As I got my laptop I also needed a mouse, for the first few weeks I just detached my computer’s mouse and plugged it into my laptop, works great but the switching is annoying.

So I decided to buy a mouse identical to the one I had (the Razer Deathadder), there are a few changes to the new model, higher DPI (3500 or something instead of 1800) and a new cord but nothing of significance for me.

So I ordered the mouse from the Razer website and a few days later I received a mail the package was sent, that afternoon they delivered it.

However when they came to deliver it somehow the packages got switched as this package said it contained a wireless controller for a PS3, so I declined the package.

After this I contacted Razer and after giving them all the info they needed they sent a new mouse which arrived today. So another good job by Razer.

~Xeross

As you can read in my previous post I’ve applied for Hellfleet and I’ve been invited to fleet up and roam around with them, so here’s a report of the latest one.

When I joined the fleet I had no idea what we were doing, all I knew was what the mandatory fitting was (cruiser, remote armor reppers and some other stuff).

So when the briefing started it turned out as a sort of remote repping course, the basics were explained and after that we set out learning while we were roaming about.

As soon as we undocked someone immediately managed to get gate aggro by remote repping someone else, resulting in a perfect training environment of the gate guns rotating targets and us keeping up with them.

After this we continued to roam about with the gate guns still aggressive to us so the learning continued.

After a while we managed to spot what I think was a Zaelot, we warped back and forth between gates at 100km for a while however he kept warping to the gate at 0.

After the last warp he started approaching us, and we decided to approach him, we locked him up and started orbiting, while keeping a close look on our watch list to make sure no one would get blown up.

After a while it became apparent we weren’t going to break his tank (Cruisers don’t do that much damage), and one of us even died because we ran out of cap.

After this the Zaelots friends warped in so we decided to jump. After this we somehow encountered them again, however this time some of us had trouble warping out and didn’t survive.

Finally we decided to dock up to refit, however as everyone was getting a bit tired we decided to call it a day and go home.

So my first steps into the realms of remote repping, it’s quite hard to keep up with the RRing while still putting up a fight, however it’s powerful so good thing I get some experience with it.

~Xeross

As most of you probably noticed the blog was down a every now and then the last few days. This is because we moved the blog once more.

I just didn’t like the restricted environment of a shared hosting account with CPanel, so I have switched the blog over to a Cloud VPS on the Rackspace Cloud

Now after setting up the blog on this new server we encountered a problem, We were going into deep swap usage on the server, meaning it would basically lockp-up entirely.

So after discovering this I went to research on how to resolve this and eventually made the switch from Apache with PHP as a module to nginx with PHP-FPM.

It still requires some tweaking but behaves a lot better compared to apache, especially now PHP isn’t loaded to handle static files.

I’ve also uploaded a shiny clean install of wordpress, meaning all wordpress files are in their original form and all plugins have been reinstalled and reactivated.

All that remains now is to get IntenseDebate to behave itself again, now waiting for it to import the comments.

Well that’s it for today, onto another long period of uninterrupted blog uptime galore.

~Xeross

Welcome to the eighteenth installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by none other than me, CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed to crazykinux@gmail.com. Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

On May 6th 2010, EVE Online celebrated its 7th Anniversary. Quite a milestone in MMO history, especially considering that it is one of the few virtual worlds out there to see its population continually grow year after year. For some of you who’ve been here since the very beginning, EVE has evolved quite a lot since its creation. With the expansion rolling out roughly twice a year, New Eden gets renewed and improved regularly. But, how about you the player? How has you gaming style evolved through the years or months since you’ve started playing? Have you always been a carebear, or roleplayer? Have you only focused on PvP or have you given other aspects of the game a chance – say manufacturing. Let’s hear your story!

Yes, the next Blog Banter is upon us, first of all a belated congratulations to CCP for EVE’s 7th anniversary.

With most games I’ve always focused on a single part of the game, but well most games don’t give you a choice over what to do other than the class you want to play.

Now in EVE there’s lots of things to do: Mining, PvP, Ratting, Missioning, Trading, Manufacturing, etc. and every one of these activities have all sorts of sub-categories themselves too (For example PvP: Pirating, Null-Sec Roaming, etc.).

So I started my career as a Capsuleer on the 31st of July 2009, knowing nothing about EVE I started following the tutorials to understand it a little better.

After that I still had lots of questions and somehow I got into Corsair Industries after this I had some great people help me out with all the questions I had about the EVE universe, and they’re probably the people that have gotten me through those critical first days in EVE.

Now I quickly got into a Rifter back then and traveled to our headquarters, I joined my corp mates in doing missions, while not being of use it was fun to have some people to do stuff with.

After a while I moved from Corsair Industries to the Escarthian Mining Corporation I got in touch with them through the Corp Recruitment Channel (Yep it’s possible), and moved again to their base of operations.

As their name suggests I got my first taste of mining with them, though I was still mining in a frigate/cruiser back then, and of course I did missions with them (While still missioning myself in a shiny rupture.

Now after this some corp hopping occurred until I settled into Novadyne Dynamics (Corp’s closed now) for a while, however the CEO turned out to be a big fraud as he had stolen billions of assets from corp members (Which he also did when he was the head of the Escarthian Mining Corp).

This discovery was only made when I already left Novadyne Dynamics for Ghosts of EMC (It took a while to join them) which was the corp people that left EMC (Escarthian Mining Corp) founded after they discovered the CEO’s fraud, so I hang out with them for a while in high-sec mining and missioning as usual.

However after a few days when I logged in a mail had arrived we were moving to null-sec, both thrilled and scared by this bold move we started packing and joined Fusion Death inc. which was coincidentally a corp most of us also hopped into a while ago.

So after a few days we packed and headed into null-sec, it was  quite a trip, and even though it was just flying and jumping it was still exciting and fun for me, I was shaking (IRL) the entire trip from anxiety and adrenaline I guess.

Now we settled into null-sec and my wallet that at that point contained 900 million ISK I had acquired through GTC’s quickly shrunk to under 50 million ISK as we didn’t have our ships from high-sec down here yet.

Here we spent ratting and mining and PvPing and we’ve been here ever since, null-sec is awesome and I can’t imagine life in Empire anymore, even just the ratting and mining has been awesome with the corp so we’re here to stay that’s for sure.

After this move I’ve tried various things including manufacturing in both null-sec and high-sec, however those weren’t profitable, however that will change because I’m primarily training for manufacturing now.

I have also recently started a new venture on an alt: trading. After I encountered someone that happened to be a programmer and also a trader in EVE I gave it a real try, and I can say it’s going pretty well.

My NAV (Net Asset Value: Estimated ISK value of everything you own) on my trade alt has doubled in a week and is continuing to grow so I’m going to keep this up to fund my PvPing.

Well that’s my history in EVE from august 2009 to present day, I hope you enjoyed reading it, and you can continue reading with the adventures of my fellow bloggers:

1. CrazyKinux’s Musing: The Heroes with a Thousand Faces
2. StarFleet Comms: Life. Evolved.
3. A Carebear’s Journeu: This Carebear Thinks He Is Developing Teeth
4. The Elitist: Our ventures in EVE
5. A Mule in EVE: From a guppy predator
6. Travels of the Ronin: Evolution and Adaptation
7. The Ralpha Dogs: The Past Through Tomorrow
8. Where the frack is my ship: A journey, not a destination
9. I am Keith Neilson: 7 Year Itch?
10. Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah: Evolution Me
11. EVE Opportunist: A long history of a short time
12. Roc’s Ramblings: Things Change
13. Guns Ablaze: Onwards and Upwards
14. EVE On Real Life: Haven’t you grown up yet?
15. The Fang: The path of the ninja
16. EVEOGANDA: Whoops Apocalypse!
17. EVE SOB: Learning to swim
18. The Life of a Dead Jester: My Time with EVE
19. Personal Files, Ciarente Roth: Personal Diary 18.6.112
20. Learning to Fly: Change is Good
21. Depths Unknown: Falling With Style
22. Morphisat’s Blog: Jack of all trades
23. More as they get published…

So a few days ago I bought an internal network card, after installing it Windows failed to pick it up, after this I tried it on my brother’s PC and it worked just fine. To be sure I swapped it with another card of the same model and tried again, same result.

This led to the conclusion that my motherboard was broken, and as I really wanted to get rid of the horror that is USB WiFi sticks I decided to buy a new one.

With this purchase I would need new DDR3 Internal Memory (As my old motherboard only supported DDR2), and my case was also pretty busted so I replaced that too, a quick list of the new shinies acquired:

• Gigabyte GA-790XTA-UD4
• Antec Nine Hundred Two
• 2x2GB DDR3 1333Mhz (Forgot brand/type)

So after this I had to reinstall Windows because it doesn’t like when you suddenly give it a new motherboard. That’s all done again, I’m slowly but surely installing all my software again but the most important things are installed again (EVE and my Dev Tools).

Well that’s it for this post.

~Xeross

Another fitting, tried and tested, it works fine on belt rats, and it should also be able to complete the hardest anomalies (Drone Hordes for example).

however for that you need a lot of level 5 shield and capacitor skills (Or you can use it in conjunction with a Dual Large Shield RR Osprey).

[Raven, Ratting Active Shield]
Capacitor Flux Coil II
Capacitor Flux Coil II
Ballistic Control System II
Ballistic Control System II
Ballistic Control System II

X-Large Clarity Ward Booster I
Shield Boost Amplifier I
Shield Boost Amplifier I
Invulnerability Field II
Invulnerability Field II
Photon Scattering Field II

‘Arbalest’ Cruise Launcher I, Paradise Cruise Missile
‘Arbalest’ Cruise Launcher I, Paradise Cruise Missile
‘Arbalest’ Cruise Launcher I, Paradise Cruise Missile
‘Arbalest’ Cruise Launcher I, Paradise Cruise Missile
‘Arbalest’ Cruise Launcher I, Paradise Cruise Missile
‘Arbalest’ Cruise Launcher I, Paradise Cruise Missile
Salvager I
Small Tractor Beam I

Large Capacitor Control Circuit I
Large Capacitor Control Circuit I
Large Capacitor Control Circuit I

Acolyte II x5
Infiltrator II x5

And if you have the skills for it and you don’t need the salvager/tractor beam you can swap the SBA’s for tech 2 ones, and swap the Clarity Ward for a T2 shield booster

I’ve taken a break from EVE for a few days now, other then changing skills and having done 30 minutes of ratting the belts the EVE client has remained pretty much closed.

Not that I don’t like EVE any more but as some others the passion to play has died out for now, partially because I can’t be bothered to “look for enjoyment” at the moment, and partially because I’ve been programming with newly found passion lately.

Now I will continue keeping my EVE accounts active and will check back every now and then but for now I’m enjoying myself more with other means and various single player games.

I’ve been working almost non-stop on a game engine I’m creating together with a friend, we already had the plan of creating a 2d MMO for some time now but until recently we had to rely on 3rd party engines that just didn’t cut it.

So we have started creating our own engine in C++ he currently has some of the graphics rendering done and I’m busy writing the networking code, so far I’ve made more progress then I anticipated but still a lot of work has to be done.

And next to that I’m also working on implementing some crucial features into my CMS, fundamental features such as user password resets and password/email changing.

Well that’s it for this update on my current ventures, hope you enjoyed reading it.

~Xeross

This script will fix the personal messages in OGame 1.2.

Download

Over at userscripts.org

Changelog

1.0 – 17/Apr/2010

Initial Release

1.1 – 25/Apr/2010

Added an additional search&replace for \’

Code

// ==UserScript==
// @name           OGame 1.2 PM Fix (v1.1)
// @namespace      http://theelitist.net/ogame-12-pm-fix/
// @description    Fixes The numerous \n\n and backslashes in PMs
// @include        http://*.ogame.*/game/index.php?page=showmessage*
// ==/UserScript==

(function() {
    var body = document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0];
    body.innerHTML = body.innerHTML.replace(/\\\\\\/g, "");
    body.innerHTML = body.innerHTML.replace(/\\n/g, "<br />");
    body.innerHTML = body.innerHTML.replace(/\\'/g, "'");
})();

Post any bugs/suggestions here in the comments or at userscripts.org

~Xeross

As I’m using my CMS in an ever increasing amount of projects it became more and more apparent that the current html structure isn’t that flexible for the various types of designs the projects have.

With this came the decision to redo the entire design both html and graphics wise. This decision was made a while ago but until a few days ago I hadn’t touched the idea.

So currently I’m rebuilding the html and css with compatibility and ease-of-use in mind, so without further ado see here the old and new design (Click them to enlarge).

The Old

The New (Click for live example)

Now let me know what you think about the new design and perhaps you have some suggestions, I’ll consider them .

I might also publish the html once it’s finished, dunno yet.

After reading this post by Myrhial Arkenath I decided to overhaul some aspects of my blog too, adding some plugins and changing some settings.

Permalinks

As you might have noticed I have changed my permalink structure, up till about 10 minutes ago the structure would’ve been /year/month/day/post-name however the date part is completely unneeded and just makes the URL longer. So now I’ve changed the structure to be /post-name as can be seen in your url bar right now (probably).

Plugins

Next to this I’ve also added some additional plugins, for info on what they do again check Myrhial’s post

• WP Super Cache
• SEO Slugs
• Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs aren’t yet implemented in the blog theme but will be added soon.

~Xeross