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Hi, my name is Adam, and I have a Death Knight. I’m writing this post as a helpful guide to starting out with the Death Knight class, for others going into it blind like I did. It’s not about spoilers or walkthroughs, just those little things that were not immediately obvious.

Some miscellaneous points of interest:

• You are confined to the Death Knight starting area until you complete the initial quest line.
• You will replace all your green starter gear with blue gear by the time you finish. This can be a nice gauge of progress. (”Two items left, almost done!”)
• You will get an epic (100% speed increase) ground mount as a quest reward.
• You will always have access to the Runeforges in Ebon Hold through Death Gate. During specific quest line events, the Runeforges will not function. Don’t worry about it, they’ll be back.
• When you finish the last quest in your faction’s capital city, go to Outland. You should be level 58, and you’re going to destroy anything you come across in Hellfire Peninsula.
• Professions
  • You will get First Aid level 270 for free, with Heavy Runecloth Bandage as an orange skill.
  • You will have the Journeyman riding skill.
  • Everything else has to start from Level 1. Enjoy grinding skillups!
• You get all the Eastern Kingdom and Kalimdor flight paths for free.
• You start with 10 Black Mushrooms, and these cannot be purchased from vendors. Send them to other characters for Tastes Like Chicken and the ilk.

And finally, notes about specific quests:

Quest: Grand Theft Palomino

Bring the horse back to Salanar, then look for a button in your new vehicle action bar for turning in the horse.

Quest: Into the Realm of Shadows

The Dark Riders were hotly contested when I did this, but they do spawn in the town. I just hung out where I initially picked up my horse.

Quest: A Special Surprise

Dialog is a big part of this quest. When you enter the prison house, you’re looking for an NPC of your race. Listen to what he has to say. You’ll know when to head back to Plaguefist.

Quest: An End to All Things…

When you’re done destroying stuff, return to The Lich King and dismount using the “Leave Vehicle” button in your toolbar.

Quests: The Lich King’s Command and The Light of Dawn

During this quest you’ll see two NPC counters and a timer at the top of your screen. If the event is already in progress, or seems to have stopped, just hang out by Browman’s Mill (or maybe even further back, I’m not sure how big the compeltion radius is) and wait for it to reset. It really is epic, do yourself a favor and experience the whole thing.

Several of us grouped which turned out to be unnecessary, and another Death Knight showed up after all the dialog and got quest credit for the whole thing. Nice time saver, but wait for the reset if you care about lore.

That’s It

Have fun. I am.

I think we found Marshall’s Halloween costume:

(MC Frontalot photo by quinnums, Creative Commons by-cc-na 2.0.)

I can has some.

I’ve been obsessing about this for a while now. Today I finally received my Seagate 7200.3 320GB 7200 RPM 2.5″ SATA drive (ST9320421AS) for my MacBook, as well as a macally FireWire (PHRS250CC) case to house my old 80GB drive. It’s liberating to have more than 2GB of disk space free. I’m expecting slightly worse battery performance due to the faster drive speed, with the potential for some speed improvements for the same reason.

The install went off without a hitch. I booted from the Mac OS X 10.5 install disc and cloned the internal drive to the new drive (temporarily in the macally case) using Disk Utility. After maybe 90 minutes the process finished and I booted from FireWire to make sure everything was kosher. One quick drive swap between the macally and the MacBook and I’m in business.

Now to see how many weeks go by before another drive is filled.

(As a side note, Mac OS X decided the existing Spotlight index was bunk, and my fans have been spinning like mad while it’s rebuilt. I wish it wouldn’t do that on battery power.)

I wrote my first bookmarklet as a proof-of-concept the other day. I often find myself shortcutting up to the location bar to switch between development and production web servers. Here’s a bookmarklet that toggles “dev” and “www” subdomains for me, broken into a few lines for readability:

javascript:dL=document.location; nH=dL.host.split('.')[0]=='www'?'dev':'www'; dL.href=dL.href.replace(/^(https?:\/\/)[^\.]+/i,"$1"+nH);

And in its ready-to-drag-to-your-bookmark-bar version: switch.

I bit the bullet and downloaded the VMware Fusion 2 release candidate today. For completeness, I also trashed my Ubuntu 7.04 Server virtual machine and installed Ubuntu 8.04 Desktop. Here’s some thoughts after a few hours of use.

Installation

During the machine setup, I was prompted to do a “Linux Easy Install.” The software auto-populated my full name and username, and asked me for a new password. I let it do its thing, having already pointed it to the Ubuntu installation ISO. A short while later, with no additional interaction, I was at the Gnome login screen. The username and password I had chosen during installation worked great.

Interface

The feature that finally pushed me over the 2.0 edge was Unity support in Linux. In the past I have only run server applications on my VM, but I had to see Linux Unity in action, layering my Linux applications with Mac OS X applications. It doesn’t disappoint.

At the other end of the spectrum is “Headless” mode. I’ve been waiting for this for a long time. When I’m using the server capabilities of my VM, I don’t want an extra application cluttering up my alt-tab. Now: “Enter Headless,” quit VMWare Fusion. Simple. I assume the VM will suspend if I shut down the computer, but I haven’t tested it yet.

The new library window is a bit more attractive, and the machine settings list is more compact. The list also shows a live thumbnail of your VM’s display, be it console or graphical. Along the same lines, the console display can now be resized to zoom the terminal text in or out.

The Gnome application menu is also accessible from the Mac OS X Dock. Apps can be launched in Unity mode without restoring the Gnome desktop.

Seamless cursor movement between the Linux and Mac desktop, along with VM resolution adjusting to the size of the machine window, are also great features, though I suspect they were present in Fusion 1.0.

Some Other Section

Looks like the VMware Fusion team has been up to good things since the first release. I haven’t yet tried Parallels, but I can’t see a reason to try anything new from where I’m sitting.

My day job makes heavy use of Smarty for page templating. We’re currently moving away from XTemplate, which I generally don’t like, but it does have one nice feature: curly braces in CSS and JavaScript blocks aren’t interpreted as template tags. I set out to determine if this behavior could be easily applied to Smarty.

The Problem

By default, Smarty uses curly braces to denote template tags, ie. {foreach from=$widgets item=widget}. The left and right tag delimiter are configurable, defaulting to { and }, respectively. Whitespace is allowed after the left delimiter. This means the following CSS rule is interpreted as a Smarty tag:

<style type="text/css"> body { font-size: 80%; } </script>

This would generate an error, claiming “syntax error: unrecognized tag: font-size: 80%.” You can use the {literal} tag to escape a block of text, or use {ldelim} instead of “{”, or change the delimiter to something less common like <!--{. I would prefer the XTemplate behavior.

The Solution

Here is a patch that modifies Smarty to ignore left delimiters which are immediately followed by whitespace. {foreach} would be parsed, but { foreach} would not. This has potential security implications since an errant space could expose part of your template to the world, but it has the potential to simplify some very convoluted markup.

I’ve done some limited testing (including creating a one-character template tag) and it seems to work fine. I’ll have to try with some more complicated templates, but hopefully this will make its way into our Smarty as a custom mod. (Thankfully we deploy Smarty via Subversion, so it’s relatively easy to mod the local library install.)