I just got an update to Lightning on my Windows machine. The main calender view looks a little sharper, I like it. Lightning isn't the perfect calendar application but it's the closest thing I've found. The multi-week view always did seem kind of week to me before. It was hard to tell what months you were looking at. They've tidied that up nicely now. The new style also seems to have less wasted space.

Sharing calendars through iCal is mandatory for me, Lightning isn't the only client that has to use my calendars. It has always dealt with that very nicely. Now I also got an error message about difficulty writing to a calendar file, I think this is new since I used to have occasional silent (and irritating) failures. Error messages aren't fun but they're an improvement on silent failure.

The Views module in Drupal is both useful and confusing. The basic idea is that Views will allow you to provide a styled list of some content. This content can be pages, stories, blog posts, comments, users, RSS feeds items, nodes and even some other kinds of data. You can think of it kind of like those generic examples of PHP and MySQL that pull out a bunch of records from a table and just give you a list. Except that it doesn't rely on just MySQL. And it doesn't just give you a list. And it does validation. And you don't really have to write any code.

The Views interface in Drupal 6 (under Administer >> Site Building >> Views) is pretty complicated. I don't understand all of it yet, so I decided to work through an example of something that I needed here on Late Night PC. There's a view included called "archive" which shows up at example.com/archive/yyyymm. This is pretty close to the way I was doing my archives under Wordpress. My archives page URLs had the form latenightpc.com/blog/archives/yyyy/mm. So I basically wanted the archive view with these changes:

1. Move the URL from archive to blog/archives
2. Change the parameter from yyyymm to yyyy/mm
3. Filter the view to show only blog posts instead of all content

I have a website that I use for stuff but not stuff on the public web. I use it for serving my calendars and private web applications. I use Apache's built in authentication to keep it from being crawled and to keep casual visitors from wandering in. I have a domain name assigned to it from dyndns.org for convenience. The ddclient script runs on one of my boxes and updates the ip address over there whenever mine changes. The system works very well. Most of the time. Somehow one weekend the domain name was left pointing at my old ip address for a while when I was out of town. Who ever had that IP address sure was serving up a lot of nasty stuff. Now Google thinks all that nasty stuff is on my private domain.

I'm going to fix it. I use Google Webmaster Tools for other stuff and I see there's a URL removal tool in there. To use the tool you have to verify that you own the domain - a reasonable request. The thing is the URLs I want to remove are on a domain that I don't want Google to crawl and the way Google verifies that you own the domain is by retrieving a specific URL from the domain. What a dilemma.

Drupal's a nice piece of code, no doubt about that, but the core Drupal install isn't about to win any beauty contests if you follow me. If I have any regular readers then I'm sure you've noticed that I converted my blog from Wordpress to Drupal this month. And I'm sure a lot of one-time readers are noticing that some of my formatting looks messed up. I'm working through fixing that over time - I need to replace a couple of my custom Wordpress plugins still. Overall I feel like I have a lot of room to grow into Drupal and customizing my theme is part of making the code my own.

Blizzard has announced that the day Wrath of the Lich King comes out they'll be resetting Honour Points for all characters to 0. Preventing an unfair advantage is the rationale behind the move but I really think they might renig on this one. Here's a little background for people who don't play World of Warcraft battlegrounds: Honor Points and Marks are earned by playing games against other players in battlegrounds (hence the term Player vs Player or PvP). Honor Points are used in combination with Marks of Honor to buy Epic gear (some of the best weapons, armour and other stuff in the game). The Marks are different from each battleground but aren't considered very hard to get - losing a game in a battleground gets you one mark and winning gets you three. So buying all this gear can cost a hundred thousand honor points and a few hundred marks. This is a pretty significant time investment. Once the expansion (Wrath of the Lich King) comes out on November 13 players will be able to go up to level 80 instead of the current maximum of level 70. Everyone realizes that once they get a few levels past 70 then even the best gear from current battlegrounds won't look so great next to gear that's easy to get at level 73 or 74.

So... what's a player to do? Hold on to those honor points until they hit 80 then spend them on the new best gear that Honor Points can buy. And while we're at it why not stockpile Honor Points to make it that much easier?

Okay, here are the rules when you rear-end me:

1. You start by giving me your name, phone number and insurance information.
2. Don't tell me how bad the damage to my car is. I'll decide if it's "not that bad."
3. If you don't want to use your insurance then you do have to offer to pay for it.
4. I pick the body shop.
5. At least act like you're sorry.

I've been working at adopting David Allen's GTD system (here's the original book) for about 6 months now. It seems to suit my personality and lifestyle very well. My Read and Review stack (rnr) is still disparate yet but I do have a couple places that I understand are well-described as "rnr". That makes it easy enough for me to grab something on my way out the door to an appointment anywhere with a waiting room. Like this morning. I had to go have a consult about my teeth. The wait wasn't long but reading about debugging device drivers (thanks for the free magazine OSR) is a lot better than twiddling my thumbs or playing games on the phone.

So it's that time of year and Brewfest is back at Ironforge! This year Blizzard's brought out new trinkets from a boss in Blackrock Depths. I got to 70 by world questing so I totally skipped Blackrock Depths when I should've been there but when I saw the quest rewards I figured it was worth the effort.

First off, how to get there in case you don't want to let on that you've got no clue where the place is. Fly out to Searing Gorge then follow this map. The northernmost point is the gryphon master. Once you get down near the southwest corner you follow the path up into Blackrock mountain and through the cracked open door. Once inside you're going to have to run down the chains over the lava. Yes you can fall off and yes you will die if you do. Once you're down the chain you still have to run around down some stairs, out the other side and down another chain. Then you end up in the quarry and you want to head north to get into the instance.

I'm an occasional hardware hacker and a packrat. That can be a messy combination. A big part of that mess is the hug mass of cables that I've accumulated over years of dealing with every kind of incompatible technology. The solution? Baggies. Zip lock sandwich bags (or the cheapest off-brand alternative). I now have a drawer in my filing cabinet with hundreds of cables all rolled up and sealed away. This isn't new for me, I started on the system when I commited myself to a clean office months ago.

Gizmondo has video of the latest ads Microsoft's apparently running. Much better than that last attempt with Bill G and Seinfield, at least from a marketing standpoint. It doesn't make the product technically any better but it's a clever ad.