One tab experiment

I'm frequently consuming multiple websites for information needed for my job, entertainment and my life. What begins small... slowly snowballs into a 30 browser tab parade sometimes across different browsers. Then by the time I want to find something open its usually lost and I'm stuck looking at single letter page titles. Is this efficient?

How much time do I save by having multiple tabs open?

Sounds like an experiment is in order. Could I survive on one tab?  Surely one tab is not enough. But let's start small.  Tomorrow I will struggle with tab and hopefully have some useful feedback albeit hindered productivity.

Rift is not the WoW Killer, but plants a seed

The following is my review of Rift after having played World of Warcraft for many years and Rift (two weeks)

By nature MMO's evolve. World of Warcraft which released in 2004 borrowed heavily from Everquest and other pioneer games. Since I played WoW from Vanilla through Cataclysm, I can attest to how much the game has changed. The World of Warcraft we have today is much improved thanks to Blizzard putting a lot of their earnings back into development. The number of features and content added since launch is incredible. This is only possible once the ball starts rolling.

Along comes Rift- brought to us from a company called Trion Worlds a much smaller development company. To start comparing early Rift to modern day WoW, WoW wins hands down. The resources put into World of Warcraft at this point would not be put into another game at a launch. It wouldn't make sense. The loss if a game failed would be too great. So Trion has to develop enough of the common MMO elements to get by and choose one area to excel. Trion has very limited time to succeed. The expense of maintaining MMO's is large and if launch doesn't pull in enough attention the funds start to dry up and before long the game is free to play. Trion knows in order to succeed it must have something different to offer us - so it gives us dynamic gameplay. Since MMO's are so expensive to develop you can't take risks in every area, the best bet is to follow a formula. So outside the dynamic gameplay, most of the game plays like WoW.

Dynamic gameplay is injected into the game by Rifts which open up sporadically in the zones. When a rift opens up, all nearby players join together to conquer monsters coming out of the rift. This is a great distraction from the usual repetitive grinding of doing quest after quest. Another source of dynamic gameplay are invasions. Invasions deal with NPC's generated at a random place on the map. NPC's move throughout the zone with intent of accomplishing an objective. Players must band forces to stop the NPC's.

Rifts and invasions are extremely fun. Just being able to instantly get in a group and work together with out any setup is not comparable to anything in WoW, except maybe one of the rare zone invasions. The world suddenly feels more alive. I feel motivated to save the zone. I know the quests will be there when I'm done.

Outside of rifts and invasions, Rift plays a lot like WoW. Instead of 8 different classes, you have four classes but each with eight subclasses. Rift allows you to play three "subclasses" at a time, but you really have to put most of your points in a particular class. This makes for some interesting class combinations. I'm currently a DPS Two handed warrior with a hunter style pet, but also have some tanking skills.

Graphics are an improvement, but nothing like you'd see on a console game nowadays. Crafting is very similar to World of Warcraft. Rift has all the other elements WoW has... Dungeons, Raids, PVP, Factions, but is lacking a lot of the nicer tools such as Dungeon Finder, Customizable interface etc. We can only hope they are added in the future.

The story from Rift tends to be more mature and has a darker tone. I'm not a player who gets into the lore, so I won't comment any more on that. The world seems pretty small compared to WoW, and the zones are not up to standard with Cataclysm zones. Rift zones are more like Vanilla WoW zones in my opinion. Of course I've only seen the entry level ones so I can't speak for endgame zones.

Overall the developer has been really responsive to the community and this might be the biggest sign that Rift will continue to grow. No one can expect Rift to kill WoW overnight. All we can hope for now is more kindling to add to the fire. A lot of people playing WoW just want something different. It doesn't have to be incredibly different, just deviate enough from the WoW forumula to give us a different perspective. My hope is Rift will continue to innovate to the point where Blizzard can start taking ideas from Trion and we no longer have a market dominated by a single developer.

Do I hope Rift kills WoW??? No. Do I hope WoW kills Rift??? No. In the end I want to two great games. One choice.

Use Wireshark to view network traffic to localhost

Wireshark will not display traffic routed back to localhost by default. This is due to no loopback interface in Windows. There is a workaround. Run the following in DOS to route all your network traffic to the gateway..

route [your_ip] add mask 255.255.255.255 [gateway] metric 1

with [your_ip] being different from 127.0.0.1. It should (has to) be the result of ipconfig command (ip address field) [the_gateway] has to be the default gateway field taken from ipconfig /all result.

Doing so, every network traffic from your machine to itself will use the physical network interface, it will then go to the gateway, back to you. Therefor, you will see each packet twice, but it can be filtered on the view.

Be careful, since your machine will use the actual network to talk to itself, it may overload the network. It may be wise to remove the new route once you are done with the tests:

route delete [your_ip]

For more information see:

http://wiki.wireshark.org/CaptureSetup/Loopback

Configuring Heap dump on Out of Memory Error

You can configure the JVM to make a Heap dump when encountering an Out of Memory error. You can also configure an optional directory where the dump file will be created. Use the following VM arguments to create a dump file in C:\dumps when jvm goes out of memory…

-XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError
-XX:HeapDumpPath=/dumps

You put a small bag in a small bag.

walked right into that one....

Average day in percentages

37% Sleep

33% Working

10% Free time

8% Cooking / Eating

4% Driving

4% Working Out

4% Personal Hygiene

 

Ok I fudged the numbers a little to make it add up to 100% but this is pretty accurate. I guess I spend a lot of time sleeping. I think its worth it you feel a lot better during the day. I'm suprised Eating takes up 8% of my day. Thats two hours. I even factored grocery shopping into my free time. Boy, if I could go without food I could almost double my free time.

 

 

 

Whats a browser?

How much do jobs really stimulate the economy

We've seen over the last year a huge push to create jobs, but does this benefit the economy as much as one might think? Busy workers are busy doing just that - working, not spending. From my perspective, I spend very little nowadays just because of work. When I'm not working, it doesn't take much to satisfy me. Sure I might have some money from working, but why spend it? I'm perfectly content sitting at home and reading a book from library, playing a video game or watching a movie. Why am I content? Because I'm not working. If I had more time to pursue other interests, no doubt my spending would increase. As employees our time is being stretched thin and technology is helping us get more entertainment out of less money. I'd love to take up sailing or mountain climbing, maybe even scuba diving. Honestly I just don't have the time. So I'll continue saving my money and putting it towards my house.

Beyond correction (Our housing catch 22)

My wife and I are currently renting but have plans to buy a house, unfortunately the housing market in our  area is overinflated. When I first heard about the mortgage problem I was optimistic buying a house would soon be affordable.  It was plain and simple people bought houses they couldn't afford. When they missed their payments on the houses, banks would take over these homes and resell them for a more realistic price. The more homes where the borrower defaults on payments the more homes on the market the more the price was pushed down.  My wife and I buy a house at a realistic price.

So what went wrong? Everything. The mortgage securities that were poisonous that should have been written down will now be bought by the government. Other government plans are also being introduced to help homeowners who can't pay their mortgages. McCain is now offering a plan where the government will pay the mortgages for troubled borrowers. Other people are taking more drastic measures to keep their house (like shooting themselves) and lenders are taking pity.

So thats where we're at. New home buyers lose. Our only regret not buying what we couldn't afford. Purchasing what you can afford went out of style like ripped jeans in the eighties. So the economy will not be benefiting from our spending, but the this is the situation we're dealt.

Fannie Mae Eases Credit To Aid Mortgage Lending

Read this article from 1999

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9c0DE7DB153EF933A0575AC0A96F958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

Gov't Regulators: 0
Free Marketers:  1

Maybe why you should panic....

Let me start by saying I know nothing about Economics. I barely passed the intro course in college so read this for whats its worth.


The FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) currently insures up to 100,000 on checking and savings accounts. This is the government safety net that was put in place after the Great Depression. The idea is when the financial system looks gloomy, no one will rush to the bank to withdrawal there money because they'll know it's insured. So you might ask, where does this reserve come from? Well the DIF (Depositor's Insurance Fund) is derived from premiums lenders pay based on the risk level of their assets. What surprising is the current DIF is only (don't rush to your bank yet..) around 1 percent of the total exposure to insured funds. Currently the reserve is around 40 billion and the total of insured deposits is around 4.29 trillion. Now it gets worse, Bailout Part Deux is pushing to have the insurance per account raised to 250,000 (recommend by Obama and McCain). This only makes the ratio worse, now granted mostly insured accounts mostly likely are not over 100,000, but every account this is over is increasing that exposure. So now how does the DIF increase to maintain that already small ratio of 1%. Well it has to be increased Bank Insurance premiums, right? Which I thought the bailout was supposed to help the Banks... but now its looking like there going to have to pay more. How does this free up credit?  This bailout never made much sense to me and now it makes less sense. The unfortunate part is it now stands a better chance of being passed.


All the numbers here are from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FDIC

Comments?

The inquisitive Smaller reader may ask... "Ben, why are there no comments on your blog?". Let me explain...

Due to the popularity of this blog since inception, it has been necessary to turn off comments. I have several hundred emails a day to read that alone is enough to manage. Please note however I reserve the right to reenable comments ... randomly... without prior notice.....

Museum of Terrible Snacks

Our office rents space on the second and third floor of a three story office plaza. We have one vending machine for the entire building - and it is the worst. Out of the approximate 50 items I'm interested in zero. Certain popular items when arriving are usually sold out in a few days. Contrary to what one might think, popular items aren't restocked but replace with less popular items.  By now our vending machine is nothing more than a museum of the worst candy and snacks one could imagine.

Make any sense? No... Well thats what I thought, until I though about it from the perspective of the vending machine service agent. He / She must visit several building on a regular schedule to examine what needs refilled. Now what advantage does the service operator have for putting in popular items?? Probably zero. Putting in popular items requires MORE restocking. The owner definitely makes more money, not the service man. The owner is probably too busy with his head up his arse in other businesses to do any type of inventory tracking, so we bear the blow.

Swedish fish anyone?

blog

blog (BLAHG) n.

A website where you can write ad nauseum about your daily life without fear of boring others. Also a place to talk about yourself without sounding overtly self-centered.

Nerd Geek Test

I'm not really sure what defines a dork/geek, but I'd be willing to bet the control of electrons has something to do with it. Millions of people go home every night and stare at fancy boxes with various patterns of electrons. Apparently staring at patterns of electrons has become so normal that these people are fine and this is acceptable in society. 

Even small user changes to electron patterns are normal and the acceptable way of doing this is with a small rectangular box that is held in one hand. The small rectangular box is used to switch to different patterns until one finds a pattern of their liking and sticks with it.

If a user wants more control and wants to switch from controlling which patterns he sees to controlling the patterns themselves, he changes to a better input device. This input device is usually held with two hands as opposed to the small rectangular box that is held with one. Holding the two handed device the user is given greater control over the electron patterns. This level of control allows more precise movement of shapes within the patterns. This level of control seems to fall beyond what is acceptable by society.

Test this out next time your at home controlling your electron box. How much control do you have? Does this relate to your own view of how geeky / nerdy you envision yourself? Let me know.

No sleep till.... LICH KING

Here's my overly cautious leveling plan to reach 70 on my priest before WoLK..

50 April 20
60  June 1
63 July 1
66 August 1
70 September 1

Thanks goodness its the weekend

OR...

 

TGI (fri|s[au][tn][u]?[r]?)day

New Content for WoW...great :P

While Eliah from WoW Insider can't wait for the next patch, there is no sense of urgency here. I'm in the middle of leveling my second character which I started in November. While I do take pleasure in leveling, I have more fun in endgame. My first main dinged 60 pre Burning Crusade and had a good six months of end game raiding. After that Burning Crusade debuted and I lost interest while running the leveling treadmill back to 70. Last November I returned to WoW when a friend started playing and rerolled Horde on a new server. Thank goodness 20-60 has been greatly speed up, but there is still the obvious 60-70 grind ahead of me. Now I'm coming to the realization that when I finally do reach 70 (sometime this summer) Lich King will nearly be upon us. That means 10 more levels... Woo Hoo. So at the time being-  I'm 44 which would mean I have 26 levels to endgame, but its starting to look more like 36. Now Sunwell Plateau I'd love to see, but I'm not high level enough to appreciate the new content yet. All I know is the sooner the 2.4 is released the closer they are to releasing Lich King. So the dangling carrot game goes on as I push forward. When will I reach engame?  Who knows.

 

Retro Servers anyone?

Today is brought to you by the number 6

6 is how many of my butts it would take up to fill the whole cushion of my office chair.

 

Pictoral representation:

 

 

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more RSS wikipedia

As a follow up to my old post, I recently noticed you'll only see comments of the changes, not the full description of comments in the rss feed. This means if whoever made the change doesn't explicitly state what he changed in the comments your left guessing of the edit. I'll look more into this when I get more time.