Hello, everyone!
Well, I've juggled school, work, and the baby well enough that I've
gotten a few new things done for the IWCCCARS site. I'll go in order:
A) COMING SOON SECTION
Some of you have noticed that the COMING SOON section no longer lists
any car sets. This is by design. NASCAR 2's car set architecture
(and .PCX file architecture, too) are substantially different from
what NASCAR 1 supports. Therefore, in the interests of prioritizing,
I have decided to focus our efforts at preparing for NASCAR 2's
release. We're working on a viable setup for the pages, as well as
looking into our own server and domain name (no, we DON'T suddenly
have a sponsor to help pay for it -- it'd still be out of pocket), and
I want to leave as much time as possible for that to pan out.
NASCAR 1 users, don't be disappointed -- we will continue to have our
NASCAR 1 car sets available for as long as we have our site up, and
there is the possibility of continuing our retrospective CARS series
through the 80's, depending on Jeff Foglietta's free time (is there
such a thing? <G>). Also, all car projects that are currently in
progress (ASA96 and TRUCKS96 are examples) will be finished before we
make the switch. We'll do all in our power to satisfy as much of you
as we can with the resources we have available.
B) MIRROR SITES
Yes, once again I am trying the "mirror concept." Thanks to the
HORRENDOUS server lags that XMission, our cheap (but inefficient)
service provider makes us suffer, accessing our page has been very
difficult. Thanks to the fellows at GIT.NET, however, we have been
offered space free of charge to mirror our site. At present, we have
the entire HTML side of the site online at the new URL, although the
car sets (which take up several MB of disk space) are still at
XMission for now. We may move them soon, as our six-month payment for
extra FTP space at XMission is up next month. Additionally, XMission
has installed a new Web server for "high-volume" sites, and it is
considerably faster than the "www" server. The URLs for all of this
will be listed below.
This is not a permanent solution. Frankly, we've been hurting for
some time for reliable Web services, due to the constraints of my
pocketbook. Efforts to attract sponsorship have failed miserably, and
my search for a new reliable ISP are equally fruitless. While
GIT.NET's Web service solves the site problem, I still have to deal
with XMission when updating all the files, and if you think accessing
the page is slow, you should see MY end of the deal via PPP. But
still, I'm working on it as much as I can, and I hope to get a
solution to this mess soon.
The URLs for IWCCCARS are as follows:
[link lost in import: /~iwcc/project.htm] (Main site for now)
[link lost in import: /~iwcc/project.htm] (Alternate Web server)
[link lost in import: /(Mirror] site)
If you notice a significant speed advantage at GIT.NET, let us know
via the guestbook and we will consider moving all operations over
there.
C) MAILING LIST
We have contracted a mailing list through GIT.NET which we are
considering offering to the sim racing public. Ideally, it would be
an e-mail venue where the bigwigs of sim racing (Ed, Charlie, John
Wallace, Mike Carver, etc.) could keep everyone up to date on sims,
sim problems, etc. However, it is not moderated and for this reason I
would like people to let me know if they think having the list would
be a good idea. Contact us via the IWCCCARS Guestbook.
That's it for now. Thanks as always for supporting our efforts!
--
Tony Johns (Hawaii: IWCCCARS)
IWCCCARS Project Coordinator
[link lost in import: /~iwcc/project.htm]
[link lost in import: /~iwcc/project.htm]
[link lost in import]
