Level 23 Priest

The Problem
Wow classes are not balanced for PVE soloing. I’m not suggesting that they aren’t balanced for other efforts or that they should be changed, but as we all know, some classes have a real problem soloing in PVE.

Some Background
I’m not a whiner, and I’ve been playing MMOs for over 5 years, so I have some experience beyond Wow. Here in Wow, in the past few months, I have played all the classes and studied the wiki guides.
Let’s look at the biggest example you are all familiar with: The Priest. The priest is the squishiest of the classes. I’m sure it’s possible to solo the priest in PVE. I’ve gotten a priest up to level 20, but it’s no fun. It’s a lot of work to solo a priest. The mental and input “load” is very high. Many different skills are required and everything needs to go just right to take down mobs, even if you are a few levels higher than they are. And if two mobs run you at the same time, forget it. You are in for a long walk from the graveyard. (more…)

Death Knight Night Elf at 61

Once you level at least one character in your account to level 55, you can create Death Knight class characters of any Race on any Realm. Death Knights start at level 55, so all the drudgery of getting to level 55 is eliminated, but there are other problems to deal with. There are many notable experiences and problems for a Death Knight:

• While you start at level 55, you have only 20 silver in your bank.
• The starting quest chain is a tight story line, which is exciting and engaging. While it is not as rich with cinematics and dialog as the Undead quest chain in the Silverpine forest, it leads you through a story that places you in the world and fills in your back story.
• You will find yourself at level 58 with an updated weapon and some new armor pieces when the quest chain ends.
• The story ends differently for Horde and Alliance based on your race. But I’ll not spoil your experience by telling you the end.
• Your only starting profession is First Aid and it is leveled for you to about level 200, so you can built quite nice bandages should you need them. (more…)

World of Warcraft

I have recently been playing World of Warcraft. While the game has much to recommend it, especially since they have a trial or starter edition that is free-to-play [up to level 20], it has a serious problem with its design of “realms” or “shards” as some games call it.

“Shards” or “Realms” of course is the name used  for the “instances” of the server that are required to support very large numbers of players. These games are MMO – Massively Multi-Player – and “Persistent” which means that they do not place players in private “instances” of the game as they play. But it is not possible to have hundreds of thousands of players all playing in the same server at the time. How is the game going to solve the problem when thousands of players show up in the same town at the same time for a party or just to hang out on a Saturday night?

Well the point is that World of Warcraft solves this problem very badly. There are better solutions out there. Let’s look at the Wow solution and then look at some other games and see much better solutions. (more…)

Cyber War

As I write this we are seeing daily reports of hacking and break-ins to commercial and defense enterprises world wide:

• Sony network down for over three weeks with customer passwords, emails and credit card information information stolen.
• Anti-bank Trojans stealing millions of dollars from customers’ bank accounts in Brazil.
• Oakridge National Laboratory was the target of a spear-phishing attack that only compromised a few megabytes of data before it was stopped.
• Millions of dollars being stolen from cell phone users in China by viruses infecting smart cell phones.
• The Stuxnet worm infects Iran’s nuclear program.

But it seems we are not doing a set of straight forward things that we can do to prepare for and mitigate the impact that cyber war is having on this country. We can start with some simple and comparatively inexpensive steps.

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What’s the big deal with apps over webpages?

Short History Lesson

In the day of the web, starting 20 years ago, say 1990, web pages were all the rage. By 2000 we had the (dot)com boom. Nobody was talking Apps then. We weren’t writing hundreds of thousands of apps for our PCs then. The concept of having a single program on the PC that could display hundreds of thousands of websites was the way things went. We could have had a PC app boom then. (more…)

AION Logo

I have been watching the AION game for some time, and since it was released in this country by NCSoft, I had hoped that they would use the same model as they do with Guild Wars, which is purchase followed by FTP [no subscription]. Well they apparently are greedy, and have gone with the WoW model, which is Pay for the game and then pay $15 / month. Sorry, but I’m not interested in this model.

However, I have found a FTP Private server. Oddly enough. GameZ AION is a private server with enhanced EXP, Currency and Drop rates.

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AlienFX Side Panel

Since May 2007 I have had an Alienware 7500-R4 system. Here is the configuration. At the time Alienware shipped systems with 4GB or more, but only supported Vista x86, which meant in my case that I only had access to 2.7GB of the 4GB that I purchased.

Lights Did Work

The AlienFX software worked for about 2 years after I upgraded to Vista x64, apparently because a flash memory on the ELC board – Electronic Lighting Control?  – saved the settings. But when I upgraded the system to 8GB recently, the system came up dark, and the lights have never re-appeared. My case is now permanently dark. (more…)

I heard about Spokeo and I’m passing the word. I’ve removed myself and here’s why.

To remove yourself, for free, go to their Privacy Page, and follow the simple instructions.

Spokeo claims their information is available from public sources. However, do we really know that? Do we know that they have not made relationships with database companies that folks would have to pay dearly to join to get my information, for example. They don’t say that, at least not in the large print that I could read. (more…)

Now that I’ve put up some new shareware programs on Source Forge, software sites have started to “recommend me”. They must be employing folks in a far off country to do some simple tests and an automatic virus scan and then put the page on the site. The problem is that I’m not sure they link back to the Source Forge site so that updates are evident to users.

PhotoResizerQt

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Iris Online is a recently released MMO that has some of the same problems as Allods Online.

Character Selection Page

Iris is an anime styled game with beautiful graphics and apparently a detailed storyline. But the game has problems that make it tedious to play. (more…)

Allods is a free-to-play MMO game at gPotato. Developed by a Russian company, it has a number of flaws that make it more of a chore to play it rather than a joy. While the graphics are excellent and there are other interesting features in the game, it is too much work to play the game to make it worthwhile.

Character Creation Screen

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The Website Building Problem

As a consultant, I am continually looking for modern tools to help my clients build websites. Recently several web site builders have appeared that combine Hosting and Website construction in a single place and for a single small fee.

In the past few years I have come across more and more clients who have been held hostage to the old way of doing websites. The old way uses off-line tools like FrontPage, DreamWeaver or other tools that run on a desktop computer and then upload the website pages to the hosting service. Clients run into several problems when these tools are used.

• These off-line site building tools are expensive [ several hundred dollars], require special training and must be upgraded over time.
• Often the clients can’t find the person who built their site, or it costs too much or that person has lost vita information about the site because it has been months or years since they made any changes.
• The hosting service may be going out of business or changing it’s terms and so the site expert needs to be contacted to move the site to a new hosting service. The client may not have the credentials or expertise to sign into the site to back it up to migrate to another hosting service.

Modern sites utilize a CMS or Content Management System. There are many out there, but only in the past couple of years have they started to appear that work for the novice user. A CMS separates the “content” of the site from its “Look”. The text and pictures are stored separately from the “Theme” which directs how the page is laid out on the browser page. Also sites using CMS’s are not built on your local computer and then uploaded. Rather they are built on the site itself, using the browser and software running on the site. So there are no expensive and separate tools to buy or learn to use.
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I recently wrote a program to test my new computer. I wanted to test the wattage range and cooling of the new processor so needed a program that would keep all the cores of the processor busy. The Core i7-950 is a 4 core processor with Hyper-Threading which means that there are a max of 8 threads. Since AMD provides server processors with up to 12 threads so the program has a maximum number threads of 32. I use the HWMonitor program to monitor temperatures and wattage if your processor supports it.

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I’ve been looking for a source control solution for some time. I used to use QVCS, but it costs money and you have to get the Enterprise version to get client/ server. At this point I have three, or four, development systems and they include both Windows and Linux.

I considered Bazaar, but after a couple of days I came up with more questions than I had answers. My reasons for not using Bazaar are here.

While there were a few glitches I was able to get going with Surround SCM in a single day. Surround SCM is easy to use, and supports client / server across Windows, Mac and Linux.

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I need a personal source control system for my development.

As a big believer in Open Source solutions I took a careful look at Bazaar. But alas, I could not get started with Bazaar.

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Introducing the GooglePhone 30.0 based on Android and featuring Meme Metal. The GP 30 not only “does” everything that you want it to, it “is” everything that you want it to be. Available for the 2030 Holiday season, the GP 30 is available from several manufacturers including HXS and LGY.

One of the Many Starbucks Memes

Meme metal allows the phone to take on shapes and behaviors based on the application that is currently running. In addition, the phone continues in any of its base capabilities – Phone, Music, Video, Credit and Game. (more…)

Wow. There is a new HD Camcorder from Sanyo that is waterproof to 3m.

Waterproof HD Camera

Hurray!!

Now I can take a camera on a hike to the beach and not get sand in it. Now I can take a camcorder out in the storm and take pictures without ruining it in the rain.

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Meetup is an interesting idea. It’s a social site based around groups of folks with common interests that want to schedule meetings. Of course the meetings could be face2face or online. (more…)