Coz I'm the admin, yo!

So, I've got this strange fascination with analyzing data. Collecting info from a dozen places, and putting it into a neat orderly table for everyone to enjoy.

But, it doesn't stop there. Nowhere NEAR even.

It's in my genes I guess. And it goes back to my grandfather (rest his kind soul). I've collected stamps, coins, Magic the Gathering cards, E-books, and a dozen other things. In Ultima Online I'd gather Runes (location bookmarks) and together with a friend we made the biggest library the game has ever seen. We even ended up needing two houses in the game to store them all. All the while I was gathering weapons, reagents, cloth, and order and sort everything neat as you may. Then came along World of Warcraft and lo and behold I'm having a hard time selling anything still because I've managed to collect 3 guild banks + a few alternate characters full of stuff. Of course I did sell some things - but at some point you just spend more time in the game organizing and sticking stuff on the auction house than actually "playing" the game.


Wiki

So, here's my current disfunction, wiki making. Alas it's to be on Wikia, I know many have a disliking for them, and personally I'm none to keen on some of the policies of the default skins, but logging in and setting "monobook" goes a long way.


At any rate,. I've been Admin on Rusty Hearts Wiki, that one is up available for adoption if anyone wants to carry the torch on that one. I've gathered quest data, text, stats and more. It's all there still so feel free to continue the work. I no longer play that game because it got tiresome. It's free to play though.

Also, I've just been made Admin on Motor World Wiki, and have been happily chugging out more data for a big list of cars you can collect there. If you want to try that game, It's for iOS only currently (at the time of writing), but it'll be available for android as well soon. Feel free to enter my referral code / friend code when you see fit: HNGG410 - It's quite an amusing little casual game and I can recommend giving it a try.

And then there's the big one, again I'm currently the Admin. Dark Summoner Wiki. This is a CCG, which means Collectible Card Game. Oh hey that sounds an awful lot like Magic the Gathering doesn't it?

Well, I suppose it does at that,. but on a smaller scale. (I've quite lost count on how many cards MTG has right now) The fun part however is that this game is on iOS, and to top it off all the calls to the game server can be "sniffed". Oh yes, pure html data straight into my parser, output as xml, csv, sql, or.... you guessed it Wiki tables :)
That's not all though! It turns out Wikia supports XML exports and imports (goosebumps here) , all you need to do is setup the proper format. And behold, Individual pages are as easy as 1.2.3 or a.b.c. All thanks to the wonderful strengths of Delphi XE.

I managed to put a little program that chugs out pretty much any data format. So, that is kind of what I've been working on the last few weeks. fun fun fun. And it gives a lot of players a very useful data source for all their card info. Before, the page was quite a clusterfuck of unsorted data, with so much information missing.

It feels good making stuff orderly.

The F word, and a big oops

CK,. !

Well, that was a bad night for me.
I was cleaning up some old junk from my PC. Zipped software, old images, mp3s you don't listen to anymore, code references, steam games you don't play much anymore.

I guess somewhere along the line windows must have put it's selection on the left side of the default explorer and I deleted it, thinking I had selected something on the right side of the screen.

Well, I went along without much clarity I guess, because I zipped a few folders, deleted more stuff, then emptied the trash can. A good 30 minutes later (while utorrent is stilly happily chugging along) I notice "huh, where the f is my Projects folder gone?" Less than a second later that cold sweaty shiver comes crawling up your back when you KNOW you did something irreversibly STUPID.

I checked the windows trash can, and obviously it wasn't there anymore...
I checked for undelete programs, and ran about two of three of those with the same result.

Any files that could be found had been overwritten permanently in the space of seconds.
What was lost? Any and all programs I had written and kept on my own computer (and not backed up - except for one).

Sure, the whole file was in "Git", but it turns out Git doesn't keep a separate storage for files, it just dumps those in the SAME FOLDER...

Le Sigh.

So anyway, that's my evening ruined.

It makes you wonder why you can't set a "lock" on folders in windows. Critical files for the system have 3 checks and warnings already. Why can't you set a triple lock on folders that are critical "to you"?