Regular Updates Weekly

My name is Hallan Turrek. This is my blog.

Saturday, April 30, 2011

So, Stuff Happened.

You vitriolic, patriotic, slam, fight, bright light, feeling pretty psyched.
R.E.M. - It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

Some people who know me well enough, know I live in central Alabama... so I was smack dab in the middle of the area hit hardest by the Tornados this week. Been without internet for a while, but we got away relatively unscathed. Thought now would be a good time to put out an update about some various things.

First of all, things are going well in Split Infinity. We're marching to war right now, but it's a good one. AAA and allies have decided that if the DRF wants to attack the North, we should hit them in the South. This is a good and solid plan, so I'm happy to participate. Time to take some space.

The podcast is still going strong, with a thousand hits this week. My thanks go out to the community for supporting me in that.

Other than that, a bit of PvP and a bit of PvE... it doesn't seem like I've really DONE much this week(except play through Chrono Trigger like twice while the cable was out).

Stay tuned, cause ENN is still coming, and so is the podcast.

Friday, April 22, 2011

New Podcast: Voices From The Void

Please allow me to introduce myself
I'm a man of wealth and taste
I've been around for a long, long year
Stole many a man's soul and faith
The Rolling Stones - Sympathy For the Devil

So, turns out editing for four hosts was a bit much for Jade. We all got together after he decided to hang up his microphone, and we've worked it out so that Dani and I will just run our own podcast, and boy howdy will it be awesome. LIE is still going to be a thing, I expect. But I can't speak for Jade.

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

CCP's Tech II Damage Control

And I'm here to remind you
Of the mess you left when you went away
It's not fair to deny me
Of the cross I bear that you gave to me
You, you, you oughta know
Alanis Morissette - You Oughta Know

Ok, I'm not a CCP hater. I've disagreed with them in the past, but all in all, I'm a fan. They make a game I play and make my own content for, so obviously there's some love there. Still, how they could let the latest forum issue go the way it did is just confusing.

And not in a good way, like these underwear.

We all remember the initial introduction of PI, right? When people could still buy stuff off the market, and reprocess it to make tons of money, right? What we had there were professional game developers making a very basic and stupid mistake. That should never have made it onto the main server, and yet it did. So we were all left scratching our heads and wondering how anyone could be that incompetent.

It's ok CCP, nobody else likes where this is going either.

And here we are again. The recent forum debacle has shown us that CCP's been pretty bad at learning from those kind of mistakes. This annoys me, it should annoy you. What's worse is that they were unclear in describing the exact extent of threat. "Our database is secure" is not what I need to hear from this sort of breach. That's the annoying part, their database was secure, they were at no risk of having client data stolen. They did that part of the work. The part they forgot was protecting us.

Now let me say first of all, I never visited the new forums. I found out about it the same way most people did, through Helicity Boson. Now I'm not a gloom and doom type, but most of what was said there makes sense, and it scares the shit out of me that CCP could allow such an exploit to go unaddressed until 30 hours after it's deployment. It should scare the shit out of you.

This guy gets it.

So mostly we're dealing with a purely forum based security breach. At least that's what the damage control post would lead me to believe. It's unlikely anyone had enough time to really screw with your PC through creative html placement. One doesn't need javascript to really fool you, especially when you're already on a trusted site. Still, there's a low likelyhood that anything actually happened. You're probably safe, and so is everyone else.

Look Lisa! A Guarantee. I'm sold. How do I give this guy my stuff again?

But why in the thousand gory hells was it even possible to screw us over? Shouldn't someone be looking at this stuff? Jesus H Christ. This ain't even the 2nd time this has happened, CCP has a long history of screwing up pretty basic logical outcomes. Deleting boot.ini when you patch? Why the fuck not? Forgetting that you can reprocesses stuff, even though you just made it reprocessable? Sure. Allow a gaping security hole in the forums to pass through inspection and multiple people reporting it in Beta Testing? Shine on you fucking crazy diamond.

CCP's choice of unicorns and rainbows on the login page starts to make a lot more sense in this context.

Even a cursory glance at CCP's history shows they've got some problems in their past. Reading all that info indicates that there used to be problems with generating items, but it's fixed now. But it used to be pretty broken. CCP just kept making do, and making mistakes. And counting on the playerbase to catch those mistakes.

CCP has a bad reputation for not taking very much care with their product, and this is not the first time they've fucked up royally. They've gotten very good at damage control throughout the the years, because they've had so many self made problems to deal with.

Sure he shot Marvin in the face, but at least he can blame it on being a Scientologist.

They're never going to make everyone happy. Lets face it, CCP couldn't do that even if they never ever ever screwed up. But they do, consistently. It's gotten so bad that whenever a patch DOESN'T include some crippling game breaking bug, it's remarkable.

Kind of like this guy going through a day without pissing himself.

What The Hell Is This?!

I wander from star to star,
As I glide bleakly through the night,
Though I travel near and far,
I've yet to find the one that's right.

A red, an orange, a white a blue,
Planets that spring forth with life,
And moons that glimmer in starlight too,
Comets pierce as sharp as knives,

Yet not one among them them will come to me,
Still onward up I'll climb,
I travel on, in my reverie,
Until the end of time.

Just little extra post that needed to go somewhere. Real content coming tonight.

Sunday, April 10, 2011

Eve News Now: Episode 19

Check it out.

And on Youtube.

CCP Really Screws Up(READ THIS)

If you used the "new forums" go here. Read this. Now.

TL;DR Your computer may be at serious risk. Get on a clean computer and change your passwords, or clean your computer to make sure it's not compromised. ASAP. It's possible that nothing happened, but there were some VERY easy ways to get all your information and even get a keylogger onto your system.

If you think someone in EVE wasn't doing that, I've got a class 12 wormhole to sell you.

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Recruit Me! Also Co-Hosting Lost In Eve.

Well I tried to make it Sunday, but I got so damn depressed,
That I set my sights on Monday and I got myself undressed,
I ain't ready for the altar but I do agree there's times,
When a woman sure can be a friend of mine.
America - Sister Golden Hair


Now on to the post:
I have now left Majesta Empire. It's been a long time coming, but a bit of a hard decision. You see, everything about null-sec war annoys me. The timers, the grinding, the alarm clock ops. Or at least it would've if I'd ever really committed to them.

I got fed up with avoiding logging in so I wouldn't get committed to another 6 hour op that I just didn't have time for. The members were nice enough, but I had no real friends the entire time I was there. So essentially, there were many reasons to leave and one very good reason to stay.

The money.

After just under a 5 month stay, I'm bit over 5 billion richer. This is significant to me in many ways but the important thing to remember is that I only got geared up to really produce isk over the last 2 months. About 2/3's of that 5 billion was made in the last two months. How, you might ask?

First of all I set up a reaction POS pair. I defrayed costs through planetary interaction, with one character making enough robotics for both POS and the other making enough Coolant and Mechanical parts to do the same. I created fernite carbide from materials(Specifically Vanadium and Scanadium) I bought in Jita. Rough profit after all costs were accumulated was about a billion isk a month. I ran this pair for 3 months. I may in the future explain this in more detail with a guide, but for now, you should know this is a ridiculously profitable enterprise.

Second of all, I stopped wasting my time on Sanctums. This may strike you as odd, but it's one of the first steps I took to making money in Null-Sec. You see, I had a Tengu with almost 700 DPS, doing very good damage to elite frigates as well. That thing could burn through Sanctums. With fighter support I could bring down 20 million isk a tic. But it's constant work. So I spent a lot of time spinning my ship instead.

You can spend 5 hours doing it, and hope for a Dread, or you can scan systems for signatures instead. I chose the second option and damn was it a good one. Suddenly having to figure out what to do with a Gila BPC, Rattlesnake BPC, 15 Enhanced Ward Consoles, and a Pith A-Type X-Large shield booster all at the same time became a problem of mine. I ran gas clouds as well, and developed my Gas mining skill to max. That's 50 million isk a site, and you finish it in an hour(which you spend "mining" so you can do plenty of other stuff in the mean time). I'll take that.

Basically if you do the right things, and put in the right things in the right places, you can make a shitton of money. All they ask for is commitment, and while that's not a terrible thing, I'm not quite ready for that yet.

Next stop, a wormhole corp. I wouldn't mind if they're PvP focused, but they need to have a strong PvE backbone, because I want to learn how to do that. Anyone recruiting?

Friday, April 1, 2011

The Come From Behind Win.

This blog has been taken hostage by the rainbow farting unicorn liberation front. 5 million isk or the content gets it. You have one day.