. It seems the PC industry went through the carefree period akin to the 60s. Free love, free network connections, no fear of problems. Then society reached the 80s and 90s and ugly things like STDs, AIDS and so on. The PC industry, specifically systems running Windows, are in the middle of a plague - a plague of email virii. As part of a larger community (namely the EH and the Internet as a whole) it is your responsibility to perform responsible computing. This includes making sure your PC is patched and up to date. This is similar to getting a regular safety check and tune-up for your car. Software today is hardly perfect out of the box and it is naive to think that it will not need patches. Don't fall victim to the social engineering aspect of email virii. If your grandmother sends you pictures of Anna Kornakova, well, there's a pretty good chance it's a virus. The recent outbreak of Klez, a virus that fakes the sending address, adds extra weight to the mantra of "Trust noone". Get a virus scanner. Keep it up to date. If $50 is the difference between you stopping those virii and having to reinstall your Windows and applications and potentially lose documents you worked hard on (like resumes), then the $50 isn't a bad investment.

Total roster count has dropped by about 150, most because of AWOL checks in the Senate and BHG, it seems. The DB gained about another 50, while the TIE Corps remained static. Total membership is around the 4,400 mark. Platform stats show a 20 point increase for TIE Fighter ownership in the TIE Corps over the last week. This compares with 11 for XWA. Since tracking only started three weeks okay, it's a bit hard to see if there's any actual trend in where the platforms are going.

Bughunt
1. Banner cleanup - old, unused banners were deleted, freeing space (30 May)
2. Custom error pages - Custom 404 and 500 error pages implemented, which mail me errors, thus speeding up problem resolution (31 May)
3. Uniform updates - Bytesize limit for uniforms reduced from 50K to 40K. (7 June) Uniform display code rewritten in ASP.net to trial ASP.net performance/functionality (8 June)
4. High score table fixed (9 June)
5. Zipped XvT and XWA BSF submitting works again. The problem was linked to old components on the server. (12 June)
6. Message board adjustment - Item totals for the boards cut in half (list views from 50 to 25, tree view from 100 to 50). The message board is one of the most visited parts of the domain and this should reduce load times and bandwidth. (13 June)