The What's New Archive
December 2000
2000
28 December
17:27 - Cleaned up a bit the "U-boats lost on this day" part of the Events on this day page.
18:31 - Spent a major amount of time on programming, both the Members Area and also general areas on the site.Planned and installed data for both Emblems of the Week and also Commander of the Week for the next 6 months or so. I love to be able to take care of something like that so far ahead in time :)
17:27 - Spent the Christmas Day (between meals and drinks :) on re-learning Freehand, using version 9 this time. I had not used it for months on end due to database work and had seemingly forgotten most of it. However after some time I got the hang of it again and created 5 new emblems, bringing the total up to 156.I am now finishing the upcoming emblems database describing the emblems that we have not (and perhaps will not) yet illustrated in Freehand. This database will be 2-300 entries at least and as time goes by it should become smaller and smaller as we remove emblems from it as we illustrate them.
This is vital element in showing both the number of emblems used in the war and also which boats used them.
17:27 - Finished upgrading the hardware in the uboat.net development machine (not the server). This was long overdue and had been slowing down our work a little bit (esp. on more complex SQL database work).Now it's a 1000MHZ AMD Athlon Thunderbird processor (overclocked to 1100MHZ) with 256MB of high speed memory - big difference on the complex queries I'll tell you! :)
17:27 - Added 343 U-boat Patrols for 54 new U-boats to our databases. This completes one of the largest tasks ever undertaken at uboat.net - we have over 5100 patrols for 864 U-boats listed in there for a complete overview of all patrols.
18:31 - We've added almost 1200 patrols for 209 U-boats to the U-boat Patrols database. Now we have installed online (in the preliminary Members Area) 4760 patrols for 808 U-boats.What remains to do is a few hundred patrols for boat in series U-300 - U-363 and then we're done with this massive project.
18:30 - Members area
I've opened up a new set of pages explaining our new and exciting Members area. Please read through them and let me know what you think. If response is good we'll open the system in early January 2001.
17:27 - The work on the U-boat Patrols is progressing nicely, we have some 150 boats left to do (including many of the busiest ones) but already we have over 3500 (the 4300 number was over calculated) patrols listed in the database. This work should be completed in the next week or so.This data also includes movements between bases which were not war patrols as such (2 day sailing from Lorient to Bordeaux for example).
17:27 - Due to the fact that I now have to pay about $50 extra due to the massive traffic on the site (bandwidth charges) I have spent some time on ways to reduce the traffic (without hindering service in any way of course). I have found a nice technical method which I am implementing on pages- this will hopefully give us a nice breathing space. What did I do? Gzip compression on PHP code before sending it to your browser. Neat :)
17:27 - Got the Ships Attacked database on its feet, first run on the newer data.
17:27 - We've added 2 new pages on allied technology to counter the U-boats, Sonobuoys and Magnetic Anomaly Detection.