It has been all done for a little over a week, and I love it. As I said in my last post, I decided, for the first time in almost 20 years, to build a machine from scratch for my home-office. I spent a bunch of time chatting with friends at work and who I play World of Warcraft with, and I think I ended up with a pretty kicking kit.

The order came in 5 shipments, which had me a bit freaked out that 4 would arrive and the CPU would be a day late stuck in Kansas, but that didn’t happen. The whole thing arrived on time, and in one big pile of boxes. In addition to the order I described last time, I also ordered another Dell E228WFP to go with the one I already had.

Construction of the machine was painless. Far more painless than I thought it would be. I was a bit worried about screwing it up, so I went pretty slowly. Opened each box, looked at what was there, set the instructions aside, etc.

The case is pretty big. It has four fans, including a big 200mm one in the top. You’d think it would be loud, and I guess it is louder than my laptop was, but I don’t find it distracting.

First thing to go in was the motherboard. I decided to put the mobo in before installing the CPU and memory and probably would do it that way next time too. Brad Wilson suggested doing the CPU and RAM on my desk to make it easier, but I figured moving that sucker around all loaded up would suck.

The mobo has tons of ports (USB, eSATA and more) on the back and came with a little panel that slides into a slot on the case to expose all the ports. That was nice and simple. Motherboard slid right in, crewed it down and moved on to the next step.

I bought a 750W power supply. Some would say that is too big, but the graphics card claimed that I needed a minimum 550W supply and the motherboard/CPU wanted 140W so I didn’t want to come up short. It came in a velvet bag like a bottle of Crown Royale, which made my laugh. Tons of connectors on it, which is great. Dropped right in, no issues. On to the next step.

I was a bit concerned about getting the CPU in there right. I’d heard stories of people breaking off pins, or breaking the lockdown clamps and crap like that. I guess going slowly was on my side though… it dropped right in. The only issue I had was getting the heatsink clamp to grab on both sides. I had to push A LOT harder than I expected. I was a bit nervous pushing that hard and had a friend on the phone saying, “Don’t worry man, I’ve done dozens of those and never broken one. Just push on it.” Haha… he was right. In it went.

After that it was smooth sailing. RAM went in next. Who knew RAM came with heat dissipation fins these days? Wow. Video card after that. Man that’s a big sucker. Takes two slots on the case, has its own big ol’ fan and two external power connectors.

Hard disk, DVD came last, then got into routing power and data cables. All in all it came together quite nicely I think and I would happily do it again. I do expect I’ll upgrade this next year to a double graphics setup. Since I’m using nVidia it will be SLI based which means I probably have to buy another mobo. That is the only downside to the sweet bundle deal I got. I’ll also add another 4GB RAM sometime later this year to bring me up to 8GB.

I’m running Windows7 RTM x64 which I love. Best operating system Microsoft has ever produced IMHO. WoW screams on this machine, pulling appx 75-100 fps with most of the graphics sliders turned way, way up. Here is the final setup on my desk showing the two monitors and my work laptop.

I’m using Synergy to share my mouse and keyboard onto the laptop which effectively makes it like a third monitor without having to actually hook it up that way. (More coming on Synergy in a follow-up post.)

I’ve been a gamer for a few years now, mostly playing World of Warcraft but also occasionally spending time on other games. I’ve never actually owned a good gaming machine, however. I’ve always played on a laptop, mostly using and external monitor, keyboard and mouse.

For a few months I’ve been considering building out a new machine from scratch. It was a bit intimidating given how long it has been since I’ve played in this space, but with the help of a few friends who know this stuff, I think I picked out a pretty good setup.

I went off to NewEgg.com and started picking parts. They’ve got lots of combo deals, reviews and spec information so they really are a great place to do this from. I also used Tom’s Hardware Guide to compare important things like CPUs and Video chipsets.

When I finally clicked BUY last night, here’s what I had decided on:

• Case – Antec Nine Hundred Black Steel ATX Mid Tower
• CPU - AMD Phenom II X4 945 Deneb 3.0GHz Quad-Core
• Power Supply - CORSAIR CMPSU-750TX 750W ATX12V / EPS12V SLI Ready
• Hard disk - Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s
• Motherboard - MSI 790FX-GD70 AM3 AMD 790FX ATX AMD Motherboard
• Video - EVGA 896-P3-1170-AR GeForce GTX 275 896MB
• DVDR - SAMSUNG DVD Burner Black SATA Model SH-S223L
• RAM - CORSAIR DOMINATOR 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM 1600

I would have liked to get a 10,000 rpm drive but I got a sweet deal on a CPU/HDD/Mobo bundle and went with it for now. I’ll also probably add 4GB RAM later to bring it up to 8GB total.

Also, I’m not really one for the glowy blue case thing, but the airflow on that case and the great reviews it gets sold me.

We’ll see… I’ll post more once I start putting it together.

Last night I finally got around to upgrading my Blackjack to Windows Mobile 6.0. I’d been delaying because they didn’t have an updater that ran on Vista and I don’t have an XP machine available. Once the Vista updater arrived, I put it on the backlog.

I had an old WoW theme for my Blackjack but I decided it was time to make a new one. Here’s a photo of it running on my phone:

If you’d like to download it, here’s the ZIP file: LichKing_SmartPhoneTheme.zip (26KB)

At Microsoft we’ve been using SmartCards for remote and building access for quite a while. This kind of authentication is called two-factor authentication because you use two different things to prove who you are, instead of just one (e.g. a password).

Two-factor Authentication on Wikipedia:

An authentication factor is a piece of information and process used to authenticate or verify a person's identity for security purposes. Two-factor authentication (T-FA) is a system wherein two different factors are used to authenticate. Using two factors as opposed to one delivers a higher level of authentication assurance. Using more than one factor is sometimes called strong authentication.

Recently the game of World of Warcraft has been plagued by a rash of accounts getting hacked. Typically this is caused by a combination of things:

• The user is probably running as an administrator on their machine (I don’t do this)
• They probably doesn’t have all their security software up-to-date (I do this constantly)
• They were probably browsing websites that have either been compromised by a hacker or are specifically there to attract WoW players (I don’t do this)

The end result is that they get a keylogger trojan installed on their machine. Apparently, this costs Blizzard a huge amount of money to address, so recently they announced a new two-factor system that uses a One Time Password token that the user must use with their regular password.

One-time Password on Wikipedia:

The purpose of a one-time password (OTP) is to make it more difficult to gain unauthorized access to restricted resources, like a computer account. Traditionally static passwords can more easily be accessed by an unauthorized intruder given enough attempts and time. By constantly altering the password, as is done with a one-time password, this risk can be greatly reduced.

There are basically three types of one-time passwords: the first type uses a mathematical algorithm to generate a new password based on the previous, a second type that is based on time-synchronization between the authentication server and the client providing the password, and a third type that is again using a mathematical algorithm, but the new password is based on a challenge (e.g. a random number chosen by the authentication server or transaction details) and a counter instead of being based on the previous password.

Blizzard’s token system is based on the time-synchronization method. The token is a small USB keyfob with an LCD display and a button. To use it, you first configure your account using the token’s serial number. Then when you login, after providing your username and password, you press the button on the token and enter the number displayed on the screen.

Is this kind of thing foolproof? No, of course not. But since most WoW hackers were having their keyloggers post the username and password to a server somewhere for illicit use later, the number will most likely have expired before they get to it. (See Bruce Schneier’s article The Failure of Two-Factor Authentication for more information about the vulnerabilities in these kinds of systems.)

Even though I’ve never had issues with my account security, I ordered mine the day they became available. Apparently so did many other WoW players… Blizzard sold out in an hour. Mine came on Friday and it works great.

I've been a tequila sipper for years. When I was young I had an incident with whiskey that put me off it, possibly for life, and tequila has nicely filled that gap.

I know the difference between good tequila and bad tequila. Good tequila is 100% blue agave and has a little number on the label that say NOM ####. That number if the distillery registration number. Look for it.

My good friend and fellow tequila sipper Aaron Mikulich sent me this great article today that sums up good tequila better than I ever could:

bbum’s weblog-o-mat » What is good tequila?

A choice quote from the beginning:

First, Cuervo Gold is not good tequila. It is actually a really terrible product, quality wise, backed by some brilliant market. Sadly, most of the tequila consumed in the United States is Cuervo Gold or something equally as bad. And by “bad”, I mean bad taste and vicious hangover.

Amen brother!

Here's an interesting little app for those of you who worry too much about death, disease, world population, etc.

http://www.chippynews.com/worldclock.htm

Enjoy!

My wife and I each have our most hated English language abuses. One of her favorites is "these ones" (you should omit the "ones" and just say "these"). One of mine is "I'm good" (it should be "I'm well" or "I feel good" because "well" is an adverb and "good" is an adjective.)

Anyway, for some reason last night I looked up "these ones" in Google and found this excellent list of common english language errors. Take some time digging through it... you never know what you will find.

UPDATE: I am now maintaining this script over on my Warcraft Wiki site on pbwiki. Please go there for documentation and the most recent updates.

I couldn't resist. Sometimes I don't even know why I do these things. Last night I decided to start playing with System.Net.WebClient from Windows PowerShell and four hours later I had something close. A few more hours today and now I have a PowerShell script that:

• Updates Subversion working copies (can be disabled w/ a switch)
• Can be configured to check for updates from wowinterface.com using a simple data file in your addons folder called addons.ps1 (see the comment header below for a sample of this file) and a nice XML endpoint provided by the guys at wowi (thanks Dolby!)
• Will check to see if an addon is one of the WowAce family of addons and will try to update it from their using their RSS feed for information.

I know I can add more addon sites to this later, but now that Auctioneer is up on wowi (ID: 4812) I don't know if I have any addons that I use that can't be updated by this script. Perhaps one or two, but that isn't bad given that I have 169 addons in my Addons directory.

This script has a few dependencies for extracting ZIP and RAR files. You will need to get unzip.exe from Info-ZIP and UnRar.exe from RARLabs and put them both on your path. Both are free.

Anyway, here is the script. There is a download at the bottom of this post for those of you who just want to have it.

DISCLAIMER: This script is supplied without warranty or support. If you play WoW and don't know anything about PowerShell, this might be a bit much for you. Take a look at WowAceUpdater or WUU instead.

  1 #########################################################################
  2 # Name: update-addons.ps1
  3 # Version: 1.0
  4 # Author: Peter Provost <peter@provost.org>
  5 #
  6 # Usage: update-addons [-skipSvn]
  7 #
  8 # Remarks: This is a simple powershell script for updating your
  9 #   World of Warcraft addons. It will autodetect SVN working copies
 10 #   and update them. It will look for a file called addons.ps1
 11 #   in your Addons folder to define special locations for downloading
 12 #   addons (see below for a sample addons.ps1). After that it will test
 13 #   if the addon can be updated from http://files.wowace.com. Any addon
 14 #   still unmatched will be skipped.
 15 #
 16 #   This sample addons.ps1 hows how to configure updates from 
 17 #   wowinterface.com:
 18 #
 19 #   $wowiAddons = @{
 20 #     'FlightMap' = 3897;
 21 #     'Clique' = 5108;
 22 #   };
 23 #
 24 #   At this point only wowinterface.com is supported in this data file
 25 #   but more may be added later.
 26 #
 27 #########################################################################
 28 
 29 param (
 30     [switch] $skipSvn
 31 );
 32 
 33 # Configuration - change these as needed
 34 $wowAddonDir = "C:\World of Warcraft\Interface\Addons";
 35 $stateFile = "PSUpdateAddons.state";
 36 
 37 function update-addon($addonSource, $downloadUrl, $remoteVersion, $fileName)
 38 {
 39     if ( $remoteVersion -ne $localVer) {
 40       write-host "$_ : ($addonSource) Update required: Current ver=$localVer, Remote ver=$remoteVersion";
 41 
 42       $tempFilePath = join-path $tempDir $fileName;
 43       downloadextract-addon $downloadUrl $tempFilePath;
 44 
 45       write-host "`tUpdating state file..." -noNewLine;
 46       $remoteVersion > $stateFilePath;
 47       "done." | write-host;
 48     } else {
 49       write-host "$_ : ($addonSource) Addon up-to-date. Skipping.";
 50     }
 51 }
 52 
 53 # Helper function for updating a single addon]
 54 function downloadextract-addon ([string] $uri, [string] $tempFile)
 55 {
 56   write-host "`tDownloading $uri to $($tempFile)..." -noNewLine;
 57   $wc.DownloadFile( $uri, $tempFile );
 58   write-host "done.";
 59 
 60   $ext = [System.IO.Path]::GetExtension($tempFile);
 61   switch ($ext) {
 62     ".rar" {
 63       write-host "`tExtracting RAR Archive..." -noNewLine;
 64       & unrar x -o+ $tempFile $wowAddonDir;
 65     }
 66     ".zip" {
 67       write-host "`tExtracting ZIP Archive..." -noNewLine;
 68       & unzip -o $tempFile -d $wowAddonDir;
 69     }
 70     default { write-host "UNKNOWN EXTENSION TYPE!" }
 71   }
 72   write-host "done.";
 73 
 74   write-host "`tDeleting zip file..." -noNewLine;
 75   remove-item $tempFile;
 76   write-host "done.";
 77 }
 78 
 79 function test-wowaceaddon( [string] $addonName )
 80 {
 81   return ((get-wowaceaddon $addonName)-ne $null)
 82 }
 83 
 84 function get-wowaceaddon( [string] $addonName )
 85 {
 86   $xpath = ("//item[title='ADDON']" -replace 'ADDON', $_.Name);
 87   return $indexXmlDoc.SelectSingleNode($xpath);
 88 }
 89 
 90 # Setup a few things before we get started
 91 $wc = new-object System.Net.WebClient;
 92 $tempDir = join-path (get-content env:\temp) "PsWowUpdater";
 93 if (-not (test-path $tempDir)) { new-item -type directory -path $tempDir; }
 94 
 95 # Load in the WowAce Index file
 96 write-host "Downloading latest.xml from http://files.wowace.com";
 97 $uri = "http://files.wowace.com/latest.xml";
 98 $rssData = $wc.DownloadString($uri);
 99 $indexXmlDoc = [xml] $rssData;
100 
101 # Load in the WOWI config database
102 . (join-path $wowAddonDir "addons.ps1")
103 
104 (get-childitem $wowAddonDir | ? { $_.PSIsContainer }) | % {
105 ## SVN UPDATE
106   if (join-path $_.Fullname ".svn" | test-path ) {
107     if ($skipSvn.isPresent) {
108       write-host "$_ : Skipping SVN working copy";
109     } else {
110       write-host "$_ : Updating SVN working copy";
111       svn up -q $_.Fullname;
112     }
113   }
114 
115 ## WOWINTERFACE.COM
116   elseif ($wowiAddons.Contains($_.Name)) {
117     $stateFilePath = join-path $_.Fullname "PSUpdateAddons.state";
118     $localVer = "";
119     if (test-path $stateFilePath) { $localVer = (get-content $stateFilePath); }
120 
121     $uri = ("http://www.wowinterface.com/patcherXXXX.xml" -replace "XXXX", $wowiAddons[$_.Name]);
122     $wowiXml = [xml] $wc.DownloadString($uri);
123 
124     $downloadUrl = $wowiXml.UpdateUI.Current.UIFileURL;
125     $remoteVersion = $wowiXml.UpdateUI.Current.UIVersion;
126     $fileName = $wowiXml.UpdateUI.Current.UIFile;
127     $addonSource = "WowInterface.com";
128 
129     update-addon $addonSource $downloadUrl $remoteVersion $fileName
130   }
131 
132 ## WOWACE FILES
133   elseif (test-wowaceaddon $_.Name) {
134     $stateFilePath = join-path $_.Fullname "PSUpdateAddons.state";
135     $localVer = "";
136     if (test-path $stateFilePath) { $localVer = (get-content $stateFilePath); }
137 
138     $elt = get-wowaceaddon $_.Name;
139 
140     $downloadUrl = $elt.enclosure.url;
141     $remoteVersion = $elt.version;
142     $fileName = $downloadUrl.Substring($downloadUrl.LastIndexOf("/")+1);
143     $addonSource = "WowAce.com";
144 
145     update-addon $addonSource $downloadUrl $remoteVersion $fileName
146   }
147 
148 ## Unknown addon source
149   else {
150     write-host "$_ : Can't figure this one out. Skipping.";
151   }
152 }

Download update-addons.zip (2KB). And here is my addons.ps1 data file to update my wowi addons. Create a file like that in your Addons folder and the script will find it.

Have you ever suddenly gone into World of Warcraft and found yourself wondering, "what the hell is that button?" It happened to me a while back after a patch day update and I couldn't figure out which addon had put it there. It really started pissing me off.

I jumped over to the #wowace IRC channel on Freenode.net and asked if anyone had any ideas. They didn't, but they did have a cool trick for figuring out the Frame's name. Assuming you have any one of the Ace addons installed on your system, you can just use this slash command in game:

/print GetMouseFocus():GetName()

That will tell you the name of the frame which might help you figure out what addon created it. (It sure helped me.)

Enjoy!

Today Brad Wilson and I presented this talk at Seattle Code Camp 2.0. Here is the session description for those of you who didn't make it:

World of Warcraft is arguably the most successful massively multiplayer game in history. Millions of players from hundreds of countries all playing together to kill monsters and each other. What could be more fun? Well, for many geeks one thing that is more fun is taking advantage of the very extensible nature of the user-interface by writing addons and extensions in a programming language called Lua. Join Brad and Peter for this fun session where you will learn how to bend the WoW UI to your will. (We promise to leave some time at the end for a little game-time demos and Q&A.)

As promised, here are a number of links to the information we discussed today. I hope you enjoyed the talk as much as we enjoyed giving it.

Lua Information

• About Lua @ Lua.org
• Programming in Lua 1st Ed. @ Lua.org
• Lua 5.0 Reference Manual @ Lua.org
• Lua Tutorial @ Lua-users.org

World of Warcraft API Information

• Official World of Warcraft Interface AddOn Kit @ Blizzard.com
• World of Warcraft API @ WowWiki.com
• World of Warcraft System Events @ WowWiki.com
• Wow Client Version Changes @ WowInterface.com

WowAce Libraries Information

• Ace-OO 2.0 Documentation @ WowAce.com
• Ace-OO 2.0 Tutorial @ WowAce.com
• Welcome Home Tutorial @ WowAce.com