Updated that little Nucleus plugin I made a while back.

Mattt said:

Yes, there aren't YET quests that will affect things in the way Auz speaks but there are a lot better quests than kill x for y.

Here's my quest list (all 20 slots filled) at level 16. I've bolded the “kill quests”, bolded and italicised those that are “kill x to get y” and * marks “Elite” quests which are intended for groups of up to five:

1. Hidden Enemies*
   Kill Bazzalan and Jergool the Invoker
2. Searching for the Lost Satchel*
   Find corpse, return to quest giver
3. Kill Grundig Darkcloud
   Kill named mob plus six Grimtotem Brutes
4. Blood Feeders
   Kill 10 Deepmoss Creepers and seven Deepmoss Venomspitters
5. Goblin Invaders
   Kill 15 Loggers
6. Centaur Bracers
   Kill enough Centaurs to get 15 bracers
7. Samophlange
   Access the Samophlange control mechanism
8. Southsea Freebooters
   Kill 12 Brigands and 6 Canonneers
9. Fungal Spores
   Collect 4 fungal spores
10. Prowlers of the Barrens
    Kill enough Savanah Prowlers to get seven claws
11. Kilkar Leaders
    Kill Barbak
12. Stagnant Oasis
    Use the seeds on the stagnant oasis
13. Miner's Fortune
    Kill mine overseers to get an emerald
14. Raptor Horns
    Kill enough Sunscale Scytheclaws to get five raptor horns
15. Stolen Silver
    Retrieve stolen silver from the Raptors
16. Consumed by Hatred
    Get 60 [!] tusks
17. Lost in Battle
    Find Mankrik's wife
18. The Guns of Northwatch
    Kill three particular mobs and kill enough of something else to get ten medals
19. Until Death Do Us Part
    Place an amulet on someone's grave
20. Serpentbloom*
    Gather 10 serpentblooms

Bah... I remember at Uni when we had a couple of null modem networked Amigas, some beer and two copies of the original Stunt Car Racer. Good times... good times...

Stunt Car Race Pro Cancelled. @ Motorsportgaming.com

Just cleared out a case of trackback spam in some of the older posts. What kind of low-grade wassock do you have to be to end up doing that sort of thing? “What do I do? I find communication systems on the Internets and piss on them by advertising cheap rip off poker sites. On my weekends I break into people's houses and rewire their phones to dial sex lines.”

EU investigates the cost of Itunes

All that rambling about WoW and I think Ubiq said it better and earlier (though I got the Yurpeen version, which wasn't out then).

Zen of Design >> Pattern-Breaking

My ISP was having trouble so I decided to try and make a dent into the DVD backlog I have. I popped “Shark Tale” in and it started with some fluff for Madagascar - which is their next movie - and the Wallace & Gromit movie. I'd be interested in seeing both so I watched it anyway. And then to the movie itself.

Halfway through I manged to crash Nero and had to restart the DVD. Up pops the preview again and I go to flip to the menu or fast-forward but they've disabled both features. Excuse me? I paid real money for this and I don't expect to be forced to sit through ads again. What kind of idiot thinks up this kind of anti-feature.

Oh... speaking of shoddy customer service. Following on from Apple's blatant and possible illegal price fixing, I used their feedback form to ask why I couldn't access the Irish store. No answer a week later.

I managed to reach level 15 in my first two days of play in WoW. Mattt suggests this is achievable “in a few days if you play casually” so I'm stoked I'm ahead of the curve.

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I was going to do a “second impressions” covering the things I did like about WoW after my first - but I was impugned in IRC by the initial brothers RJO and GD. Apparently, in this day and age, it's no longer en vogue to point out the Emperor has no clothes, you must then design for him a replacement set. And woe betide if you aren't already an imperial couturier, for then you probably shouldn't even be opening your mouth about the nakedness anyway.

Now, I do have a few ideas about what to do in MMOGs, but unfortunately you don't appear to be waving a couple of million dollars around, so you're not going to get the full monty. However, so as not to appear entirely “evasive” I'll put up a few ideas relating to what I mentioned the other day.

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It's not that World of Warcraft is bad; in fact, I'd go so far as to say it combines the best bits from all the other MMOGs I've played. The problem is it combines the best bits from all the other MMOGs I've played. And therein lies the disappointment... I've already done this stuff before.

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Warner Brothers is planning on “re-imagining” the Looney Tunes characters into a new series called “Loonatics”, set in 2772 and featuring updated, anime-ised descendants of the originals (ie Buzz Bunny is a martial arts expect with laser eyes - though whether he'll also cross-dress a lot has not been specified). Amongst discussion on the usual suspects there's a palable question of “why are they bending our childhood over the desk and abrubtly sodomising it?”

The answer of course is it's their job (and they can't help it if they enjoy it). And, given that despite initial scepticism, Battlestar Galactica is now seen as one of the better Sci-Fi shows on TV it's not impossible for Loonatics to not entirely suck... possibly.

But you still have to ask: if you're going to spend time and money coming up with characters so far from the originals you claim to be basing them on, what was the point, amongst fficial">all the coverage about... oh.

(Also, when does the copyright on Looney Tunes run out?)

Prompted by bean's rage at iTunes blocking her rampant anglomusiphilia I downloaded the iTunes client and had a browse.

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In 1981 Simple Minds released two albums simultaenously (because double albums weren't cool in 1981... mmmkay) called “Sons and Fascination” and “Sister Feelings Call”.

I just got the remastered version (re-released a couple of years ago) for the simple - and sad - reason that my original CD version - made in the days when they still though ~60 minutes was the limit for CDs - dropped “Sound in 70 Cities” and “League of Nations” to fit both releases on one CD. Though “Sound” is actually just an instrumental version of “70 Cities as Love Brings the Fall”, I think it's actually a better song - the vocals on “70 Cities” are a tad discordant.

“Sister” also contains an instrumental not derived from a track on “Sons”: “Theme For Great Cities”, which is an interesting thing because Simple Minds' lead singer Jim Kerr is just that, their lead singer. He doesn't play an instrument, so you have to wonder what he was supposed to do if they played it live. Still, they still managed to have an instrumental track on every album release up until they got to be stadium-huge (and everyone left the band apart from Kerr and guitarist Charlie Burchill). Apparently they've reappeared again on recent albums, though I didn't keep up with the band much after the preachy Street Fighting Years, when they stopped competing musically with U2 and started trying to match Bono on polemics.

On “Sister” and “Sons” though, they were firing on all guns.

Athlete's Wires seems to be on heavy rotation on pretty much every radio station around the place at the moment; their album Tourist also hit number one the other week, only to be knocked off by the boost Keane's Hopes and Fears got from their winning most bland album and least offensive new act at the Brits.

Wires is, apparently, about the lead singer's infant daughter who was born premature and with epilepsy.

Wires is the first single from the album and managed to hit at least number 4. Tourist itself has been certified platinum in the UK (meaning some 100,000+ units shifted). Athlete have added a third night to their concerts in London after the first two sold out.

Do you ever wish your job allowed you to convert the suffering and pain of your family members into money? I don't think I've been so repulsed by an artist since Eric Clapton made so much out of the death of his son with Tears in Heaven.

I saw the Ghost Ship in City of Heroes today. The “Moraine” is a large tanker which, after being lost at sea, has returned to haunt Paragon city by sliding spectrally through several zones - ignoring such inconveniences as solid land. Occasionally the lost souls of the sailors who lost their lives at sea drop from the insubstantial decks. As the ship passes the lost spirits cry to the world their sorry demise: “Cargo flooding! Ship sinking!” “Must reach land!” A glance at their description tells their pitiful tale.



So what do we heroic citizens of Paragon City do? Gank them basically...

Y'know - when I want an online avatar thank makes me appear vacant I now know where to go:



And from the same people, a variation on the buggery smiley?

I've done a bit of programming and I think it can be safely said that humanity would not be released today, even under the most lax of QA departments. In no particular order then, five bugs or odd features that spring to mind:

• Diabetes. This one's fun; the human buffer overflow hack. There are two major forms of Diabetes known, obscurely, as type one and type two. Type one is characterised by the failure of the body to produce enough insulin, which is required to transport sugar into the cells from the bloodstream. Type two is characterised by a reduced efficiency of the system which transports the sugar from the blood. Both types result in an increased blood-sugar level which overworks the kidneys. Since the job of the kidneys is to clean the blood, their inefficiency at this can cause damage to other parts of the body. One of the most susceptable organs to poorly cleaned blood is the pancreas - which, coincidently, is responsible for insulin production. If not spotted, this can turn type two into type one. Obviously this wasn't tested.
• The Appendix. Location: the end of the cecum. Size: 2 to 20 cm. Use: er... can we get back to you on that? One sec... got it here... “its purpose is to do nothing and then, randomly, go bad and explode causing, if possible, peritonitus and shock.” How'd that one get on the spec sheet?
• The Urethra. No... really, who thought it was a good idea to use the same tunnel for liquid waste and reproduction. I've heard of code re-use... but sheesh.
• The Testicles. On the subject of reproduction, couldn't they find a better way of cooling them than hanging them outside? That's not going to win any design awards.
• Death. “I'm not seeing the selling point here, you say that barring accidents, the human body will last, at most, 120 years and into the 80s on average. And for the last few it's probably not going to be working all that well... you're hoping people will want another one after that kind of service or something?”

Evangelical Christians battle evolution | WORLD | NEWS | tvnz.co.nz

Apparently beans is more easily shocked than I suspected...

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When you're sending out your scam emails, it pays to avoid weird requests being appended to the bottom of the fake...

Here's an old pic I found whilst trying to work out which extension was crashing Firefox when uploading files. Ironically, it was “Crash Recovery”. Didn't happen when installed on a fresh profile though, so maybe it's corruption or a conflict with one of my other 37 extensions...

I find this curiously amusing...



(available from Party Monkey)

...have they considered holding “Pope Idol” to pick the next one?

(If he isn't already dead and they've stuffed him so they don't have to pick a new one)

[Isn't about they re-considered the whole must-die-in-office thing? It seems such an undignified way to do things]

“Robbie Williams' track Angels has won the prize for the best British song of the past 25 years at the Brit Awards. [...] Williams went on to perform the track as a duet with best British female winner Joss Stone at the event, hosted by Chris Evans.”

What a joke. Did they promise it to him if he sang it? There were worthy winners in Franz Ferdinand, the Scissor Sisters and Muse, and I was willing to overlook Coldplay-Lite Keane winning a couple of prizes in that light, but “Angels” best song of the past 25 years?

“Williams' track beat songs by Will Young, Queen, Kate Bush and Joy Division in a vote by BBC Radio 2 listeners.”

Oh... that explains it. People with no ears voted for it.

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Music | Robbie wins Brits best song prize

According to the “Ask Jeeves buys Bloglines FAQ”, Ask Jeeves is going to be rilly rilly big one day

“Ask.com was the 7th most visited site in December, 2005”

Bloglines | Ask Jeeves / Bloglines FAQ

Update: February 10, 2005. Now fixed

Here's my guide to getting a decent Windows-Fedora setup going with two monitors using Cygwin/X.

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My Bug arrived. Or is that my The Bug arrived. At 8am... on a Saturday. Hopefully the delivery guy is used to dishevelled looking people wearing just a pair of jeans peering through sleep-rimmed eyes at them.

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One of the latest tasks at work involves getting customer information from a client's database. For a variety of interesting reasons, they've chosen SOAP - the Simple Object Access Protocol - as the communication protocol. Aside from the amusing jokes you can play based on the name (“do you use SOAP?” “No” “Haha... I could tell from the smell!” and... uhm...) the use of the word Simple in the name is a blatant lie.

Example: there's a module for Perl called SOAP::Lite that's supposed to simplify use of the damn thing. In turn, there's another module, SOAP::WSDL which simplifies use of the SOAP::Lite module. You know you're not at simplicity's front door when there's two layers of simplification going on.

The partner's tech sent over a Java client to query the db via SOAP. You pass it an integer user id on the command line and it returns the user's data, maybe 15 lines of text. It bulked out at 3Mb...

It's become common these days to find “long” articles on some sites split into two or more pages. Usually, there's some spurious rational about people not wanting to scroll down (though they presumably love clicking through to a new page) or wanting to keep the traditional, easy-to-read column layout found in most newspapers (yet the International Herald Tribune seems to have managed to do this without resorting to reloading the ads loading a new page). But some have gone even further...

Following a link on Mozillazine takes you to a 16 paragraph article from PC Mage with each paragraph on it's own page and each page taking up three or so screens with the ads surrounding the pitiful scrap of text. To read the entire piece, I'm guessing you're expected to stumble through all sixteen pages of this. I realise bandwidth isn't free... but good grief. They do set a cookie though, and if you visit again (or, apropos of nothing, reload the first page) the entire article will magically appear for you.

With the Winter Horde removed from CoH, Cryptic have frozen over the lakes in Paragon City - so you can go skating...

2.58Mb DivX/MP3 AVI

(needs the DivX codec; made with FRAPS)

Navigating a roundabout this evening, I chanced up a fellow driver who felt that the act of signalling a left turn was sufficient to allow him to move into the lane to his left, which I, unfortunately, already occupied. Fortunately for both of us, he managed to glance to his left with enough time to jink away and avoid slamming me into the lorry on my left. This is, if not a common incident, then one that I can understand happening quite easily.

However, subsequent to the incident, he caught up with me further down the dual-carriageway and, just to underscore how brain-dead he was, swerved towards me again as he went past. Seriously... you're driving a 1½ ton car and your response to nearly causing a crash is to try and intimidate the person you nearly crashed into with the same manouever. To that person, should he chance upon my little corner of the Internets, I say: you sir, are a wassock.

I actually got a question answered in one of these things for the first time in like... ever!

City of Heroes Official Forums

1. Are we going to see any European-situated zones?

After City of Villains, I want to focus on expanding our game universe across the world. Heroes and villains alike will be traveling across the planet…

A touch vague mind you...