Learning by doing

 == Overview == This Dreaming City Nightfall is already considered one of the most irritating strikes, in part because of bugs that sometimes prevent players from proceeding to the next encounter.  Notable bugged areas are the transition from the Elevator to the Knights Steps, and after the passage, the temple sometimes doesn't reveal a way to the shadow realm where you will take your leap. Important Note: After a "de-buff" from Particle Deconstruction, shoot the boss in the head!  It is quite effective, and can melt her with some coordination. Champions: Unstoppable and Overload Shields: Arc, Solar and Void (many shields!) Don't place your well in the open where boss can snipe the sword!  She will break your super. Pass the "Relic" (Orb) twice to maximize damage. == Loadouts == General: * Add Taken spec to every weapon Titans: * Bottom Tree Solar + Path of the Burning Steps or Phoenix Cradle * Sentinal Shield + Ursa, Aeon Gauntlets Warlocks: * Stasis + Blea...

 I don't have complete notes for Insight Terminus, but here are a few tips. 1) A warlock with bleak watcher (stasis turret grenade), and a titan with Banner Shield and Ursa Furiosa are very helpful.  2) Zoom past all of the ads (low level adversaries) until you go underground.  3) In the first room, there are 3 barrier champions, two near the entry, and a 3rd in the left-hand "near" corner. 4) In the second room (Cabal), take out the snipers first. 5) On the Psion plate, try not to kill all of the dogs.  Freeze turret can help here.  If you kill all enemy, that triggers the champions to charge in. 6) When entering the "orb dunk" room (3rd room), stay to the far left to avoid the vex milk that can kill you with arc damage. 7) In the "orb dunk" room, the two strategic spots are behind a rectangular block right at the entrance, and on the far left front corner.  In GMs, a final unstoppable shows up when you pick up the 2nd orb to dunk it, along with the 2...

 [I accidentally named this "Insight Terminus" when I built it!] Overview Environmental concerns ... a few Solar shields, mostly Arc and Void. Loadout By Class / Titan, Hunter, Warlock ( do this for next rotation ) This one is fairly easy, so Witherhoard, Scout and Anarchy are workable.  Blinding Grenade Launcher are effective in the the first cavern, the Drill Platform Control Center and any other crowded areas.  Titans with Cuirass of the Falling Stars, Chaos Reach + Geomag Stabilizers and other hard-hitting exotic + super combinations are good. A scout with one of each element type (solar, arc and void) is best.  I used my void Royal Entry rocket launcher on a few void shielded red bars and vex.  In "clutch" situations, I would stun then Rocket a champion. The best loadouts had Anarchy, Witherhoard, Blinding Grenades and scout rifles (because of mods).  Don't use Auto Rifle because they don't have enough range, and you will waste ammo.  Of course, ...

For Season of the Splicer (Summer 2021), seasonal mods are: Barrier Auto or Scout Rifle, Unstoppable Pistol or Grenade Launcher (not needed) , Overload Submachine Gun or Hand Cannon.  Champions are Barrier and Overload, and solar damage is increased. Elemental enemies shields are mostly arc and void (maybe no solar shields). Team Loadout: * Titan with Ursa Furiosa (Void middle tree Banner Shield)  Scout Rifle with Explosive Payload (Nightwatch, Hung Jury)  Submachine Gun - Riskrunner (Exotic Arc Submachine Gun)  Rocket Launcher (void) - Tomorrow's Answer, Royal Entry, Hezen Vengance  (When Titan uses banner shield, be aware of where the power orbs will fall, for faster supers).  * Warlock with Radiant Well / Phoenix Protocol  Night Watch Scout  Truth Teller Grenade Launcher (void) w/ Blinding Grenades  Anarchy * Warlock with Shade Binder (Turret Grenade, Winter's wrath) / [Verity's Brow] or Eye Of Another World (something for faster stasis gr...

Flexible Custom Reports for SQL Server This article is written by developer for other developers, sharing my experience with a technique that I found in Kimberly Tripp's SQL Server blog article titled " Building High Performance Stored Procedures ". In her article, she demonstrated a dynamic SQL technique that allows for "Query By Example" screens that allow most fields to be optional. I would strongly encourage you to read her article along with the associated cautionary notes. I would further add that this technique should not be used for any automated reporting tasks. If you have a known report requirement, make a dedicated stored procedure for it! I am writing this article to share a few refinements as well as a nice way to catch refactoring dependencies when this stored procedure is part of a database project in Visual Studio.  As a point of reference, I used MS SQL 2014 and Visual Studio 2017, but the technique should work with older versions of SQ...

Imagine the following scenario - you are looking for an application (app) on the Google Store, but the application that you found does 3 or 4 other things that you are not really interested in.   Perhaps it is a photo editor that also syncs with Dropbox, has an online gallery, etc.  All you want is local photo editing.  Today, there is nothing you can do unless the app uses Android 6.0 run-time permissions, but if you had more fine-grained permission control, you could deny or just limit access to those extraneous permissions like web access. I previously wrote about a solution to many of the problems associated with the Android operating system.  For the rest of this article, I will pretend that the Android community has adopted these design ideas. A trustworthy OS would give the user full control over each app's ability to run in the background, upload and download data over various connections (mobile, public network, private "home" network), etc.  ...

I'll give you two design options that would improve OS privacy.  I am thinking of the Android Operating System, but these are design principles, so they would be just as applicable for a Windows 10 Universal Application (App) or an iOS App.  I am aware that this would be a huge undertaking, but it would be awesome! 1.  Handle-based access This is not a new concept, but when you combine a system with pick-list controls and standard display controls, it is possible to allow an application to choose one or more contacts, display them and send a message without knowing the names or phone numbers.  The system would only expose a single handle to represent each contact.  Only isolated components would have the special privileges allowing access to the private details.  This would change the way applications create custom-drawn components, but would prevent even a HACKED system from leaking information as long as the process isolation subsystem was not compro...

I am so behind the times ... NHibernate 2.0.1 GA was released last fall and 2.1.0 Alphas are coming out. In the mean time, Hibernate.org has been subsumed by Redhat's JBoss. The url www.hibernate.org doesn't take you anywhere useful, and following the javascript menu to projects / services / hibernate still doesn't get you anywhere - pure garbage. It is clear that JBoss wants to sell you their enterprise build of Hibernate instead (that "Products" link works). I have been so busy with my day job that I haven't been keeping up. I work at a hospital, supporting Cerner Millenium - writing CCL, Perl, Python, Microsoft SQL (occasionally), and a bit of C#. Cerner CCL is a proprietary language that feels like a mash-up of Fortran IV and and an arcane dialect of SQL from 1976. The language used to run on VMS servers, but we have migrated to HP-UX, and I am OVERJOYED to have a choice of using a posix shell, ksh or csh. Also, I recently discovered that CCL al...

(Yes, We say script now instead of batch ... times are changing). Here is a stupid little batch file that I have written several times. It adds a single argument to the path in your current command-line session (so it is not permanent). @echo off if "%1" == "" goto end_script set path=%path%;%1 :end_script

The "Iron" languages that run on the .NET DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime) are making progress. I just noticed that IronRuby has a release on RubyForge . To be honest though, I have moved to Python as my script language of choice, with Perl as the ever-present fallback. Iron Python seems like it is coming along nicely. Iron Python 2 can even host itself . I can't wait for MonoDevelop or SharpDevelop to support IronPython on Windows.

I just spotted this on FishEye ... an example native SQL query . You'll need source from SVN or a recent download from the build server - more recent than patch 5551 by mzywitza on 17 February 2009. This is very nice, allowing parameterized SQL without the hacks that I used (you can search here for some of my old blogs on the subject).

I usually have to look this up, so I am posting it to my blog. Visual Studio 2005 has a "Regular Expression" option on the "search and replace" dialog. (Previous .Net editions had it as well.) I occasionally want to rewrite several lines of text without writing a macro or wearing out my fingers. Here's what I do ... If I have a file with several lines of DECLARE R1 = VC WITH CONSTANT("TEST1") DECLARE R20 = VC WITH CONSTANT("TEST2") DECLARE R31 = VC WITH CONSTANT("TEST3") DECLARE R42 = VC WITH CONSTANT("TEST4") And I would like to convert these to SET R1 = "TEST1" SET R20 = "TEST2" SET R31 = "TEST3" SET R42 = "TEST4" I would search for "declare [R|r]{.*} = .* with constant\({.*}\)" and replace with "set r\1 = \2" (don't add quotes into the search dialog). This grabs the text in curly braces and assigns it to \1 and \2, so I can re-assemble it as I wish. I...

I have tried a couple of times over the last 3 months to use PdfPoster on some Erwin documents. Unfortunately, I am using Windows XP on my work PC. It was clearly documented that I needed to install PyPdf 1.11 or higher, so I did easy_setup to install 1.12. Recently, I tried "C:\test>pdfposter -vvv -s 2.0 SCHEDULING.pdf scheduling_2x.pdf" ... and received a nice traceback (see below). This led me on a wild goose chase, under the assumption that my PyPDF library was not installed correctly. After a while, I decided to start python in immediate mode and just exercise PyPdf. It worked fine, but I noticed that the example opened a file using "rb" mode (read only, binary). So, I opened pdfposter/__init__.py under my site library directory, scrolled down to the bottom and changed the 3rd line of "def main" from "inpdf = PdfFileReader(open(infilename))" to "inpdf = PdfFileReader(open(infilename, "rb" ))". Problem solved!...

I'm sure most of you have heard of Google's new WebKit based browser "Chrome" . Well, a German company has released a more privacy friendly version called "Iron" , with the browser usage tracking removed. Their site is written in German, but here is a translation thanks to Google's Language Translation tools. I haven't had a chance to try it out yet, but I'm glad someone is taking advantage of the open source nature of Google's offering.

I just discovered the Turtle graphics module for Python 2.5 using the Tk graphics library. It is very "kid friendly", and it sets up a screen when you make your first function call. This was very fun, just like when I first played with LOGO on my Commodore 64! >>> from turtle import * >>> clear() >>> down() >>> goto(66,66) >>> for step in range(24): ... right(105) ... forward(100) ... >>> up() >>> goto(0,0) >>> color("red") >>> write("Done!") >>> exit() Seen on the Web in August 2008 Iron Python on ASP.Net http://ironpythonresource.com/post/2008/08/03/Beginning-IronPython-Creating-a-basic-ASPNET-Form-(Part-1).aspx Connecting to a database http://ironpythonresource.com/post/2008/08/09/Connecting-to-a-database-and-using-the-gridview.aspx Creating a class http://ironpythonresource.com/post/2008/08/10/Beginning-IronPython-Creating-a-class.aspx Creating an updat...

I like to play Chess sometimes, and I like the MKGI Chess Club . It is great for guys like me who do not have time to play a complete game in one sitting. The site uses a "postal chess" model, where I can play a move in several games, then wait for my opponent to move, or go on with my day, and check later or the next day. The site has an unfortunate quirk. It allows you to write notes about the game, but if it is the opponent's turn, the game page has a 30 second refresh. It is <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="30" >. I tried deleting this from the page using Grease Monkey (an HTML rewriting tool for FireFox), but even after I remove the element, the refresh occurs. So finally, I go into FireFox's about:config and type refresh in the finder. There is "accessibility.blockautorefresh"! So now, I get a notice that the page wants to refresh, instead of losing my notes!

Python is sticking pretty close to their release schedule for Python 2.6 and 3.0 as documented in PEP 361 . They released Python 2.6 beta 1 and 3.0 beta 1 today. If you&apos're curious about their progress, check the 2.6 release notes . By the way, I noticed that they fixed a problem with one of the rotating log handlers - it was using a simple filename instead of the full file path when deleting old log files. I have been wanting to check my code in both 2.6 and 3.0 latest releases. Now that it is in beta, I should be able to get a pretty good idea of what has changed. All I want is for it to "feel" like python.

Use WMI with Python . Thanks to Tim Golden , Python on Win32 (I use ActiveState Python ) can use COM to talk to WMI. WMI allows you to run SQL-like queries to determine available memory, free disk space, database size, transaction log size, transaction log space available, when a database was last backed up, ... all of the good stuff. Any DBA knows that databases need free disk space and frequent backups. I don't want to imply that this is the only work a DBA would perform, but I have worked at shops where there really wasn't a DBA in our department. My programs occasionally failed because there was no disk space, and the transaction logs had not been backed up for a few weeks (sure, the database was backed up, but not the logs). If you don't want to use WMI, SqlServerCentral has some great articles for SQL 2000 and 2005. Give them time and they will have 2008 as well. If you want to to check a backup, try this .

Python has some nice basic logging facilities, but I really wanted a rotating logger that would rotate on each execution. I tried the obvious - just specifying class=MyModule.MyClassName, but I received a NameError exception for my trouble. After some hacking on /python25/lib/logging (a big no-no!), I did another google search and discovered that I could just import the class in my application, and set a reference to my custom class. Hard-coding a logging handler doesn't feel very dynamic, but at least I did't have to hack any more. from MyCustomHandlers import SessionRotatingFileHandler logging.SessionRotatingFileHandler = SessionRotatingFileHandler logfile_name = "test.l4p" logging.config.fileConfig(logfile_name) This allows me to place my custom log handler in my application directory. I still need to figure out how to add things to site-packages.

Recently at work, we have been discussing the question of Perl versus Python for file copy, ftp, email and other daily, weekly or monthly automation / integration tasks. We considered Perl because some existing tasks had already been written in it, and Perl has a reputation as the System Admin's language of choice. I took a task that needed automated and wrote it in Perl 5.8, then refined it using CPAN (sweet CPAN) for ArgvFile, Log4Perl, Carp, and Date::Calc. I find Perl to be very functional and completely able to meet my needs, but very quirky or perhaps unsettling. You see, I have been an object oriented programmer for a while now, and Perl's class system just feels "bolted on" to me. And I really had to jump through hoops to do a try/catch, but using eval with a return flag and an END block to test the return worked acceptably. I didn't test the exception module, as I did not discover it in time. Next I tried Python 2.5. After a quick brush-up on the...