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!