Stex Toys

Seems there is some kind of problem with the beta where many people can’t log on being refused on their Online ID .. most frustrating. Hopefully it will all be sorted by the time I have access to a gaming computer again!

Thanks to my FilePlanet subscription I get to same the MultiPlayer delights of Red Alert today! Downloading as I type, yummy yummy!

For some time now I’ve been storing all my large data files, photos, downloads and so on on a nice spanned volume of, just shy of, 1TB tucked away inside my girlfriends computer. It was better there than in mine as she doesn’t end up rebooting several times a night from messing around with Windows too much
It is constructed of 4 250GB IDE drives, which used to hum away inside my Netgear SC-101 until I had finally had enough of the driver based implementation they had. Using Windows XP’s built in Dynamic Drives I had them spanned together. This has been working absolutely fine for a good six months.
However, Monday night the gremlins came out and trashed one of the IDE ports on her machine. Somewhat hopefully I simply disconnected the DVD drive, and moved the two ‘lost’ disks over to that channel and waited for Windows to find the drives so I could reactivate the volume. but it wasn’t to be.. the IDE channel had obviously decided in it’s death dance to trash the tables on one of the drives, rendering any hope of a repair hopeless.
Of course this is the risk of running a purely spanned or stripped array.. no safety measure in place to catch the volume when a disk goes, however without picking up some hardware based RAID it’s pretty much the only option you have for a nice simple big old volume. (On Windows at least, a Linux server is in my future I know)
Backup, backup, backup is the cry to make next.. however I had been somewhat lax in this department and found the last full backup I had was September… 2006 .. Fortunately a combination of this and Flickr restored all of our memories in photographic form, so our losses have mainly been less dramatic items, like gaming spreadsheets and course notes.. a pity but nothing we can’t live without.

So.. for the future, having reconstructed the array, a new backup strategy was needed. Now many people would probably go out and buy themselves a backup package, or even just use Windows Backup.. but I wanted something with a little more control. So I hit upon the idea of cannibalising a backup routine I have in work which makes use of the excellent compression tool 7zip and adding on the extra safeguard of a PAR based recovery set.

The two important command lines I’ve come up with are as follows…

For 7zip I have this:
"c:\program files\7-zip\7z.exe" a -r -t7z -mx7 -v640m %backupDir%\backup -i@FilesToBackup.txt -x!recycler

Which basically evokes 7zips command line program 7z.exe and sets it to add files whilst recursing subdirectories to a 7zip format archive set using a compression level of 7 out of 10, and splitting the backup up into CD sized chunks. I may modify this to be DVD sized chunks when the data is back up to it’s original levels. The files to backup are stored in a text file imaginatively called FilesToBackup.txt and it ignores anything that might happen to be in the recycle bin folders that may appear in the location I’m backing up.

The second line which creates the robust PAR set is this:

cd %backupDir%
..\par2 c -r30 backup backup.*

Which moves into the backup folder (I couldn’t get the PAR tool to accept my variable for the backup folder so ended up forcing it into the folder before evoking the command) and creates a set large enough to recover from a 30% data loss from the 7zipped archive. I will be adjusting this level once I know how much I have to off load to CDs to cover the loss of one, or maybe two CDs from the set.

This the full .bat file, which I now have scheduled to run once a week, is as follows..

echo off
set backupDir=%date:~-4,4%%date:~-7,2%%date:~0,2%-%time:~-11,2%%time:~-8,2%%time:~-5,2%
echo.
echo.Creating new backup directory "%backupDir%"
mkdir %backupDir%
echo.
echo Backing up Files
"c:\program files\7-zip\7z.exe" a -r -t7z -mx7 -v640m %backupDir%\backup -i@FilesToBackup.txt -x!recycler
echo.
echo.Creating Recovery Files
cd %backupDir%
..\par2 c -r30 backup backup.*


The initial part is just creating a folder name made up of year-month-day-hour-minute-second to create a fairly unique folder name such as 20080813-182034, although it has a slight bug in this code, which causes the command to fail it the hour in the day is below 10, ie single figures, resulting in two folders being created and all the 7z files being in the root.. and the PAR task just fails completely! I’ll have to review that, although I’m not 100% familiar with how that part works having re-worked something I found online.. somewhere.

Feel free to make use of any of this code if you have a use for it, and if you have any ideas for improvements I’d love to hear them!

We are, that is my Fiancee and I, approaching the final levels with our latest mains on City of Heroes. Neither of us have gotten this high before, that being level 41 out of 50 possible levels. We did once before obtain top ranking in World of Warcraft, although that was back when the top level there was 50 also.. or was it 60.. whatever it was originally.

Unlike in WoW however we are starting to actually experiance some of the End Game content. I chose my first ‘Epic’ powerset skill last night and we’ve been taking on some Arch Villians helping others in the Supergroup to ding 50. (I just went to look for a Wiki page on ‘Dinging’ in MMOs and there isn’t one, I am somewhat shocked!) This is helped by the wonderful SideKick/Exemplar feature in City of Heroes, allowing either players who’d levels are lower then the team to be boosted up to just one level below whoever they are sidekicked by, or Exemplar for someone and have their level reduced to that of the team. This makes it far easier than and other MMO I’ve played to get a team together, and especially from ones own Supergroup, or Guild/Clan to give it a more generic term.

As we start to get through some of the more interesting areas I’ll put down my thoughts on what NCSoft have gotten into the game for those that make it all the way to the top, besides unlocking the two new character classes, or Architypes as CoH calls them.

From now on any blog posts should post me up a new twitter. Should prevent me appearing idle so much

Well it’s been a long time coming, but it had to happen eventually. World of Warcraft is no longer my most played game! Over the weekend City of Heroes finally passed the 280 hours I had logged with X-Fire and is now shooting up the 300s!

Xfire stats as City of Heroes passes WoW

To be fair I didn’t have X-Fire installed since the beginning of WoW play, so in reality it’s probably still had more time sunk into it, however I have to take X-Fire as my official timings as i have no idea how many additional hours where wasted, erm, I mean enjoyed in the lands of Azeroth.

Over the past year the server speed at my host websitesource has dwindled to annoying levels, in fact pretty much back to the sort of speeds people got when I hosted my website on a home PC with my time 512Kb uppipe! So over the past week we’ve been busy moving this, and some of our other websites to a new host called HostPapa.co.uk.

Speed is much improved, and not only to they give unlimited space, and more importantly unlimited bandwidth, they also operate in a green way. All very impressive. The live chats I’ve had with the support staff whilst setting up have been great too.. rapid response and got me through the few things i needed to get right when moving over to them.

So if you’re looking for hosting they may be worth checking out.

The coutdown is still long, but the screens coming out of THQ/Relic are promising!

Today, the 10th of July is Beatles Day in the UK. In fact 2008 is the first year that the Beatles have had a day dedicated to them. It comes as Liverpool is currently the European Capital of Culture, an EU funded title created to revive some of Europe’s most historic cities.

It was 44 years ago today that the Beatles returned to Liverpool following their first American visit, and the four boys from Liverpool had become household names on both sides of the Atlantic.

Sadly neither John or George are with us today, but Paul and Ringo continue in their music careers. As a fellow Liverpudlian, or “scouser”, pronounced [scow-sir] as we are known in the UK, I would like to send a salute to those four boys from my home town, and thank them for some of my favourite music of all time.

All You Need Is Love!

The Guru of 3D has a report that AMD/ATi are readying a 4800 series board that comes ready fitted for water cooling. Water cooler componants can but run at much higher clocks than air cooled, in general, due to the enhanced cooling given by the water ’sloshing’ about the components. OK it’s a little neater than that makes it sound, but you get the idea! the extra headroom, they surmise, could allow the RV770 based chip to surpass nVidia’s 280s, at base speeds I am presuming.