Busy Busy.

I have not thought to update the ol blog lately but I figured I'm a bit overdue and should put some thoughts to e-paper real quick.

Went out and participated in early voting yesterday which had a much higher turnout than I had anticipated. The wife and I waited in line for just about 90 minutes to get in and vote which was not the most fun in the world, but at least we got it done and took care of that important piece of civic business. I am not one who is big into politics but I think this election will be very close and it will be interesting to see how it unfolds and how it will shape the next few years of direction for the US.

I have not made much progress in DQ6 lately because I got very distracted by a few other things that have held my interest very well. The first of which is the Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. I've had this game for a while but for various reasons I never had much interest in playing it. A few weeks back I was ill with a cold and while laid out on the couch I decided to give it one more try and I was hooked. My build is a redguard warrior focusing on mace + shield combat and heavy armor which is serving me quite well. Little over 20 hours of gametime clocked and I have plenty more to go. My backlog continues to pile up as I neglect other games and add more to it, but I am entraced with Skyrim and I will ride that as long as I can.

I also picked up a new book to read. Sticking with my nerd instincts, I decided to dive into the fantasy realm and picked up Homeland by R.A. Salvatore. It's not his first book, but the first chronologically in the tale of Drizzt Do'Urden who is a famous character in the Forgotten Realms that I have never spent much time with until now. I'm about halfway through the book and I am already wanting to go back to the bookstore to pick up the next installment in the series. I try to buy most of my books from a secondhand store here locally as they can be had dirt cheap and I get to support a local business, but I am liking these so much that I will order from Amazon if necessary to keep going once I wrap up the first book.

That's about all for now. Eventually I may make it back to DQ6, but if not i'll just start writing about Skyrim or something else to keep me writing on here. FUS RO DAH!

Cisco IDS Java Heap Issue

This morning I needed to get into some of our IPS modules in our Cisco ASA firewalls to check on some licensing issues that we were having. Unfortunately I had recently upgraded Java to version 7 and the code that we had on the firewall was not playing nice with Java 7, so that was kinda sad. I searched around and found that in some cases downgrading back down to Java 6 would fix the problem, but that did not solve the problem for me.

What ended up working was browsing to the IP address of the IPS modules and downloading the shortcut to directly launch the IDS to manage the IPS modules. When I launched the shortcut, it fired up the IDS and allowed me to log in, but quickly threw up a fun warning about memory:

Some people suggested that you can modify your Java settings in the control panel and add a switch to set your minimum heap size, but that wasn't working for me either. To solve the problem, I followed the solution found here and modified my IDS shortcut with a text editor, setting the java minimum heap size to 256m and the max size to 512m. See below for the line I modified:

Hope this helps out any other folks that are fighting to get into their IDS interface.

DQ6 Progress: Post 2 + Book Plug

So i'm up to about 11 hours clocked in DQ6 and I have mixed feelings thus far. The story has progressed forward a little bit and provided me a little bit of information as to one of the major plot elements, but I'm a little disappointed in how things turned out:

So as it turns out the alternate world is a "dream world." I was thinking it might be some kind of time travel or something like that, but I was dead wrong. I'm OK with that, but I don't entirely like how they did the whole "Hey thanks for killing that dread fiend but btw you're still asleep so why don't you go tool around the world for a bit and see if you can find the real you kthx". I didn't think that defeating Murdaw that quickly in the game would be the end (and perhaps I haven't seen the last of him yet) but I just wasn't crazy about that plot turn.

Regardless I will continue to soldier on as I'm still having a pretty good time destroying cute anime monsters and that's all that matters. There's also a class system that I have just scratched the surface of, but I am a huge fan of those so I hope to dive into that a bit more in the next few weeks.

While I'm writing here I just finished a pretty darn good book that I highly recommend everyone give a read. "No Easy Day" by Mark Owen is an account of the mission that killed Osama bin Laden and also some good insight into the life of a US Navy Seal. I recommend anyone interested in how that whole thing went down check it out and you will not be disappointed.

Fun IT Tools: blat

As the exchange administrator at my current place of employ, one of my favorite tools is the little e-mail command line tool that could: blat. It's a lightweight command-line based tool designed to send e-mails and that is basically it. One might say that lots of things can send e-mail these days and why would you ever need a command line tool to do that for you?

The main reason I use blat is when the ever-confident developer walks through the door and insists that his/her code is 100% correct and my mail server isn't allowing their application to send/relay e-mail off of my broken server. In some cases they are correct (for example if I have not allowed their app server to relay off my exchange server or something like that), but often times they have some messed up code. If they don't believe me - and they often don't - blat is a quick and easy method to put that to bed. I load it up on their app server and put in some example settings as close to their particular setup as I can get it - and in most cases blat is able to successfully fire off an e-mail as many times as I would like. It's a great troubleshooting tool for when you have custom applications attempting to send e-mail or just need general mail troubleshooting from a server or remote source. You could also incorporate it into a script to send an e-mail alert for your jobs if you wish. Plenty of fun uses for it out there!

FYI I don't hate developers despite the "tone" of this post - I just like to be prepared for them!

DQ6 Progress: Post 1

Since my last post I have clocked about 4 hours into DQ6 and i'm at the point in a DQ game where my interest begins to falter just a little bit. Part of my problem in these JRPGs is making my way through the "intro" of the game, or really the section of the game leading up to where the plot begins to pick up and either hook me or lose me. Some games manage have the right amount of build up to get you going (Chrono Trigger for example), and others take way too long (of games I have played recently Trails in the Sky comes to mind but I may have not given that one enough time since people seem to really love it).

At this point in Dragon Quest 6 I have a primary objective and I have some folks in my party, but I don't quite yet have that hook in the plot that keeps me going. I knew coming in that it would be like this as the entire series is more or less designed the same way, and I can either tough it out or give up and move on. I'm not willing to give up quite yet so I will press on and see where things take me.

One awesome thing in the game thus far: there is a dog named Mr. Barkington. Best dog name in a JRPG ever? I can't think of any that are better off the top of my head so I'd have to say yes.

Dragon Quest VI: Realms of BATTLES EVERYWHERE

Moreso than just about anything else I can think of, I am a gamer and have been for most of my years on this earth. Thus far in 2012 according to my backloggery page I have beaten/finished 17 games, and for number 18 I have selected Dragon Quest VI: Realms of Revelations for the Nintendo DS. This is a remake of the sixth installment in the DQ series originally released for the Super NES back in the mid 90s. If nothing else the series is famous for its unique art style and characters designed by Akira Toriyama of Dragon Ball Z fame, and for shutting down the country of Japan every time a new one is released. Up until the 8th installment in the series the games were called Dragon Warrior when/if they were released in America. I can only assume this is because of our intense loathing of quests and our keen fondness for warriors?

I have probably played every game in the main DQ series, but the only one that I ever managed to complete was the original. They have maintained the old school JRPG style to this day with a few functional changes but not a whole lot else. They are packed with random battles, typically feature a hero/save the world type story, and then have even more random battles.

While I do enjoy these games, I have found that I don't have the patience to play them all the time just based on the type of gameplay experience that you get. The random battles can be a bit much from time to time, and the storyline is more or less the same in every installment (hero, world crisis, save it, make dollas, etc). What this game does provide is that great feeling of nostalgia from when I was playing games on the NES/SNES as a kid, mixed with the updated graphics and mobile platform of the DS. Well that, and slimes:

It hurts to look them directly in their happy little faces since you essentially commit slime genocide in every DQ game you ever touch. How do we sleep at night?

Anyway, I will probably write about my journey through the game as I make my way through. Those poor poor slimes....

New blog post what is this I don't even

When I started this blog my intent was to share various experiences that I encountered in my IT career, and as usual I forgot about it and never added anything. I have decided instead to use this a medium to write about whatever I happen to be doing throughout my life in an attempt to get myself writing on a somewhat more regular basis. Will this make a difference? We shall see!