The iTMS finally (well, it’s been a while since I looked, so “finally” may be a literal stretch) made Marillion’s Misplaced Childhood available. Oh happy day! This was one of my most played albums in college, and has strong emotional ties. And of course who didn’t have the album cover poster hanging in their room? I mean, c’mon! This (along with a Peter Gabriel era Genesis poster and Spuds MacKenzie) were the standard posters for freshman in 1987.

The Achievement system Blizzard introduced in the 3.0.2 patch leads people to do some pretty silly things. One of these is Old Crafty: Fish Up Old Crafty in Ogrimmar. Old Crafty is a rare fish found in the Horde city of Ogrimmar, so to catch him you need to find your way into the city and live long enough to catch him. So as not to feel left out, the Horde have their own sisyphean effort in catching Old Ironjaw inside Iron Forge (a much more difficult task, if you ask me.)

Yesterday I managed to land Old Crafty. Here’s the story.

I made the decision that I was going to fish in the Valley of Honor, which has a nice little waterfall that empties into a rock pool, keeping you out-of-sight. The downside of this is that you have to get into the Valley of Honor, which is hike from both entrances. The alternative is to take the side entrance and fish in the Valley of Spirits; this is where I did my Fishing Diplomat catch. However, the recommended spot is behind the mage trainer and anyone porting into Ogrimmar has a chance of seeing you: which is what happened to me. Gank.

It is a given that you will die getting into the city. Or at least it was a given for me: the city guards now see through unaided stealth. Because I planned to go to the Valley of Honor, the front entrance made the most sense. To get through the entrance you have to run a gauntlet of five guards: two on the outside and two on the inside, with one patrolling between them. Knowing that the guards would see through my stealth, I planned on the following:

1. Get naked, switch to kitty form.
2. Go stealth, walk up close to the guard’s hitbox, then dash as far as I can get.
3. Ghost walk back, rez, repeat until out of range of the guards.

But I had an Invisibility Potion with me (found it in my bank) so just before dashing in I quaffed the potion: and the two guards out front didn’t aggro! I scooted into a corner and waited for the patrol to walk by. He stopped and looked at me, but didn’t aggro. Phew.

I’m home free (I thought): I can see the Valley of Strength straight ahead. Off I go: only to be ganked by the two inside guards. I ran as far as I could to the right so that my corpse would be out of range of them when I reclaimed it and died. Death #1.

Note that your ghost doesn’t go to the graveyard just outside of Ogrimmar. Oh no, that would be too easy. It’s back to Razor Hill with you.

Once I had my body back I was able to stealth to The Drag without incident. There is a city guard that patrols this area, but they’re easy to spot and you can avoid him. When you enter The Drag stay on the right: the guard pats to the left and goes up the ramp.

The entrance to the Valley of Honor is identical to the entrance to Ogrimmar proper: two guards on The Drag side, two on the Honor side, and one that patrols in between. Unfortunately I didn’t have another Invisibility Potion with me, so I knew this was going to be another case of Dead Kitty Dashing. I made it through to the inner guards, and just inside the Valley before they killed me. Death #2.

When I got back I went as far from my body as possible to rez: unfortunately it wasn’t far enough and I aggrod one of the inside guards. I ran to the right back against the wall so that I was definitely out of range for the next. Death #3.

This time I was all set: when I came back I was able to stealth over to the waterfall without incident, put on my fishing hat, got my pole out, and started casting.

This I did for around two-and-a-half hours before a hunter wandered by and killed me. He obviously came looking to see if anyone was fishing at the waterfall, because you wouldn’t be able to see me otherwise. After I was dead he hugged my corpse and went away. He didn’t tell his friends, and didn’t wait for me to rez so he could get more honor. Guess he just was after the city defender achievement. After about 3 hours I couldn’t take it any more and logged for a bit. Came back an hour or so later and fished for about 30 minutes until I caught him!

After taking the snapshot I hearthed. I have no plans to go back there. Here’s the breakdown:

It took 555 catches and four deaths to get the stupid thing. Not bad compared to some things I’ve read, but still…

Last night Amicitia was able to kill Illidan Stormrage in Black Temple! What an accomplishment for us: after taking out six bosses the night before, we finished the place the second night. And this was only our second look at the ultimate fight. Even with the post-3.0 nerf this says alot about the quality of our guild and our leadership (kudos to our officers and raid leaders, especially (in alphabetical order) Chatter, Korlash, Reden and Sovliess). We also couldn’t have done it without our allies, who filled empty spots. Thanks!

So, on the loot front, Charlotta spent some DKP on the Shroud of the Final Stand and on my T6 shoulders. A good night all in all.

Amicitia has reached Illidan in Black Temple: last week we cleared up to him. Monday we had some solid attempts at getting him down, making it a good way through phase 4. It’s a really fun fight, requiring a lot of coordination (even after the 3.0 nerf — I can’t imaging how tough he was before that!) This week we want to get back and finally kill him, with at least a full night to work on the fight. That means clearing our way to him in at most two nights so we have our third night to concentrate solely on Illidan.

So last night we managed to start the raid on time, and proceeded to take out 6 bosses in just under 3 hours! It was really amazing: every boss but Bloodboil was one-shotted, and we got that ugly snot down on our second attempt. We were chain pulling trash — total insanity. I felt like I was doing a Kara or ZA speed run… and it worked great. I had no mana issues: I don’t think I used a single mana pot and maybe only one or two mage biscuits the whole evening. I hope tonight our luck with Mother and The Council is just as good and we get a chance to beat on the Winged One a bit. Good times.

The WoW 3.02 patch went live yesterday, and I leveled Inscription to 365 — the highest you can go before Northrend opens up in WotLK — in about 5 hours (the world server was rebooted once during that time, and went down hard another time.) I had grand plans to track the number of herbs it took to get up there, storing the yields of common and rare pigments, generating cool graphs and other descriptive statistics. I wrote a little add-on to track this, tested that it worked on the beta client, and then assumed it would work in the released client. Oh well: after I was done I went looking for the saved data and… nothing. So I don’t have anything to share as far as how many stacks it took to level up. Actually I’m hoping that the data is there somewhere, I was just too tired to find it, but I doubt it.

Some quick notes:

• I only made items necessary to level, as well as a handful of glyphs for people in the guild. I ended up putting around 120 or 130 glyphs in the AH.
• Pricing is way below what I expected: very few glyphs are listed for more than 25g. Some of the higher-level glyphs go higher, and I listed some in the 40g — 50g range, but they aren’t selling yet.
• I listed the minor glyph I discovered, Glyph of Renewed Life, at over 100g each. I was the only scribe to list them, but so far none have sold.
• So far I’ve made about 950g selling glyphs, with well over 100 still in the AH. Not as much as I expected, but still not bad. I spent around 200g levelling, I think.

That’s all that comes to mind.

It will be interesting to see how Glyphs will be handled in the general WoW economy. These are random stream-of-consciousness ramblings… they probably don’t make sense.

Alchemists can rarely make money on potions: if you are an herbalist, then you often make more selling the herbs than you will selling the resulting potions: for example, an Super Healing Potion requires two Netherbloom, one Felweed, and one Imbued Vial. Today on my server (Scarlet Crusade) a stack of Netherbloom is going for around 97g and a stack of Felweed for 19g, so the cost of materials for a single healing potion is 10g65s (ignoring the cost of the vial). A stack (of five) Super Healing Potions has a buyout price of 14g (or 2g80s each). Why should I spend time farming Netherbloom to make these pots when I can sell it for so much more!

Gems can be bought on the AH, picked up each month from The Consortium, prospected, or found as drops in higher-end content. Miners can sell ore for Jewel Crafters to prospect. When I’ve needed a gem cut, I buy the gem on the AH. I don’t buy stacks of the ore that the gem may drop from and give that to a JC to prospect: maybe if I was a JC I would do this, but otherwise it doesn’t make sense.

For scribes things will be interesting: now herbs will be showing up in the AH and competition will exist between scribes wanting stacks to mill for pigments, alchemists wanting stacks to make into potions, and everyone else wanting materials for their friendly neighbourhood scribe or alchemist.

Will we see pigments showing up in the AH by themselves? If so, what are the prices going to look like? Presumably at least as much as the 5 stack of herbs needed to get them? And what about Glyphs? If someone wants a glyph are they going to buy the herbs or the pigments or the Glyph itself? Will the Glyphs sell for more than the materials? If they do, how much more?

For example, consider Glyph of Rebirth. This requires two Jadefire Ink to make, which requires 4 Emerald Pigment. You mill Emerald Pigment from Khadgar’s Whisker, Goldthorn, Fadeleaf, and Wintersbite. You get 2-4 pigment per batch of herbs you mill, so you may need 10 of the aforementioned herbs to get enough pigment to make the ink required for the Glyph. Right now there is a lot of prospecting going on in the AH over the herbs for inscription: a stack of Khadgar’s Whisker is going for between 18g and 30g; Goldthorn 40g; Fadeleaf 18g and 35g; and Wintersbite 45g+. So someone is going to spend a non-trivial amount of gold to buy the mats for the mats for the inscription. Presumably the pigments will show up in the AH, for more than the corresponding herb prices. And this implies that the glyphs will have a premium on top of that! Oh, you could put Ink up on the AH too!

If someone gives you the herbs to make a glyph, you could end up on top if your milling goes well. Then do you have to make multiple glyphs for the person? Lets say someone buys a stack of Khadgar’s Whisker and gives you a stack of 10 to mill for their glyph: you get lucky and get 4 pigment for each batch: now you have 8 Emerald Pigment that make 4 bottles of Jadefire ink, which make 2 Glyphs of Rebirth. Do you keep the extra pigment? The extra ink? Give the parts back to the person? Or keep them?

Something I have to do once in a while is find all the files that were modified (or added, or deleted) between two revisions in Subversion. And each time I forget what the right incantation is, so to save myself the effort of sussing out the right command-line the next time around, here it is:

svn log -v -r 7921:HEAD -q | grep -E '^   [A-Z]' | sort -u

Where 7921 should be replaced with the starting revision, and HEAD with the ending revision. Note that there are three spaces in the regexp

I was just listening to the song Hot Topic by Le Tigre and I had a flashback to a practical joke I was part of a long time ago.

My father had an independent environmental testing lab when I was in High School and College, specializing in asbestos testing. Abatement contractors would use the lab to test air and material samples for the presence of various kinds of asbestos. He had all kinds of cool equipment like a scanning electron microscope (SEM) (which I got to use for a project in my high school physics class!), a transmission electron microscope, and an x-ray defractometer. The lab would sometimes have companies send in samples they were worried about to see if they had any asbestos contamination.

One day we decided to play a prank on the lab manager (who was French Canadian): we put some Frosted Flakes into a baggy and spiked it with chrysotile asbestos. The “sample” was logged as coming from one “Anthony Le Tigre” at Kellog’s: evidently there was some concern that the cereal production line was being contaminated and Mr. Le Tigre was wondering if we could identify the contaminate (if any). So the lab manager prepares the sample, puts it into the SEM, and finds that it contains a non-trivial amount of asbestos. Suffice it to say she freaked out: asbestos in the food chain? OMFG! We took the better part of 10 minutes to talk her off the cliff. Afterall, would Tony the Tiger really do that?

In a post today to the Clojure mailing list, its creator Rich Hickey says,

As I’ve said in my talks, most Clojure users go from “eww, Java libs” to “ooh, Java libs”, leveraging the fact there there is already a lib for almost anything they need to do. And using the lib is completely transparent, idiomatic and wrapper free. OTOH, if they want to customize their interface to a lib, it is trivial to do so in Clojure.

This sums up what I like most about Clojure, over Scheme or Common LISP: because of its operability with the Java platform Clojure arrives with “batteries included”. This has always been one of my major likes with Python, and one of my main complaints with most LISP and Scheme implementations. This is something that Clojure gets right, in a Big Way.

It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything in my blog. I’ve been keeping a written journal off and on, more off of late. I used to try to write faithfully every morning and every evening when I got onto the train, but as with so many things I start this kind of just petered out. But now I’m going to start writing again, probably in both places. There are a bunch of things I’ve been thinking about getting out into the ether, in the rare event that someone might find them interesting in some strange way.

I’ve been playing World of Warcraft quite a bit over the last four or five months. One of my co-workers also plays and he convinced me to switch my main toon (Charlotta, a level 70 resto Druid who used to be known as Mathilde on the previous server) over to his server. From there I got invited into the guild he was in (Saga, which fell apart a month or two after I joined due to excessive drama) and subsequently started running with, and joining, Amicitia. It’s a small raiding guild, drama free, and I’ve made some good friends. We’ve been doing really well on progressing through T5 content (only Kael’thas in The Eye has yet to fall to us: we’ve killed Lady Vashj twice!) and are 4/5 bosses through Hyjal. We’ve also cleared ZA many times, and our speed team has amassed 5 bear mounts so far and hope to get another 5 for the remaining team members before it goes away with the 3.0 patch. A couple of weeks ago we did a full Kara clear in under 3 hours, which was pretty cool. We’re ranked 22nd on our server, which doesn’t suck considering we’ve only just started to put feelers into Black Temple.

Speaking of the 3.0 patch, I was lucky enough to get a Wrath of the Lich King beta key, so I’ve been splitting my time between the live and beta servers. You could only copy level 70 toons over to the test realms, so Charlotta is the only one I could bring. And of course someone had her name, so there she goes by Matilde. She’s in the guild Shift Happens, formed by the the author of one of my favorite WoW blogs Resto4Life. I’ll have more to write about the beta soon, though Phaelia is a much better Druid writer than I could ever hope to be. I dropped alchemy or Inscriptions, which has been interesting. I am looking forward to seeing how the profession shapes up as more releases of the beta are made. To paraphrase the graduate, “I want to say one word to you. Just one word.” … “Mageroyal.”

Well, that’s it for now.