paran0id’s blog

It all happened yesterday, April 11th. Sylph Alliance dropped a new Outpost in the ZQ-Z3Y solar system, T-HHHT constellation.

After 3 months of planning and working on details, we began moving the Outpost from empire. A 6 freighter caravan began it’s trip reaching ESA solar system 6 hours later. The caravan then parked in empire for a few hours and at around 0230 it started moving down to ZQ-Z3Y. 2 hours later the freighters arrived their final destination. The caravan then safed up and waited till around 0930 eve time to prepare the anchoring of the Outpost. Stone Shadow Syndicate started building the Outpost at around 10.50 eve time.

I was out of town since Sunday and my portable internet connection isn’t very good so I wasn’t online very often. Anyways, I just got home today and I noticed that Whatpulse is alive again after 1 year and half. Personally, I never thought the owners would bother with this project again, I had it tagged as ‘dead’ for a long time now, but apparently they have a new guy in the development team and they just started developping with maximum strength.

For those of you that don’t know what Whatpulse is, it’s a small piece of software that counts your keystrokes and mouse clicks. Every 24 hours (depending on configuration settings) it sends (pulses) your keystrokes and clicks to the server and builds a nice page with your statistics and your rank worldwide. On top of that, Whatpulse also tracks down your mouse movement and tells you how many Kilometers have you walked with your mouse. For some people this might seem useless but I’m a sucker for statistics, I love this type of things.

The new Whatpulse release (1.6.2) features a lot of bug fixes as well as some new features. You can read more about it here.

There is, however, a new unofficial (for now) version – 1.6.2.1 – that includes some fixes and debug code wiping. You can download Whatpulse 1.6.2.1 here.

Joint OP started at around 1900 EVE Time.
Fleet moved to Assah and then made route to low-sec system Irshah.

From there we moved around in Derelik region and bashed a few POS’s into Reinforced mode belonging to X13 Alliance and Ushra’Khan.

The beginning of the Operation was a little messy but I have to say that I wasn’t 100% listening to comms either. After the first half hour everything was running smooth. We had capitals on hold, scouts covering all entry points, a support fleet with RR battleships and a sniper fleet.

The first POS we engaged was handled by the capital fleet for the most part – snipers fleet assisted in the beginning – and it went down pretty fast. While capitals were bashing the POS, my fleet (support) was sitting in one of the gates waiting for potential threat. Anyways, POS went down and after that we engaged another 2 POS’s from X13 but this time support fleet was also called in as there was no enemy movement in any of the nearby systems.

  
CVA/LFA/Sylph engaging one of the X13 Alliance POS’s in Irshah

After X13 POS’s were down, we had one final POS to take care of: Ushra’Khan’s “Bannable Offense” – Location: Mifrata.
This was a True Sansha Control Tower Medium with a 2 warp scramblers, bunch of shield hardeners, jammers and a few True Sansha weapons. It was an awesome time, specially because we had Lord Makk sitting inside the forcefield watching us beating down his POS into reinforcement. The operation took 5 hours and a half and it was very well coordinated and commanded (great job FC’s!)

  
 
Bashing Ushra’Khan POS in Mifrata

EVE expansion ‘Apocrypha’ was released 4 days ago, March 10th. What can I say about this expansion so far?
Well, to be honest, the first that comes to my mind is: good job. I don’t remember an expansion going so smooth and being so successfull as this one, and i’ve seen quite a few already!

The most noticable changes:
It’s all about the Wormholes. The whole thing has been modified and adjusted because of these new space anomalies. Scanning is completly different from what it was before Apocrypha, we have T3 modulated ships, new probes, new skills, new cosmic anomalies and complexes, and so on.
We also have the skill queue, which isn’t 100% fully functional right now as there are reports of a few bugs on it, but it’s nothing as serious as, for example, the whole ’socket closed’ problem everyone had in Quantum Rise. There’s also the whole ‘Attribute Remap’ function which i’m not really to fond of since we are limited to 1 remap every 12 months.
We also have some new tweaks and features added to the user interface. There’s a new fitting screen that allows you to save/load ship fittings (*very* usefull imo), the neocom has suffered a few changes too (no more zoom in/out buttons), and few fixes and new options added to the context menus here and there.

On top of this all we have the new Premium Lite graphics (shader model 2.0), i was actually thinking that this was going to be a bad move, but I can honestly say that, so far, i haven’t noticed ANY change on my game performance with these new graphics. (I was using classic graphics before) Right now, i’m using ‘max quality’ settings and everything just runs smooth as it ran 5 days ago. There’s also new animations for jumping, warping, scanning (survey scanner, etc), salvaging, tracking beams, turrent effects, scramblers, etc etc as well as new sounds for each of the new animations mentioned. Not every single bit of the new graphics or sounds are working I mean, on wormhole space there are some problems with textures, the wormholes and the warp animation seems to be screwed up (there’s some pixelated bits, you can see it on that wormhole screenshot on the left), the sound glitches and loops when listening to the new race-intros etc.

All in all, hats off CCP. You guys did a great job and you actually didn’t cause THAT many problems on the community with the new expansion. Some people complained about the file size of the patch, granted it was a big download (nearly 2GB for classic clients) it was more than worth it!

EVE: Apocrypha is recommended and an endorsed product by this blog. :)

One week ago, CVA, Sylph, Paxton Federation, Aegis Militia, Sev3rance and Libertas Fidelitas engaged on Ushra’Khan POS’s that were being used as a tactical point to perform attacks in the northern providence region.
The operation started on saturday, 14th February, and ended 2 days later with the destruction of Ushra’Khan’s last tower. Here’s a little report from the first day of the operation that I found:

Saturday 14th February, 2009

“I woke to the howling of an alarm siren over my bunk in Promethia. Now that in itself wasn’t unnatural, it happened at all hours of the day and all hours of the night. But this one was louder and accompanying it a constant audio feed from our admirals.

“ALL SYLPH PILOTS GET IN YOUR BATTLESHIPS AND GET TO ERVK-P.” The message repeated over and over. “ALL CAPITAL PILOTS ARE TO ASSEMBLE THERE AS WELL. EVERYONE NEEDS TO BE THERE.”

[...]

I queried the station for undocking, my ship waiting for clearance before it could be placed in the launch tubes for battleships. Next to me, a Revelation Dreadnought was already launching, going out the launch bay for capitals. It just barely fit.

“Permission granted, clear the bay.” The Promethia automated docking system replied.

My ship was lowed my magnetic locks into the launch bay and catapulted into space. Immediately I aligned and warped for BR-N97, followed by ERVK-P. Upon arriving the fleet was assembling nicely, with our capitals on standby and our conventional fleet also holding steady.

Our allies were on their way, with us joining up when they reached ERVK-P. Together, multiple fleets with hundreds of ships began working their way down to the target area. Our destination was still classified, but we all knew what was going to go down. We were hitting GE and GMLH, two system currently being used as a staging ground for UK.

Status: 3 POS towers reinforced, with almost no resistance, but we knew that tomorrow would be when they came out of reinforced, and tomorrow was when they would be finally destroyed”

Today I decided to update my blog to the latest version of Wordpress. After updating, I felt like the theme was outdated too (I was tired of it, to be honest) so I went and changed the theme to something more… me.

After playing around with the usual customizations I have to do on the themes, i noticed my permalinks weren’t working. For some reason, I deleted my .htaccess file and I never replaced it. (lol!) Anyways, all links are working now.

For those of you that, ocasionally, come here and got tired of seeing all those ‘404 not found’ errors, I apologize. But hey! It’s your fault, you should’ve warned me about it. :)

(updated: 4.15pm GMT)
Ok, so now there’s more info on the table. BoB claims it wasn’t spy related. Anyways, here’s the latest news on the matter:

“NOL-M9 – A few hours after midnight on 05.02.111, Band of Brothers alliance was disbanded. The loss of formal alliance status forcibly relinquished all Band of Brothers held sovereignty, and thus is expected to render all their outposts vulnerable, pause the construction of all motherships and titans currently being built in their capital assembly arrays and interfere with the proper fuctioning of cynojammers and jump bridge waystations at their control towers. This effect has never been seen before on such a huge scale, so there is much uncertainty about the precise effects.

There are currently multiple theories as to the actual cause of the disbanding of the alliance. A director in Band of Brother’s executor corp, TinFoil, and director Haargoth Agamar of Black Nova Corp are alleged to have disbanded the alliance and handed over Black Nova Corp assets at the instigation of The Mittani of Goonswarm. Comments on the Corporation, Alliance and Organization Discussions section of GalNet, however, shed doubt on this claim.”

A Director from a BoB corp, states:
“I like how everyone is stating their opinions like it is fact… when in truth they have no idea what happened. I will state as a fact:

“1) it wasnt a bill/money issue.
“2) it wasnt spy related. “

Elitus of Reikoku stated on GalNet that the issue was not an unpaid bill:

“I’ll go and say this: previous bill was paid on the 6th of Janurary. Previous bill before that was paid on the 6th of December. Currently looks like HAT was compromised… Log shows 500 mil was removed from the wallet stating ‘mittani says hi.’ We are investigating.”

in http://myeve.eve-online.com/mb/news.asp?nid=2737

related threads on EVE-Online forums:
http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=990388
http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=990381

Ok, not much to say at this point, still way too fresh. Let’s just hope Goonswarm did it through game mechanics and not through external ways.
More info here:
http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=990381

This is for all of you Ultima Online fans! :) UO is still alive and kicking. It’s been more than 7 months that i’ve returned to the UO scene and i’m amazed with the amount of people still playing this game.

A lot has happened while I was away of UO, UOGateway is no more. Now we have ConnnectUO which is currently being redesigned and should be done -very- soon.

Anyways, long story short, I returned to Oblivion Reloaded shard after a 4 year break. The shard is SO MUCH better now and the community along with the staff is great!
If you’re looking for a peaceful, interesting, with a good community and well-driven (dev wise), this is the place for you! :)

Take a look at Oblivion Wiki, all you need to know to start playing is there along with a lot of information regarding custom items, dungeons etc!

Okay, i just read this @ Dougal Campbell blog about Wordpress 2.3.x having major security holes as well as add-ons and plugins, here’s the post he wrote:

in Upgrade or else!:

Okay, people, if you are running any version of WordPress older than 2.3.3*, you need to upgrade now. Seriously. WordPress 2.3.2 and older have security holes that are being actively exploited by hackers to inject spam links into blogs which are not maintained. And search engines like Technorati are de-listing hacked blogs. Are you listening now? Do I have your attention? Upgrade your web apps before you get hacked and your site drops off the search-engine radar.

While the Technorati article specifically talks about WordPress sites, this goes for any web application. You need to pay attention to updates which are released, and upgrade whenever a security probem is fixed. WordPress gets particular attention due to its popularity and the sheer number of installed sites out in the wild. But it is no more or less secure than any other similar web application. So whatever you’re running, keep it up-to-date.

And the same goes for any add-ons — if you install third-part plugins or themes, make sure you keep up with updates. WordPress 2.5 makes updating plugins easier than ever. Review your Plugins page from time to time, and pay attention when it tells you that a newer version of a plugin is available.

read the full article here: http://dougal.gunters.org/blog/2008/04/08/upgrade-or-else

So the owner of EVEHQ decided to run a contest for EVEHQ application (a tool for EVE-Online players that let them manage their chars skill training, assets, generates reports, map routes and a lot more) at the EVE-GFX website.

The process took nearly 1 month, a lot of artists entered the competion and there was a lot of nice works which also deserved the prize (400 million ISK).
In the end, there was only one winner and it was me. Besides the splash screens the owner also wanted the logo i come up with in the splash screens (the one you see at the top of this post).
I made 5 entries/versions of the splash screens which you can check below.

splash screens: v1 | v2 | v3 | v4 | v5