I just finished a big work project so it's back to World of Warcraft for me! I played for the first time last night in a couple of months. There was a big update between the time I stopped and yesterday. But I thought ahead and had my client all updated. It did give me a chance to re-spec my character. That's the process of allocating talent points in your talent tree. It can make a huge difference depending on what you choose. I read up a little about it and decided that I wanted my Shaman to be specialized in Enhancement (after some advice from my co-workers.)

I played for a while and then I decided to read up on power-leveling now that my co-workers are 20 levels above me. From what I have read, other than paying someone or using a bot, the best way to power level is to do quests and grinding 2-3 levels below your current level. I have actually been doing the opposite of this. The quests I have been doing are mostly orange and the monsters are 3-4 levels above me. They made a good point. You spend a lot of time healing/waiting in between kills. When you are killing monsters that are below your level you spend more time killing with no downtime. Each kill is worth less but you get more kills which amounts to more XP in the long run. I'm really going to have to try this the next time I play.

I was reading on Microsoft Research about ILMerge when I ran onto this sentence.

Currently, ILMerge works only on Windows-based platforms. It does not yet support Rotor or Mono.

Of course, this is just one guy that works for microsoft and it's not really indicative of Microsoft's stance on the subject.

I had a Bookmark Toolbar Folder full of blog's RSS feeds. But I found myself more and more not ever wanting to look at them in that format. It doesn't seem like a very intuitive way to read it. I think news sites might be better suited to have an RSS feed that actually works. Often times the title of a blog has nothing or little to do with the actual content. A view I share with this blog.

With that said I just removed all the RSS feeds and changed them to links to the sites. Some I have collected over a little while and may never read. Oh well. Here is my list.

• The Daily WTF

This is actually a great site if you are a programmer. Very funny stuff that people run into while they are working. Much like my previous blog but a lot better.

• ISerializable - Roy Osherove's Blog

I honestly don't remember why I bookmarked this the first time. But I do know that he pointed me towards the free SQL Prompt product which is great.

• Jacken's Blog

Seems like this guy had something to do with .. drupal maybe? No wait.. Asterisk. Yeah. I read this one a LOT!

• walkah | striving towards mediocrity

Now maybe this guy is drupal.

• Windows PowerShell

This is a blog about Windows PowerShell (formerly Monad.) Windows PowerShell aims to be a better command line for windows. So far I have found some good things in it but it hasn't become a replacement.

• The Moth

This guy is a windows (I believe .NET) developer and I have, in the past, found some good stuff on his site.

• Dave's Pics

Dave has the same camera as me and somehow takes really great pictures. How would it be to really know what you're doing. :)

I seem to run into this quite often when modifying older programs. Take a look at this piece of VB6 code.

If Trim(SourceCode) = "" Then
   Print #fileNumber, UCase(Left(SourceCode + Space(3), 3));
Else
   Print #fileNumber, UCase(Left(SourceCode + Space(3), 3));
End If

I'm sure one side of the if statement did something different at one time. But the person who changed this must not have considered what the other side is doing. This is clearly a case of Quick and Dirty code editing.

I keep getting the tray notification that I have updates. But when I double click on it to get the updates it tries to reload the package list from the server.

I get this error.

But after I click Ok nothing happens. A little bit later the tray icon comes back saying I have updates. I know I can import the GPG signature to get rid of that error but it's a little tedious. They really need to streamline that process. Plus that error is a bit cryptic don't you think?

I started to setup rsync on my machine which really wasn't that hard and seemed like it was going to work well. That was until I remembered the time I stored my files on a hard drive that was formatted NTFS. I lost all of my permissions and had some very strange behavior. Unfortunately the only machine that I have with enough space to store my backup (about 10 gigs) is a windows machine. An rsync server is easy to setup thanks to DeltaCopy. From what I understand you might be able to keep those permissions if the server is running under cygwin, but I really didn't want to go through the trouble.

My next idea was to use dar, my previous backup solution, and use rsync to syncronize the archives to a server. This seemed like a good idea at first and the diff backups were very fast. The problem is that I telecommute using a 6 gig Vmware Windows XP image. Everytime 1 byte is changed the whole thing is archived again. This makes for a very long backup process. Back to the drawing board. :)

Probably the best thing is to get an rsync server setup on a linux machine.

Ok. So after my post yesterday I started having some trouble. TestDisk did a create job recovering the partition table and I could access my Ubuntu partitions just fine. Unfortunately something happened with my windows partition that made it in-accessible. It wasn't a big deal since the only thing I have on there is World of Warcraft. I decided to backup my ubuntu files, clean my partition table, and re-install. I started up a live cd and ran a command to create a tar.gz from my home directory over a samba share (to my windows machine.)

 tar -cvzf /media/network/npalmer/backup.tar.gz /media/home/nate

My partition table got screwed up again thanks to Partition Magic 8! I should really learn to avoid this program in the future. Unfortunately it has worked so well in the past that I keep going to it. The problem is that it will get an error part-way through trying to resize/change partition information and when that happens I'm screwed. I boot back into Partition Magic and all it gives me is an error message. It can do nothing to repair it.

But all is not lost at this point. On every occasion that this has happened I have pulled out my Ultimate Boot CD and ran TestDisk. TestDisk is a partition recovery program that will show you deleted/invalid partitions and let you manually set what it should be. Since it's a manual process it has usually taken me a few tries to get it right but in the end I am the victor!

I just installed Banshee from CVS and tried to burn an Audio Cd for my son. I was however presented with this error.

** (Banshee:5221): CRITICAL **:
nautilus_burn_recorder_write_tracks: assertion 
`tracks != NULL' failed
 

After a bit of searching it seemed like there was a patch available for libnautilus-burn4. But I didn't know where the update to it was. In the meantime I installed Bonfire and tried to burn the cd with that (it uses a different backend than libnautilus-burn4.) It fortunately gave me an error saying that I didn't have MP3 support installed.

Somehow my panel got messed up in Guh-nome. It had to do with the SUSE main menu I have been using. But I couldn't find a directory to delete in order to "reset" the settings. Aparantly it's stored in gconf and this is how you can reset it (thanks redmond!)

gconftool-2 --recursive-unset /apps/panel
killall gnome-panel