4.0.1 the Money Maker and Class Breaker ( kinda )

4.0.1 Hit last week and there has been blog after blog written about it. Many much better written than this one. With that in mind, here's how 4.0.1 affected moi.

Fiance and I moved the Monday before patch day. This means that we didn't have internet again until Wednesday night. Because of this I completely missed out on 24-hours of post-patch mayhem. This was both good and bad, good in that we were able to get enough stuff unpacked to be able to live BEFORE I totally got sucked into WoW. Bad because I missed out on a huge amount of glyph business.

Class Changes

In short, almost all my toons, especially the 80s, underwent huge changes. As of yesterday some still don't even have their specs rebuilt. This is mostly my fault, I've spent far more time making glyphs than actually rebuilding the toons.

Bob, Warlock

Destruction
The destruction rotation is very complicated. Much more complicated that the previous rotation. The old rotation went something like this:

Opener: Life Tap, CoE, Immolate, Chaos Bolt, Conflagrate, Incinerate.
Maintenance: Keep Chaos Bolt and Conflag on cooldown, refresh Immolate as needed, lifetap every 30-40sec to keep the buff up and get mana.

Now:

Opener: Bane of Doom, CoE, Soul Fire, Immolate, Chaos Bolt, Conflagrate, Shadow Flame, Corruption, Incinerate.
Maintenance: Keep Chaos Bolt, Conflag, and Shadow Flame on cooldown, refresh Bane of Doom, Immolate, and Corruption as needed. If Empowered Imp procs then cast Soul Fire. On top of all that use Soul Burn->Soul Fire three times somewhere in the fight. Spam Incinerate otherwise.

The opener has 9 spells, you're keeping 3 on cooldown, refreshing 3 dots, watching for a proc and weaving in 3 big cooldowns. I'm slowly developing the feel of it on a target dummy. Its complicated, and I find myself watching the dot timers and my action bars. On a target dummy the rotation is involved, in a real raid where you have to move around, it would be very difficult, at least at first.

The good part about all this, is the DPS. I'm pulling in 6K when I do the rotation well. Thats pretty crazy considering I was only getting 3-4k pre-patch.

Demonology
With dual-spec being lowered to 100g, I went ahead and got bob a second spec. I've always wanted to try Demonology, its the most utility oriented class, plus who doesn't want to turn into a big purple demon?

The rotation is much easier, but the DPS I was getting was only around 3.5k. Its entirely possible that my gear isn't suited for this spec or that I just don't know the "proper" rotation. Either way, I'll have to work on it and see how things progress.

Hooff, Paladin

Paladins ( and Hunters ) have had the biggest change in terms of class mechanics of the patch. Pallies now have "Holy Power" think mini rogue combo points. For Retribution, the rotation isn't that much more complicated, but it changes the tempo of the class quite a bit.

Rotation: Crusader Strike(CS), Filler, CS, Filler, CS, Templar's Verdict. Filler being Exorcism when Art of War procs, judgements, holy wrath ( which now affects all enemies but stuns undead/demons). Its made the class feel slower, more rigid. Whereas before it was priority and you hit whatever was off cooldown, now you have to wait and try to build up holy points (with crusader strike) as fast as possible to hit with a heavy TV. I have to keep myself from trying to hit the abilities as they come off CD.

Unfortunately melee DPS seems to be down accross the board. I don't know if they've fixed it yet, but that was the scuttlebut on wowinsider and mmochampion.

Holy
I haven't got the courage up to try healing on Hooff yet. The heals have been shifted around and new ones added. Flash of Light is now a big, fast, expensive heal. Holy Light is the slower, small heal. Divine Light is the big, slow nuke heal. Except for the names changing, its not a huge change. Then there's the Holy Power mechanic. Holy Shock is still instant, with a CD, and it heals for a decent amount. It also produces 1 holy power. Word of Glory is instant, has no mana cost, but consumes all your Holy Power. The more holy power the more it heals. So this leads to the scenario where you want to use Holy Shock all the time to build up HP to get mana-free healing using WoG. There's also Light of Dawn, which is a Cone type AOE heal.

I haven't actually tried healing with this new toolbox so I don't know how anything feels. My old playstyle heavily favored Holy Shock + Flash of Light combos so that should be easy enough to convert to Holy Shock + Holy Light. Remembering to use WoG will come with time. From what I've heard, the mana pools are so large ( from the SP->Int conversion) that using Flash of Light won't drain your mana much at all.

Hotplate, Death Knight

Blood Tanking
I haven't even respec'd her yet. I forsee that it shouldn't be a huge change for me, since I was already blood tanking pre-patch. There might be new abilities, or name changes but it should be ok. With that said, I haven't built up the bravery or inclination to try tanking with her yet.

Frost Dual-Weild DPS
I just spec'd her into dual wield DPS yesterday. To be honest I really just like seeing a character go to town on a monster with two weapons. With 2pcT9 dps with a bunch of tanking gear, plus a tanking 1hander, I was pulling 2.5k DPS on a target dummy. Pretty low, but to be expected considering my gear and inexperience with the spec.

Waash Druid

To be perfectly honest Waash has spent the majority of the time creating Glyphs. Though I did get around to specing him back into tanking. I even tried tanking a few heroics. The biggest change? Swipe now has a 6sec CD. Thats an eternity for an ability that used to be spam'd with no cooldown. It makes getting AOE threat much much more involved. Now I still use swipe on every cooldown, but I have to be smarter when I use it. For example, during a pull I have to make sure that first swipe gets EVERY mob, so that I can get some initial threat. After that I'll throw a mangle on the first target, then tab-target a lacerate on each mob until swipe is back off CD. Eventually either every mob will have the complete set of debuffs or they'll be dead.
I'll mix in Maul if I'm falling behind in threat and/or I have plenty of rage.

Onaara Shaman

Probably the least affected toon. DPS is exactly the same as before. Healing did take some getting used to, but mostly the same spells, just different named. No more Lesser Healing Wave. Healing Wave and Greater Healing Wave (new) have the same cast time, but different heal and mana costs. With the SP->Int conversion I have a huge mana pool now. I rarely have to drink, and even spamming chain heal barely dents the mana bar. This will probably change at 85, but at 73 its awesome.

Glyphs-mas

Even with the 24-hour late start, glyphs have been selling. I had about a guild tab full of icethorn going into the patch. This was by chance from when I used to do glyphs before my last hiatus. Those herbs came in handy. Once I got my auction addon working ( ZeroAuctions instead of QuickAuctions), I looked around. Most glyphs were going for 100+ some weren't even on the AH. I set my fallback to 200G ( just in case ) and made all the expensive glyphs I could. I chewed through those herbs in a few hours. Everything was selling. I made 8k that first night, which was nothing compared to the 20-30k other people were making that prepared.

I'm still creating glyphs, I predict that it'll still be easy profitable for another few days. Once most of the glyphs drop below the threshold I'll have to make a decision on whether I want to continue or just get out and enjoy my profits.

Paddling News

Winter Off-season has hit for paddling. It's hit pretty hard. Because of the weather, its hard to get out on the water more than once a week, sometimes none at all. There were some highlights though.

PIFA 2010

PIFA was a big success. It was my first time going. I stayed for all of the first day ( Saturday). The usual suspects were there, Fiance, Uncle, Auntie, Victor, Mica, Princess, etc. One of the Keiki's put on the gourd helmets, which helped to attract attention. MN was leading the charge getting everyone signed up for the intro paddle the following weekend. All in all we got about 6 pages of emails/info for people interested in trying it out that day. If we even get a percentage of that to show up at the intro-paddle its going to be huge. I heard that over the 2 days we got over 13 pages worth of emails.

Intro Paddle 10/02/2010

The most intro paddlers I've seen at one place ever. By last count there were 50 people there. Because of time constraints we didn't do a double-hull, just had all 4 going out constantly. There was rarely a time where a canoe was sitting on the beach. Fiance, and all the other steersmen were very busy that day. Uncle did his introduction speech and paddling basics. It was longer than normal, probably cause there were so many people that he put in quite a bit of culture into the course. There wasn't near enough Wa'a to take everyone out at once so people had to take turns. IKOCC provided seats 1 and 6, the rest were intro people.

True to Uncle's word, we were having a nice luau when a Regatta breaks out. Some of the intro paddlers, a group of 6 to be exact, wanted to go out again, this time racing. This started it off, soon every canoe was lining up and putting on a small sprint race. When I saw the 5 guys going out again, I grabbed Rog and Fiance and got a crew together to race against them. Needless to say we killed them, but the intro people in our canoe loved it.

I think we've stumbled into something to get people even more interested in joining the club, and racing in general. These little mock sprints are short enough ( and exciting enough) to get people going. But they're also short enough that they don't feel discouraged when they're being left behind. Something like deanza to the bowling pin and back would be wayyy too long and take too much time.

[WoW IC] Back into it.

Dearest Sister,

Greetings! Its been a while since I've had a chance to write. This was
partially because the past few months I haven't had anything to write
about. I've been pretty quiet the past 4-5 months. Stayed at an inn
and just tried to live the normal life. Even got as far as putting my
armor into a crate, because I thought I "wouldnt' be using it any time
soon". Well that changed quickly.

A few weeks ago the little termors and rumblings I've been noticing
have gotten worse. I don't know if you notice these quakes in
Ironforge, ( it being deep in into a mountain maybe that makes them
MORE noticeable? ) but you must have heard the talk. There's talk that
the end of the world is near. That a huge shakeup is due and that some
sort of Cataclysm is about to happen. No one seems to know when, but
they all know its coming "Soon". I didn't pay it much mind, even the
quakes I eventually got used to.

Unforunately, as is usually the case, I started getting cabin
fever. I've never been able to stay in one place too long. Since we
were children, neither of us have really spent more than a year living
somewhere. The lure of fortune and adventure was just too much, and so
about 2 weeks ago I bid farewell to the innkeeper and set off yet
again.

I've learned a lot in the past 2 weeks. The shaman master in stormwind
has taught me quite a bit, both in the art of healing and melee
combat. I've needed every ounce of knowledge. I've been traveling to
quite a few new places. I've spent the majority of my time at this
huge mountain. It was the kingdom of the Dark Iron Dwarves ( cousins
of the dwarves from Ironforge). Unfortunately they're not very
friendly, but there is an elemental infestation. I've joined up with
other adventurers to help keep back the evil living there. I've gone
in many times, usually with random people, usually with mixed
success. Being able to effectively heal has made me more valuable to
the war effort. Seems quite a few people know how to hurt, but not to
heal.

One of the commanders mentioned that I might be powerful enough to be
of some use in Outland. I remember Elder Hooff talking about it a few
months back. I'm excited to go, from what we've been told the fight is
going well there, but slowly. Wish you were here.

I'll write again as soon as I'm able.

- Onaara

Too Hot

CPU Temps on Squirrel

My new obession seems to be temperature and heat. More specifically
how how my cpu and hard drives are running. I noticed a few days ago
when Squirrel ( Q8400 w/ stock cooler) was encoding some video in a
very hot apartment, the temperatures hit 86C. That's crazy. I let it
finish the encode, but vowed not to let the temps get that high
again. This is especially worrysome because the chip isn't even
overclocked ( unlike my Athlon64 @2.3Ghz, stock 1.8Ghz).

I think the culpurit is the stock Intel cooler. Its just not up to the
challenge. As far as I know the Q8400 isn't known for being
particularly warm. It runs at 2.66Ghz with 4MB of cache. The only part
in the rig that could be producing crazy amount of heat is the ATI
4870 ( which itself has a massive cooler that exhausts to the outside
of the case). I'm thinking I want to replace the stock cooler. For $20
- $50 or so I can get a really good cooler that will keep the machine
nice and frosty. I haven't even tried to overclock ( mainly cause its
fast enough for what I need and the temps were a bit high). With a
better cooler the temps might be low enough that overclocking would be
nice. Plus it would boost my folding and transcoding a bit.

At first I'm only planning on replacing the cooler on Squirrel. Dug
doesn't get used near enough to warrant a new part. It's kind of a
shame really. But I can't really blame Fiance for not using her
Quad. There's so much stuff stacked all over her desk, that just
getting to her computer would take a while. I keep mine relatively
cleared off just because I want to be able to use my machine.

HDD Temps on Frisket

Also recently I found a linux utility, hddtemp, that reads out the
temperature of the hard drives. On a whim I checked the temps on
Downy. Those are running at about 40-45C, considering there's 5 HDs in
that case I would say thats pretty good. The Antec300 case seems to
really help with keep the temperatures down. Makes sense considering
there's 2x120MM fans blowing straight onto the drives, a 120MM
exhausting hot air out the back and a monster 140MM fan exhausting air
out of the top. With that kind of airflow, the drives should be ok.

I checked the temps on Frisket, which only has 3 HDs total and those
temps were in the 55-59C range. Much higher. I think this is
attributed to the fact that that machine is still on my old desktop
case. The case itself was ok back in the day, but if I'm planning on
turning it into a true server class machine, I need a better
case. With that in mind I ordered another Antec300 case for the
server. This time its the "Illusion" version. which just means it
comes with front led fans, so I don't have to buy them seperately.

Subie again...

Why I hate living in an apartment.

Went out to Subie this morning, on my way to work. Saw a shiny mark,
about the size of silver dollar. I thought it was bird poop, like
normal. Closer look it was a scratch. Not just a small normal one, it
was pretty deep and it looked like it went through the paint into the
actual shell.

This isn't the first time Subie has been accosted in this parking
lot. The side is littered with little dings and scratches, mostly from
incosiderate fuckers that can't understand that maybe other people
actually give a shit about their cars.

One particular incident comes to mind. Fiance and I were walking to
her car to go on a jog ( back when we did such things). On the way
there I see 4 mexicans hanging around the car. Worst, one of them was
SITTING on the hood. Maybe more like leaning, but there was butt to
hood contact. Me being the chicken shit I was ( I'd like to think was,
but possibly still am) didn't say anything. I'm actually trying hard
to be better at this. I've gone out of my way to face confrontation,
instead of scurrying away. I even went and got a manager because a guy
was being unruly during a movie.

This is a perfect example of people thinking they can do whatever they
like. They have no concept of personal property. They don't care if
they sit on their car so why should anyone else care? People wonder
why the "rich" like to segregate themselves away in gated communities,
this is one of those reasons. Logic follows that if you're in that
situation then hopefully you're of the same mindset, ie: I won't fuck
with your shit if you don't fuck with mine.

PS: Does them being Mexican have anything to do with them being
dumbasses? I don't know, they were Mexican so I'm describing them as
such. If they were black I would have said "4 black guys", if they
were filipino I would have said "4 bastards". ;-)

Back in on the Crack

Yesterday I reactivated my World of Warcraft account. Why? Mainly cause I needed some stress relief from the house and paddling. Paddling itself is winding down, and I can feel my body just needs more rest than it used to. I think some time playing games will really help me deflate after this season.

Minutes after reactivating my account I hopped into a Halls of Reflection PUG. I was healing, and it did not go well. Partly I'm sure was my forgetting where all my keybindings were and how everything is. I was even experiencing some lag at certain points... which was strange.

I hopped into a Sunken Temple run with Onaara also. That went better. I slowly had to remember how to play a resto-shaman. It went well enough that I dinged 49. Did some questing and got to within 700xp of level 50. Went to bed, then finished it off early this morning. I'm now at level 50.

New Server

Low Power Server?

Was talking to a fellow mdadm/server/RAID5/packrat about what he has
planned for his current and next server. His significant-other is
starting a new endeavor that requires she have a redudant,
fault-tolerant system to keep all her documents on. He of course
though that a Ubuntu based RAID with automated backup would be perfect
for this.

Reuse

He decided that based on her storage needs, his current server would
be more than adequete for her needs ( with some minor reshuffling
towards data backup than maximum capacity). He will take his RAID5,
composed of 5x500GB drives, and turn it into a RAID1, with hot
spare. 500GB is more than enough space for her needs, and the other
two drives can be used for cycled backups. He would have a nightly
backup of the RAID onto another 500GB, and this would be cycled on
some schedule. I'm going to suggest he create something like
rsnapshot, which would enable him to have versioning as well as
backup.

With this repurposing, it enables him to think about what he will do
for his next, bigger, badder RAID server.

... Less? Power

He apparently has been thinking of building DOWN his server. He's
noticed that he doesn't use much of the server's processing power on a
day to day basis. With the amount of electricity a dual-core (not to
mention the quad-core I was planning on getting) uses up even at idle,
a more efficient system could lead to significant savings.

I originally was planning on upgrading the "new" server to a quad
core, probably an AthlonII X4 630 or similar. Its a cheap chip, with
decent performance for the money. Yes some dual core intels are
faster, but I like knowing I have 4 real cores. The reasoning behind
this upgrade was Air Video, the fact that it does take up some power
for live-conversion almost necessiates a powerful machine. Plus I'd
like to be able to run Bittorrent and possibly other services on the
machine.

With a lower power machine I would save quite a bit of energy. With
the possibility of moving into a house, saving electricity will be
even more important. But at the same time, I'll lose the ability to
have a power server. It can probably still do the software NAS
functions, samba sharing, as well as bittorrenting. Air Video
live-conversions would be too taxing for the little processor. This
could be possibly remedied by farming out the conversion duties to my
quad desktop ( much like how its done now ). It wouldn't be too bad,
since I don't think I'd really get in the habit of turning the quad
off.

Prices

The prices for Atom based boards are about comparable to a decent sale
at Fry's for the quad-core Athlon. I've seen the Athlon II X4 630 +
motherboard on sale at Fry's for as little as $70. The Atom based
boards on newegg are closer to $100 for processor and
motherboard. Another potential savings would be on the power
supply. With such an efficient processor, more of the PSU's power
would go towards the drives, meaning I would be able to use less
powerful (400-430W) PSU's instead of the big ones I use now ( 500W+).

Either way, first things first. I need a case for that
server. Regardless of the processor, those drives aren't being
properly cooled.

Contract Signed

Contact Signed

Got an email yesterday from the realtor. He has the signed contract and is forwarding it to our loan guy. Fiance dropped off all but 1 of the documents loan guy needed to get to the underwriter. She was missing her W-2 from an old old job. That came in the mail yesterday also, but not until after she'd already made the trip to drop off the other docs. Guess she's making another trip to drop it off.

Open Escrow?

I don't really know if this means we've opened Escrow and thus have moved into the "Contingency" portion of the process. We haven't given our deposit check ( is it even a check I don't know) so I'm guessing we're not. But we'll have to see.

Next up, we need inspections up the wazoo to make sure the house isn't hiding anything weird under the hood.

Even closer...?

Just got a call from our Realtor. He has the signed contract.

New House?

Fiance and I have been looking at houses for about 2 weeks now. We've been looking at places online, and if the pictures look good, we decide to drive by. We drive by to see the outside of the house, and the neighborhood on our own. That usually will narrow the field pretty quickly. After that we'll schedule an outing with our real estate agent to actually take a look at the inside.

We took a look at 2 houses we really liked last tuesday. The first one, we loved the outside and the area, but the inside turned out not so good. The rooms were small, and over customized. Disappointed we headed for the next house. This house I wasn't too excited about the outside. This was because the last time we saw it was at night. Seeing it in the daytime made quite a difference. Once we got inside it was great, the rooms were spacious and the layout was nice. The backyard was huge as well. We really liked it but wanted to be cautious.

After much deliberation we decided to take another look and then put in a bid. When in contact with our realtor, he informed us that a strong bid was placed on the house on FRIDAY. This house has been on the market 50 days. We decided we didn't want to try to fight for the house and gave up. As the day wore on, we talked about how much we like it. About 20 minutes later we decided to put in a full-price bid. We thought the house was worth full price, so might as well give it a shot.

Fast forward to yesterday. We get a call from the realtor that our bid was VERBALLY accepted. Meaning that there's a very good chance we got the house. Its not for sure that they've accepted it, but we're hoping.

I'm trying not to get too excited, especially since we don't have the contract signed yet. But its hard not to get excited! I'm already starting to think about how I want the server rack to be...

Air Video.. more like Air Awesome.

Shortly after getting my iPad I went searching for the "essential"
apps for it. I came accross a review for a program called Air
Video. In a nutshell, it is a Client/Server program that lets you
stream your videos wirelessly from your computer to your iPod
Touch/iPhone/iPad. It does this beautifully. With this application I
don't have to worry about pre-loading my devices with movies, as long
as I'm within my own network.

Internet Streaming!

Another, experimental, feature of Air Video is that it can also stream
outside of your network, over the internet. At first I didn't think
this would be THAT useful. When would I ever really want to be
watching movies on the go? Especially since my iPad is Wifi. It turns
out it is very useful. Having the ability to access and watch every
video on the server from my iPhone is amazing. Any time I'm sitting in
one place for potentially more than 10 minutes, I pull out the iPhone
and watch something.

Live-Conversion

This of course can all be done using DLNA server/client, much like
MediaTomb. The killer feature for this solution (other than the
aforementioned internet streaming) is the live-conversion its capable
of doing. It will stream any format the iPhone is capable of playing (
h.264, etc). It shines when it finds a video that the iPhone cannot
play, such as .wmv, .avi, etc. It uses ffmpeg.exe to on-the-fly
transcoding to the proper format. I can literally request to play any
video in my collection and Air Video Server will transcode it as I
watch.

Its even smart enough to figure out what device you're trying to watch
on and how the bandwidth is. This information is used to figure out
what resolution to output to the device. This means that theoretically
an iPad with great bandwidth would receive a high resolutoin image,
while an iPhone on a congested network (such as ATT's 3G) may receive
a lower quality one. It even does this on the fly, so if as the video
goes on, the bandwidth gets more congested, Air Video will
automatically downscale to a lower quality image so that there's no
interruption in the video. Depending on how drastic it needs to be,
there may be a momentary stop in the video to change streams.

Speed

The Air Video Server component is fast. It is multi-threaded so it
will use up every core my system has. I'm currently running it on
Squirrel, which is the Q8400 quad with 4GB of ram. It pegs all 4
processors at 100%. This is probably overkill for one live-conversion
thread. The faster the processor, the "farther-ahead" the converstion
can be, on top of real-time. For example, with this system, assume
that we start at the beginning of the video. If my machine can
transcode at 2 seconds of video per second, then at 30 seconds of
watching video, the NEXT 30 seconds is already done and waiting to be
sent over the wire. If somehow the load on the server goes up, it will
be 30 seconds before I even see any kind of stutter (because of the
buffered video).

As I said, a quad core is probably very overkill for
one live-conversion stream. But what about multiple streams? Air Video
can handle streaming video to multiple devices. Not only that, it can
stream different videos to different devices concurrently. The only
limit ( I've found) is how much resources the server has. My record
has been to stream 4 720p (source) videos, in .wmv format, to 4
devices. These devices include an iPod Touch 1G, an iPhone 3G (on
Wifi), an iPhone 3GS (on Wifi) and a 16GB Wifi iPad. Each stream was
clear, with no stuttering. I even did some high speed scrubbing on
each and saw no performance loss. *I'll be adding an iPhone 4 to this
soon, and will post a picture.

Ease of Use

This program is definetly designed for the mac, and mac
users. Everythign is as simple as possible. There are no configuration
files, everything is very straight forward. It even makes a valiant
attempt at configuring your router for internet streaming (through
UPNP). They even provide a server "PIN", which you can enter on your
mobile device to reference your server. I have a hunch that this pin
is merely some numerical transform based on your external IP and port
number. For advanced users, putting the IP and Port would probalby be
more straight forward and easier to debug. But for normal users this
PIN makes everything very simple and very intuitive. Those kinds of
little touches are all around the application. This is the kind of
thing that makes this otherwise good application into a great one.

Cons

The company that created Air Video (inmethod) is very much an iOS
design house. The software doesn't run on any other mobile
platforms. This is only really a con if you don't have an iPhone. Its
such a nice piece of software, it'd be great to have it on Android as
well. Though I will confess to having a bit of smugness knowing that
our Android friends don't have access to it ;-). I'm sure there's an
equivalent app for Android, but is it as polished and easy to use as
this? I dunno.

The server software only works on OSX and Windows. Again, only a con
if you need it in Linux. For me this was a bigger issue than not
working in Android ( since I don't have any android devices). Both of
my file servers ( downy and frisket) both run a flavor of Ubuntu. It
would be awesome if I could run the Air Video Server on one of these
machines, to keep everything self contained. Two issues prevent me
from doing this; the software not running in linux and the horsepower
needed for live-conversion. The older server ( downy ) is a 1.3Ghz
Athlon T-bird with 768MB of RAM. Handling the CRC and file i/o duties
of a software raid5 tend to keep it pretty busy. The newer server (
frisket ) is a 2.3Ghz Athlon64 with 3GB of ram. It is quite a bit more
powerful than downy and has plenty of ram. Unfortunately Air Video
states that it requires at least a Core2Duo class processor. I've seen
people run it on Pentium D's with no issue. So at least a dual-core
for live-conversion. Probably significantly less for straight
playback/streaming.

Conclusion

The price for all this functionality? $3. Amazing. Technically its
free if you get creative with your folder structure. But for 3 bucks
it was well worth it.

The Great Linux Grinding Noise

My linux box at work as been giving some issues lately. A weird sound was coming from it. I thought it was probably a fan. Because its a work machine, I decided against rooting around and fixing it myself.

Today it finally made enough noise that I couldn't stand it anymore. I put in an IT ticket and they came out to fix it. The guy turned it on, saw that it was the video card fan, and then just unplugged the power. This solution makes the perfect sense because:

1. Its linux, thus rarely run 3D applications.

2. Its quick and cheap ( 5 mins of his time, no material costs).

3. Fixing it "right" would have been at least 20 minutes of his time, and $10 for a new fan.

4. Its unlikely to overheat, given that its in an climate controlled office.

Would I have done the same in his place? If I was exactly in his place, with his job, yes I would have. If this was one of my home machine I would have RMA'd the card or bought a new fan. I'm just like that, I hate knowing that something isn't quite working.

Either way my linux box is up and running again. Silently.

Jury duty

Waiting around in jury duty. So far they've shown that inspirational video that they tend to show when they want to get people to do something they know no one wants to do. Honestly it worked decently well on me p, I almost wouldn't mind if I had to serve. Almost.

Paddling

Our paddling Ironman season ended a few weeks ago. It ended in a bang. We've been medaling in every race we've been in up to now. ( 2x 1st and 2x 3rds ). The last race of the season was Iron Champs here in Mission Bay, San Diego. We had a really good chance of doing well, it was home water, we knew the course, and we were rested. Unfortunately in our hurry, the rigging on Maho'a was done incorrectly, ( the front 'iako's shim was backwards, causing the front of the Ama to be lower than normal). This plus the bad advice SCORA gave ( hug the rocks? Really? ). And some pretty bad conditions ( turbulent water + small channel + way too many canosed ) contributed to a Huli ( capsize). We got out of it ok, there are some crazy pictures that I can repost later.

Now we are winding down our sprint season as well. Up next is 9-mans. I won't be racing because my swimming just isn't good enough for me to be able to jump in and out of the boat. Maybe next year.

Ubuntu 10.04 64-bit + Adobe Air + Tweetdeck

To install Tweetdeck ( or any Adobe Air app) onto Ubuntu is pretty simple, thought of course it requires a few more steps than in Windows or OSX.

Install Adobe Air

1. Get the BINARY (.bin) file for Adobe Air. You can get it from:

http://www.adobe.com/products/air/

Make sure you get the .bin, as the .deb is built for 32-bit (i386) architecture.

2. Find where you downloaded the .bin, and give it execution permission:

chmod +x AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

3. Run the .bin

./AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

It will ask you a few setup questions, nothing too difficult. The defaults seem to work well for me.

Install Tweetdeck

1. Go to www.tweetdeck.com

2. Click on the "Download/Install" now. If everything went well during the AIR installation then it should magically all work.

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

After straightening out the issues I was having with booting from the last entry, I was able to get everything configured just how I liked it. The next day a new version of Ubuntu comes out, and I'm tempted to start over again.

The new version is an LTS, which means something like Long Term Service. I've had good experience with LTS editions before, downy, the previous server, still runs on the last LTS release ( 8.04 Hardy Heron ). This release, 10.04 Lucid Lynx, will hopefully be just as good.

My impressions so far, the new eye candy is nice. Previously I installed the server version of Ubuntu, which starts with a very bare system and lets you install only the packages you want to install. I liked this for the server, mainly because of the limited horsepower and memory I was working with. Eventually I did install a desktop interface on it, just to make early administration easier.

This time I decided to start with the desktop release. One of the factors was location, this server ( at least for now ), will live in the bedroom, next to Squirrel. This effectively makes it a desktop. I even have my older Dell 1701 17" LCD hooked up to it. I figured it would be nice to have access to a linux desktop, if nothing more than to have a secure workstation to do our banking on.

The new theme is more purple than orange. The change that seems to have polarized the community is the moving of the windows controls from the right ( default in windows) to the left ( default in OSX). This has been called everything from a revolutionary leap forward in HID ( Human Interface Design) to an affront to all things good about Ubuntu and Linux in general. Personally? I haven't decided if I like it on that side or not. A good thing about Ubuntu, it can be moved back if you don't like it.

Frisket + Ubuntu 9.10 + 2x2TB Drives Adventures

So, I recently I installed Ubuntu 9.10 on Frisket, on an old 500GB PATA HD I had. This was in preparation for creating a new, bigger server. Ubuntu installed fine and I was able to configure it.

Jump start to today, where I'm trying to install the 2 TB Hitachi hard drives I bought last week. First of all, Frisket seems to have a weird quirk where it always lists SATA drives before PATA drives. This thoroughly confused GRUB for Ubuntu, it kept trying to boot one of the blank 2TB HDs. I tried messing with grub to save the install but that wasn't working either. Finally I decided to just get a fresh start and reinstall.

The reinstall seemed to work fine until I tried to reboot. Upon reboot it seems to hang with "GRUB" and just sit there. Googling was a big useless, mainly because the keywords are very common.

Update:

Mysteriously... I reinstalled grub, it had no effect. Turning off the computer and leaving it for an hour some how lets it boot. I'm now creating the RAID1 out of the 2x2TB drives. When I get the 3rd 2TB drive, I'll convert the RAID1 to a RAID5, which I've heard is completely possible.

Update2:

Resyncing the raid1 ( so named.. raidy) is going at 70MB/s, so it should be done in about 6 hours for the whole 2TB. Compare this to the 4MB/s that downy was capable of. That took over a week to resync. Its pretty amazing. Frisket is now toping out at 109 MB/s, which drops the time to about 4.5 hours. Crazy.

Update3:

After setting up the MDADM RAID1, I can no longer boot again. Same "GRUB" problem after POST. I created a ubuntu forum post because I'm out of ideas about what's happening.

Wow Hiatus

If you couldn't tell from the lack of updates, I have canceled my World of Warcraft subscription.

Why?

Because I wasn't having much fun anymore. I'm far from a type-a personality. I can meander around on my own for extended periods of time. But at the same time, I do like working towards some goal, lofty or far-reaching it may be. After getting my level 80's geared up in triumph gear, I reached a point where, without raiding, I didn't really have anything to work for. I could grind for weeks for slightly better ilvl triumph or frost emblem gear, but I had no place to actually USE it. That realization really cut to the heart of why I was playing. I was preparing for a time that wouldn't/couldn't happen. I don't have the time to devote to seriously raid, even at the casual friendly style that Wrath is known for. I barely have time to sleep. It really took the wind out of my sails.

Leveling Onaara helped a bit, the excitement of new abilities, and a new playstyle kept me very occupied for a while. But at around level 46-48, the only thing I could look forward to was getting into Outland... for the 5th time. Once that was over it would be Northrend, then it would be back to heroics. It just didn't feel like something great to look forward to.

Also, work and paddling have really taken a huge chunk of time. I now have basically an hour or two on friday and possibly 3-4 hours on Saturday to play WoW. Thats just not enough time for me. Add to the fact that I have a stack of PS3 games that are collecting dust.

Maybe its time to change the name of the blog yet again?

WoW Break?

This weekend was a bit strange in that I had a few hours on Saturday that I could play WoW but I didn't. Part of me rationalized it by saying that my forearms were very sore from paddling so a few hours of using the mouse would not be a good idea.

The strange thing was that I didn't miss playing it. My shaman has hit the dulldrums of levels (48-58). Neither starting a new toon or powering through it sound particularly appealing. A lot of what made WoW so much fun was the social aspects of the game. Now that I'm effectvely solo questing all the time has really diminished the game for me. One can only level and get better gear for so long until you start to question why your working so hard in the first place. Assuming I get Onaara to 80, gear her up in restoration as well as enhancement sets. What's the point? I don't have the time to seriously commit to a true raiding guild.

Maybe it's time to cancel the suscription, check back in before Cataclysim starts.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Overwhelmed

Things have just been steadily getting more and more busy. With everything going on at work, home and paddling, today really overwhelmed me. I started down the dark path I used to frequent.

I had to take 30 mins, even though it was really late and just quest. I only did 1 quest but it was enough to give me just a little breathing room before bed. It's amazing how necessary hobbies are. Specially when other activities that you used to think of as hobbies suddenly feel like another Job.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone