Peter's Blog

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.

Maecyn

I got caught up in mage play and ran Maecyn up nine levels to level 20. I'm not sure I would call Mage easy mode but in getting to level 20 she has died a total of three times despite fighting predominantly equal level mobs and tackling whatever quests I attempted, e.g. clearing Trogg camps in Loch Modan. This is better than I managed with Paladin/Hunter/Warlock/Druid.

I dont' think this was because mages are overpowered but rather because Frost Nova is just THE most useful thing in the world. She can use it as a freezing trap during a fight or she can drop it while running away and leave a group of monsters standing. I've spent the talent points in reducing the cooldown to 21 seconds so I can use it twice in particularly tricky fights. This attack works nice against melee mobs:

• Frost bolt (damage + slowing effect)
• Arcane Missiles (damage as the slowly approach)
• Fire Blast (instant damage, 6 second cooldown, I think of it as a shotgun for some reason)
• Frost Nova to freeze them
• Jump back
• Fire bolt: three second cast for them to say their prayers
• If the Fire Bolt didn't get them, a Fire Blast or wand will.

Fighting anything with a ranged attack becomes a problem. Mage has a 'Dampen Magic' buff that reduces damage taken from spells (and reduces friendly healing which isn't an issue when soloing) but it didn't make much difference against dragonkin or knife/bow weilders (anything with 'scout' in it's name). Because the mob isn't frozen the mage is continually taking damage so the mob has to be burnt down quick. I found this to be quickest:

• Fire Bolt (three second cast but this is 'before' the fight i.e. the enemy isn't hitting me)
• Fire Blast (have to get into 20 yard range to fire it now, get it in early so the cooldown will start running and it can be used again)
• Arcane Missiles. During this time the mob is firing back and some of the missiles may not fire if I am taking hits but some of the missiles do land. A Fire Bolt during this time will be interrupted a lot, too much to be useful. Repeat Arcane Missiles till Fire Blast has cooled down.
• Fire Blast.
• Wand to death

Ranged mobs are much harder than melee and Maecyn usually needs food/drink between EACH fight (bah).

Polymporph (sheeping) is handy when attacking pairs but it is very situational. I sometime polymorph an add during a fight but I am aware that sheeping allows it to heal so I only use it on healthy mobs.

At level 20 she got Blink, Blizzard, Teleports and some other goodies.

• Blink: I love it. Heavenly. If frost nova is on cooldown, this instantly puts 20 yards between you and the mob. Melee Mobs are invariably slowed by Frost Armour so 20 yards gives good time to land some Arcane Missiles. Maecyn could handle level 23 raptors with the aid of blink. Also good for running away, in one case it seemed to put in enough distance to instantly make the mob give up. I had one fight in murloc country go very wrong and she ended up running through level 25 murloc territory. Frost Nova/Blink got her through it. She uses it every 15 seconds while running, passes the time on long runs watching the cooldown expire.
• Blizzard. I don't think she is in AoE grinding terriory yet but when an add joins a fight she can frost nova the pair then use this to finish off the first while damaging the second.
• Teleports: Ironforge and Stormwind are 10 seconds away! Love it too.

ToDo: script to eat & drink bound to a hotkey. Oh and conjuour water automatically if there isn't any. And make space in inventory for the water. And play the game for me while I watch telly.

UPDATE: @ level 20 I also got Mana Shield and then completely forgot to try it, too busy blinking. Too many goodies in one go. There's another skill to regenerate mana but it has an 8 minute cooldown

I recently bought a new USB Memory thingy, a Corsair Voyager 4G, to replace a rather nice verbatim that I had for about a month before I lost it (with important files on ). I fancied a rugged replacement that I could put on my keyring. Some research told me that the most rugged are reputedly Corsair and Sandisk. The comments on Amazon.co.uk revealed people moaning about their Sandisks and being very happy with their Corsairs so I bought the latter. The Sandisks come with some invasive 'feature' called U3 which can be a particularly annoying piece of tat-you-didn't-ask-for. The Corsair comes with some cryptographic thing if you happen to be between the I-need-encryption and the all-encryption-systems-have-government-backdoors levels of paranoia.

It seems rugged enough as it has a rubberised finish which feels rather unpleasant in the hand so I will not be inclined to keep fondling it in my pocket. Even better, the cap is rubber and so I won't be habitually clicking it. I would prefer a capless design but Corsair don't make one and then I would be fiddling with the cap mechanism. The rubber cap is downright unpleasant and I will only use it when necessary. The rubber seems to attract pocket lint

So I had a look around at the state of the art in Linuxes that boot from USB and I come across a little gem: DSL USB Embedded. DSL is Damn Small Linux and is an old 2.4 kernel and 50 megabytes of applications, a minimal system with hand-picked useful apps. The beauty of this particular distrbution is that it includes a QEMU virtual machine so you can be running windows, bung the USB memory in the hole, run a batch file and have your own linux running in a virtual machine under windows without having to install linux or reboot into a live CD. Amaze and bewilder your friends by running linux on their cruddy windows boxes! Remove your USB key and all traces of linux with it!

DSL USB Embedded

DSL USB Embedded under Vista with IE7 to prove it is Windows. It boots quite quickly too (less than a minute) which is much better than Ubuntu/Knoppix live CDs.

The USB key can also be set up to boot a pc straight into linux for some light Windows password resetting and it can have some persistant memory allocated to it should you not wish to cover your tracks.

My Evernote usage is showing no signs of abating and I am dumping everything I can think of in there.

Evernote Notes:

• You can draw handwritten notes using a Wacom Pen Tablet. It made a pretty good job of recognising my scrawly writing which isn't much better with the Tablet than it is with a mouse. Unfortunately it didn't manage to sync my experiments before I switched the pc off so I have no examples. I think I assumed it would sync before it shut down but maybe it doesn't?
• The Evernote Blog mentions an application called ShoZu which is supposed to make uploading pictures from a mobile phone to Flickr, Blogger etc easier. It can theoretically send photos to email and hence Evernote. I say theoretically as I had a bugger of a time getting the application to download to my phone (I had to hack wap/gprs settings) and then when I did install it I couldn't get it to upload anything. I fiddled with the wap/gprs some more but unfortunately it is designed to upload things automatically in the background which means it has no mechanism to show me progress bars or errors. I gave up and deleted it. If it had worked it's one useful looking feature would have been the ability to easily rotate a picture before sending it. When I want to send a photo to my moblog I have to use the built-in photo editing thing to rotate the picture which is a bit slow and fiddly. UPDATE: fixed it
• I had an email from another note-taking application vendor asking me to try it out. This one is an amalgum of twitter and 30 boxes. However for me the big advantage of Evernote is the way it finds text within photos and drawings. A good example would be photoing business cards and putting them in Evernote. The text on the cards would be automatically indexed and you wouldn't have to visit Staples for a business card album. You can then read them anywhere you have internet access. I'm not a big meetings man but wouldn't it be cool to put meeting minutes in Evernote along with photos of business cards of attendees? Almost worth buying a suit for.
• Evernote has an 'Install Evernote Portable' option which installs Evernote on a USB stick. You can then run it from the USB stick, synchronise and you have a portable backup of your data.

I tried out ShoZu a few days ago and had such trouble getting it to work with WAP/GPRS that I gave up in frustration and deleted it.

I was watching the BBC's Click program (again) and it was all about the new iPhone 3g and basically how wonderful modern phones are. It inspired me to have another try at getting 3G working on my phone. I did a network search and found two versions of 'vodafone uk' one with a little icon. I connected to this network and a new icon appeared on the phone. I looked it up in the user manual and it indeed means I had 3G!

I downloaded the ShoZu application again and this time it came down very quickly, 450k in less than a minute. I fired it up and it synced with the server to set up the links I can send stuff to. I tried it out by blasting a picture to EverNote and again it worked, taking about a minute to upload a picture. The option in ShoZu to rotate a picture works nicely.

My 3G reception is still patchy and it looks like the phone will keep dropping back to the non-3G signal all the time. It's made me think about various options such as streaming webcams to the phone etc. May have to sign up to the vodafone 'unlimited' internet package that is limited to 500M/month.

Maexyn

I just wanted to level Maexyn up quick so dammit went to Blasted Lands for the tedious animal parts quests. It was as dull as always but being level 50 she was tougher than all the beasts there, even the 51's. The only problem beasts were the Felhunter things that had a mana tap, they tended to tap the voidwalker and what with the rate of killing the voidwalker was struggling for health (no mana for consume shadows). Maexyn herself didn't need much downtime, just voidwalker maintenance.

She was using her new level 50 DoT, Unstable Afflication and it is more harmful than Syphon Life, mobs died quicker, needing maybe one Drain Life before going into Drain Soul. Unstable Affliction wasn't a big mana user either, she could maintain pretty much full health/mana.

After dinging 51 she went to Western Plaguelands to do Sorrow Hill and the first cauldron. This wasn't a big stretch and well worth doing at this level for the added experience: Maezyn put this off till level 56 when it was kinda trivial.

She is now in Gadgetzan, ready to hit Un'goro. MUST remember to send her a mithril casing to repair the robot gorilla.

Maesyn

Maesyn did a load of dragonling killing in Badlands to get to level 43. I always spend a hour or so there with each character since getting a dragonling pet drop with Maevyn but no joy there since then.

At 43 she went back to Southern STV to do the naga and pirates. This was big fun. Druid is definitely my favourite class right now, run from fight to fight, < 20 second kills, no downtime, lovvit.

She has put her recent talent points in 'Improved Leader of the Pack' for heals on critical strikes and 'Nurturing Instincts' for +healing. The latter talent has improved her healing noticably: if she casts the 'Regenerate' DoT in a fight she gets enough healing against a level 41 for her health to be increasing during the fight. In cat form!

Maes v Kong

Took on the big ape. It took two stacks of combo points but she did it!

Maexyn

Maexyn hit Un'goro. I was having connection problems and hence some fights were interrupted. This was tolerable when she could do a ribbon dance with an endless drain soul but overall it sucked the fun out of it. I got her to level 54 and hearthed to the trainer for some next ranks.

Maesyn

Maesyn did a trivial naga quest in Feathermoon and I got bored and quit. Her next quest would be against bosses in a cave and I didn't fancy doing that with a flaky connection.

My plan had been to level Maexyn and Maesyn each one level per week so that could alternate their visits to the class trainer but I got tied up with Maecyn and didn't run Maesyn and more.

Maecyn

Maecyn did some Redwood and Wetlands questing. My connection was still dodgy and she died a few times when I was disconnected during a fight. I swore a lot. After cursing my internet provider I wondered if it was a linux/wine problem so I rebooted into windows, waited patiently while it installed two WoW patches (accepting a total of six pages of terms and conditions) and carried on. No more connection problems. My inventory page is not being updated until the next random ubuntu patch fixes my networking.

Anyway Maecyn got to level 23 and had all available 'improved blizzard' talent points and I fancied a go at the frost AoE stuff. According to this page there are some gnoll camps in Wetlands that are about as good as it gets with this. I started with one or two gnolls and worked up to four and died. I wasn't that fed up with it but it made me think. I've done the AoE thing with Pooky and AoE opportunities aren't that frequent, needing lots of melee mobs. I wanted more general purpose skills. Also something was drawing me to the Fire tree. I thought of Fire mages as glass canons but still I succombed to temptation and respecced as a Fire Mage.

For my first fight I had to refer to my talents and work out what really was different. Well the Pyroblast spell is the main thing, a mighty six second cast for a small nuclear weapon. I tried this on some murlocs and found that with a Pyroblast followed by a Fireball I could two-shot them: they were dead before they reached me. I had talented up the casting range and Pyroblast has a huge 41 yard range, so far that tab-targetting doesn't work, I have to click on them. With equal level mobs a fight goes like this:

• pyroblast
• immediately start casting fire ball (three second cast, with talents, but some of this is while the pyroblast is still in transit)
• if there is time cast a scorch (1.5 second cast) but with fast running mobs there isn't usually time for this but if they are slow then this is devestating and they probably won't survive the next step
• Fire Blast (instant cast)

Mobs of equal level or lower are now dead or will be with a little wanding. For higher level mobs continue with

• blink
• scorch (frost armour should be slowing mob so there is 1.5 second to cast this)
• fire blast (cooldown, with fire mage talents, will be up by now).
• getting bored now so frost nova, distance and fire ball should wrap things up.

Ok the pyroblast has a long cast time but the trepidation makes it worthwhile and I checked out the mana bar and mana is still regenerating during this six seconds. Also, it can take six seconds to run up to the mob to melee it. A normal pyroblast will take 40% of a mobs health in one hit and there is a DoT effect on top of that. Pyroblast can crit for about 380 (level 25 mage) which normally means the mob won't reach the mage alive. I found it is possible to check that the area behind you is clear during the six second cast, you don't have to be facing the target all the time.

The timing of the casts has a little room for manouvre as the Fire Mage talents give a 70% resistance to interruption. Sometimes the mob will be beating for the latter part of a Scorch cast but that is no big deal.

Mana wise, she seems to need fewer mana breaks than when she was frost as more of her casting is offensive and isn't spent slowing the mobs down. The mobs die faster so she doesn't need to defend as much.

Unsurprisingly Maecyn is now level 26 as the Fire Mage thing is great fun. She hasn't died since she went fire. She can tackle mobs three levels higher (e.g. Worgon Shadow Weavers, Sarltooth etc). I've used Mana Shield exactly once on purpose (i.e not finger trouble), against Sarltooth (lvl 29 vs 26) and finished that fight with 90 something health left and 48 or so mana.

So what about multiple mobs I hear you ponder. Well, she could clear gnoll camps in Wetlands, mobs about one level below her. It works like this:

• hit selected mob with pyroblast.
• keep hitting mob till it is dead, should be about the time it reaches you.
• if you get one add, frost nova, distance, fire ball, etc, kill it too. It's good to chuck in an Arcane Explosion before the Frost Nova to finish off the first mob and start on the second.
• if you get two adds, frost nova them both and run away, come back and take them both at your leisure. Polymorph is good.

And there's Counterspell! Love it, turns a caster into a melee mob for eight seconds which is plenty of time to kill it.

In summary, Fire Mage feels like the most overpowered character I've tried so far. It may get harder as she levels and she may well go back to frost for Sorrow Hill but right now I'm having omgwtfpewpew fun.

Maevyn

Whenever I make this kind of comment it normally screws up the market but Maevyn has been making about 100g a day by transmuting Earthstorm Diamonds. There I said it. The mats are getting expensive so she bulk buys.

Peter's 2.4.3 patch notes

• I get the open ticket thing on my UI. I am NOT disabling my addons or resetting the UI, I just ignore it.
• My characters have started tripping on the steps of the ironforge Auction House. How do Blizzard manage to break things that have worked perfectly for years in these patches? That reminds me, I hate it when blink stalls at the edge of bridges or silly things like that.
• Looking forward to Maecyn's Mechanostider at level 30 although the Mage teleports are wonderful timesavers.
• No I'm not forking out 1800g for a gigantique bag. I need that for Maex's, Maes's and Maec's epic mounts.

Yes, two days of posts! Whatever next!

Maesyn

Had some time to catch up on Maesyn. I think I've been playing too much fire mage as now the Feral Kitty Druid seems slow killing things, it's time mostly spent waiting to regenerate energy for the next claw Fire Mage is more exciting, unless you get a lucky two-shot you don't stand around waiting for cooldowns!

Maesyn went into a cave to kill a naga lord, tough work, lots of casters which aren't good for feral mode. Should I brush up my casting skills to try out-blasting them? Maexyn and Maevyn found this one easy, the final boss was 47 and had two bodyguards and it was far too much for my level 44 Bear. A prot pally would have taken them (but would still have struggled with those casters).

Spirit healer, fly to tanaris during debuff, fight easy mode level 41 wastewater guys till hitting level 45.

Not looking forward to trying fire mage in a cave. No 41 yard range, nowhere to blink to, Maecyn may just develop claustrophobia.

Epix

I forgot to mention that I got my first ever epic world drop! 343 levels of killing things and finally I get one. Maexyn got it in Western Plaguelands, it is a Freezing Band, a mage ring that has a chance to freeze. It's level 47 and I'm saving it for Maecyn. In a way it is one of the reasons I respecced her to Fire: a chance to freeze is Very Bad for an AoE Frost Mage as it is very improtant to keep one's mobs in a tight pack.

Xming is an X server for Windows. With it one can run linux applications on a remote linux box with the X user interface windows appearing on ones Windows desktop:

xming demo

Internet Explorer, xeyes and xterm in perfect harmony.

How to do this wonderous thing?

• install xming
• run xlaunch to fire up xming as your windows X server (should be added to quick launch), selecting the following options:
  • Multiple Windows (each app gets its own windows window)
  • Display Number 0
  • Start no Client (client is the program that runs)
  • No Access Control (I'm a trusting soul)
• you now have an X server on your windows box as display :0. An X server is something that displays the user interface for X client programs (X keeps you on your toes by using counter-intuitive terminology).
• open putty at the configuration of your favourite linux box.
• enable the X forwarding option:
  
  

  X forwarding in Putty

  the 127.0.0.1:0 means remote X clients will display on your new windows X server (:0) running on your pc (127.0.0.1)
• open the ssh connection in putty and enter a command such as xterm. Amazingly, an xterm window should open on your local pc! It's wonderous, xterm is running on the remote pc but the user interface is on your windows box.

Interestingly, the ssh session you open has a DISPLAY environment variable open that tells the X clients you launch from it where to stick their displays.

peter@server:~$ echo $DISPLAY
localhost:10.0
peter@server:~$

Through the miracle of ssh this is routed back to xming on the Windows box.

Now, how about if beyond your gateway ssh server is another ssh server and you want to run your X client applications on that? The answer is amazingly simple. Open the session on the gateway server as described above and then use the command:

ssh -X name-of-other-server

you now have a command prompt on the remote remote server and if you now run

xterm

then again you get a xterm display coming up on your local windows pc but this time from the remote^2 box.

UPDATE: troubleshooting

• may need this in /etc/ssh/sshd_config

  X11UseLocalhost yes
  

• may need to

  sudo apt-get install xauth
  

  I needed this on a previously x-less box where I had installed gitk to do some git study on a headless server box

Maecyn

Maecyn did the 'Cursed Crew' quest in Wetlands, she 26, mobs 26-29 including Snellig. Snellig was easy but most fighting was tricky with downtime between almost every fight and a lot of running away when adds appeared (e.g. giant crocolisks when she kited things along the shore). Maecyn was 27 for the follow on quest against the level 30 ghost pirate captain but she couldn't handle him. He hits hard, is sited where he can't be pyroblasted from 41 yards away, resists every other spell. Tried twice, ran away twice, will leave him and ponder strategy (e.g sheep/pyroblast). Maexyn and pooky both kicked his arse.

Maevyn

Following my tip the Auction House is full of Everstorm Diamonds at 150g a time. Ok funny man reader who's trying to kill my market, I have enough gold for now and I can choose when to sell my diamonds. In fact, the mats are on a cheap cycle at the moment so it's time to stock up.

I had some spare time so I actually took Maevyn out of Ironforge(!) and sent her to silithus to buy some enchants. For the first time in months she used her flying mount for the inn->darnassus portal trip! I still don't see any point in busting a gut for an epic flyer if she can't use it till level 77 in wotlk. However, at level 77 not having one will be social suicide (not that I'm social)

Maezyn & Pookypoo

A while back I tried the multi-boxing thing where I had two instances of WoW running and controlled two characters, Maezyn(mk 1) and Sissle. I gave it up because it felt like cheating.

Right now my thoughts are, is it cheating any more than doing solo quests in a group? I find it annoying when I get to a quest site and there is a group there laying waste to the place, why aren't they off farming instances where they belong? Multi-boxing takes more skill than ganging up.

So I'm tempted to send pook off to a new account and have him team with Maezyn so they can take on outlands as a duo. The problem is, given Maezyn is dps, what is pooks role?

Replace the pet

as protection he could do this but I can't imaging his dps on autoattack is any better than a pet, especially if he is sword and board. With a two hander he will need Maezyn to chop stuff down quick. Also Beefy has a charge ability, pook has little more than Linken's Boomerang.

Follows as healbot

only a small mana saving over Maezyn using Mend Pet. The buffs would be pretty negligible too.

More dps

paladin dps is about spamming judgements, doing this at the same time as spamming steady shot with Maezyn would be a challenge. Would paladin + hunter autoattack be powerful enough? Saving mana would help them both.

Pet on defensive would be around back of mob out of pookys way but it would still be levelling.

(Wotlk question: if pets are going to automatically jump to five level's below the hunter when trained, what about pets that have been left in the stables for 20 levels? Is one meant to abandon them and mess around getting another ghost sabre/Rak'shiri?).

I could also move Maexyn to a different account so she can enchant the others but it looks like in WOTLK she will be emailing enchanting scrolls to them so it's not worth the expense just now, especially as she's having trouble levelling > 275 as the mats aren't coming in. When Maesyn starts skinning rugged leather this should improve. Then again, Pooky's big axe would look good with a glow, even a cheapo elemental slayer.

WoW on Wine Notes

• Linux would make a nice multi-boxing platform as Gnome and KDE both has 'focus follows mouse' facilities where I just move the mouse from one instance to another and key presses will go to that instance, no need to click on the app.
• My linux disconnection problems seem to have gone away.
• I use a script to launch WoW on linux. The script waits for WoW to finish, then uploads my inventory to the blog and backs up my WoW install to the mythtv box so that my two installs are in sync. This kind of thing is a bitch on windows as batch files don't wait for windows applications to end.

I can confirm that the latest titan panel fixes the 'open ticket' thing.

Wotlk

There is no way I'm typing Wrath of the Lich King half a dozen times in every blog. Yes I've been looking through what is coming, some nice things, but the amount of coverage is bordering hysteria. I will be bearing it in mind in my planning and I'm certainly not going to waste time on S4/T6 epics if they are Northrend vendor trash.

The thought of levelling any crafting profession to 450 makes me groan. Should be heavenly for gatherers though.