SDS Finished (For Real This Time!)

The centerpiece of the project, the SixDegreeSteam crawler/server, has been thoroughly completed. Since the promised launch date of December 25, the crawler was experiencing memory issues that would cause it to die roughly 5 minutes after startup. Im very pleased to announce that version 1.5.77C of the crawler (yes, it seriously took that many revisions to get everything up to working conditions) is now in effect, and running smoothly!

Now I can switch over to working on the client software. More about that will be released later. Here are some statistics about the limited runtime the crawler got between its crashes.

- Uptime: 2 hours
- Users crawled: 1,961
- Groups crawled: 10,337
- Users/Groups pending: 408,376

A special thanks to everyone who has sent me emails, joined the Steam group, and otherwise completely overwhelmed me with their gracious comments! Its truly inspiring to see so many people in support of what I invisioned to be a small personal project. As always, feel free to email me with questions, comments, concerns, or funny lolcats. blake.oxx@gmail.com (remove the dot)

SixDegreeSteam Finished

After about 3 months of development, SixDegreeSteam has reached the final steps in the launch process. The database has been set up, the crawler has been completed, and the folks at Valve have been sent "please let me borrow your bandwidth" cookies. Everything is pumped and primed. However, the project has not yet been released on the community. Why? Because Valve has not yet agreed. As soon as the green flag is given, the experiment will begin full-force.

As a side note, a previous article I posted about how SDS would acquire information is wrong. Actually working on the program and digging through the Steam Community site has enlightened me a little more about the crawling process. The article will be corrected as soon as I have time.