The first hurdle came in deciding which computer she should use and which OS. It was finally settled on Ubuntu Linux on a laptop that I could SSH into if I needed to access any files on it while she was using it. To me this was a new hurdle as before everyone else working with or for Furry Moon Creations already used Linux or Mac on their personal computer or used approved programs like Open Office and GIMP. We had to talk about filing order and priorities and I mean talk not me tell her how it's done. New office supplies had to be purchased and furniture shuffled and a wire run anew, but it was to be expected. I have so far been very pleased with her level of energy and desire to help my company grow. It is something I've been seeing a lot of lately.

Yesterday my lead artist came by for a visit, and I recall our first meeting last fall. She had energy and professionalism, but she didn't see the company's vision and was concerned about how reliable we would be as new commissions. Yesterday she had stories to tell me about how much fun she has had working for us and how we were one of the best people she worked with. Her ability to see what we see and love it the way we do is now there. That love is spreading too, her friends and family have a growing interest, the near by college is starting to talk about it. This blog page it's self is hit more then twenty times as often as it was sixty days ago.

What will the next month bring? We don't know but we do know we will try to bring you closer to seeing our vision and in time we hope you will love us too.

1st: Misty of Indiana; Female Water Panther the Wizzard. *Finder of 1st Bug!*
2nd: Kevin of Maryland; Male Fire Fox the Jack of all Trades.
3rd: Beth of Indiana; Female Shadow Panther the Assassin.
4th: Bill of Indiana; Female Dark Panther the Wizzard.
5th: Nicholas of Pennsylvania; Male Plant Panther the Archer.
6th: Michael of Illinois; Female Metal Hare the Jack of all Trades.
7th: Eric of Kentucky; Male Fire Eagle the Skirmisher.
8th: Rekeme of Wisconsin; Male Plant Fox the Channeler.
9th: Zachary of Nebraska; Female Water Panther the Jack of all Trades.
10th: Dracallis of Indiana; Male Shadow Turtle the Brute.
11th: Forrest of Virginia; Male Shadow Rat the Assassin.
12th: Barry of Wisconsin; Male Fire Crocodile the Finisher.
13th: Jonathan of Illinois; Male Dark Fox the Wizard.
14th: Steel of Illinois; Geldmale Plant Rat the Channeler.
15th: Draggor of Illinois; Male Shadow Crocodile the Jack of all Trades.
16th: Charles of Michigan; Female Water Otter the Rogue.
17th: Sean of Wisconsin; Male Water Otter the Nullifier.
18th: William of Virginia; Male Shadow Panther the Assassin.
19th: William of Virginia; Male Shadow Panther the Assassin.
20th: Eric of Arizona; Female Water Otter the Wizard.
21st: Spuds of California; Male Shadow Panther the Wizard.
22nd: J. of Connecticut; Geldmale Ground Rat the Channeler.
23rd: John of Washington; Male Light Wolf the Jack of all Trades.
24th: Jade of Minnesota; Female Fire Fox the Wizard.
25th: Zachary of Alabama; Male Ice Fox the Assassin.

25 Winners from accross the country will be annouced here and unveiled on a permenent page on our site. Each one will have the chance to help test each of the planned Moonshards games from Alpha to release, with a chance to become among our professional game testers when we start hiring. In addition they will receive a limited printing of the flier seen at Midwest Fur Fest 2009 using art and personalization. These will not be reproduced by the company and they will be able to show friends and family for years to come that they are winners.

All of the Natives of Lop Ear Purlieu, Winners of the Contest, and anyone else with a second life account are welcome to join us in Falcon Forest on the 17th for a spring get together. Some of our smart, sexy, and dilegent natives have worked with us to bring you a lovely party with music and fun. During the event you will get a chance to see the winter snow blanketing the regeions disapate before your eyes as the lushness that defines the olcano dominated land returns.

We hope to see you all there, and for those who are unaware of second life or just don't have it installed, Our Estate Page makes for a great guide.

It happened...the thing any company dreads to see, an email with the contents "That's not my information. This is my information." Within moments of receiving the email, we sought out the source of the problem; the only reason we found the problem so promptly is because Misty, the contest winner who replied, gave us the right information. I personally let Misty know not only how helpful that was, but also provided them with a special honor that will been seen for years to come.

The next step was to quickly find every single mistake made on every last email sent out and let each one know we had solved the problem, most before they even knew it existed. Due to the mistake, we had incorrectly informed three people that they had won. This caused us but a moment's thought as it was clear the fault was ours. We let them know what steps, if any, needed to be taken to still be winners. We did not feel it was fair to them to be given such an award only to rip it from them because we had a technical glitch.

While I do not like to make mistakes -- and no one likes to admit to them -- if Furry Moon Creations is going to claim to have the interest of its users at heart, then a precedent must be set while we are still a young company. We do not hide our mistakes and pretend they never happened. We own up to them and fix them while they remain small. I do not look forward to the next mistake we make, but I would be making a mistake right now to think we will never make another mistake.

I want to thank everyone who signed up for the Alpha Testing both before, during, and after the promo. (And we're still taking applications!) Furry Moon Creations looks forward to seeing you at conventions, and one day looks forward to you seeing each other in our software.

This leads me to thinking. How can we prevent the spread of "colds" in our products? Software can be thought of as a lot of small, interlocking pieces. How can we keep problems in one component from affecting others?

Colds spread because of intimacy. People being too close, breathing the same air, touching the same surfaces. A good way to reduce the spread of a cold is to reduce contact: wearing a mask or gloves, not coughing on others, not shaking hands. Even better, just stay away physically.

This idea can be implemented metaphorically in software design. One of the biggest problems with software security is pieces of a system being too intimate with other pieces of the system. This can be seen in modules that share the same memory space or use the same files for communication. A good way to reduce the spread of a problem -- whether a virus or some other sort of bug -- is to separate the components. We've already discussed using a messaging base in our previous post on scalability, but that infrastructure also imposes a separation between components that reduces their ability to "infect" each other with flawed or malicious content. If a component only responds to strictly defined messages, then an error or a virus in another component will be much more limited in its potential to spread harm to it.

Of course, all of this demands a certain degree of overhead. Passing messages is less efficient than simply modifying shared memory directly. We are researching platforms for implementing the message-passing infrastructure in terms of efficiency and scalability, while simultaneously designing our message system to balance the need for speed against the need for security. This often boils down to the size of the message; the finer-grained the action in a message, the more it can be separated from other actions, but the more messages will be needed to perform some actions. We expect the messaging to be adjusted as design and development progresses, but we are starting out with that in mind so we are keeping the messaging structure flexible rather than rigid and brittle to facilitate evolution in our products.

I'll be posting more details on our approach to scalability, security, and efficiency as our projects progress. I hope you will follow along with us, ask questions, and speak your mind. We don't want our development process hidden away from view. After all, that's not healthy!

This move is a result of the convention's success. But such a shift is only possible due to scaling. The events must be broken down finely enough to be spread out over many rooms, and the responsibilities must be equally broken down so that additional staff can be brought in to cover gaps that appear. A convention that leans too heavily on a few individuals will not be able to grow beyond the ability of those people to manage it.

So, too, does a software project progress. Most projects begin small, with little thought to large-scale applications. Software developers have an itch to scratch, so they produce a working program as quickly as they can. This is fine if you are developing a small recipe holder or a package to annotate the few hundred photos you have scattered on your hard drive, but what happens when you decide to release it to the outside world? People have more data than you do, or they have wider requirements than you do. Your little program is strained under the pressure, but it is so difficult to expand it. It wasn't designed to take advantage of multi-core processors, and adding new UI features requires many scattered changes to your hardcoded implementation.

We are striving to avoid this scenario at Furry Moon Creations. We know, right now, that we want our products to be useable by tens, even hundreds, of thousands of people in time. We know we will be adding new content and new hardware to our systems as we grow. And we know that we will have bugs, so we need to limit them to as small a scope as possible.

This all requires us to build a scalable infrastructure from the start. Before a single line of application code is written, we will have developed a software messaging base that allows our highly compartmentalized components to talk to each other transparently, either on the same machine or on the other side of the continent, allowing both long-term expansion and reducing the possibility of single points of failure. To do this, we are pulling together both old, reliable technologies and new upstarts in an effort to optimize each segment of our underlying core.

This isn't sexy work, but it's a necessary step in making a product that can grow both with us and with you.

That is correct the Furry Life Grid is live. For those of you who don’t know what it is. The Furry Life Grid is a Second Life clone for furries using the OpenSimulator technology. It’s still in Alpha but it can be logged into. The Furry Life Grid is a joint project between Jason Hodder, Kevin Keeney, and Mina Kitsune. Our test grid is working though very flawed still. Not bad for only starting it on Monday 01Sep08. There are large plans for this grid and the first few regions will be managed by a name you trust from Second Life “Sedary Raymaker” owner of the Lop Ear Purlieu Estate. You can see some sneak peaks here and here