So yeah, I deleted TANK again. I decided that going for the Defender of Ascalon title is just too insane. Death leveling just feels wrong. So instead, I turned him into a Ranger. I’m going for the Survivor title… again. It seems a lot harder as a Ranger. I’m having trouble getting over the Shiverpeak mountains, but this is a mission that I must complete. I’ve been cordially invited to attend the 2009 Wintersday festivities. With over two weeks of extra loot, this is a perfect opportunity to farm titles. Therefore, I want to get to Kilroy’s Punch-Out Extravaganza. That means I have to make it to Lion’s Arch, and then travel over to the Eye of the North expansion.
Continue reading “Getting Ready for the 2009 Wintersday Party”
So OK, I’ve been doing the mobile development thing for about a year now and I’m finally starting to see some money being generated by my apps. Throughout 2009, the coins would add up. Five cents here, 10 cents there… whoa… $2.09 from a book sale… the cash would accumulate in my account. I was holding off on redeeming my earnings because Google Checkout wanted my bank account number. Suddenly, it was no longer a fun game with arcade like scoring. No, once I cashed out the money, there would be real world consequences… like income tax forms and trips to the mall. Hey, wait a minute, I like buying stuff… so Google, where’s my money? Before I could get paid, there was the little matter of account verification.
Recently, I moved all of my Guild Wars content to a new website. I feel pretty good about the new content management system and the new direction of the website. But as I went to bed last night, I started thinking about 404 Errors – Page Not Found. I had forgotten to set up Apache Redirects. After having a dream about poor search engine ranking, I woke up and updated my .htaccess file. It was simple but important work. Without sending web traffic to the new location, I risked losing visitors. Fortunately, with Apache Redirects, I could point web visitors to the new locations. This should create a better experience for both Human and Robot visitors.
When you launch the Guild Wars application, you can see important messages from ArenaNet. Typically, the weekend event is the main highlight. The message box can also includes a warning about proper game etiquette. The message is usually something minor, but today it was not. There appears to have been a major breach of security. An ominous warning, highlighted in red, informed me that I should change my password today. Upon further investigation, it seems that a fansite might have been compromised. I had a feeling that this would happen someday. By cracking the weaker security of a fansite, hackers could harvest user names and passwords from Guild Wars players. Since many players do not use unique passwords, their Guild Wars account is vulnerable.
When I would publish my Android Apps, the Google Developer Console would give me an unusual error. “The apk is not zipaligned. Please run the…” Blah, blah, blah… what’s Google complaining about now? Typically, I would just ignore this warning. Why should I care? Google didn’t prevent my app from being published, so I would just let it go. But recently, I decided to give this another look. How do I zipalign my apps? I went digging through the Android Developer documents and I was finally able to publish my apps properly. Although, as usual, it was a bit of a struggle. That’s because I hadn’t updated my Android software in a while. It seems that some things have changed in Android land.