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judda

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Posts posted by judda

    How do you give good customer/user support?

    in Management

    Posted

    This morning I was looking through my email, and I noticed an email from Amazon Web services about a service I use of their's which will have small changes soon.

    Quote

    Hello,

    Athena has been constantly making improvements to its SQL query syntax to make it more logical and user friendly, and during this process we have identified some query syntax that could have behaved in a more reasonable manner. As a result, effective December 1, 2021, we are changing the way how queries return the result for certain syntax. We encourage you to review your queries sooner than December 1, 2021 to adjust to the new behaviors that will be introduced. Read this document to familiarize yourself with the changes and how they might affect your customers.

    Q: What are the syntax that will be impacted?
    A: There are three behavior changes for corresponding syntax. To help you better understand how the changes look like, we have provided a simple example query for each change.

    1. Evaluation of comparison between CHAR type column and a string literal will become easier. No more padding is needed in the string literal.

    Example: Suppose table t has a column named col5 with data type CHAR(5), and it contains a row with value 'abcd ' (note the trailing space) for column col5. Currently, you have to use the exact same string literal in order to find a match:

    SELECT 1 FROM t WHERE col5 = 'abcd '; -- the trailing space in the string literal is needed to get a match

    With the new behavior, you will no longer need to provide the trailing spaces for such queries to match the condition:

    SELECT 1 FROM t WHERE col5 = 'abcd'; -- there is no need to have a trailing space in the string literal to get a match

    Both the above queries will get a match. We encourage you to start using the latter one, which is more natural and convenient. The current behavior will still be valid.

    2. Accessing a non-existing key in a MAP type will cause an error instead of having NULL returned as the result.

    Example: Suppose you want to access the value for a non-existing key ‘abc’ from the following MAP data. Currently, Athena returns NULL since the key ‘abc’ does not exist in the MAP. Now with the new change, Athena will report an error indicating "Key not present in map: abc", which is more reasonable and less error prone.

    SELECT MAP(array['foo', 'bar'], array[1, 2])['abc'];

    If you still prefer the query to return NULL for such cases, you can leverage the TRY function to achieve that:

    SELECT TRY(MAP(array['foo', 'bar'], array[1, 2])['abc']);

    3. Accessing anonymous row fields in the form of “.field[n]” is no longer supported.

    Example: Suppose you want to access a field of an anonymous row. Currently, Athena returns the first field, which is 'a', for the following query. With the new behavior, Athena will report an error indicating "Column 'ROW ('a', 'b').field0' cannot be resolved".

    SELECT ROW('a', 'b').field0;

    It will not impact the way you access a non-anonymous row. For example, the following query still works the same way and returns 'a'.
    SELECT CAST(row('a', 'b') AS ROW(col0 char, col1 char)).col0;

    Q: How does this impact my existing queries?
    A: We recommend you to review all your queries to find out if these changes are applicable to them. You can use above example queries to test out the new behaviors. If you notice discrepant results, double check if your queries involve any of these syntax.

    Q: What if I need additional help?
    A: For any questions, please contact AWS customer support [1].

    [1] https://aws.amazon.com/support

    Sincerely,
    Amazon Web Services

    Very technical, but still, when I read it, I thought "this is really good customer service", they are proactively telling me what is going to change in 3 months time!.

    So, do you do that with your site? How is it typically received?

    Classic Neopets Remakes

    in General Game Development

    Posted

    22 hours ago, dracula said:

    I actually had the joy of meeting the owner of moderneo and got to hear some of their ideas. Originally I thought the site would be merely a 'clone' but it seems they're going to be expanding beyond that and continuing some features of neopets that were discontinued. In that way, I think it'll be more of a 'what if neopets took this route' sort of deal. I don't want to say anything too specific because I don't know exactly what's being kept under wraps but I think it's interesting to see where that goes. And, if nothing as, as someone who still plays neopets it'll be nice to have a backup for my current pets/petpages and (presumably) be able to write things more thoroughly without words like "uncle" being blocked by filters lol!

    I haven't delved much into neopetsclassic, but I think that's the more well known of the two probably?

    Genuinely it's nice to enjoy the nostalgia of these sites. My only hope is that they're able to assign specific artists to pet art because the community contributions method always turns out so messy and chaotic. Not sure how things will turn out with them running Patreon but I wish both teams luck in their endeavors!

    Oooh - exciting! I can't wait to see where they take it, and hope that one day they release it to more than just Patreons *crosses fingers*.

    Classic Neopets Remakes

    in General Game Development

    Posted

    Lots of the pet sites that we have today stem from Neopets, either people started their "pet site career" there, or on a site inspired by what Neopets has done.

    Recently, I found two new projects that are being built (with Patreon supporters) which I find really interesting.  They are rebuilding the Classic Neopets site.  They are:

    I'm very curious though if Neopets would just shut them down because it's a direct copy of their old site.

    What do you think about these clones?

    Why Virtual Pet Sites Vanish

    in General Game Development

    Posted

    18 hours ago, jakdacrowe said:

    Well uh. You have the site owner, who's as good as missing since he's actually impossible to contact.

    The programmer, who is also our only admin now, who won't release stuff on the site, quoting that he isn't getting paid to do it. And he's the only one with ANY contact with the site owner.

    We HAVE some content for events we were supposed to release in the back.
    The assets are DONE. It's just sitting there.

     

    Only thing now is a miracle of someone somehow getting in contact with the owner, and offering him a serious offer on the site.

    The problem is the amount for the "serious offer".  I still speak with the original programmer who sold Verpets every once in a while who has contact with Joe.  I was even given Joe's number to text via Whatsapp, but half of the time (as usual) I got crickets with my messages which sucks!

    Looking to Hire a programmer for Game

    in Looking To Hire

    Posted

    Welcome @GrumpyRyno I'm very sorry that this happened to you in the past.  We've had a few bad apples over the years, and it was a fair bit more common than I would have hoped, though normally it was the same 1-2 individuals "spreading themselves thin", then going radio silent.

    The two developers that come two mind however, have been banned.  So I can hope that this won't happen to you again!

    Do you have a rough sense of the requirements that you have for the animal SIM?

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