So today is my last day at Carestream Health. I have been working there for a little over a year, on a co-op as part of the graduation requirements for RIT. Overall it was a good experience. They were very flexible and nearly everyone was quite friendly. Aside from fulfilling my graduation requirements and getting some work experience to pad my resume, I should be set on money until I graduate in February. Class starts again on Monday. I’m somewhat looking forward to returning to school but I’m sure that will fade quickly once I’m actually there.

So my supervisor wanted to do some preliminary testing of our product on Windows Server 2008 on some spare machines, Dell 1750’s to be specific. One problem, no DVD drives and the 1750’s don’t boot from USB. He tried just installing on another machine and ghosting onto the 1750 but ran into problems due to the PERC4/Di raid controller on the 1750.

I didn’t really want to set up the full Vista/2008 deployment system, so my first attempt was to install on another machine and just load the PERC4/Di driver when given the option during install (You have to uncheck the “hide drivers that aren’t for this system” option). Apparently at some point during the install it purges the driver if it doesn’t need it, so it just BSODed after ghosting to the 1750. I thought of a possible workaround the other day and finally got around to trying it today. Right after you load the additional storage drivers it reboots before finishing the installation. I grabbed the image during that reboot and let the install finish on the 1750 successfully. This should work on any system in a similar situation.

You may or may not have noticed that we added a link to a URL of ours. This is a little project we are working on which will, hopefully, have big results. While its still in the early development stages, I will give you a sneak peek.

About two years ago, towards the end of vanilla WoW, Jon and I ran a guild that did the 20-man content of the day. We managed loot by a system produced by the guild Nurfed. They kept this up-to-date until BC arrived when they went to a loot council system and dropped support for theirs, named NDKP. We were saddened by this when we picked up the game again a few months ago and wanted to use this system. It would seem, apparently, that others were also upset because they trusted this system.

NDKP version 3.22 still exists on the Nurfed servers but is severely out of date. Almost all of the code for the calculations and in-game add-ons are broken. We will attempt to update this code and the calculations for use in BC and, hopefully, into WotLK. We have, appropriately, named this new milestone on the system, ZSDKP (standing for zero-sum dkp, of course).

Check back often for more!

Made some changes to fix a bunch of CSS issues. Please contact me if anything sucks… and by sucks, I mean is broken.

Changes, so you know what to look for:

• Captions now float left right and center, look like captions, and surround the picture with a nice box
• Code tags make code look like a little code window
• Added a new kind of quote mechanism for “citing” articles rather than “block quoting” them… though I haven’t decided which one is sweeter

Here’s where the help comes in: need some ideas on any other changes to the CSS that might rock. The idea I had in mind is added a title to a code window such that:

import crapola;
class aFunnyProg() {
}

Has a little title at the top of the box that says “Code:” or whatever. Anyone with some pro-tips?

Had this been pre-2.whatever I would have beaten the game. Either way, victory over BT is mine (and my guilds). Here is the screenie for nostalgia.

Illidan down