Huy's blag

It's time for a list of apparently useful gear again. Not that much has been introduced to the game with the Fall 2011 update, but there most certainly are a few gems in there. Literally.

Without further ado, gear!

Weapons

• Coruscanti [BRD]
• Lux Pugio [BRD]
• Surya's Staff +3 [BRD] [SCH]

Obvious staff is obvious. It presumably grants Cure potency +25%, which will get you dangerously close to Cure potency +50% (cap) without the help of Korin Obi. Especially with some more new gear.

Other Trial staves are getting +3 updates, as well, so have a good time grinding!

Apart from those staves, some non-Relic, non-Mythic, and non-Empyreal daggers look interesting, namely Lux Pugio and Coruscanti.

Grips

• Wizzan Grip [SCH]

Finally, a real update for nuking grips (not counting Vivid Strap +1). It's pretty much a no-brainer for nuking.

Ranged + Ammo

• Memoria Satchet [SCH]
• Ombre Tathlum [SCH]

While Memoria Satchet is just a small upgrade from Witchstone for nukes, Ombre Tathlum is a huge upgrade from Phantom Tathlum for Helices. Taking into consideration that INT+4 is almost equivalent to MAB+2 for SCH (the real ratio is somewhere about 2.2:1 for most SCHs, I think), a single Ombre Tathlum does just almost as well as a Memoria Satchet, if you really need those inventory slots.

Head

• Nefer Khat +1 [SCH]

Nefer Khat +1 probably is the new hat to cast most offensive SCH magic in, except for Helices (Teal Chapeau or any other high-INT hat) and arguably Aspir/Drain (Argute Mortarboard for cutting down recast timers). Thanks to its rather high enmity reduction, you could as well use it for that purpose during Light Arts action, as well.

Neck

• Moepapa Pendant [SCH]
• Saevus Pendant [SCH]
• Wiglen Gorget [BRD] [SCH]

Savant's Chain is the new lazy mage gear piece, now that you have one piece to cast Helices (Moepapa Pendant) and one piece to cast nukes (Saevus Pendant) in. This pair also pretty much obsoletes Uggalepih Pendant, as each of them consistently outdoes the latent effect on their own. Saevus Pendant also gets close to Artemis' Medal around Full Moon, so you could save yet another inventory slot here, if you wanted to.

The MACC-3 effect in my opinion looks worse than it actually is, because you could easily compensate for that downside by gearing for MACC a bit more in some other slot, if you really needed to.

A big question mark over my head appears when I'm trying to figure out whether to wear a Wiglen Gorget or a Twilight Torque. You obviously wouldn't want to wear Wiglen Gorget when going against spellcasters primarily, but the question here is whether gaining Regen is worth the downside of taking more magic damage, if you are going to be hit. I tend to stick to Wiglen Gorget most of the time, I think...

Earrings

• Brachyura Earring [BRD] [SCH]
• Earthcry Earring [BRD] [SCH]
• Enchanter's Earring [BRD]
• Strophadic Earring [SCH]

Depending on how big the bonus on Brachyura Earring is, it might be a horrible piece of crap... or not. Testing will tell. Earthcry Earring adds yet another Stoneskin piece (SE could as well just have introduced Stoneskin II...) and Strophadic Earring is clearly better than Moldavite Earring for anything offensive SCH magic, especially Helices, but still is inferior to Hecate's Earring for regular nukes.

As for Enchanter's Earring, it should be superior to whatever you have been using with your Musical Earring until now, when it's about offensive magic.

Body

• Heka's Kalasiris [BRD] [SCH]
• Nefer Kalasiris +1 [BRD] [SCH]

If you have Heka's Kalasiris, you obviously don't even want to look at Nefer Kalasiris +1, because the rare/ex piece is better no matter how you look at it. It almost gives Pluviale a run for its... effort as a idling piece and is obviously huge for curing purposes. Cure potency +40% with just Heka's Kalasiris and Surya's Staff +3 is just awesome. Since the Serpentes' set grants another 5%, it's just a short trip to 50% from there.

Hands

• Alucinor Mitts [BRD]

Gogogo, lolmeleebrd. Even though you can easily get Haste +26% already...

Rings

• Aife's Ring [BRD]
• Paguroidea Ring [BRD] [SCH]
• Portus Annulet [BRD]
• Prolix Ring [BRD] [SCH]

The Regen effect on Paguroidea Ring is most definitely interesting, but I haven't tried figuring out whether damage reduction or Regen is more preferable to have full-time. It basically is the same question I didn't have an answer for above (Wiglen Gorget or Twilight Torque), but this time, the damage reduction from another ring most likely won't be as strong as Twilight Torque. I'd probably go with the Regen effect, unless I actually expect to be hit...

Using Prolix Ring however is easy: Strap it on precast, do your stuff a tiny bit faster, take it off afterwards. Same with the rings for lolmeleebrd.

Back

• Balladeer's Cape [BRD]
• Kaikia's Cape [SCH]
• Oretenia's Cape [BRD] [SCH]
• Romanus Cape [SCH]

Oretenia's Cape is yet another piece that enhances Cure potency, which actually makes me hope SE is going to lift the cap for Cure potency+ at some time. This cape is not as good as Twilight Cape, if you like having Aurorastorm on yourself when SCH-ing, but it most definitely is worth getting, granting an unconditional +4%.

Romanus Cape is the best nuking cape out there (possibly second to Twilight Cape for SCH), and a very close second to Potentia Cape (technically fourth, because Pedant Cape also gives INT+6). Can't really complain, I suppose. Kaikia's Cape also gives INT+6 and pimps Aero nukes as well as Anemohelix by a good chunk, but with INT+6 only, it doesn't get close to Romanus Cape for non-Aero nukes.

Balladeer's Cape makes you think whether you really need that skill for your Stringed instruments, as it doesn't really outdo good ol' Jester's Cape +1 for Elegy, which is best sung with a wind instrument.

Waist

• Casso Sash [SCH]
• Corvax Sash [BRD]
• Flume Belt [BRD]
• Harfner's Sash
• Phasmida Belt [BRD]

Out of the skill +5 sashes, Casso Sash probably is the most interesting one for SCH, especially since there is a lack of decent waist pieces for those purposes (Argute Belt and some Haste belt might qualify), anyway. The other ones that SCHs can benefit from only are of some use when they help breaking a given tier, which only applies to Enhancing Magic. But it's definitely not a downside that Olympus Sash comes with Elemental Magic +5...

BRDs get their own instrument +5 sash, which is pretty interesting. Assuming BRDs can still cap their songs as easily as before the update, they don't need that sash for buffs though, which opens up use cases for Corvax Sash. You could try and mimic the reduced recast effect using a Haste belt, but assuming Haste +6%, you'd need to face an unmodified recast timer of 34 seconds to do better than Corvax Sash with Haste +6%. Talking about Haste +6... Phasmida Belt is such a belt and it probably is the best belt you can TP in with your lolmeleebrd.

Flume Belt is an awesome idling piece for BRD. Not because of the effect when taking damage, but more because it's yet another damage reducing piece of gear. Getting back some MP is "just" nice to have.

Legs

• Galvanic Slops [SCH]

These pants are better than Cybele Pants for Helices (damage-wise), but still are a little bit worse than Teal Slops for nukes. But we're getting close to outdoing those Teal Slops...

Shoes

• Aife's Pumps [SCH]

Presumably the best shoes for SCH, when it's about nuking or Helices. Those MACC-4 aren't that bad, because of the high INT+ these shoes grant, which makes up for some magic accuracy. Savant's Loafers +2 still break these when adding Klimaform to the equations, but Aife's Pumps seem great, nonetheless.

I'm outta here...

Looking at these upgrades, I kind of am happy to see my good old Novio Earring are still worth the hassle I've gone through to acquire them. Not everything from "back then" has been obsoleted. But then, I look at some of the other pieces and see some huge power creep. Once upon a time, I told myself I'd never get a Prudence Torque by myself, because our luck with that pair of goldfish has been abysmal and the line for Prudence Torque was horribly long. These days, we're not talking about an unconditional INT+5, but about an unconditional INT+8, MAB+9, or INT+5, MAB+3, MACC+3. Most definitely feels awkward.

But thankfully, SE seems to have ceased continuing their (in my opinion horrible) idea of Abyssea, taking the action back to the "real" Vana'diel. Even though I'm not playing myself anymore, I'm kind of looking forward to see what ideas SE will be coming up with for the near future.

I'm especially looking forward to see how prominent the power creep will be once the level cap has been fully lifted to 99. I can see why gear for 91-95 should be reasonably stronger than gear for 86-90, I just hope it's not keeping that pace once level 99 has been established as the "real" cap. Like 75 has been for many years some time ago.

Sooo, empathy broke down on Debian wheezy a few months ago ago, saying no more than this:

XServer appears to lack the required GLX support
Run 'empathy --help' to see a full list of available command line options.

Now that I got some free time to spare, I tried to get back empathy on my notebook. (XMPP-ing on my mobile instead was more than tedious at work.) xserver-xorg-core changelog claims that this problem has been fixed some time ago and even though that version has been pushed to wheezy already, the problem persisted on my notebook.

After some more reading the internets and checking my installed packages, I found out that libgl1-mesa-dri was not installed, because xserver-xorg-core listed that package as "recommends" only. Once libgl1-mesa-dri was installed... my empathy started without any complaints! \o/

Maybe... time for compiz. I think compiz ran into the same error, but it's been too long for me to remember.

Using some on-line resources (for links see below), I managed to deploy bleeding edge Typo on Heroku. Despite having a virtual root server to run Typo on, I decided to have it run somewhere else, because of the limitations on my virtual root server. Namely the number of open files, for Typo wouldn't have been the only thing running on it.

Preparations

Getting Typo is not exactly difficult. All you need is git and it's just

$ git clone git://github.com/fdv/typo.git
$ cd typo

to download the most recent version of Typo into a directory typo and jumping right into that directory. And since we are working with Heroku, installing the Heroku gem provides a useful command-line interface to your Heroku app:

$ gem install heroku

Setting up the repository for Heroku

Before you can do a git push to Heroku, you need to do a few things first. They all deal with the fact that the Heroku file system is read-only by creating empty folders (and keeping them in git) and disabling write access wherever needed.

Empty folders

Empty folders first. As git ignores empty folders, we need empty files within those (then not-so-empty) folders get them into git.

$ mkdir -p public/files tmp/cache
$ touch public/files/.gitkeep tmp/cache/.gitkeep
$ git add -f public/files/.gitkeep tmp/cache/.gitkeep
$ git commit -m "Adding empty directories for Heroku."

Removing write access

Now we need to disable write access in whatever might be writing to the file system. Create a file config/preinitializer.rb containing

require 'fileutils'

file_utils_no_write = FileUtils::NoWrite
Object.send :remove_const, :FileUtils
FileUtils = file_utils_no_write

to disable copying assets from the plugins to the public folder. This seems safe to do, because Typo comes with those files in the right place already.

I haven't tried using default themes, but using my own one, I've run into HTTP 500 errors when trying to get files like /images/theme/foobar.jpg. This presumably happens because caching fails (due to read-only restrictions), so I disabled this behaviour in config/environments/production.rb:

--- a/config/environments/production.rb
+++ b/config/environments/production.rb
@@ -7,7 +7,7 @@ TypoBlog::Application.configure do
 
   # Full error reports are disabled and caching is turned on
   config.consider_all_requests_local = false
-  config.action_controller.perform_caching             = true
+  config.action_controller.perform_caching             = false
 
   # See everything in the log (default is :info)
   # config.log_level = :debug

This works for me, but it seems to slow down the site by quite a bit. So maybe try and store images, stylesheets, and JavaScript files somewhere else and link to them.

Lastly, the CKeditor tries to write stuff to public/javascripts. Fortunately, StackOverflow is a good friend and knows a few solutions to that problem. I went with this editing vendor/plugins/easy-ckeditor/init.rb:

--- a/vendor/plugins/easy-ckeditor/init.rb
+++ b/vendor/plugins/easy-ckeditor/init.rb
@@ -1,9 +1,9 @@
 # Include hook code here
 require 'ckeditor'
 require 'ckeditor_version'
-require 'ckeditor_file_utils'
+# require 'ckeditor_file_utils'
 
-CkeditorFileUtils.check_and_install
+# CkeditorFileUtils.check_and_install
 
 # make plugin controller available to app
 config.autoload_paths += %W(#{Ckeditor::PLUGIN_CONTROLLER_PATH} #{Ckeditor::PLUGIN_HELPER_PATH})

As pointed out on StackOverflow, a pretty ghetto-ish solution...

$ git add config/preinitializer.rb config/environments/production.rb vendor/plugins/easy-ckeditor/init.rb
$ git commit -m "Disabling write access where needed for Heroku."

Databases and gems

The easiest way to let Heroku know which gems to install probably is providing a Gemfile.lock file. Doing this instead of creating a .gems file manually will ensure that all required gems are being listed, which may be relevant if the Typo team decides to add a gem for some new feature (or just use more recent versions of some gems).

Before we can get a Gemfile.lock file, we need to set up the config/database.yml file containing this:

development:
  adapter: sqlite3
  database: db/development.sqlite3
  pool: 5
  timeout: 5000

test:
  adapter: sqlite3
  database: db/test.sqlite3
  pool: 5
  timeout: 5000

production:
  adapter: sqlite3
  database: db/production.sqlite3
  pool: 5
  timeout: 5000

With config/database.yml in its place, we finally can fire bundle to get the Gemfile.lock we need.

$ bundle
$ git add -f Gemfile.lock config/database.yml
$ git commit -m "Adding Gemfile.lock and database.yml for Heroku"

If bundle fails for you, install the bundler gem first:

$ gem install bundler

This step is a major detour from what I have found on this topic. Chances are I'm doing too much here by implying the need of sqlite3 or so. But I think this is the more robust way to provide information about which gems we need to Heroku.

reCaptcha

For a while now (I don't know since when, as I had patched Typo for reCaptcha support some time ago), the master branch of Typo also supports reCaptcha. In order to use it, you need to enable it in the administration interface and have your reCaptcha keys, which you can get on the reCaptcha website, stored in config/initializers/recaptcha.rb.

$ git add config/initializers/recaptcha.rb
$ git commit -m "Adding reCaptcha keys."

Ship it to Heroku!

Since deploying to Heroku is as easy as a git push, that's all there is.

$ git push <your-heroku-git-reposiory> master:master

The last step to your Heroku-hosted Typo blog then is setting up the database.

$ heroku rake db:migrate

Congratulations on your own Typo blog on Heroku!

Custom Heroku domains with lighttpd

If you want your Heroku application to be reachable at http://yourdomain.com, there are a few possibilities. Heroku suggests setting the A record of your domain or subdomain to Heroku IP addresses. This may or may not be a viable option to you, but it was not one to me.

Fortunately, I found another way that did not require me to mess with the A record of my domains: Using a lighttpd reverse proxy to forward HTTP requests to Heroku:

$HTTP["host"] =~ "^(huydinh|informagics)\.eu$" {
  proxy.server  = ( "" =>
    (
      ( "host" => "75.101.163.44" ),
      ( "host" => "75.101.145.87" ),
      ( "host" => "174.129.212.2" ),
    ),
  )
}

This only sends HTTP(S) requests to my domains to the Heroku servers, while leaving all other requests untouched. A way more preferable solution to me.

To do...

As I had mentioned before, you maybe want your stylesheet/image/JavaScript files to be served statically instead of having Typo deal with /images/theme/* types of files. If you have a lighttpd (or any other web server) available anyway, it might as well offer such static files. I haven't implemented it yet, but chances are I will do so soon enough. Depending on what NewRelic and friends tell me.

So, this year's EuRuKo is over and next year's EuRuKo will be in Amsterdam. I guess that means I will have to camp them tickets even harder...

Party! Not...

Unfortunately, I did not have time for either of the three "parties" at c-base, Tante Käthe and somewhere else each. For that I blame... "someone". ;-D

From what I've heard, however, getting to Tante Käthe was more difficult than the organizers have hoped it'd be. Not only was it pretty far from the conference site, but it was very well hidden, too. Getting there in the dark did not help much either. I hope Amsterdam will feature some more easily reached party site.

Next year, if I am going to be in Amsterdam, I will have to make up for this year. Promise.

Talks

Most insightful to me were both Paolo Perrotta's talk about method_missing() and Jose Valim's talk about writing programming languages. Please don't get me wrong, I don't mean to say all other talks were not interesting. For example, Mateusz Drozdzynski's talk about sentiment analysis was great, as well, but not inducing a WHOA! as strongly as Paolo or Jose did to me, though.

While Paolo's talk probably benefitted a lot from Paolo's really strong performance on stage (not saying there was any lack of content!), Jose introduced me to a topic I haven't ever really got in touch with before. Plus his ideas were rather interesting, as well.

Some other talks however were... not that good. Some were just poorly presented and some had a severe lack of relevant content. But that's to be expected of conferences.

Ruby, Ruby, Ruby!

This. 'nuff said.

Gearing up Bard has become easier than ever before. Among the songs that matter, 671 combined skill apparently is enough (for Valor Minuet V) to cap every one of those. Since you have 620 combined base skill already at BRD90, getting the last +51 is not even remotely difficult, if you have put some effort into BRD before.

Plus!

The real things (and most significant upgrades) about BRD gear in Abyssea are the +3 instruments though.

• Pan's Horn
• Oneiros Harp
• Langeleik

And then, BRD finally gets an unconditional Ballad+ instrument:

Looking at those instruments, you will notice that a good deal of them are Stringed Instruments. As such, you do not only have to skill up your String skill, but you also have to pay attention to the effective song range, because it is not a fixed 10 yalms.

For the sake of completeness, these two shall be mentioned:

Being able to keep a third song running is a novelty Daurdabla comes with. The lack of any song+ effect can be a problem sometimes, because of the lack of extended duration: You might be overwriting the third song instead of the first one.

Yet another novelty is gear featuring song+ effects:

Song Spellcasting Time

SE also have realized (and acknowledged) that singing maybe does take a little bit too long, and in came, in addition to Aoidos' Calot +1/+2, five more pieces to help out.

These five pieces reduce song spellcasting time by 19%. Since Atma of the Deep Devourer reduces that by another 20%, Sha'ir Manteel is sufficient to floor singing time with those five items inside Abyssea. Even without Atma, you can get as close to -43% with Sha'ir Manteel and Aoidos' Calot +2. Another -1% can be found for lots of money in Sheikh Manteel though. Pretty close to floor. Without all the hassle dealing with Minstrel's Ring! \o/

Skill

So BRD received some song+ love, as well as singing time reduction love. What they did not really get is gear that raised their skill levels. The only item that is worth mentioning and has not been mentioned before does not even give that much of a bonus:

Therefore, those missing +51 points of combined skill -- assuming capped skills at BRD90 -- for capping Valor Minuet V have to be acquired using pre-Abyssea gear and/or Empyreal Armor +1/+2. You can hit that cap with Empyreal Armor +2 and merits solely, even: 620 base skill, +46 from AF3+2 and at least +6 from merits in either Singing or Wind Instrument (3/8).