uruloki’s lair

I got into the Closed Beta for WAR finally, and had a great time. Then the Preview Weekend hit, and I started to get hit with CTDs, lag, and other wonky server behavior. The Scenario servers liked to make me wait for 15-20 minutes and then give the “2 minutes to server shutdown” message when we’re about 20% into it. So, I’m going to wait to play WAR until the Head Start kicks off, especially since all the work in beta gets wiped and I hate to waste work.

Meanwhile, we had a nifty one-shot on Brutallus (only our second kill) in WOW. Ugly, ugly kill, but a kill nonetheless after a two-shot on Kalecgos. Unfortunately, all of the WOW servers in what looks like our battle group are now experiencing lag and DC’s, which means no loot and no continuing the raid. Today’s random intersection: crappy servers, I hate you all!!

Tags: Gaming, Technology by uruloki
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I don’t know about you, but when I’m driving in an area with little to no traffic signage or other guidelines I’m usually much more cautious. It turns out that pretty much everyone is:

A year after the change, the results of this “extreme makeover” were striking: Not only had congestion decreased in the ­intersection—­buses spent less time waiting to get through, for ­example—­but there were half as many accidents, even though total car traffic was up by a third. Students from a local engineering college who studied the intersection reported that both drivers and, unusually, cyclists were using ­signals—­of the electronic or hand ­variety—­more often. They also found, in surveys, that residents, despite the measurable increase in safety, perceived the place to be more dangerous.

It would be interesting if some of his theories could be applied in here in the U.S. rather than increasing the number of traffic cameras while shortening the yellow lights to make money.

Tags: Life, Technology by uruloki
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I ran some security upgrades on the site and promptly ran into a problem with the user permissions not being set right. Google to the rescue.

Once your tables are renamed with a different prefix, you need to modify the prefix_usermeta and prefix_options tables with the following code:

Replace all occurrences of prefix with your changed version and you are good to go.

Tags: Technology, Web site by uruloki
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I just upgraded to WP 2.5.1 to fix the security bug that was in 2.5. It basically allowed exploits to be run on blogs with open user registration, which used to be this one as well. Immediately after I upgraded to 2.5, I looked at the user management page for the first time in, well, ever. I’m a very good writer to a lot of Russians apparently, since I had about 390 random—spam-like—emails registered on the site mostly with .ru* extensions. The highlight of the list was EltonJohn and RonPaul, who I think registered to approve of everything I have ever said. After the cleanup and just before 2.5.1 went on, I had to go clear another 34 “people” that had registered. The site is now closed to open registrations, I have to approve everyone now.

Then there is the home computer. I’ve been running out of space on the hard-drive and wondering where it’s all going. A couple of nights ago, Disk Defragmenter highlighted a file it couldn’t move since it was too big for the available space on the HD. My Function Key Controller driver has somehow ballooned to 1.3 GB. The download from Alienware? 1.3 MB. Something has taken up residence so it is time to do a full clean on the harddrive. I’ll also be running WinDirStat or JDiskReport to figure out where some of the big files are that I never use.

I’m also doing the pricewatch.com surfing to try and find another hard drive with decent space that is under $50 so I can get it without checking with the CINCHouse.

Tags: Technology by uruloki
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Forget my current job, I want to work on this project.

The Reynard project will begin by profiling online gaming behavior, then potentially move on to its ultimate goal of “automatically detecting suspicious behavior and actions in the virtual world.”

Money qoute from the comment section:

Maybe they can start by data-mining Barrens chat.

Or the /trade channel. Would the ERP people get picked up for solicitation?

Tags: Funny, Life, Technology by uruloki
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This is quite honestly another step up by the Chinese government:

“Xiao Chen” is his online name. Along with his two colleagues, he does not want to reveal his true identity. The three belong to what some Western experts say is a civilian cyber militia in China, launching attacks on government and private Web sites around the world.

It’s in the same area as the missile shootdown that they performed last year, an public escalation of what their known capabilities are. It’s getting hotter.

Edit: Now that I know it’s open source, I can safely say that we’ll find out more about Chinese hacking and infiltration all over the place. Like in that new router you just bought:

Until a source in China tipped off the FBI, no one could tell that the parts were Cisco knockoffs rather than the real thing.

Tags: Technology by uruloki
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I need some feedback. I upgraded the WP install to the latest and greatest which means I need a new theme. The feedback so far on this one is “The whiteness, it burns!” Thanks Rith!

So, black background, light text is the way to go? Can I get some feedback?

Tags: Technology, Web site by uruloki
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With the release of the iPhone and its Satanic contract with AT&T a lot of people had to pay termination fees to get out of their existing cell phone provider relationship. Here’s an easier way:

Sprint-Nextel is disconnecting more than 1,000 subscribers on grounds the clients call customer service too often and make “unreasonable requests.”

I am definitely going to keep this in mind for when Otter wants to change cell phones. Again…

Tags: Life, Technology by uruloki
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I’ve been making large use of del.icio.us and Google Reader lately. The benefits for using these sites is that I get to use my bookmarks on pretty much any computer (as long as a flippin’ firewall isn’t up) and I get to read all the blogs/headlines I want to on one site.

On the browsing side itself, I upgraded the home computer to Firefox 2.0 the other day. Still using FirefoxPortable at work, so the issue becomes getting all the settings from FFP to the new install. Lesse, what am I doing… Well, I used a load of the hints from Lifehacker to clean up the menu and navigation bars. No forward, back, or reload buttons as everything is taken care of in All-in-One Gestures. I finally figured out the Scroll Wheel Navigation (as in I can do it on purpose instead of accidentally now) and already used a mouse gesture to reload anyways, so three buttons gone. TinyMenu puts all the text menus into a single drop down, and then using the “Customize” option on the toolbars lets me move eveything up to the top menu area and get rid of the entire navigation bar. Search shortcuts makes the search bar superfluous, and the damn throbber and go button vanish as well. Finally, all my sites with the nifty favicon.ico get their text description wiped out on the bookmark toolbar so I have a set of plain buttons that I can click and therefore have more space for other random bookmarks before I del.icio.us them. Now, if certain people would stop crying and let me visit forums…

Anyways, that the geekery for today!

Tags: Technology by uruloki
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I’m trying to get Ubernyms(link) to work with WP_Itemstats(link). The CSS(link) (Cascading Style Sheets) for each doesn’t play nicely for some reason. It is especially mystifying since each uses well coded CSS(link) around their respective items. I just don’t know sometimes…

Tags: Technology, Web site by uruloki
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