Forgive me for the hit-and-run posting, but I wanted to share two things very quickly:

1. The 2.4.0 Test Realms (both PTR and TTR) have closed for good, and Blizzard has announced extended maintenance tomorrow. So we’re looking good for a 2.4 launch in the morning.
2. After some extreme finagling on my part, I think I am once again in a state where I can update Petopia. But I’m not certain.

Putting these two things together: I beg your forbearance if it takes me a bit to get updated for Patch 2.4 tomorrow. Luckily, there’s only one new pet that I’m aware of at this point: the Razorthorn Ravager.

Technical details about my finagling follow. Feel free to skip them.

My main desktop computer is dead. Many of the pieces are still operational (including a terabyte of hard drive space and my very-nice-a-year-ago graphics card). So the plan was to buy a barebones machine as cheap as possible and rebuild with what I could scavenge. I even went ahead and ordered the machine.

But … I have this laptop. It is a very nice laptop — I bought it for work, so it’s got some decent performance, plus I made sure the graphics card was meaty enough to run WoW with no problem. (Mind you, some toasters could run WoW with no problem.) And it cost a lot, and I’ve barely used it since I stopped travelling so much after Christmas. And honestly I can’t really afford to just plop down the money for a new machine right now — not even a cheap barebones machine.

So I cancelled my order and started working on the laptop. First I reinstalled Vista, which had gotten partially eaten in a development mishap a few months ago. (Nothing too huge, but I couldn’t unzip zip files to save my life.) I considered switching to XP — I adore XP — but Sony has a long list of which pieces of my laptop stop working if I go back to XP. So I stuck with Vista … although I did install SP1 first thing.

Then I installed program after program so I could get my dev environment for Petopia operational. I hadn’t realized how much specialized software I use! The trickiest bit was getting Apache and MySQL and PHP to all play nice under Vista. Among other things, I had to use a resource hack program on the MySQL configuration tool to get it to run. Not something I’d pictured myself doing a few weeks ago.

Even after all the software was set up, though, I had a problem — I needed the data off those old hard drives! Sure, the important stuff is in Perforce and I can reproduce most of the Petopia changes I had in progress without too much trouble, but … I needed my browser bookmarks. I needed my password file. I needed my Jonathon Coulton songs. I needed my spreadsheet of which bills I’ve paid this month! But most of all, I needed more space than this piddly little laptop drive has.

So today I called random computer parts stores until I found one that had what I needed: an external hard drive enclosure that would take a SATA drive and had at least eSATA and USB 2.0 connectors. Oh, and a powered fan. I’m running it off the USB tonight, and that’s not terrible, but tomorrow I’m going to pick up a PCMCIA ExpressCard-based eSATA converter so I can use my empty card slot for a faster connection.

And after convincing Perforce that I really was allowed to use the existing clientspec from this machine and re-ordering the drive letters, I was able to pick up exactly where I left off with my projects in Perforce.

Total cost of converting the laptop to replace my desktop: $53. And several days of doing nothing but setting up the software, but honestly that would have happened anyway. Okay, okay — it might have taken a day or two less without Vista, I admit.

Anyway, I’m relatively happy. Plus I’d been hoping I could save enough to buy a second monitor — but now I get one for free! Well, in a sense: I’m using both the laptop monitor and my old desktop monitor side-by-side. The laptop monitor is a little squished, but it is technically a second monitor. That will make typing up blog posts as I finish leveling Kaet a bit easier if nothing else.