Hello. My name is Mistress Stormcloud, and I’m a Paragon, a leader of warriors.

Sunspear Armor in Blue

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I just made this movie. Linda and Robbie discuss the recent Solar Flare and how it is going to change their lives during the next few weeks until it subsides.

I made this movie using State software from the XtraNormal site. I tried to make the movie online, but I had to pay for some unknown number of points to be allowed to publish the movie, but thankfully I was able to download the State software for free and make the movie on my desktop and then manually publish it to youtube. The choices of characters and scenes are very limited using State.

Enjoy and consider how dependent you are on your wireless devices.

A few of us have had some accomplishments of enough note that they can be displayed in the Eye of the North Hall of Monuments.

Jacob Whirlwind has obtained the Ancient Prestige Armor in the Nightfall Campaign.

Jacob Whirlwind - Ancient Armor

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The Dragon Festival has been going on in Shing Jea Monastery for the past few days. You can collect 250 Victory Tokens to get your own Dragon Mask.

The Dragon Festival 2010

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Gulf Coast Oil Cleanup

Gulf Coast Cleanup Ideas and all associated materials by Darrell Duffy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

The oil coming ashore on the gulf coast is making a terrible mess. In order to save the wetlands, the wildlife and the seafood industries of the area it is clear that the oil will need to be cleaned up, but this is not going to be the same problem as we faced in Alaska. Men in haz-mat suits with brushes and steam hoses are not going to be able to tackle the problem. So how might this problem be solved?
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Seitung Armor in Green

My name is Windy Summoner. I was born on April 1st, 2010 on Shing Jea Island and began my training with Master Togo. My mission was to train to level 20 in Kaineng City and then emigrate to Elona to assist the Sunspears with the battle to save Elona from Night Fall. As a Ritualist I control the spirits of nature to help in my battles.

My weaker Seitung Armor was green in keeping with the forest colors of the island. But shortly after moving to the City, I found that Seitung armor was way too expensive since it required 32 Monstrous Claws which were 1800G each. This meant that my armor would have cost well over 40P [40,000G]. I was able to obtain Canthan maximum strength armor for 5P [5000G] and decided it should be purple. The market price for Monstrous Claws seemed very unusual.

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As we have seen in previous articles, I’ve been looking at what we might call Personal Cloud Databases. There are many Cloud Data tools out there. I found a review article here, and then looked at these and other alternatives.

• ZOHO Creator – 3 apps free. $15/mo basic plan.
• Dabble DB – free public data. $24/mo for private data. Very cool concepts.
• Web Office – $53/mo includes data.
• Google Docs – Free. No database. Spreadsheet only.
• BaseCamp – No free option. Starts at $24/mo.
• Windows Azure – Clearly not personal. Impossible to tell what it would cost.

And there are more, mostly pitched at small businesses and enterprises, and expensive. At least very expensive compared with Blogging or Photo Galleries. So my question is: Why are database tools so expensive compared with Blogging and Photo tools, which are usually free or almost free? The reason I believe is Open Source.

I think there is a very interesting opportunity for a platform, like WordPress for personal data tables.

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As you may remember from a previous article, I have been using ZOHO creator to store MMO game data while I play the game to keep track of my characters and their loot. I was not happy with the ZOHO solution due to it’s high cost – $15/mo beyond 3 databases [applications]. While I have not yet exceeded that, I desire a solution that will live on my hosting service where I have unlimited storage/databases.

I have found a solution with DHX Quick Tables, and for now I’m using that as we will see. (more…)

I have started using Google calendar and now I want to analyze the events that I’m saving. Google provides a calendar, but no tools to analyze the events on a calendar. Also they only provide iCal format export of the calendar and no way to move the calendar to Google Docs.

An iCal importer for Open Office Calc would have the widest appeal and widest platform support.

I have written a simple importer for Open Office 3.1.1. I have not tested it on other versions of OO.

You can download it here: iCal_Import_04

After an Import

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The WP-Cumulus plug-in displays a tag / topic cloud using flash. Here we go:

Is that cool or what??

I didn’t have any tags assigned, but it’s willing to cloud my topics, er Categories. So no worries.

Enjoy,

Windy

So, when you install Karmic Koala [9.10], you still don’t get Windows File sharing [SAMBA], and setting it up is still a few undocumented and obscure steps. I covered this before for Gutsy, but things are a little different with Karmic, so I’ve redone the screen shots and directions.

If you could Google for “Ubuntu Samba Install” and get a page that told you what you wanted to know, then I wouldn’t do this post, but you don’t get a good page. This page is not that helpful. It looks it was written in the dark ages and it does not configure WINS so that you can PING the other systems on your network.

So here’s the real scoop, which is a modified version of this post I did for Gutsy.

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I just upgraded my Ubuntu Linux system to Karmic Koala [ 9.10 ] from Gutsy Gibbon [7.04]. As you can tell, it had been some time since I had upgrade. The good news is that the upgrades, through 8.04, 8.10, 8.04, to 9.10, went without a hitch, although they took over 3 hours.

And network file sharing, SAMBA or SMB, works without a hitch with no modifications to the built in configuration. Hurray!!!. You may remember a previous post about Ubuntu Not Playing Nice that showed the modifications that I had to do to BIND and to SMB configuration to get things to work. UPDATE: file sharing worked because I had fixed it in Gutsy. It still DOES NOT WORK OUT OF THE BOX with Karmic Koala.

See this post for how to start to make it work with Karmic [9.10].

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ZOHO provides Cloud Applications including a database builder called Creator. It looks very nice and allows you to build a simple database with very little work, and no extensive database expertise. I moved my 2Moons character database to ZOHO in only an hour or so. Looks great to me.
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James Cameron’s vision of Pandora caused me to think in new ways about what it is to have a sustainable culture. Clearly the Na’vi culture is completely sustainable, and in many ways very advanced. Here are some perspectives on the history of our planet and my take on some of the ideas in Avatar. (more…)

I encourage you to donate to Wikipedia on your next visit. Keep this information free and plentiful as a resource for the world. If you are like me, you use this site many times each day.

Thanks,

Darrell