Peter's Blog

andLinux

andLinux is designed to make any sentence sound ungrammatical. It is also a linux distribution that runs under Windows 2000/XP/Vista. I was put onto it by long-time commenter spikeles and I am really impressed with it.

You install it on your Windows box and it creates a Windows service that is a linux kernel. It also includes enough X smarts to be able to run X applications alongside your windows apps. Here is the obligatory screenshot of IE7 peacefully coexisting with Krusader and Konsole on a Windows Vista desktop:

andLinux

Notice how the different 'linux' apps have their own windows taskbar entries. And you can NEVER have enough dual-pane file managers. And yes, konsole is about a billion times better than the windows command terminal. Oh, and note that the last quicklaunch bar entry is for Konsole and was created by the andLinux installer.

It's support for linux is about as deep as I can trawl, I was able to get autofs running exactly as I would under ubuntu. It is based on Kubuntu (most of the apps that come with it are KDE) and while the current install gives you a version of gutsy I was able to upgrade it to hardy from the standard ubuntu repositories.

I can cut and paste between linux and windows apps. The linux apps can access the windows files using Samba: there is an alternative method of accessing the windows files called cofs but the cofs website says:

Please note: The cofs device is new in coLinux 0.6.2. It's still in the experimental phase and is very buggy! So don't blame us if it breaks your disk ;)... YES it is, it crashed my server when I tried to rename a file from within coLinux This and other crashes are fixed in coLinux 0.6.3. Please see Cofs in 0.6.3 for a description how to use it there.

so sod that.

One bugbear at the moment is that with a dual-screen setup, andLinux seems to think there is just one big monitor and so windows pop up in the centre of the big screen, windows tend to be too large for one monitor etc. It is something I can live with.

andLinux makes cygwin look mighty primitive. There is always an element of finger crossing to using cygwin and I have struggled to get it working properly with NetBeans. andLinux makes running linux in a vm look like a cludge. If you want to use apps written by developers for developers rather than apps designed by marketing for management and you are compelled by your corporate overlords to do it on a windows box then this is what you want.

Thanks spike!

UPDATE: OMG Konsole is good.

WoW News Issue 231

Maexyn

Got Maexyn to level 50 by dint of Tanaris Pirates and a spot of Felwood. The Pirates went ok but not as fun as with a hunter. Afflication Warlock fighting is a lot of waiting for things to die. The curse of recklessness is indeed very good for stopping runners, I used it just before Drain Soul.

She got the level 50/41 point talent 'Unstable Affliction' and it seems like a reasonably ok DoT, even if I ignore the PvP dispell boobytrap element. Things died quicker when using it. It's probably a matter of time before I succomb to temptation and respec her for the Fel Guard but as I read that the Fel Guard needs to learn a few talents before it is vastly better than a voidwalker I will bide my time.

At level 50 I decided to try the king-kong island to the south east of STV, only to find that the big ape was only level 43, I had read it was level 50 but that was a couple of patches ago. The ape was big though.

Maesyn

Ran Maesyn two levels to 42 (eighties group blah blah: is it really the fifth time I've made that reference?). She did lots of killing in mid-stranglethron, found a big temple full of trolls with fetishes (not that kind of fetish) that I hadn't come across before. Many trolls around but prowl is very useful when deep in enemy territory. While roaming around the countryside I also found a troll in a cave who wanted a gorilla tooth which explained why I was purpetually having to destroy quest related gorilla teeth that I had autolooted. And he only wanted one tooth. The quest involved killing three gorillas that attacked, a level 42, 43 and 44, one after the other. Killed them ok with the trolls help, finished the quest, then as I walked off the three baddie gorillas respawned. Killed them again (druid cat form cat handle a three-level higher mob easily) and got some extra leather.

Picked up the green bottle for the king-kong quest, only to find it's minimum level requirement is 42 and she was still 41.

Ran through some alterac quests but they were against level 35 mobs so a bit of a walkover. Killing a few trolls in the Hinterlands made the level 42 ding.

I gave her another respec, dropped Furor and picked up the level 40 talent, Leader of the Pack for and extra 5% crit. Her crit is now 19% so that should average comfortably at a crit per fight. She crits for better than 600 damage and I'm liking the big numbers.

Maesyn rarely has any downtime, when mana is very low I just wait for enough to shift to cat form, then continue and after a few mobs there is enough for continued healing. She has picked up a skill called 'Innervate' which improves her mana regeneration by 400% for a few seconds which means even less downtime.

Maecyn

By this time I was low on rest bonus and a bit bored so I succombed to a temptation to roll another alt. Back in Searing Gorge Maexyn had run into an equal level mage who was dealing with trio's of dwarves with such ease that I just had to try a frost mage. Ok it's lots of mana breaks but the killing looks like fun.

I tried a human male mage ages ago and it was ok but he got stuck at level 8. Maecyn is a female gnome, not sure why I chose gnome but the Escape Artist could help her (Maexyn never needs it) and she has Expansive Mind for extra intellect.

(If it helps, you should be able to mouse over the mae?yn names and a tool tip will remind you which one I am writing about.)

The first eleven levels flashed past. Ok I know the gnome/dwarf starting area backwards but Maecyn was killing equal level mobs in four seconds. Eventually I worked out that it is the 'Bonfire's Blessing' from the wotsit festival that is on, it gives her a 30% chance to deal 80 damage and 80 damage is quite a bit against a level 7 Ice Claw Bear. My advice: if you have alt-itis, get out there now.

Frost Mage Fun:

Standard Attack
- Frost Bolt (damages and slows down attacking enemy)
- Arcane Missiles (a bit of damage while it runs up)
- Fire Blast (instant cast damage) if mob has > 20% health left
- Wand to death
If the frost bolt doesn't work or if she gets attacked close up then the frost armour has a chance to slow down the attacker so she can run to distance and either try to frost bolt again or kite and Fire Blast whenever the 6 second cooldown is up (although the latter takes a while and she has to run in circles to avoid running into adds).
Frost Nova! Level 10 goodie, slows down all attackers in an area ready for kiting/legging it. Also good for attacking when can't get good line of sight for a frostbolt.

She is another Herbalist/Skinner and her skinning is already level 75.

Since she will be taking mana breaks every four seconds I will also make an effort to level her cookery so she can get some food buffs while she is drinking.

Pookypoo

I logged into pook and found him in the middle of Winterspring ready for some thorium farming. He had to kill a few big cats and the Bonfire's Blessing for him gave 600 damage, as much as one of Maesyn's crits.

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Life With Evernote

Two days with Evernote, so how is it going?

Well I am taking notes.
It is very nice for jotting things down. Stuff is saved automatically so there is no need to worry about pressing edit or save buttons, just point and type.
If I select a file full of code from Netbeans and try to paste it into Evernote, Evernote crashes. I can paste it into notepad, copy it again and then paste it. Evernote didn't lose any data when it crashed.
A big bugbear for me is that if have some code that has been converted to html and syntax highlighted open in a browser, if I copy it to Evernote the colouring disappears. Then only way I have found to keep the colouring intact is to email the highlighted code to the evernote website from outlook.
It has those problems that many wysiwyg editors have (e.g. outlook) whereby you try to add some text and it picks up some existing weird font style/size from adjascent text and you have to fiddle around adding spaces and carriage returns and deleting them again to try to get it back to the default style.
appears to be broken under wine/linux

Apart from the syntax highlighting thing I am still liking evernote.

What's in my Pockets?

Another fusion of WoW and rails.

While planning Maexyn's conversion to alchemy I thought it would be nice to be able to get a listing of my characters bag and bank items so I could look through my stocks and see what was what. It occurred to me that a nice way to do this would be to scan through the lua files that are dumped by the TBags mod since that holds a database of contents of all my characters bags and bank. Doing this in ruby turned out to be very easy:

Install ruby lua support:

sudo aptitude install liblua5.1-0-dev
sudo gem install rua

Ruby code to convert lua data file into ruby data:

oRua = Rua.new(:all)
oRua.eval( open( File.dirname( __FILE__) + "/../../db/TBag.lua").read)

oRua now has an array of items that maps onto the data stored in the lua file.

oRua['TBnkItm'] has a list of items in the bank
oRua['TInvItm'] has a list of items in the inventory

The end result is this page where I can see what stocks I have. Auctioneer also stores its data in lua so in a similar way I added a lookup so I see the values to these stocks. I can also use the item numbers to add links to the items to thottbot for reference. It isn't perfect, it should show vendor values, especially for soulbound items.

Anyway with this I can plan some sales, particularly of Maexyn's enchanting materials.

Currently the auctioneer data is way out of date, I need to get it running again and do a few scans.

This isn't here as a way of boasting about my vast wealth, I guess a week's karak farming would be better that this junk pile (minions scourgestones?!?).

N.B: an alternative implementation would be simply to write something in the lua language that reads the two lua databases and then dumps out the html. For me it is easier to do it in ruby than learn lua.

Evernote 3

I was watching the very interesting 'Click' tech program on BBC News (you can also see it on their website) and it had a feature on 'cloud' storage i.e. storing everything over the internet.

Something they mentioned was something I have tried before, Evernote. There is a new version of Evernote that looks like exactly the kind of notetaking tool that I have wanted for years (it was this notetaking desire that led me to start this blog five years ago).

Here are some features:

Install client application on windows, mac or windows moble (java/phone is in the works). The main reason I want to use a client application rather than a pure web application is because I want to be able to paste screen clips straight in and web applications cannot do that, I have to dick about uploading files.
The contents of the client application are synchronised over the internet so the same notes are available on other pc's and also directly from the server using a web browser. There is also a mobile version of the website so I can get my notes from my phone.
It will do text recognition in images. In theory you can take a photo of something on your phone, email it to evernote, it will index the words it finds in the image and then you can find it later in searches. I tested it by doing a screen clip of something written in a cursive font and it worked! For test 2 I took a photo of the screen with my phone and emailed it. It was on the web within a minute and after synchronising it was on the client. I played with the indexing and it could find most of the words.

Evernote Test
Here it found the word 'great' and highlighted it. Is that cool or what?
The client has a built in screen capture utility.
You can export notes to html so I have a mechanism for extracting my data, I am not locked in.
It has tagging but it also has a very good search tool and 'saved searches'.
It will work in linux under wine (although drag/drop is broken and I have't tried the built in screen capture tool).
I can make some notebooks public and I can put a widget on this blog to display them:

You can go through here and play with the text recognition. However, I feel the presentation leaves something to be desired. I could use this for the stuff that doesn't warrant a blog entry but I can't see anyone wanting to read it (even less so than the blog).

I had to register for the Evernote beta but it only took 2 days for my invite to arrive.

You get 40M of storage a month on a free acount and they don't specify a maximum limit so this could mean 480M/year free storage. For $5 a month you get 500M.

I think this is it, if this version of Evernote does not get me fastidiously notetaking, lifehacking, brain dumping etc then nothing will.

WoW News Issue 230

Maexyn

Took Maexyn to Searing Gorge and did about eight quests in two hours to get her from level 47 through half way to level 49. Interestingly the Golems there were immune to Drain Life and Siphon Life so replaced these with Shadow Bolts and Immolation respectively.

I did have to do a Howl of Terror in the Cauldron when under attack from three mobs with the voidy netted. The results were not good. Best warlock skill: soulstone.

Maesyn

At 38 Maesyn took on the higher level parts of Desolace, particularly the Undead Ravagers (lvl 37-40) and the Demon camp (lvl 37-39?). She dealt with everything quite comfortably. She can handle casters now: at 38 vs a level 40 centaur caster thing she just stealthed up, Pounce, Shred, a couple of claws and it is dead in 12 seconds. lvl 38 Warlock + minion? Stealth up, take out the minion in two hits in as many seconds, take out the warlock in 12 seconds. Not a problem.

Fighting in cat and get an add? Again, not a problem, press R to cast Regenerate, press F to go back to cat and continue. Regenerate (Heal over Time) is quite ok if you have a reasonable anount of health to begin with, it tends to stop your health falling further, makes up for the beating you are taking. And it's instant cast so you can do it whenever there is mana.

Fighting in cat and get two adds? Not a problem, press = for dash and run away.

I had an enlightened moment about my stealth attacks and started doing this:

approach mob from any directing in stealth
press 7 to Pounce
while mob is stunned go behind it for a Shred. Here I realised that I just have to go through the mob, I don't have to worry about going around it to avoid breaking stealth any more. This makes it much easier. 'Behind' is very loose, somewhere in 180 degrees in front of you has to coincide with the 180 degrees behind the mob, that's all.

She went back to STV to do the troll temples to get the last two tablets. The trolls were level 34-37 or so but dense and tricky. I love stealth, she just walked through the main gates past the guards, no having to kill everything on the way in (she had no rest bonus left so pure killing is not an efficient use of time compared to rapid quest turnins). She had to clear about six trolls from an area in front of a tablet but again stealth is great for scouting and choosing targets: pull melee guys with Feral Faerie Fire, stealth/pounce stray castors etc. She had to do the last three trolls in bear but again the instant cast Regenerate spell is my friend. The trolls had a nasty trick of netting and running to distance to throw spears but shape shift breaks the net. That was a good fight.

At level 40 Maesyn picked up some new goodies:

Nice pussy mount:

Maes at 40

Definitely a perk of being a Nelf.

Dire bear form. Tried this out on a level 43 Basilisk and lived with about 40% health left and no healing. Not bad but kitty, with an initial regenerate could end the fight much faster and with more health left.
Found a druid hat on the AH that gives energy or rage after a shape shift, similar to the Furor talent AND it stacks with the Furor talent. This means that after pressing R for a regenerate, when she goes back to cat she gets 60 energy which is enough for a free Claw with a bit of change.
In prowl mode she creeps a bit faster. Prowling was ok before, what with the swiftness talents, now it is better.
A skill that reduces damage from falling. Can she survive the Aldor lift?

Summary

I'm enjoying the druid more than ever. Her survivability is improving as I learn the tactics and I enjoy the play style, especially the back stabbing and 12 second kills. The warlock is powerful but a bit mechanical, casting DoTs is a slow way of killing things.

I'm thinking of leaving Maezyn on hold for a bit, along with Pook. Maezyn is on the edge of what to me is the biggest grind in the game, the part between western helfire, through Zangarmarsh and Terokkah (sp?) up until Nagrand. I cannot think of a single quest in that long stretch that I enjoy doing, it is weeks of grind. Also as a hunter she has now got all the useful hunter talents and I'm not sure I will learn a lot from levelling her. Her leatherworking will be useful to Maesyn.

I'm having more fun running Maexyn and Maesyn and learning about Warlocks and Druids so I'm going to focus on them for a bit.

Next goal: Maexyn to 50.

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Eeuw

According to wikipedia:

Blue Smarties were re-introduced in the UK in February 2008, using a natural blue dye derived from the cyanobacteria spirulina.[4]

Violet Smarties are dyed with cochineal, a derivative of the Cochineal insect which is listed in the ingredients as carminic acid. Its presence means that Smarties are neither kosher nor vegetarian.[5] [6]

So there you have it. Smarties are made from insects and bacteria.

WoW News Issue 229.5

I feel like expanding on yesterdays post. I can't skip over six odd levels of druid experience in a paragraph.

I did some reading on druid talent specs and went for a feral/restoration build with 11 points in restoration for the Omen of Clarity. The Omen essentially gives Maesyn a free heal or attack at some random point during a fight. As it can occur at any time it normally ends up as being a free Claw. I'm not totally bowled away with it but on the way to the talent I picked up Furor which is a 100% chance to get some rage/energy after a shapeshift which is nice. Normally when the druid shifts she has no energy to fight and has to wait which is kinda frustrating. Furor fixes that. It also enables some cool tricks, e.g:

can switch to bear, instantly bash for a stun and heal (although whenever I try this trick the heal seems to go wrong and give bugger all healing and I'm staring incredulously at 20% health: it's on my todo list to figure out what the problem is: global cooldown?).
she can switch to bear and then has enough rage to instantly Feral Charge which can work as a spell lock, although it has an annoying 8-30 yard range and the casters always seem to be at 7.5 yards away.

Her current fighting is to prowl up behind something and Pounce which stuns the enemy for four seconds (extended with two talent points), then Shred while still behind. This is quite a devestating combo, it can take half a mobs health in one go. I've done a lot of stealthing in the last few levels and with two talent points in improved stealth you can pretty much do anything around a mob as long as you don't accidently go through it if it suddenly changes direction. She doesn't need to be directly behind to Shred, she can be perpendicular, i.e. stabbing it in the shoulder. With the swiftness talents it isn't too much of a problem to get into position and as I mentioned yesterday it is quite satisfying.

I love travel form: it doesn't seem that much slower than a normal mount but it's so cool being about to change in and out while running and it made the long runs (gadgetzan, desolace) quite tolerable. It's much better for running away than Aspect of the Cheetah as there is less (but still some) chance to be dazed. The game has an annoying bug where it takes it a few seconds to work out that you have left a building and can switch to travel form, like the opposite of the delay between entering a building and being dismounted. When the druid enters a building she is 'dismounted' from travel form to caster rather than the faster cat form so one has to try to preempt this (memo to self: does this 'dismount' cost mana? Prob not, although I don't see any tactical benefits).

As I mentioned yesterday, she has little downtime. If she is low on mana she can wait for enough mana to switch to cat, then idle away some time killing things, after which mana has regenerated for a heal and switch back to cat. I normally use Regrowth for healing as it is more mana efficient than Healing Touch and has a heal-over-time element so she can be some way into a fight before her health dips below 100%. Also worth noting that the HoT from Regrowth appears to stack with the HoT from Regenerate so she normally casts a regenerate immediately after a caster pull.

As a grinding/farming machine the lack of downtime and the speed of travel make the druid a good choice. Just keep away from caster camps!

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WoW News Issue 229

A quick catchup.

Maezyn

Visited hunter trainer at 62 and discovered I had neglected to visit since level 58. Many upgrades and 62 yielded steady shot. With a shot rotation that includes Steady Shot she can kill very quickly but runs out of mana equally quickly.

My comments about beastmaster vs marksman in the last post proved wrong: marksman pet needs hefty healing.

In summary, battles are over quickly but pet healing and mana drinks make up for that.

Maexyn

Maevyn and Maesyn sent her all their herbs stocks and she is now a 285 alchemist. I decided that levelling tailoring just for the high level BoP's wasn't worth it. All the decent leatherworking plans seem to come from instances and I doubt tailoring is any different. Maexyn will never raid and is my only clothie so not much point in levelling tailoring. Still need to get alchemy to 350 to start lucrative transmuting and she can't improve alchemy skill till level 50 so that can wait for a bit.

She is now level 47. At 46 she could kill level 47-49 water elementals and zapped giants in Feralas effortlessly. 30 seconds to kill a 49! I was happy when pook could kill something three levels higher in less than two minutes.

Maesyn

Went kinda crazy and levelled her six levels to 38. She's no longer the baby! I am addicted to stealthing up behind mobs, Pouncing and shredding. She can grind for hours with no mana breaks, rarely needs bandaging and never needs a food stop yet can still kill things in 20 seconds. Still very weak against multiple mobs and casters: caster camps are as difficult as for a paladin.

Druid play is more challenging than hunter/warlock but stabbing things in the back gives uneasy satisfaction.

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WoW News issue 228

Maexyn

Maexyn got to level 46 in Feralas doing the dart spriter, naga and yeti quests. Not much to report execpt to say what fun it was in the dart spriter camp when I kept pressing the howl of terror button instead of shadow bolt. It has to be THE best way to agro a whole camp.

I haven't got into using Death Coil yet but I read a good tip: use the three second death coil window to cast a proper fear.

The yeti seemed to resist the Voidwalker's taunts and Maexyn got a lot of beating and had to eat/drink every ten mobs or so. I maybe could have switched to succubus but voidwalker is just the best warlock pet. It is nice to have Sacrifice available.

Maezyn

Maezyn did all the shatter point quests without dying, a first for me. I'm happy with my pulling, the boar makes it precise and Maezyn can burn things down pretty quickly.

Right now I would say I can't really tell much difference between a beastmaster and marksman hunter, they both get the job done. A beastmaster pet is probably a better tank but I don't seem to get into big (3-4 mob) fights as often these days, maybe because my pulling is better. I prefer silencing shot to the beast within.

Maesyn

Maesyn got to level 32 by killing things in southshore, not the easiest fights. However, at 32 she got two nice things:

Ravage: A nice opening move, have to use it from behind in stealth but it can take 20% of a mobs health in one hit. Almost worth messing around in stealth for.
Feroscious Bite: I've been waiting for something like this. An instant hit finishing move that uses up all combo points and energy but gives a big hit. This thing is one of the hardest hitting moves I've seen on all my characters and can take out a mob with 30% health left.

With better starting and finishing moves, Maesyn just got a lot more powerful.

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