Nathan Palmer's Blog - Tech talk and other stuff

I've been doing it all wrong!

Sun, 24 Dec 2006 07:49:04 -0800

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.

Microsoft secretly endorsing Mono?

Fri, 06 Oct 2006 13:12:11 -0700

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.

Firefox Live Feeds

Fri, 25 Aug 2006 08:06:52 -0700

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. :)

Pointless Logic

Wed, 23 Aug 2006 12:56:47 -0700

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.

Ubuntu Dapper - Update Manager not working

Tue, 22 Aug 2006 21:32:33 -0700

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?

Backup: rsync and dar

Tue, 22 Aug 2006 21:22:50 -0700

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.

Backup? What Backup?!?

Sat, 12 Aug 2006 09:59:39 -0700

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

Everything seemed to be fine, I don't remember any errors. Unfortunately it didn't hit me that my 4 gig home directory ended up being a 2 gig file. Well. Needless to say once I REFORMATTED and reinstalled that my archive didn't work properly. Once again losing data for simply being awesome. This has prompted me to look up some type of backup solutions. I'd prefer some type of GUI but I'm not sure that a good one exists for linux. What I have run onto so far is rsync, rdiff-backup, and rsnapshot.

Saved again!

Fri, 11 Aug 2006 15:02:59 -0700

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!

Banshee Create Audio CD Problem with Ubuntu Dapper

Wed, 09 Aug 2006 14:40:01 -0700

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.

Thank you redmond!

Mon, 07 Aug 2006 11:40:23 -0700

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

Linux Package Managers

Thu, 20 Jul 2006 11:52:25 -0700

Ubuntu ships with Synaptic as it's default gui package manager along with apt-get and aptitude as command line package managers. From the repository you can also get smartpm (as a gui or command line, same executable)

It seems they all have their strengths.

Synaptic
- Best graphical experience (compared with smartpm)
- Uses apt-get behind the scenes
apt-get
- You can install using a wildcard character *
Aptitude
- Automatic removal of package dependancies when you are removing a master package.

Windows Task Scheduling - Part 2

Wed, 19 Jul 2006 20:42:53 -0700

At this point I'm pretty much done with my searching. There were a couple of programs that I failed to test simply because of their price (250+, 1500+) or their lack of price (call us for a price quote, no thanks.)

I really think the best solution is to build my own. I didn't want to do that because I figured it would take a lot of time to make sure that the scheduler component is stable and 100% accurate. I don't want a process to miss it's alotted time because of bad programming in the core.

This discussion has been coming up again because one of our clients has been frequently requesting us to stop a specific process between times that they are running maintenance. This isn't a normal day to day thing, it's only when it's requested. Makes me wonder if I should build in some type of "temporary" schedule that gets applied and then reverts back to the normal schedule once it's done. That would be a nice feature.

Task Scheduling on Windows

Tue, 18 Jul 2006 12:59:15 -0700

I want to find a Task Scheduler for windows that has these basic features.

Schedule an executable
Will show if the executable is running
Will let you end/abort the task and kill the running exe

I know that the Windows Task Scheduler can do this but I'm looking for other features. Third party products seem to have the other features but fail at the last option. Some don't give you an option to abort, and the ones that do don't actually end the process.

I contributed to Open Source Software

Fri, 23 Jun 2006 23:21:37 -0700

I have officially contributed to Open Source Software. While I was trying out the various plugin's to Banshee I noticed that the MP3 Locker and iTunes plugin's would not compile. I submitted two bug reports on Gnome's Bugzilla and attached the corresponding fixes for them.

The first one was accepted today and the comment from the team was

Looks good to me! Thanks for your work Nathan!

That's always good to hear. A nice

Hello! svn diff

Fri, 23 Jun 2006 23:05:11 -0700

In my recent departure from windows and journey into linux I downloaded the most recent source code for Banshee and the corresponding plugins. One of the plugins that I wanted to get to work was the Podcast plugin so that I could listen to my school's podcast feeds. Unfortunately it seemed that every podcast software on linux would not handle the feed and I did not know why.

Since I had the source to the Podcast plugin for banshee I decided to take a look. After some searching I found out that the site that hosts the podcast feed had a certificate and it was not trusted so it failed to receive the xml. I have dealt with this in the past so I quickly threw in some code to handle it (ignore the certificate), compiled and soon after was listening to my podcast!