Thursday 29 November 2007

The Mysterious Project Gazelle

What.cd users were presented with a riddle on the front page of their website today.
What begins with a G, ends with a E, and can run at 50 miles per hour?
The answer, it seems, is Gazelle (not Giraffe as I first thought -- they can only manage 32 miles per hour), and once you input the correct answer you're presented with a link to Project Gazelle.

There's no information yet as to what Project Gazelle actually is. If you know, please leave a comment. Wild speculation is heartily encouraged.

On another note, What.cd have secured hosting at PRQ and expect to move their operation there ahead of the December 1st deadline that was imposed on them by Leaseweb.

Edit: Project Gazelle is apparently the new torrent site source that What is making. If he pulls this off, you could be looking at a replacement for the ageing yet ubiquitous TBSource.

Edit 2: What.cd have now posted a news bulletin about Project Gazelle:
Well, I'm sure you've all seen our latest riddle, What begins with a G, ends with a E, and can run at 50 miles per hour, so I guess its time for an official announcement. The answer is 'gazelle', and if you guess correctly, the page links you to http://projectgazelle.org. Project Gazelle is the official name of our new sourcecode.

Our sourcecode is meant to be the foundation of a high volume website, and has been designed around that concept. It has full memcached support, and the vast majority of the pages should be able to be run using only one to three queries - for the end user, this means "lots more users, and a very fast website". This is a pretty impressive feat, allowing a website to handle tens of thousands of users on even the weakest servers. Furthermore, the entire sourcecode is modularized - this allows people to easily create their own features, or variations of features already implemented.

The sourcecode is well organized, and commented. This means that users with only a basic knowledge of PHP and MySQL will be able to run a fully functional and scalable torrent site. In addition to ease of use, our sourcecode allows for the easy development of additional features by the general public. We feel that this is one of the stronger points of our code.

We have also taken a note from the previous issues with our current source, and are writing Project Gazelle with security in mind.

Development is coming along at a steady pace, and we expect to have a closed beta running within the next 6 weeks. We'll give you updates on the development every time we have something to get excited about, but for the time being, just keep on using the current site - all of the important data will be transferred over when we're done.

29 comments:

ayou_texhnology said...

i thought it was giraffe first, too..

Anonymous said...

first post

Anonymous said...

I dont know what it is but i have to say the "Gazelle" logo is Fuck!ng beautiful (the whole color and font choose ... thats a genius clean design)

Anonymous said...

I am no longer actively working on the current version of the site. All of my coding efforts are being directed towards the new version of the site (codenamed Gazelle).

From What's user profile on What.cd (sysOP)

Anonymous said...

It could be the "ground up" code rewrite that they are planning on doing to replace the torrentbits source that is used on alot of the current music torrent sites.

Anonymous said...

waffles will be @ prq too. cool

Tom said...

I would guess that it's the tracker software they're making and have been talking about for weeks.

Anonymous said...

Wild speculation:
Pirate Bay et. al. (PRQ) wanted the OiNK replacement to be public.
What.cd negotiates terms with Pirate Bay/PRQ for hosting.
Terms include starting a new public music tracker similar to its own... Except, you know.... public.

daniel said...

Supposedly it's the site for the TBSource replacement that the what.cd developers are working on

Anonymous said...

What's Profile:

I am no longer actively working on the current version of the site. All of my coding efforts are being directed towards the new version of the site (codenamed Gazelle).

Anonymous said...

I can't remember where I read this but if I believe Gazelle is what they're calling the new project they're working on, in other words the new codebase which is supposed to replace TBSource

Johan said...

It is probably their new tracker which is supposed to be open source.

Anonymous said...

....And, [as an admin has already confirmed] perhaps the greatest part of it all....


you dont have to submit OiNK proof and then wait for 2 months to get an invite.

Anonymous said...

public? Shoot me now.

Anonymous said...

Well, I'm sure you've all seen our latest riddle, What begins with a G, ends with a E, and can run at 50 miles per hour, so I guess its time for an official announcement. The answer is 'gazelle', and if you guess correctly, the page links you to http://projectgazelle.org. Project Gazelle is the official name of our new sourcecode.

Our sourcecode is meant to be the foundation of a high volume website, and has been designed around that concept. It has full memcached support, and the vast majority of the pages should be able to be run using only one to three queries - for the end user, this means "lots more users, and a very fast website". This is a pretty impressive feat, allowing a website to handle tens of thousands of users on even the weakest servers. Furthermore, the entire sourcecode is modularized - this allows people to easily create their own features, or variations of features already implemented.

The sourcecode is well organized, and commented. This means that users with only a basic knowledge of PHP and MySQL will be able to run a fully functional and scalable torrent site. In addition to ease of use, our sourcecode allows for the easy development of additional features by the general public. We feel that this is one of the stronger points of our code.

We have also taken a note from the previous issues with our current source, and are writing Project Gazelle with security in mind.

Development is coming along at a steady pace, and we expect to have a closed beta running within the next 6 weeks. We'll give you updates on the development every time we have something to get excited about, but for the time being, just keep on using the current site - all of the important data will be transferred over when we're done.

Anonymous said...

mmmmmmm dont really know what's going on... but it looks so cool and it's in pink =)

Anonymous said...

I heard that it's actually an animal that roams the Serengeti and sometimes Lions eat their flesh.

Anonymous said...

Anyone notice that the background is a zoomed in version of waffles?

Anonymous said...

They can't even get their site coded properly...so many bugs...why start something else when you can't even fix the tried and tested...?

Anonymous said...

Man, like the others said the site looks quite nice, im rather excited!

Anonymous said...

"They can't even get their site coded properly...so many bugs...why start something else when you can't even fix the tried and tested...?"

they stated a few weeks ago that were concentrating their efforts into coding the new site.
that's the whole point. TB source (what 'wat.cd uses atm) is full of bugs and security flaws from the start.

Anonymous said...

"They can't even get their site coded properly...so many bugs...why start something else when you can't even fix the tried and tested...?"


A wise man once said, you cannot polish a turd.

Unknown said...

Anyone have the DNS fix for what?

Anonymous said...

"public? Shoot me now."

It's not going to be public you dick head.

Im very excited about this, good job what.cd staff, can't wait for it to be finished.

Anonymous said...

Here are some updates on the server move to prq, taken from the home page:

"Welcome to Sweden!

Yes, you're reading that correctly. A few hours ago, we relocated the entire site to a single server hosted in the prq.se datacenter - with 12 hours left on our leaseweb deadline. The move went quite smoothly (a lot more smoothly than we anticipated), although some users are still experiencing DNS problems.

If you're having problems accessing the site or the tracker, do this:

1. Check your hosts file. If you edited it when we changed servers before, it'll still be forwarding the what.cd domain name to the old server. Just remove the what.cd lines, and all should be well.

2. If that doesn't work, flush dns. In windows, you do this by going start -> run, typing in cmd, then typing in ifconfig /flushdns.

3. If the above two methods have no effect, then your problems are most likely caused by caching in your DNS servers. They'll be sorted out automatically in the next 12 hours."

Anonymous said...

HHHMMM a pink logo...

HOW ORIGINAL!

Anonymous said...

its funny, they cant fix current bugs
as magic quotes (few seconds enough to fix that) but have started new code. so lame...

Anonymous said...

http://stdev.net/

Anonymous said...

its not only the bugs, they're concern with scalability also. tbsource just can't do what they want it to do they have to create something else.
they claim its difficult to create a new code base when most of their time is spent smashing tbsource bugs, problems and feature requests.