The Columbus area Adobe User Group is picking up steam again. They have been meeting regularly on Tuesday evening for the past couple of months. Michael Krotscheck has been heading things up and the group is now official again. There is a new site designed by the members, Columbus Digital. Make sure to check it out.

The World of Warcraft Armory site has not been updating for many members of my guild recently. Sometimes the information is out of date and sometimes there is no information at all. Blizzard has confirmed an issue with the Armory data and states that an upcoming maintenance to the servers this week should fix it.

I was asked question on how to retrieve item information in my World of Warcraft Armory Data Item Update entry and thought I would give a couple of ideas here.

There are a couple of ways that I can see doing this and it really depends on your setup and intent for the data. If you want to mine all the data the item-info.xml takes in one parameter which is i and is an unique integer value for the item. Taking a quick look at my profile the highest value is 33522 and my lowest value is 5976. So you could easily setup a loop to loop from 1 to 40000 and should get the majority of items. The thing to note is this will get you every item including vendor trash.

Another approach would be to only retrieve item data for items that you are using in your dataset. For instance a small guild site where the web host might limit the size of a database. To pull this information, I would use the character profiles of the guild. Items appear in several places on the character-sheet.xml. Specifically they are in the item node under the attributes gem0Id, gem1Id, gem2Id and id. Building off of the character sheet will reduce the total size of the item inventory. This method does require a little more maintenance. For instance patches that change items or when players stop equipping items that have already been recorded. So wiping the dataset periodically would not be a bad idea.

I hit a milestone this week on my Paladin. Last night we dropped Nightbane and for my first time since we have been clearing Karazhan for 6 months now, the breastplate drops. The irony is badge 74 and 75 dropped off him. So I passed to our warrior who had also been waiting a long time for it too. I picked up the Chestguard of the Stoic Guardian in town and gemmed it with the gems I had on reserve. The upgraded moved me from 14.9k health to 15.3k. I still have to get the 150 health enchant and that will take me to 15.5k health unbuffed. My next focus will be to add a little more spell damage to help with threat.

I work at a certain big brown parcel company that tends to get very busy around the holiday season. I went on a peak assignment to one of our operations for the last two months which ate into all of my time. Since my normal job is doing IT work I have actually been extremely busy for the last 4 months because we have to get any of our application deployments done before the operation peak happens. So I am finally able to take a deep breath, relax a little bit and dust off this website a bit.

I am pretty excited, my host will be upgrading to ColdFusion 8. I have been waiting to play around some more with some of the new features since I played with the beta. I will probably start working on some of the things I was doing for my WoW guild again as I had a signature creator in ASP.NET but would love to try it with ColdFusion.

Scott Stroz will be speaking about Flex at our Columbus ColdFusion User Group> on September 27th. You can RSVP by going to the site.

The World of Warcraft Armory has gotten a shortened URL. You can now use http://www.wowarmory.com/ instead of the longer http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com. With the update they also improved on the size of some the XML files and made some structure changes to the XML.

Adam Lehman is going to be presenting on the new PDF and AJAX features of ColdFusion 8 on August 16th at 5:30 PM. I only wish I could attend but I have a prior engagement presenting on our eLearning initiatives at UPS.

You can RSVP at columbuscfug.org

Had a fun night tonight. I tanked several bosses in our cleanup run of Karazhan tonight. They included Prince Malchezaar, Terestian Illhoof, Maiden of Virtue and Attumen the Huntsman.

Now most people would say that is great, every warrior does that. Will that is where this is different. I am a tankadin or protection spec paladin. The other neat thing is I did all the tanking solo without the help of a second tank.

We wiped the first time on prince as we got boxed in on a couple of unlucky infernal drops but the second time went smooth. Maiden of Virtue was a pain because of the silence but I managed to stay ahead on the threat meter. Attumen and Midnight were fun as I got to tank both bosses while they were separated.

Overall a fun evening and very challenging but also nice to show the guild a tankadin can MT just fine.