Game g = new Game();

It’s been an interesting first week for us after the beta launch of AT.LANT.IS.

We had a lot of PIs and registrations coming from banner ads during the end of last week, and (whats more important) an satisfying amount of returning visitors.

I am not sure what percentage of unconfirmed email-addresses can be considered normal. We do require optin from the parent’s email address, and it seems some users (children?) are confused about that.

I fixed another ressource leak that slipped through our internal tests, because it happened only once a day after heavy usage of the administration interface (Note: MidpSSH works like a charm to restart your servers from your mobile).

The users themselves are very creative in entertaining themselves, using the games and features we provide in the platform, or else – some of them organized a Hide and Seek, others did a beauty contest in one of the users homes, a lot of them are heavily using the ingame messaging system (probably because they do not have access to email or IM themselves).

So, all in all a very successful and promising start.

Tomorrow Friday 27. Feb. 09 between 16:00 and 19:00, we are holding the first ingame events in AT.LANT.IS.

For some time now I have been looking for a flexible reporting solution.

The thing was – I had a couple of SQL queries ready, and everytime somebody asked, I copy/pasted them into phpMyAdmin and copy/pasted the resulting tables back. Easy yes, quick sort of, elegant – certainly not.

At first, I tested a couple of charting libraries – JFreeChart, Google Charts, XML/SWF Charts, Open Flash Chart. (Note – if you like Google Charts but do not want to send your data to Google, take a look at Eastwood Charts. It implements the Google Chart API, but on your own server.)

All of them are fine and can produce some stunning results – but ideally, at least for this scenario, I do not want to bother translating the SQL resultset into the data format the charting library expects, write some server code to run the query, render and present the charts, add some user authentication and the option to parametrize some of the queries, … etc.

Then I thought, maybe a complete reporting framework would do the trick. I came across this excellent list of open source charting and reporting tools. JasperReports seemed like the defacto industry standard, with many other frameworks (like iReport or OpenReports) building upon it and extending it’s functionality and usability.

But as I’m not a reporting pro, I did not want to waddle through hundreds of PDF manual pages before I understand how to produce a simple bar or pie chart.

Enter ART – Art Reporting Tool. (Yes, recursive acronyms still seem “in” to some. Hey, if it’s good enough for VISA = Visa International Service Association…). From their website:

ART is a lightweight, multiplatform web based query tool and reporting environment. SQL queries can be published in a few minutes. It supports tabular, crosstab, charts, scheduling, email alerts. Results are exportable to spreadsheet, pdf or can be embedded in a portal-like page to create a simple but effective Business Intelligence solution.

And that’s simply the case, period.

I deployed the ART webapp to a local Tomcat, set up the DB connections, and used my existing SQL queries to create some charts, some of them with parameters, some static. The charts are certainly not the best looking ones, but they definitely do their job, including value details via mouseover-tooltip.

Same goes for the admin GUI – it looks and feels pretty outdated for today’s standards, but once you accept that, it gets the job done – and in the end, that’s what counts.

I had set up some portlet page, showing 5 charts, each of them refreshing in a different interval (to have the more expensive queries updated less frequently than the cheaper, quicker ones).

I then set up some user account, granting it access to view the portal page – worked perfectly.

So, for the time being – and my investment of around an hour from first stumbling across ART, having it downloaded, installed and configured, and defining the queries, charting details, user account and privileges and portlet page – it seems I will stick with this package.

(I will have to research some more, how to schedule the contents of the portal page to be exported as PDF and emailed regularly, though. Not sure if that’s possible.)

It is done – well, almost. The beta, at least.

Last thursday plazz entertainment, the company I’m working for, launched it’s new virtual world aimed at kids, AT.LANT.IS, as beta open for everyone.

Now, since this is a rather technical blog, I will not bore you with marketing blah about why and how great this platform as – nevertheless, we are pretty proud that we are live, finally.

Here are some screenshots.

During the beta (which will last for a couple of weeks), all users have access to all the features the platform has to offer, for free, like

• creating your own avatar
• chatting and exploring Atlantis
• go swimming in the ocean
• learning about the backstory by finding and reading infosources
• playing minigames, single and multiplayer, earning ingame money
• competing for highscores
• spending ingame money on new clothes for your avatar
• inviting your buddies into your own private home room
• exchanging ingame-mails with your buddies

(Note: Not everything is live, we will keep adding content and features during the beta phase.)

Even if it’s “just” the beta, the security and safety of our beta users is very imporant to us.

The platform is  moderated by staff members who answer questions and watch the chat and mail logs in realtime between  8 hours (on weekdays) and 12 hours (on weekends) every day.

At night, chatting is only possible in “supersafe mode” using predefined text phrases; and no ingame mails can be sent to others.

So, I invite you to go check it out, let us know what works for you and what does not. All feedback is very welcome – either comment here, or use the feedback form on the site.

Of course, I will continue to post updates, including some more technical background info.

Since I just reinstalled my MacBook and spent some time getting everything back in place, I thought I list some of my favourite apps and utilities. No ranking though, since I’m not a tonight show host:

	Onyx A very clever app, offering dozens of options to optimize your system, run maintainance tasks, configure hidden parameters of Finder, Dock and other apps, clean caches and remove outdated files, etc.
	Monolingual From the website: “Monolingual is a program for removing unnecessary language resources from Mac OS X, in order to reclaim several hundred megabytes of disk space.” For the records – on my more or less new system, I just saved 2.8 Gigs (!!).
	Quicksilver Quicksilver once was hyped beyond believe in the Mac universe, as a revolutionary, optimized way of interacting with your operating system. Ignorant as I am, I only use it as launcher – just hit CTRL-ALT-APPLE (or whatever key combo you assigned it) and start typing the applications name, and hit enter to launch it.
	VLC Yeah boooring, I know. One of the major annoyances for me is how Apple supports (or actually does not care much about free support for) additional codecs for Quicktime. VLC comes to the rescue, with all important codecs (and dozens more) compiled into the app, to play whatever audio or video format you encounter during those nightly easynews sessions…
	Cyberduck Another Mac mystery – for reasons unclear to me, I can mount an FTP server into Finder, but only as read-only. I don’t know why I thought Fetch is the only option for a good FTP-client on the Mac – I just started using Cyberduck, and so far I’m pretty happy with it. Also supports WebDAV, Cloud Files and Amazons S3 (if you are hip enough to need that…)
	Little Snitch Seems the defacto-standard for a personal firewall on OS X. Runs for a limited amount of time until it has to be restarted manually, unless you buy a license. Highly recommended!
	Adium Good multi-network IM client, all in one – although I find myself using Meebo as online-replacement more and more often.
	1Password A good password manager, with plugins for all major browsers, secure notes etc. Can autofill passwords and other form fields on web pages, sync with your iPhone/iPod touch or Palm (does anyone still use Palms??). A single license is $39.95, but I got it with a MacHeist package, so I did not compare it with any other free password managers that are undoubtedly out there.
	iStat menu provides configurable statistics and status infos about all parts of your system – CPU and memory usage, network bandwidth, fan speeds, temperature, etc.