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I picked up a copy of Warhammer Online this past week, and have been quite enjoying it. Enjoying it enough that I’ve joined a guild. So far they seem to be a pretty decent, if somewhat sarcastic and crass, group of people; I should fit right in. They require the use of Ventrilo for voice chat, which is a pretty reasonable requirement for a guild that’s going to do PvP combat.

There are some quirks with Ventrilo and Vista, however, and I wanted to make mention of them here in the hopes that they might be useful to other people. Note that these tips were only tested with Warhammer Online and they may or may not apply to other games, and while this was done on 64-bit Vista, both Ventrilo and Warhammer Online were the 32-bit versions so they should behave the same on 32-bit Vista. Your mileage may vary.

Push-to-Talk (PTT)

In order for your PTT hotkey — which defaults to the left Ctrl key — to be recognized when you’re in WAR, you’ll need to run Ventrilo as an Administrator. This may be because WAR needs to run as admin, or maybe it’s just something with Vent. Either way, that’s how it has to be.

Overlay

The overlay is important to me, as I still don’t know how to recognize people on Vent by their voices. I spent a couple of hours fiddling with third-party overlay add-ons, graphics settings, compatibility options, etc. Then a clever idea hit me: run WAR in windowed mode, with the resolution set to the same thing I’d use for full-screen. That worked perfectly! I was able to position the overlay such that it didn’t cover anything too terribly useful, and I also set up a hot key so I could toggle the overlay display in the event that I did need to see something behind it.

So now I’m exceptionally happy with how Vent and WAR are playing together, and I’m looking forward to a long and happy life of fart jokes via voice chat while beating in the heads of stupid Destruction players.

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First off, apologies for this post’s title.  It had to be done, though.  On Monday, LiveJournal was sold to a Russian company.  When I first read about it, one eyebrow raised slightly, but I didn’t think much of it.  Then I started noticing comments coming in from my friends and colleagues talking about how they felt about it.

A former coworker of mine, icon, who was born in Russia, expressed his concern about the purchase.  He casts doubts on Russia’s privacy laws and a Russian company’s concern in adhering to what laws there are.  I was expecting him to speak up on this issue, and am glad to have his input.  Luis Villa also throws in his thoughts, as well as the thoughts of a former coworker of his.  Luis knows his way around law, free speech, and free software, so I was also looking forward to hearing what he thought.

My take on it is that we can’t be certain to trust LiveJournal with our private information any longer, nor can we safely consider them reputable librarians of our thoughts and ideas that we’re sharing with the world through blogs.  I have a handful of friends who are deep into LJ, but I think if there’s a good time to move your stuff off to another site, it’s now.  Six Apart — the company who previously owned LiveJournal — also owns both Vox and TypePad, which provide similar user experiences to LJ but are still held by an American company.  There’s also Google‘s very popular Blogger, which is where Icon’s moved to, and I think Google’s as trustworthy as any other company at the moment.  I personally run the open-source WordPress software hosted on a server that I share, but I understand that’s beyond many people’s technical skills, for whom I recommend WordPress.com, run by the company under whose stewardship the similarly named software currently rests.

All of those options are, so far as I’m aware, either entirely free (as in $0) or free for a certain basic level of service.  If you know otherwise, or if you have any other ideas, please leave comments.  Your personal data, as well as your thoughts, are too important to leave in the hands of someone you can’t trust.

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One of the frequent complaints I hear about 3rd Edition (and 3.5) D&D is that you have to play it with miniatures. “It was designed to sell them,” a friend of mine bemoans, pointing to Attacks of Opportunity as the most damning evidence. I’ll admit that I did consider AoO to be so difficult without some sort of physical tactical gameplay aid that I’d generally not used them — they are an optional rule, after all, being labeled with such words as “can” and “may” in the Player’s Handbook. But I decided to see if there were other options.

Some quick Googling led me to one other person’s opinion, and that person happened to be Monte Cook. You may have come across his name before, in the front cover of your Player’s Handbook or Dungeon Master’s Guide since he was part of the core 3rd Edition team and is an all-around awesome RPG developer. Check out what he says — his advice is sound, and I think that’s how I’m going to try to play the upcoming D&D 3.5e game I’ll be running before considering and investing in other solutions.

If that turns out to not work well, and the group decides not to revert to my previous behavior of simply ignoring AoO, I might give some of Fiery Dragon‘s counter sets a go. Cheaper than miniatures by a long shot, they still accomplish the goal of allowing everyone to see the tactical layout of the encounter.

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Now cracks a noble heart. Good-night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

A good friend and pillar of my peer group passed away this morning. He had lymphoma.

He will truely be missed, and the greatest heartfelt sorrows goes out towards his widow, who will receive every single last bit of help and strength I have to offer.

We love you, Derek and Kassi.