Messenger comes

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A few short months ago, a messenger had arrived at the manor. The messenger was from the king of Stormwind himself. The messenger checked the directions he was given twice before knocking on the dilapidated home in the middle of Elwynn Forest. Surely he must be in the wrong area. There was no way a Warlock or a Death Knight would live in a house that looked so much of ... Nature.

The surprises continued as the door opened. A young Drainei had answered, though in honesty, the messenger wasn't the best judge of age of other races. But judging from her attire and smile, she wasn't an adventurer, and couldn't be the heroes he was sent to find.

"Yes? Can I help you Soldier?" asked the Drainei in a cheery voice. The Drainei was attractive. Her bright smile, and sunny greeting only helped to momentarily clear the messenger's mind of what he was about to say.

"I have a message for Master Bob, and Mistress Hotplate" replied the messenger, in the most authoritative tone he could muster.

The messenger saw a tiger behind her yawn, apparently bored of the entire exchange.

"I'll take it to them" answered the Drainei, extend her hand to take the missives.

"I'm sorry ma'am, but I was instructed to present the messages to them in person". said the Messenger.

"Suit yourself, come in.", the door opened wider to allow the messenger in. "My name is Huntry. Bob's in his study, and I think Hotplate is in the backyard practicing. I'll see if I can get them"

The messenger walked through the threshold. The house almost seemed bigger on the inside. It seemed ordinary, if not a little messy. There were singe marks on the drapes, some bigger than others. Simple wooden furnishings here and there. Though not ornate, the furniture was solid and strong. This was easy to notice since the large tiger "brushed" against the leg of a table, and the table didn't budge.

"Have a seat at the table", Huntry gestured towards the chair closes to the Tiger. The Messenger thought for a moment about sitting next to the Tiger, but its large fangs "encouraged" him to take a seat a few chairs down.


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A raggedy looking old man walked into the room. His beard was unkempt, his eyes sullen from too much reading, the midsection of his simple robe was tighter than on the rest of his body. To the casual observer, he looked like a simple, though somewhat curmudgeon farmer. But the messenger had been around warriors all his life, knew how they talked, knew how they walked, and knew how they entered a room. This "old man" did not walk like an old man. His gait had no limp, and was fluid, never off balance. As he entered the room, his eyes flickered around, quickly taking stock of anything, or any one, that hadn't been there before.

"You have a message for me... corporal?" asked the old man.

"Yes sir, from King Varian himself". The messenger drew closer to hand the sealed note to the old man. As he got closer to his subject, it became much clearer that this was no ordinary old man. His eyes were sharp, and burned with a fire born of service and magic.

The messenger handed the sealed envelope to Bob and waited patiently.

Bob took the message, and seeing that the messenger had no intention of leaving until it had been read, quickly broke the wax seal and opened the letter. 

Huntry busied herself by "cleaning" a shelf nearby. Conveniently the position afforded her a clear view of the message. Dranei eyes are sharp. Unfortunately Huntry could only see a blank page. Bob studied the page intently. Obviously he could see something that Huntry could not.

Bob folded the missive and regarded the messenger. "Yes, two."

"Yes sir, I shall inform the King of your reply" replied the messenger, giving a quick bow. Huntry showed the messenger out.

Huntry returned to the table to find Bob re-reading the missive quietly.

"Yes to what?" asked Huntry, no longer able to contain her curiosity. Bob was never one to accept anything, especially not from a message.

"Tell Hotplate to pack her gear. Her and I are leaving at nightfall." commanded Bob. Though his voice was clear, Huntry could tell that his attention was elsewhere.

Suddenly Kragnar and Bizpit materialized between them. Bob, not surprised in the least merely commanded,  "Find Onaara, tell her to drop whatever she's doing and come here". Kragnar disappeared without a reply. Bob turned to Bizpit, the usually annoying Imp was silent. He must have picked up on his master's thoughts and remained serious for once.

"Send word to the dragons, I'll need their help soon" Bizpit disppeared as quickly as Kragnar. 

Huntry, frozen by the sudden activity merely stared at Bob. It was clear that Bob was worried. Again, not characteristic of the old Warlock at all.

"Ready my armor, I must consult my books before we leave. Wait for Onaara, she should arrive within the week. When she arrives, both of you follow us."

"I don't understand, where are you going? Where am I going? What's going on?" asked Huntry.

"Anduin is missing, they think the Horde has taken him" replied Bob.

Prime lens and E3

Took my 35mm f/1.8 lens to E3. Rationale was that the low light inside the expo floor would really need the super wide aperture. Plus I could simply zoom with my feet

Unfortunately it just didn't give me the flexibility I needed. I was constantly at the wrong place, and everything was out of composition. It was frustrating.  The wide aperture was nice, but a flash would have probably done more to help with the whole situation.

[Server Fame] Current State of Machines

So every now and then I put up an update on my never-ending-collection of computers. Near as I can figure, this is whats up.

Phuong:
25Mhz 286/386
Retired, donated. I just didn't have the room to keep it any longer.

Mouse:
200Mhz Pentium Pro w/MMX
Retired, donated. I just didn't ahve the room to keep it any longer

Uppy:
350Mhz Pentium 3 Laptop
Retired, waiting to be donated. I don't have room for it, but I haven't got around to donating it yet.

Downy:
1.4Ghz Athlon T-bird. 768MB RAM, 2.25TB
Retired. Still in box. It is still viable, and works well. Considered giving it to my parents and having them have a server at home. That might have been the plan if I didn't get a "new" Core2Duo to become the new main desktop.

Frisket:
2.3Ghz Athlon64 3000+ 3GB RAM, 8TB
Currently the main server. Still going strong. Recently had its first hard drive fault. The plan for the future is for it to "retire" and head to my parent's place to serve as their DLNA server, and offsite backup. It won't have a raid when its there, so the load should be quite a bit less. Majority of the space will be on the 2TB external drive.

Squirrel:
2.66Ghz Core2Quad E8400 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD, 1TB 7200rpm
Still the "big iron" of the farm. Running strong. Installing the extra 4GB of ram was harrowing, since it seemed to cause instability in the north or southbridge. Was very annoying to diagnose.

Currently running the AirVideo software for streaming to the iOS devices. Also runs the uTorrent software for downloading. Also running PS3 Media Server. Its a backup DLNA server. I still haven't found a software I like as much as MediaTomb, but MediaTomb just isn't doing everything I want it to. Plus squirrel is beefy enough to do live-transcoding, which mostly works.

New:
Galactica:
2.40Ghz Core2Duo E7400, 17" Mobile Workstation. 128GB SSD
One of two laptops I got from a friend. It was missing battery, charger, ram and HD. This laptop even has a Quadro level graphics card. It plays WoW fine, though I don't play that much. It plays hearthstone just fine though. Named after Battlestar Galactica, because its so huge.

Pegaus:
2.40Ghz Core2Duo E7400 15" Laptop. 4GB RAM, 750GB 7200RPM
The other of the two laptops I got from a friend. This one is virtually the same as the previous, but with intel integrated graphics, a 15" screen and a 7200rpm HD instead of the SSD. I use it mostly for when I'm out and about. Though lately I've been using it as a server to offload repacking/transcoding duties from Frisket. With Gigabit and SMB mounts, the network lag isn't that bad. Named after the other battlestar, Pegasus.

Codename: Dreadnaught:
2.66Ghz Core2Duo E6700, 4GB of RAM, 300GB 7200RPM
I got this for cheap at work. It came with a Quadro graphics card, but it is faulty so I took ti out. But it has onboard video, which I'm using now, it works fine. Right now I'm planning on migrating the 8TB RAID from frisket to this machine. This will become my main server. Frisket will then be moved to lighter duties at my parent's place. This solves a few of the issues I was trying to figure out with the Pogoplug and PS3.

Haven't decided if I'm going to get a case for it. I want to. The alternative is to transplant frisket into the case from work, and put the Core2Duo into Frisket's Antec 300. The case from work is probably good enough for what my parents need, but if its going to be on 24/7 and it gets super hot where they are.

Converting to Mp4 ( for PS3 use for example)

http://askubuntu.com/questions/50433/how-to-convert-mkv-file-into-mp4-file-losslessly

I decided to use avidemux. It seems to work pretty well. On this Core2Duo T7700 @2.4Ghz ( laptop) speed was decent. Specially since this IS NOT TRANSCODING then speeds are very fast. The only transcoding I had to do was the Audio into AAC, since the MP4 container only supports AAC with H264 and presumable X264.

Note: This is a repackaging program, but it will do transcoding as well. Transcoding recompresses a video ( or audio or both) from one format to another. Demuxing ( remuxing) copies video/audio/both from one container to another, without recompressing ( so its fast and lossless). In this case I was converting from mkv and avi's ( the containers) to mp4 (container).

[Android] Easy Logging

From the Java ( log to logcat)

import android.util.Log

Log.w("myApp", "My Message");

From the NDK/Native side ( still logs to logcat)

#include
#define APPNAME "MyApp"


__android_log_print(ANDROID_LOG_VERBOSE, APPNAME, "MyMessage\n");

also remember to add the following to Android.mk

LD_LDFLAGS := -llog

Easy peezy.

Answers were from:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2364811/how-do-i-write-outputs-to-the-log-in-android
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4629308/any-simple-or-easy-way-to-debug-android-ndk-code

[Android] undefined references

If you get a ton of undefined references, for methods/functions that you're sure are defined. Make sure to add:

"LOCAL_ALLOW_UNDEFINED_SYMBOLS := true" to your Android.mk file.

Reasoning is given here:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7209971/ndk-build-undefined-reference-to-errors-when-statically-linking-to-libxml-a

[Android] Note: limits: No such file or directory

If you get the following error:

fatal error: limits: No such file or directory

Or

error: 'numeric_limits' is not a member of 'std'

The solution is to include ( not or ). Then add

"APP_STL := stlport_static" to your jni/Application.mk 

Adding it to your Android.mk file does not work. I created an Application.mk file, with just that line and it worked.

Solution from:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/android-ndk/4cIVid0P3go/LY3htUx_qMgJ

[Android] Note: Device Not Showing up in ADC

If DDMS is seeing the device, but eclipse/Android Device Chooser is not showing it then check to see if the project requires a more up to date SDK version.

[RAID] Updated the RAID5 yet again

My RAID5 on frisket was running dangerously low on space. When I noticed that it only had 100GB's left, I knew it was time to either upgrade or delete massive amounts of data. To those that are saying 100GB is plenty of space, the drive was 98% full, and I still had about 500GB of data on various external drives that needed copying to the main server.

I decided that even deleting all my rips, I would still fill up again within a year. I needed another 2TB HD, if the server could handle it. I also needed a backup. RAID is not a backup. It will guard against single drive failure yes, but not against misguided fingers. Checked the server setup, and I still have 2 SATA ports free ( on the expansion card). I also had one more open 3.5" bay.

I bought a 2TB internal drive, a Seagate Barracuda instead of my regular Hitachi's. I also bought a 2TB external drive, for backups and safeguarding critical data for the RAID grow. Growing a raid is non-destructive.. if all goes well. But getting any command wrong, formatting the wrong drive, or a power failure at a critical moment can all lead to a broken RAID, and lost data. 

I copied all my TV Shows and Movies to the 2TB drive. That almost completely filled the drive. I also copied over any data that couldn't be replaced, and weren't stored anywhere else. This filled up any left over nooks and crannies in all my external drives. Unfortunately my 500GB and 750GB external drives are now at my parent's place and remotely transferring 500GB+ worth of data back and forth on my 100KB/s upload is just not plausible. 

On Sunday I started the procedure. I used the same procedure I outlined here RAID5-fun. Currently the RAID has about 23 hours left on the re-sync. After that I have to resize the file-system in order to utilize the free space.

Update: Took roughly 26 hours total to do the grow of the raid partition. Currently I'm running e2fsck to check the filesystem over, then the filesystem has to be grown. 

[WOW IC] Bob and Hotplate back in action

Bob wiped his lip and gingerly put some weight on his knee. It didn't give out instantly, which was a good sign. Whatever liquid his hand wiped from his chin, whether it was blood or sweat, Bob didn't get a chance to look. Kragnar let out a taunt at the pair of Yongol he was fighting. These Youngol, were different than the Youngol he had encountered in the village. They were imbued with the power of the Sha. Instead of simple brute force ( of which they had plenty of), they were attacking with the force of hatred itself.

Bob hurled yellow and green deadly fire at the pair. The yellow fire streaked through the ground, curling left and right, like a snake, ready to devour its target. The green fireball of chaos streaked through the air on a more direct route. Regardless, they both hit at almost the same moment. Where there were once two hate filled Youngol, only two craters now remained.

Kragnar turned to acknowledge his master, then silently floated off in the direction of his next target.

A few yards away, Hotplate was keeping herself busy as well. Her dual blades whistled in the night air. Normally, Pandaren nights were moderate, requiring nothing more than a linen blanket to sleep under the stars. But the air around hotplate was as frigid as a blizzard in Northrend. The death knight was born of this bitter cold, and it would never leave her. Now the cold was her weapon, along with blood and rune. Her blades gave off an eerie white glow, like the color of snow in the moonlight. But instead of inspiring an image of a peaceful Winter Solstice, they were cleaving through a particularly large Youngol warrior.

The warrior did not last long.

-------

"Did I ever thank you for dragging me to this demon infested continent?" quiped Hot.

"You could have stayed at the manor, helped Hunt at the market" replied Bob.

"What? And let an old man like you go back to war on his own?" joked Hot.

While Bob wasn't as young as he used to be, he looked younger than he'd looked in years. The last few months in Pandaria had hardened Bob. After years of being cooped up in the manor with his books, his body had softened and aged. This new campaign sharpened his mind and reinvigorated his body. He was almost in as good a shape as he was when he fought the Burning Legion, a lifetime ago.

The trip had done well for Hotplate as well. Retirement had not suited her. While the others could change clothes, and pretend to live the simple lives of civilians, the Northrend campaign had obviously changed Hotplate. She no longer spoke about her time before becoming a Death Knight. Before Arthas had made her into what she was now. But the action had given her a purpose, and that was something she was sorely missing.