Basternae.org

I’ve been meaning to get a laptop for a while.  One might say that I don’t need another laptop.  After all, I do have five already.

Of course, all five of these have bad hard drives.  The newest one is seven years old.  One has a blown motherboard.  One lacks a power supply.  One has a dead keyboard.

So maybe it’s time for a new one.

Newegg.com had a sale on one I couldn’t resist — a Gateway T-6345U Pentium T3400 2.16GHz dual core system with 2GB of RAM and 250 GB hard drive for $399 (normally $549).  Since it’s pretty much the same spec as an $800 machine I was considering, it was a no-brainer.  I’ve always thought you had to have no brains to buy Gateway, so in this case it was a done deal.

Believe it or not, the hardware doesn’t actually suck.  You get a lot for 400 bucks.

It shipped with Vista Home Premium.  Resizing the partition to make room for Ubuntu Linux was a bit of a pain — I couldn’t squeeze more than 110GB out of the Vista partiton in the resize, and that was with page files and snapshots turned off and a good solid defrag.  And, of course, after all that ridiculous junk that gets bundled with a new PC was removed.  Why do they even try to sell people Earthlink dialup?

After trying to install Ubuntu 8.04 and totally botching the partition job (it boots, but can’t login because home directories can’t exist — Whoops!), I’ve thrown in the towel on 8.04 and will be installing 9.04 after it finishes downloading (at a blazing 25kb a second — why do I have this 4 meg high-speed connection again?)

Eventually I’ll have the sucker set up for dual booting Vista and Ubuntu and not long after that, set up for developing Basternae 3 and all of the other web miscellany that I’ve been working on (Django, ASP.NET MVC, etc.)

On to the next one… this time it’s the .NET Framework 3.5 Windows Communication Foundation exam.  The study guide for this one seems pretty dry and repetitive so far.

It might just be that I have less experience with WCF than I did with the other exam subjects, but so far this one is requiring a serious act of willpower to stay focused on reading.

I doubt I’ll be able to continue my one-exam-every-two-weeks pace, but we’ll see…

I took and passed the Microsoft 70-561 exam today and how have the “MCTS: .NET Framework 3.5 ADO.NET Applications” certification.

This exam was incredibly hard, and I didn’t obliterate like I did to the previous two.  A score of 700 was required to pass and I picked up a 768.

The study book for the ADO exam wasn’t really all that good — it was far too sparse and left out too much information.  It was only about 450 pages or so and should have been around 700 to really cover the material.

Believe it or not, before this year I had never read any of the novels in the Forgotten Realms series. I had always been more of a fan of Dragonlance.

Lately I’ve started reading The Harpers series. I started because I read and enjoyed the Dark Sun novels by Troy Denning. Since he wrote the first book in the Harpers series, I decided to give them a try. So far I’m up to the third book, Red Magic, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to eventually end up finishing the whole series.

Of course, I know it’s a gateway drug. Before long I’ll be reading all of Salvatore.

As if the random name generator from a week ago wasn’t goofy enough, I’ve created a version with umlauts, accents, and all manner of weird-ifying characters added to the mix.

Try it here: Odd character name generator.

Expect some extremely unpronounceable names.

I wrote a random character name generator in Python today. It’s HERE at Xangis.com.

The system used is:
1. Roll a d6. 1-3 = consonant (1d20). 4-5 = vowel (1d6 with ‘y’ counting as a vowel), 6 = end name.
2. Names must be at least 3 characters long, ignore a roll of 6 if the name is too short.
3. If you get three consonants in a row, end the name.

I used to use that method to generate horrible character names for AD&D a decade and a half ago.

Zone data encapsulation is complete now.  It was a long, tedious process, but it’s all for the greater good.

Last time the code was Fx-Copped, It ran 778,249 checks and found 10,850 issues.  This time, it ran 865,441 checks and found 10,370 issues.  It’s an improvement, but not a huge one.

We now have the power to enforce sanity.  For instance, when an object’s condition is set, we cap it at a max of 100% (perfect) and a minimum of 0% (destroyed).

Finished one exam, on to the next now.  The upcoming target is the Microsoft 70-561 exam, “Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 ADO.NET Application Development”.

I’m already a fair way into the book, and it looks like I shouldn’t have too much trouble wrapping my head around the material.  There are a few things I haven’t really worked with, like the Entity Framework and LINQ to XML, but much of the material involves things I’ve been using a lot lately — datasets, LINQ to SQL, etc.

It should be a couple weeks before I’m ready to tackle the exam, but I can’t imagine that it will be all that hard.  It’s the WCF and ASP.NET ones I’m worried about (mainly due to lack of experience with the technologies).

Over the weekend I took and passed the Microsoft 70-505 certification exam and now have the “MCTS: .NET 3.5 Windows Forms Application Development” certification.  It was far harder than I expected, but I still ended up with a score of 914 (passing score was 700).

Just a progress report — things are moving along slowly but steadily and it shouldn’t take all that much longer to finish data encapsulation for the zone data classes.