Bam-zine

Good Times

Damn that Minmatar wine, it kicks your head like a mule in the morning. I bumped into a couple of old equantencies in that bar the other day, not seen either of them for a while, they moved to foreign parts with those crazy religious nutters the Amaar. I’m sure it was purely a financial move on their part, but I do worry about them living amongst them all, we all remember the stories about that cult who did that thing with the moolies, no we wont go there again. I digress, my old chums Oresome and Layla, apparently been on a serious bender for the last few days and ended up coming to see little ol’ me on a drunken whim. I cant believe Oresome is still chasing Layla round like a little puppy, she will never put out, the rich bitches women are all the same, but its a meal ticket I spose, cant hold it against the man.

Anyway it seems Oresome has become a bit of a minor celebrity, after E-ON some ‘Independent’ Rag that calls itself a newspaper interviewed him for an article about his legendary industrial history, pah! legendary I ask you! So he put up a few Outposts, big deal, well I s’pose was one was mid-invasion with a hostile fleet camping the surrounding systems and Outposts. Well it seems they are both still a bit power hungry, or maybe afraid to go it alone, and still keep links with some of the major alliances.

We managed to put away a few more bottles before heading on to find somewhere a little more upmarket, and believe me that’s bloody hard in a Minmatar station. We settled for a Gallente restaurant, it came well recommended, but it turned out to be a complete crap hole, the manager wouldn’t even let us in with our “Remember Its Womble Day” hats on! I know Womble Day was a few weeks ago, but we were busy! Finaly we got a table and ordered what looked likely to be cooked well, I had a salad, and some local brandy, not too sure what Oresome and Layla had, but it cost a bloody fortune. I was asleep before the food arrived, and got rudely awoken by the manager demanding I pay the bill and leave, as he wasn’t running a Caldari doss-house.

You wait ’til I’m next out in God-Land drunk! You two owe me……

EVE API – Piece of Pie

Ha! Have at you EVE API!

Success! I have managed, god knows how to coble together a poor excuse for php code that manages your EVE-Online assets out of game. I can tell how interested everyone is. Anyway I now have a basic site with a user registration system, and encrypted API Key storage, that allows you to retrieve your AssetsList.xml file from the EVE server. This data is then fed into your personal database that is searchable, and currently lists your assets by station. There is also a basic materials overview for the industrialists, which is the main reason behind me building this. I have started to pretty things up a bit by adding icons for each asset, some of the links are still wrong, and I need list totals rather than individual stacks of items. But hey, I am learning php and SQL by doing this, and managing to put off decorating to gold medal standard.

Those of you who know, know where to go to sign up and help me test my code.

EVE API woes

I have been trying to get the EVE Online API working on this server so I can use its data for my own nefarious deeds. The API is, as far as I understand it, an interface between EVE Online game data and the outside world, in this case the web server. Some very clever people over at eve-dev.net have written lots of nice php classes to help get this data back. The only class missing however was the one I wanted, the php code to retrieve the personal and corporation asset lists. After spending a while googling and reading I decided I have to butcher myself a new class from the existing code. My programming skills are next to zero, and everything I have learnt is from picking apart other peoples code, and a lot of trial and error.

Anyway, much copy and pasting and tweaking later I had a working php class that would retrieve the AssetList.xml file from the server and store it in the cache directory. I used the code from the WalletJournal part of the class if anyone is interested. Sorted I thought, but I couldn’t get the corp asset list to work. Lots of reading, tweaking and a smoke or two later I managed to get it to work, and get the data from both files imported into a database.

I feel quite chuffed now, mission accomplished.

China Lion

This animations sound track is from a Radio 4 comedy show called Talking and Not Talking by Laura Solon. This character has appeared sever times in the show, each time with a different story of China Lion and the Mad Lady’s latest escapades.

For all you people who think BBC Radio 4 is for old farts, take a look at this.

Giant Moth

Does anyone out there know what kind of moth this is?

1256

Our cat had a go at catching it, but I managed to rescue it before she finished it off. Its the largest damn moth I have ever seen in the UK, it sounded almost like a bat flying around, its wings were that big.

Build Queues

Bored, bored, bored!

After all the excitement of the Jita run, sitting around this damn factory is driving me nuts. If these Golems were not worth so much in profit I don’t know if would bother. The armor plating alone is going to take the best part of a month to build, and its not my blueprints, they have all been thru the economizer over one hundred times to make the build process as time efficient as possible. The sheer complexity of the task means it can’t be rushed too much, and I refuse to pay some young upstart to build them for me and slap on some ridiculous mark-up.

So nothing else to do than get out of this damn pod and go for a wander, there’s nothing a Gallante girl likes more than socialising in one of the top pleasure hubs. Crap! I knew there was a reason I hated staying at HQ, its a bloody Minmatar station, they have no idea about style and to them taste is reserved solely for food, or what they pass of as food. I have half a mind to go back to my ship and pass the next 2 weeks consuming those narcotics I managed to loot from some dirty Serpentis scumbag.

……..

Anotha bottle o that sharming Minmatar vintish if-yoo-pleashe my gud fellow!

Ist no-that bad y’know, after the first bottle or two, deshided to pop in here for a quick drinkie and got a little waylaid by the charmin Hek vintage. Issat least 2 years old you know, older than this clone! I’ll just have one more bottle, then back to work, I promise….

Remember Rainbow?

I mean the kids TV show from the 70’s, not the band. Zippy and George have made brief TV appearances since The Weakest Link springs to mind.

Anyway I was going thru a load of old files on my linux box today and stumbled across a classic Rainbow outtake video, its very poor quality, but its still great. I have been told there is a full 20-30 minute episode and this is just a tiny clip from it, I have yet to find the full episode. So if anyone has it please let me know. Its a bit rude btw…..

It only appears to work in Internet Explorer though

I have found a fix for this, you need to get a media player plugin for Firefox 2, then the video will work. You can get it here.

Sales

More Scorch L crystals out the cooker today, which is lucky as my Sinq Laison market orders had just run dry. I think I will let the market demand pick up a little before I flood it again with my merchandise. After all my hard work recently I am having a little holiday, the market can wait for me. I have a few more batches of Ammo in the cooker at the moment so I’m going to wait until they are all finished before hitting the market.

Site problems

I had a few problems yesterday in setting up this site, Wordpress decided to mess with the .htaccess files on the server giving me a nice code 500 error on all my sub-domains. A few google searches later the problem was fixed, then the real problems started…

I am not sure if these Wordpress issues cuased the host server to crash or reboot, but my connectivity to the server was up and down like a yo-yo for a while, then all my SQL databases disappeared. This gave me a good excuse to test out the live support that hostpapa offer, within 30 seconds I was chatting with a nice lady called Liz who was very helpful. Typically half way thru talking to Liz and explaining my problems the databases all reappeared in the cPanel. Since then I have had no issues, touch wood.

It took me a while to work out how Wordpress works with its theme loops etc, but I finally think I have managed to work out how to get the posts I want to appear in each section of the site. Things may chnage around a bit still so bear with me.

New Host

I gave up with trying to find time to rebuild my linux box, and opted for the rented webspace option instead. I went with hostpapa.co.uk if you are looking for someone to blame for my site being offline now. So far so good, had a few teething problems getting the gallery and wordpress to work together.

If you want a slight warm feeling inside, the webserver hosting this site runs entirely from green renewable electricity!! Relatively cheap too, with no bandwidth or space usage limits, we will have to see how the reliability goes.