gaming & great weather

Ryan

Weather is great for a change, we planted some corn last weekend. Instead of indoor climbing we went biking this week. was fun, but my butt was kinda sore after a few hours.

And what’s new with gaming here? Well I started dual-boxing World of Warcraft (playing two characters simultaneously).  I must say, playing two different clients at the same time is something you have to get your head wrapped around. Right now I’m trying to get a warlock and a paladin up to max level. Then I can use my paladin for normal instances, and dual box two warlocks at the same time (2xsame class is defiantly less of a mind twister). Other than that I started plaing Final Fantasy: Core Crisis on my PSP. It gets a 10/10 rating on my “cool games” scale.

PS. Did I mention that my wordpress is strange? Every time I write something, a red box pops up that says “You do not have permission to do that.”. While that is probably true, I have no Idea WHAT it wants to do. Thus making it a bit difficult to fix the problem …

dialog

Ryandialog, linux

Yeah, every time I write a oneliner that could use a nice curses gui I go and forget what the prog is called to easily make them. DIALOG, god I must be getting old, couldn’t remember that if my life depended on it.
Anyway, anyone who wants to spiff up a nice little command line thingy should have a look at it, makes life tons easier.

rrdtool magic

Ryanrrd, rrdtool

I upgraded some rrdtool graphs today (in the examples below, I was using weekly graphs). First I smoothed out some of the data with TREND. That was pretty easy, you just specify which data and the timeframe it should use to smooth out: CDEF:trend_data=data,21600,TREND smooths out data by 6 hours (21600 seconds). trend_data can be used afterwards (for LINE, AREA, ….) The DEF will have to be expanded a bit so that enough data is available for the TREND, I just added a days woth of data to begining and end by adding the following to the end of my DEF statement :start=now-8d:end=now+1d

The whole trend would look kinda like this:
rrdtool graph image.png \
–width 500 –height 200 \
–end now –start now-7d \
–vertical-label “data” \
DEF:data=some.rrd:data:AVERAGE:start=now-8d:end=now+1d \
CDEF:trend_data=data,21600,TREND \
LINE1:trend_data#000000:”smoothed out data”

The next thing I played around with, was extrapolating the data and drawing a projection. Fist thing to do, is open up the graph to end a few days in the future, easy to do with the –start and –end options: –end now+3d –start now-7d Now lets make DEF over the time range we want to use for the projection, this example will use the data of the last two weeks: DEF:data=some.rrd:data:AVERAGE:start=now-2w:end=now+3d All we need now is a little rrd magic I found in the depths of the internet:
VDEF:D=data,LSLSLOPE \
VDEF:H=data,LSLINT \
CDEF:projection=data,POP,D,COUNT,*,H,+ \
LINE1:projection#BB2030:”2 week projection”

Ok, if we throw both trend and projection together we end up with a cute little rrd mess that looks something like this:
rrdtool graph image.png \
–width 500 –height 200 \
–end now –start now-7d \
–vertical-label “data” \
DEF:data1=some.rrd:data:AVERAGE:start=now-8d:end=now+1d \
DEF:data2=some.rrd:data:AVERAGE:start=now-2w:end=now+3d \
CDEF:trend_data=data1,21600,TREND \
LINE1:trend_data#000000:”smoothed out data” \
VDEF:D=data2,LSLSLOPE \
VDEF:H=data2,LSLINT \
CDEF:projection=data2,POP,D,COUNT,*,H,+ \
LINE1:projection#BB2030:”2 week projection”

programming

Ryan1 Comment on programmingphp, wow

Haven’t posted in a while, not much going on. Currently the only thing half way interesting is a small web application I’m writing. Every few hours it checks the database of World of Warcraft, and saves in a database who is in which guild. When it is done you can see which players switched guilds when. I’ve got all kinds of funny statistics going on in my head that I can generate out of that data. Since there is no list of all characters oder guilds on a realm, I wrote it to automatically expand the checks when it discovers new characters or guilds. Currently it is watching about 2000 horde players in the EU realm Kil’jaeden. Given the high fluctuation of people joining or leaving guilds, I’d say that after about 2 weeks I should have about 80% of the larger guilds on the realm.

Not much I can show right now since I’ve only written the back end (database, and script to scan and save data). No front end yet, I still have about a week or two till enough data has been saved to actually write and test a front end.