And on a completely different note, the JVM project has been dropped. As I said in the post about it, I started right before my vacation, and as I foresaw, I never got started again when I came back. I did however manage to read half of the data of the class file, which was rather interesting, but no big deal.

Well, that’s all, I wrote this mostly to get over my strange dream.
Much lubs, Kris =)

I’ve decided to build a JVM, in Java. This might seem a big challenge, and I have no doubt it will be, and frankly, I might not get very far. My vacation in a few days will probably doom any effort to get started again, but what the heck, it still gives me at least a couple of nights to work on it.

Well, I’ve already started, but I will, hopefully, talk more about that in a later post. People following the project might also notice, that I’ll be working extremely slowly, simply due to the fact that I’m doing this for fun, and not as anything serious.

One thing I have noticed already, is how delightfully easy the  Java Virtual Machine specification is to read. Everything is clearly documented, and there are very few things that seem to go unmentioned. It is also freely available, in HTML format, so everything is easy to read.

Well, time to look for some new TV-shows to watch before bed, but another post should follow shortly (IE, before the release of Diablo 3).

Much love, Krismaz.

I recently managed to fix my major problems with flash when running Linux Mint 6 (might be a problem in other distros too), and I thought I’d share the solution with the rest of the world.

Okay, The story goes like this:
I’m using Linux Mint 6 32-bit, and while browsing with FF3, I noticed hat i had a lot of problems using flash, and often the flash player would crash, leaving a blank space where the flash app should be.
To find out what was wrong, I ran Firefox from a console, and noticed that it kept getting errors from something called nspluginwrapper. I then searched the internet for this strange program, and found out that it was used to get plugins running on 64-bit systems, which I obviously don’t need, so i decided to get rid of it. Here’s how I did it:

1: Make sure you’ll be able to put things back together if you break your system doing this, I do not guarantee this guide to work, nor will i take any responsibility for damages caused. Do this at your own responsibility.
2: Don’t do this if you’re using a 64-bit system, most likely it will harm your flash playing capabilities

Okay:
1: Go to about:plugins in Firefox and find out whether you’re using nspluginwrapper.libflashplayer.so to open flash files, if you’re not, this guide is not for you. If you are however, you might have had the same problems that I did.
2: Remove the ‘flashplugin-nonfree’ package and install ‘adobe-flashplugin’ instead
3: Go to /usr/lib/adobe-flash-plugin/, and create a link to libflashplayer. right-click and select copy.
4: Go to /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/. Remove nspluginwrapper.libflashplayer.so if it exists and paste the link into this folder
5:Go to /usr/lib/firefox-’3-point-something’/plugins/. Remove nspluginwrapper.libflashplayer.so if it exists and paste the link into this folder
6:Restart Firefox, test it, and if it works, rejoice ^^

That’s all.
i have no idea why the 64-bit wrapper was installed by standard

Note: I might have used nspluginwrapper when the real name should be nspluginviewer. The to names are interchangeable in this guide, due to my bad memory.

Our 10-man group managed to down Firefighter. The fight is made up of pure chaos, so the key to downing the boss is getting everyone accustomed to running around and constantly avoiding the fire. We did of course spend a lot of time wiping, which made me realize how much I hate wiping due to other people mistakes (since I’m a melee dps, who has the ability to do simple things such as seeing and runnning, this makes nearly every wipe one of these).

My guild also managed to down steelbreaker (iron council hard). The fight is about having everyone alive at phase three (you’re retarded if you die during the first two phases anyway), and then burn the shit out of the boss during the very short time. if I’m not totally off this mean doing 12 mil. dmg in 1:20 (using 2 tanks and combat-ressing one of them once)… hard but doable it seems.

That’s all for now, cya ^^

First of all, I got my greasy fingers on the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. So far I’ve only seen the first episode but it looks really promising, and i think watching the show will be quite enjoyable ^^

Secondly, if you have an iphone, you have to try out Tap Tap Revenge 2. The game is a DDR-like (read: like Guitar Hero), and the touch screen and motion sensors in the phone simply makes this game perfect for the platform ^^ Super fun.

I’ve also started on writing a small raycaster, though i haven’t gotten around to get more done than defining circles and making simple bitmaps (without 3d raycasting)… should be easy to do though once i get started.

And finally, it seems like everyone has been searching my site for shaman arena specs, so let’s  have a look at them:

Enhance arena specs: The important thing to remember about enhancement is that you are not meant to be in an arena… so don’t! Keep out, it’s not worth it! Trust me!… No it’s probably just me that sucks. But seriously, enhancement is a joke in the arena, so just try an make a double dps (with mortal strike) and go full pve-gear/spec and lol while you get cc’d/trained

Resto arena specs: All resto specs must include either: summon retri pal or summon death knight. Resto shamans are still sub-par when it comes to arenas, so try to get a face-roll partner and hope you meet noob-teams. Just go nuke-nuke with you buddy while you spam riptide/LHW. Not much to say (actually there’s a lot of interesting cooldowns and stuff, resto pvp is fun, but still way gimped).

I believe the devs have stated the shamans have a high “skill-cap” in pvp… this is not true, other classes are just better than shamans (/flamewar)

Oh, and wohoo I’m a heartbreaker (in game ofc). Killing Deconstructor hardmode seemed extremely easy compared to some other hardmodes.

You might have noticed that I haven’t posted anything recently. The reason for this lack of interwebz attendance is simple: I’ve been busy.
First of all, I’ve had my final exams and I’ve graduated (which means lots and lots of drinking), and then I had a couple friends visiting… all in all I’ve been doing nothing usefull.

But I think I should do a short update:

Yogg-Saron went down the same week they nerfed him (Oh…My…God, he’s piece of cake now)… I feel ashamed that we didn’t down him before the nerf, he’s simply a joke now.

Notherhack now has some really basic Load/Save functions. Only the basic map and the current dungeon depth is saved…It’s bug-free though.

My iphone now has real GPS-navigation. Getting everything to work took more time than I’ll probably ever spend using it.

And that’s it… Oh, and I’ve started playing Oblivion again, NWN is simply to easy and grindy =/

Over

This blog, seeing that noone reads it, is mostly spam free. However, a few weeks ago, a lot of spam comments started showing up. Russian spam to be correct. This seems very strange, since the blog is English and all, and even more interesting, all the spam is centered on the ‘Nother ‘Nother NotherHack. Very strange indeed. But, here are the spam comments (identical posts excluded) and their translations, by google translate:

-знакомства, знакомства, хочу познакомтся с автором сайта, ровно с вами связаться?

-dating, dating, want to look at the author of the site, and just to contact you?

Standard dating site spam it seems

-прикрутить смс оплату может быть к блогу?

-tie to SMS payment may be a blog?

I think this is something about making my blog a paysite for mobile phones…but why?

-а вы интересно публикуете видосы впроекте?

-and you are interested post vidosy vproekte?

Yes I am interested in it now, since I’d like to know what it means 0o

And now i present to you; the grand finale, the Russian rambling ringleader, the one spam comment to block them all:

-Привет! =) видел новый фильм Идентификация Борна
вот описание :
“Главенство итальянского рыболовецкого судна находит в водах Средиземного моря тело мужчины. У него два пулевых ранения в спине и имплантированный в бедро микрофильм, помеченный номером швейцарского банка. Когда раненый незнакомец приходит в сознание, оказывается, который он не помнит который он, и что с ним случилось, все он может разглагольствовать не нескольких языках и обладает другими экстраординарными способностями. Получив в Цюрихе касса с указанного банковского счета он узнает свое термин – Джейсон Борн. Но настоящее ли это его фамилия или нет? Борн сносный не помнит. Пытаясь вспомнить свое прошлое, он находит свой адрес в Париже, но вообще с этим понимает, сколько отслеживается убийцей. Борн уговаривает немецкую студентку Мэри отвезти его в Париж, воеже выяснить всегда о своем прошлом и понять, который хочет его убить…”
Когда что вот тогда с хорошим качеством можно посмотреть ))

-Hi! =) Saw the new movie Identification Born

I’m quite sure this is a commercial for watching the Bourne Identity online (there was an URL at the end, I snipped it).

Now this all seems like fairly normal spam, except for the fact that it’s Russian. Why the heck am I being targeted by Russian spam. Well never mind, big hugs to the Akismet spam filter.

Just a short update cya ^^

I stepped into an arena and had a controlled and fair match. What I mean is; I had a match where things went smoothly, were not burst dependant, and did not rely on the other team panicking. What I mean is of course that i specced resto.

Yup, true, resto. I’ve allways been a die-hard enhancement shaman, even in pvp…on a side not, I rolled my shaman after their 2h wf lolcrit nerf. This means I’ve never really thought much about pvp or arena tactics, since everything i had was burst. Since they nerfed enhance burst yet again in WotLK, I’ve been failing like a keyboardturner on Heigan.

Just to make things clear, I’ve made a small write-up of my arena history:

Tbc:

Enh shaman + holy pala ; Went well, the pala respecced prot the same week -.-

Enh shaman + Prot pala/hunter ; Pure fail.

Enh shaman + ele shaman; This was an interesting team, since the old stormstrike gave us quite a lot of synergy, and loads of burst.

WotLK:

Enh  shaman + arms warr; nice, bursty and healer panicking ^^

Enh shaman + Ret pala ; Pure distilled failure.

And now, my current team : Resto shaman + Ret Pala.

I’ve looked pretty far for any form of synergy between these two speccs and I’ve found none. However, simply the presence of a healer seems to make this work. My resto gear is pretty bad as it is, with about 580 resil and 1600 +healing, and my ret buddy isn’t geared at all, wearing random epics collected through offspec, and not wearing a single piece of pvp gear, but our lack of gear doesn’t seem to matter much. I have to admit, were not doing well statistically, going 5-5 on our first ten matches, but we’ve found something new; control. It’s seems that having me heal instead of going pewpew-zerkermode, is working out quite well (if you think 5-5 is bad, you don’t want to know how stuff was when i was enh).

And it’s alot more fun too, the matches are longer, not filled with panic, and we yell a lot less. I’m also using a lot more shaman stuff; strategic hexes, grounding and earthbind totems, timing bloodlusts and simply being on top of everything, something I clearly wasn’t in my enhance dps rage. Not that my enhance playstyle mattered much; there’s a strict limit of what you can do when you only live 10 seconds into the match.

Taking everything into consideration I’d say i have to agree with the common impression that the only viable pvp spec for shamans is resto, though I haven’t tried ele of course. The specc simply contributes so much more to the team than enhance, even though my enhance gear is much much better (Ulduar stuff mostly), and everything just seems easier. So if you’re a frustrated enhance pvp’er, use your dual-spec and rejoice.

Oh, and as a last note i have to mention disc priests. I’ve heard they should be the top notch pvp face-roll class atm… I can’t really agree ^^ Resto shamans have to be the ultimate bane to disc priest. Just chase the them while spamming purge and keeping tremor up, and if they stop to cast penance (I really haven’t seen a disc riest using anything else with a casting time), just spank him with an earth shock. Of course most disc priests do not like to be chased, so they try to mana burn you. No problem, throw down a grounding totem or LoS them. (If there’s one thing I’ve learnt from my time of raiding it’s running =]). Then hope for your partner to go bashy-bashy on their skull.

Wow, that turned out to be a very long post… wall of text crit’s you for 1337 gdm… go ankh =P

After bumping into very large and cluttered mp3 collection (not mine of course, mine is sorted, and, believe it or not, fairly legal) I decided to write a program to sort these files using their ID3 tags. It all turned out to be very easy even though most file I/O was unknown to me (all i know was how to read lines from a filestream), but finding a bit of code explaining how to read ID3 tags is apparently easy as pie (funny thing, I don’t like pie very much).

After having found out how to read ID3 tags from a file, just sorting the files and copying them into their respective folders were even easier.

There is however one problem. Some people are complete i when it comes to ID3 tags. Not only did I encounter files that weren’t correctly tagged, some of them were tagged with complete gibberish. Why even bother tagging your music if you’re just going to put in random characters? Beats me.

After getting everything to work, (well, nearly work… some glitches were simply to strange or too minor for me to bother fixing) and filtering out any unreasonable tags, I started looking into multithreading everything…now that’s a bitch, especially due to a complete lack of information on how to do multithreading with methods accepting several parameters. In the end i managed to box all the info into a struct, and figure how to construct a few wrapper functions, though I’m quite sure there ought to be easier ways to do this.

Multithreading enables the sorting to be done in seconds… however in the end the overall speed advantage is near near null, due to the copying being constrained by hard-drive writing speed… so sad….

On a side not, heavy-duty threading work and the COM interface seems get in each other’s way, since i kept getting timeouts on my interface updating… weird shit…

But all is well, and the sorter works (if you keep and eye on it and has a lot of patience that is) ^^

Now todays lesson is: Tag your bloody music in a sensible way, I will personally track you down and eat your strawberry shortcakes if you don’t!

I like strawberries =)