Miranda IM

Today, I have a tip for all users of the wonderfully simple and lightweight instant messenger “Miranda”. Sometimes the problem occurs that, when starting a conversation, the complete history of that contact will load and appear in the chat window. One may not even realize it at the beginning – I myself didn’t notice it for a long time –, until the history becomes so long that opening the chat window takes several seconds and makes the machine rattle.

dbtool.exe

For such and similar problems, there is a simple solution: In the installation directory of Miranda, there is a file named dbtool.exe. You can execute it after exiting Miranda. As a precaution, you can check “Create backup” on the first selection window. In the next window, check “Mark all read events” and let the tool do its work. Now the window should be empty again when starting a chat.

Source: http://forums.miranda-im.org/showthread.php?t=20034

Pretty - and pretty expensive?

When I wanted to sign up for my driver’s license at 17, I had to pass a quick eye test just like everyone else. After I had guessed the final, completely blurred characters correctly, with more luck than skill, my optician let me get away without the obligation to wear glasses when driving. Nevertheless, he urged me to have my eyes examined closer again in the near future and maybe get a pair of spectacles.
That was almost exactly ten years ago, and my vision has since become worse and worse. Yet I still don’t have glasses.

Now, one would think that the fact, that my own sister is an optician, would somehow facilitate the purchase of glasses. But it was her who kept telling me: “You won’t get anything good under 300 dollars.” And to me, it was simply not worth so much money, because I really only needed the glasses for things like watching TV, cinema, etc. (Only driving became a more and more unpleasant and dangerous thing over the years.)
Even at the (allegedly) incredibly cheap opticians that we know from advertising, “wearable” glasses usually still cost above 150 dollars – unless you like big, ugly plastic frames.

All the time I have wondered: What about people who simply can’t afford this? There must be cheap glasses for them somewhere that do not look completely stupid.
As this article proves, it is indeed possible (at least in the U.S.). The eyewear manufacturer “Zenni” described there offers eyeglasses starting from eight dollars! The only small drawback is that they are manufactured in China and therefore you have to wait a couple of weeks for your spectacles. In addition, you must know your pupillary distance, so the lenses will sit at the right place later. Although you can roughly measure this value yourself, it would be better to simply ask your eye doctor for the number.

I think, if you take a look at the eyeglasses from Zenni, even the models for eight dollars look pretty damn good! Anyway, good enough so you don’t have to sink in shame when wearing them.
I really think about ordering something from them.

The boat to Northrend

Almost nobody believed in it anymore, and I too hadn’t expected the opening of Northrend any sooner than the date when Blizzard already launched the next addon. But today was the day: About one year after the release of “Wrath of the Lich King”, we can finally level up to 80 on our server, too.

Bugged ore deposits ftw!

As expected, not everything worked smoothly on the first day – for example, you all the quests granted far too little experience. So we decided to first push our professions and quest later, when the experience rate got fixed. To our aid came a bugged ore which, after mining it, immediately spawned again as soon as you moved an inch. Needless to mention that, as a blacksmith and jeweler, we particularly benefited from that. Within minutes we had pushed our professions to approximately 410. Unfortunately, the ores were repaired a few hours later. But luckily we were there in time!

Even for the higher skill points, we were well supplied: By Hardcore Darkmoon Faire farming, I had already collected Eternal stuff, different leathers, arctic furs and other things – although they shouldn’t normally have been available to us at that time. Thus, we had a small supply of everything in the guild bank and could all level up our professions smoothly without having to farm for missing reagents or buy them expensively.

But now it’s time for us to level!

For a while I’ve been looking for a way to integrate the top-posts of my site, that have been established by the WordPress stats plugin, into my template. I wanted to have a list of the five most visited posts, preferably with the number of comments.
I remembered that I had once seen a plugin for that: WordPress Popular Posts. But when I installed it, I found that in the latest version, it works exclusively as a widget and does not provide a template tag. That way, of course, it was of absolutely no use to me, because my template is not and will never be intended for widgets. And simply installing an older version of the plugin is not a permanent solution either.

But as usual, I thought to myself: “Man, there must be some way to do this!” And there is one indeed! With just a few lines of code, you can integrate your top posts from the WordPress stats plugin at any place in your template, without any additional plugin!

Here’s how:

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<?php if(function_exists('stats_get_csv')) : ?>
	<h3>Popular Posts</h3>
	<ul id="popularposts">
	<?php
		$top_posts = stats_get_csv('postviews', 'days=0&limit=5');
		foreach($top_posts as $post) {
			if(!get_post($post['post_id'])) continue;
			echo '<li><a href="'.get_permalink($post['post_id']).'">'.get_the_title($post['post_id']).'</a><div class="commentsnumber">('.get_comments_number($post['post_id']).' comments)</div></li>';
		}
	?>
	</ul>
<?php endif; ?>

Short description:

• Line 1: The entire list will be created only if the WordPress stats plugin is installed and activated.
• Line 5: Here you define which or how many posts are shown. If you set “days” to 0, you get the top posts of all time, ever since the stats plugin has started collecting data. However, if you set it to 7, for example, you get the top posts of the last seven days. The value “limit” indicates how many posts you would like to display. So in the example, the five most popular posts are shown.
• Line 8: Here we output the link with the number of comments. Of course you can adjust the HTML depending on your needs.

This issue is certainly known to a few, and I too have had the problem for a while that I couldn’t leave any comments on my own blog when logged in as admin (I could comment only from the back end, but not from the website). Today I have finally taken the “time” to go to the root of the problem. I am writing this in quotes, because in the end it didn’t take me three minutes to find the error. If only I had started searching much earlier.

The problem was a missing hidden input in the comment form, which is required by Wordpress:

<input type="hidden" name="comment_post_ID" value="<?php echo $post->ID; ?>" />

So if you constantly get a blank page after submitting a comment, you should check your comments template (usually that’s the file comments.php in the directory of your theme) to see if this line has been forgotten or inserted at a wrong place.

In my case, for example, I had inserted the line in the wrong place inside an if statement:

<?php if ( $user_ID ) : ?>
	<p>You are logged in as ...</p>
<?php else : ?>
	[Form fields for name, email etc.]
	<input type="hidden" name="comment_post_ID" value="<?php echo $post->ID; ?>" />
<?php endif; ?>

Thus the line was present for not logged-in visitors (guests), so they could comment without any problems. However, if you were logged in (which I, as the admin, of course always was), the line was missing, and if it’s missing, Wordpress exits its comment script with a blank page without comment (haha!).
Correctly, it has to be like this of course:

<?php if ( $user_ID ) : ?>
	<p>You are logged in as ...</p>
<?php else : ?>
	[Form fields for name, email etc.]
<?php endif; ?>
<input type="hidden" name="comment_post_ID" value="<?php echo $post->ID; ?>" />

This way, the line is displayed in all cases, and then it also works as an admin!

In these days you get more and more overwhelmed with commercials for online dating on German television, from “neu.de” to “parship.de” to “elitepartner.de”. And although I would never try and find a partner through such a service, three quarters of my own relationships developed – at least partially – via the Internet. But by what criteria do you choose a potential partner when all you get to see of him is only a name and maybe a few details and a photo? Can you make an informed decision at all as to whether a person is suitable for you or not?

A little anecdote: More than a decade ago, I went into the “Internet room” of our school with a classmate, where we logged into a major German chat site using our normal pre‑/nicknames. After fifteen minutes of unsuccessful attempts to make contact and get into the conversation, I said to my friend: “Okay, this apparently doesn’t work. Let’s log in again, but this time I call myself ‘Hashgirl’, and you go by ‘Vodkagirl’.”
No sooner said than done – and suddenly we were swamped by a wave of greetings, age and private room requests. By simply changing our names to something that sounded a little vicious and suggested femaleness, we had grown from two boring girls to exciting and much sought-after online hussies – although in reality there were still the same two sixteen year old teenagers sitting there as before.

When you meet somebody in a “conventional” manner, the subconscious decides in a split second whether the other person is physically, socially and intellectually compatible. Online, however, you can’t really evaluate two of these three criteria: Your opposite might only show photographs of his “best side” or even edit them with Photoshop, and you can also lie or wrap yourself in silence about your social status.
Only the intellectual level can’t be hidden so easily when chatting. A man who manages to place ten spelling and grammatical errors in three sentences may look as good as can be – to me it’s clear that I would never be able to be with this person over a longer period of time. Other people, however, would probably have very different priorities. To them it is perhaps more important that the prospective partner is handsome and financially independent, while they are rather less interested in his/her intelligence.

The “Oxford Internet Institute” of the University of Oxford has published a study about online dating, which is devoted to precisely these questions: What role does the Internet play in becoming acquainted, and what criteria are really important to us when we choose a (potential) partner online? And what is it like once you are together: Is chatting with strangers looked upon as a kind of “cheating” then? And do couples still communicate with each other online, for example to settle a quarrel?
I particularly like the slideshow in PDF format which is linked further down the page and contains some very interesting statistics.

What about you? Have you ever found a partner online? Tell me about your experiences!

Sometimes it can really drive you crazy, this Windows … It hadn’t been too long since I had managed to make my shared files accessible to everyone on the network without entering a password, but now it was again broken, although I hadn’t changed any settings since then. Again, I was prompted for username and password when attempting to access shared files, which was exactly what I did not want. After some hair-tearing and cursing, I found the solution, which seems (once more) completely insane and incoherent and would never come to a normal user’s mind. Maybe it helps one or another who is also despairing of this.

Windows Event Viewer

To determine whether the error described here is the reason for the sharing problems, you should take a look into the Event Viewer. It can be found under Start → Settings → Control Panel → Administrative Tools → Event Viewer → System. Click through the errors marked with a red icon, watching for the message: “The Server’s configuration parameter "IRPStackSize" is too small for the server to use a local device. Please increase the value of this parameter.” If you find it, there is a good chance that this is the cause for the non-functioning Windows file shares!

This is the official solution proposed by Microsoft:

1. Click Start, and then click Run.
2. Type regedit, and then click OK.
3. Navigate to the following key:
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters
4. In the right pane, double-click the IRPStackSize value.
   NOTE: If the IRPStackSize value does not already exist, use the following procedure to create it:
1. In the Parameters folder of the registry, right-click the right pane.
2. Point to New, and then click DWord Value.
3. Type IRPStackSize.
   IMPORTANT: Type “IRPStackSize” exactly as it is displayed because the value name is case-sensitive.
5. Change the Base to decimal.
6. In the Value Data box, type a value that is larger than the value that is listed.
   If you created the IRPStackSize value using the procedure described in step 4, the default value is 15. It is recommended that you increase the value by 3. Therefore, if the previous value was 11, type 14, and then click OK.
7. Close the Registry Editor.
8. Restart the computer.

If the problem persists after you complete the preceding procedure, try to increase the value of IRPStackSize even more. The maximum value for Windows 2000 is 50 (0×32 hex).

I first tested a value of 15 as described, but the problem still existed. Then I tried 30, and lo and behold: As if by magic, all my file shares worked again without a password, as desired! Hurray! By the way, I found this tip here.

Shopping at the Darkmoon Faire

Every month the Darkmoon Faire offers its exotic goods for one week. But to be honest: How often do you really get something there? Whenever you talk to one of the vendors, everything useful is already sold out, and most often it seems obvious that it must have something to do with those level-1 characters standing around there day and night. The only way to play a trick on such “buying bots” is to bot back against them! (For the fainthearted: No, this is not really about true botting.)

Admittedly, this post comes a bit late. Eternal stuff, lotuses, furs, etc. are no longer as sought-after and valuable as they once were. On the other hand, a new addon is coming up soon, and who knows, maybe there will be new buyable reagents there again which people will be panting for, especially at the beginning.
However, even now you can still reap some good profits off some of the things. I’ve compared the purchase prices of some items to the average AH prices according to Wowhead:

Item	Purchase	AH value	Profit in %
Eternal Fire	2 40	30	1150
Crystallized Fire	24	4	1567
Eternal Air	2 40	20	733
Crystallized Air	24	1	317
Eternal Life	2 40	15	525
Crystallized Life	24	1	317
Eternal Water	2 40	5	108
Crystallized Water	24	1	317
Eternal Shadow	2 40	5	108
Crystallized Shadow	24	1	317
Eternal Earth	2 40	5	108
Crystallized Earth	24	50	108
Frost Lotus	4	30	650
Arctic Fur	12	50	317

Gold in a box!

As you can see, you can do quite good business, especially with fire, air and life, but also with Frost Lotus, the more so as their deposit costs are not too high. Depending on the server, prices will surely vary a little bit, so it might be worthwile to search through all the herbs, leathers, etc. in the AH and then decide which ones to buy best.
However, perhaps you don’t actually want to deal in them, but only buy certain reagents to skill your professions, or simply stock yourself up with certain items.

The method

There are two methods to farm these vendors. The first one I just want to describe very briefly, because I do not think it best: Get the addon FreeRefills and add all the items that you want to buy from the faire. Once you open a merchant window now, the addon checks whether the items are available and buys them if possible. To make the whole thing work, you now need a program which is able to record mouse clicks and movements (e.g. Mouse Recorder Pro). Set it up so it keeps talking to the vendor and then closing the window again.
The advantage of this method is that you can alternately farm two vendors that are standing side by side, which does not work with the other method. The downside: It is much slower than the second method, which increases the likelihood that the other “buying bots” will be faster with their macros and still snatch everything from under your nose. In addition, there is a risk that someone will stand in your way, on a fat Kodo for example, so the program can no longer click the vendor – or it might unintentionally right-click someone from the other faction, which is also not very helpful …

That’s why I prefer the use of purchasing macros. You can write as many macros as you need to buy everything you want. Then you write a “master macro” that calls all these purchasing macros within a split second. Now you open the merchant window and leave it open all the time, while you have the master macro clicked 3–4 times per second by an autoclicker. Then you go to sleep or AFK, and when you come back, your bags will be full of treasures!
Below you will find some sample macros that can of course be changed/extended at will – I think they are fairly self-explanatory. You just have to fiddle a bit to squeeze everything into the 255-character limit. (There is said to be an addon to override this limit. Never tested it though.)

The macros

Macro 1:

/script local function buy(n,q) for i=1,100 do if n==GetMerchantItemInfo(i) then BuyMerchantItem(i,q) end end end buy("Crystallized Life",1) buy("Crystallized Shadow",1) buy("Crystallized Water",1) buy("Crystallized Air",1);

Macro 2:

/script local function buy(n,q) for i=1,100 do if n==GetMerchantItemInfo(i) then BuyMerchantItem(i,q) end end end buy("Crystallized Fire",1) buy("Crystallized Earth",1) buy("Borean Leather",1) buy("Heavy Borean Leather",1);

Macro 3:

/script local function buy(n,q) for i=1,100 do if n==GetMerchantItemInfo(i) then BuyMerchantItem(i,q) end end end buy("Arctic Fur",1) buy("Frost Lotus",1) buy("Lichbloom",1) buy("Adder's Tongue",1) buy("Tiger Lily",1) buy("Talandra's Rose",1);

Macro 4:

/use Crystallized Life
/use Crystallized Water
/use Crystallized Air
/use Crystallized Fire
/use Crystallized Earth
/use Crystallized Shadow

Place these buying macros on your main action bar on the buttons 2–5. The first button is reserved for the

Master macro:

/click ActionButton2
/click ActionButton3
/click ActionButton4
/click ActionButton5

If you like you can add a /cast Stealth or /cast Shadowmeld to macro 4 – provided you play the according class/race for that. (On the other hand, merging crystallized stuff should usually not remove stealth anyway, so you could also leave it away.)

Now you need an autoclicker that can repeatedly click button 1 for you, or a program that hammers key 1 on the keyboard. Suitable for this purpose is, for example, Delphino AutoMaus, if you set it to 250–330 milliseconds (i.e. 3–4 clicks per second). Sometimes, however, I had the problem that with an all too regular click-interval, the other “buying bots” always seemed to buy exactly between my clicks, and thus forestalled me again all the time. Since then, I usually tick the “Random” checkbox and enter “250” and “330” milliseconds as limits. This way, the click interval is a little bit random, which worked better for me then.

Nuisance leather ball

Once the surrounding Darkmoon customers, who desperately hope to snatch just a single mote, notice your cunning machinations, they will often try to fill up your inventory with balls. In theory, they could of course do this with Happy Fun Rocks, Voodoo Skulls, etc. as well, but since there is that nice little boy on the faire who sells Heavy Leather Balls for 20 copper, it will in 99.9 % of the cases be these balls that end up in your inventory.

But no problem, even for this there is a macro:

/run for x=0,4 do for y=1,GetContainerNumSlots(x) do l=GetContainerItemLink(x,y) if l then if GetItemInfo(l)=="Heavy Leather Ball" then PickupContainerItem(x,y) DeleteCursorItem() return end end end end

Simply put the macro on Button 6 and extend the master macro by a /click ActionButton6, and from now on, with every click, all possibly existing balls will be removed from the inventory.

And now have fun shopping!

There it is!

Well, how about that? I went to the Weeping Cave for a moment, just to reveal the map, and killed a few of those disgusting slimes, and suddenly held an Oozing Bag with a cute little Disgusting Oozeling in my hands! That’s how it must be!

Actually, I only wanted to see for myself what the slimes in the cave carry with them. For due to a bug, they have an almost 100 % chance to drop Hakkari Shrouds, Hakkari Breastplates and Marks of Hakkar. These items should normally be contained exclusively inside the Hakkari Urn, which can be obtained only once through a quest in the Sunken Temple. However, it is quite nice this way, too – and above all it’s an inexhaustible source of Dream Dust, Lesser Eternal Essences and Small Brilliant Shards!

Instant rep the Second!

Apart from that, we recently went into the Shadow Labyrinth with our junior star Promenized, because he could use some experience and reputation. Of course, we walked in there in a threesome, which made the instance fairly challenging and a lot of fun. The reputation gain, however, sometimes reminded of our experiences in Stratholme.
By now, up-and-coming talent Phony has also reached the 70th level and is now beginning to get equipped in order to be a real help someday.

Deodorant - toiletry of doom.

You read that right: The use of deodorant can cause you an aluminium poisoning, and with your fluorine-containing toothpaste you brush yourself into your own grave! – These and similar scaremongerings are disseminated over the Internet again and again by stupid people, only to be taken seriously by even stupider ones. And if these “facts” at some point even make their way to the websites of some stupid Homeopaths, Naturopaths etc., the average idiot will of course take that as an additional confirmation from a credible authority.

So, my dear friends of uncritical receptivity and unchecked dissemination of pseudo-knowledge! Let’s go to the bottom of the case: Fluorine is a halogen gas and aluminum a metal. If you unscrew your toothpaste, does a squall of gas come out? And are there small metal splinters in your deodorant? Well, in mine there aren’t. Would be uncomfortably itchy under the arms, too, wouldn’t it …
What toothpaste and many deodorants really contain is fluoride and aluminum chloride. I only had a D in chemistry at school, and I was anything but interested in the subject, but even I was able to memorize that everything ending on “-ide”, “-ite” or “-ate” is a salt.

Now you might think: “Okay, okay, smart ass. So the correct names of the substances are different – still they are poisonous!”
I’ll just comment that as follows: Anyone who feels like it can go and buy aluminum chloride in the drugstore. It’s obtainable without prescription. And now I’ll give your your not-accustomed-to-active-use brains a brief moment to think about what that might mean in a country where a prescription is needed for almost everything that you could harm yourself with. You get it? – Right! The stuff is simply not dangerous. Of course, you should not necessarily drink it pure or something. But you shouldn’t do that with spiritus, citric acid or drain cleaner either. In deodorants, aluminum chloride is only contained in concentrations of about 10–30 %, which can at most result in a mild skin irritation, if you have especially sensitive skin.

As for the fluorides: Those do indeed need a prescription, but as you can see from the above linked drug prescription regulation, there are specific conditions under which it may be freely sold anyhow. Quote:

Fluoride, soluble,
– if not a daily dose is given on containers and outer packages which corresponds to a fluorine content up to 2 mg –
– except in preparations as a gel for topical use on the teeth in packs of up to 25 grams, as long as containers and outer packages indicate that the application is limited to adults and children over the age of 6 years and to a single dose per week, which corresponds to a fluorine content of 7 mg –

Now you, you know why “Elmex Gelée” is only offered in such tiny tubes – coincidentally exactly 25 grams – and why you should only use it once a week and only from six years up.

Salt - the white death.

The lethal dose of aluminum chloride is about 3.45 g per kilogram of body weight.^[1] So a man of 70 kg would have to consume 241.5 grams of aluminum chloride in order to die. In other words: Depending on the concentration, he would have to spray four to twelve average sized spray cans of his favorite deodorant into his throat.
For the fluorides, the probably toxic dose is 5 mg per kilogram of body weight.^[2] The fluoride content in toothpaste lies at about 100 mg per tube, and according to the ingredient information on the packing, the 500-gram box of salt in my kitchen cupboard has been enriched with about 235–320 mg of fluoride. So in order to die, the abovementioned man would have to suck out three to four tubes of toothpaste, or toss a whole 500-gram pack of salt all at once – although I doubt that it would really be the fluoride then which kills him. The certainly toxic dose of fluoride, by the way, is stated even 7–13 times higher.

As so often, it is the hormetic effect, which has already been recognized by Paracelsus, that applies here:

“All things are poison and nothing is without poison, only the dose permits something not to be poisonous.”

You can also booze yourself to death with water, increase your cancer risk using vitamin C or poison yourself fatally from the green part of the tomato, as I have shown convincingly some time ago. It’s all a question of dose.

So. Now you can either believe me or turn back to your life beyond all media competence by penetrating the mailboxes of your friends, acquaintances and colleagues with the story of little lost Lisa, or support the bone marrow transplantation for poor, terminally ill Kevin with a generous donation. Oh, and do not forget to forward every ICQ and Facebook message, that asks you to, to fifteen people. Otherwise you will be deleted. Forever.