Wednesday, December 31, 2008

cool tweak to the silverlight pie chart

http://community.irritatedvowel.com/blogs/pete_browns_blog/archive/2008/12/04/Pie-Chart-Styling-in-the-Silverlight-Toolkit-_2D00_-Cross_2D00_Slice-Gradients.aspx

Yep, he did a nice shade using absolute values. Haven't found any good use of it yet, but I will try to see if I can change it dynamically.

Monday, December 29, 2008

That could be amazing!

A close relative of mine (Let's name her "X") is about 2 month pregnant. This morning she went to doctors for a check out. She was excited because she know they will be able to tell her the baby's gender today. The doctor told her she had a girl, and she called everyone about it me included.

Baby One
X's brother has a boy (Baby One) who is two and a half year old, and his mother told Baby1 that his aunt will have a girl. And the 2 year old said "No". So his mother asked him "Why, is it a boy?" and he said "yes". Not long ago when we have a family reunion, X who is pregnant asked Baby One if he want a little brother or sister, and he said he want a sister, but when asked if it is a boy or girl inside of his aunt, he said it is a boy.


Baby Two
About two years back, another relative of mine come to visit. They also had a two year old boy (Baby Two). X was also present. At the time X is trying to have a baby for some time with no luck. After the relative returns home, Baby Two one day wake up and said "Aunt X give birth to a boy".


Baby Three
The above two cases I know personally. According to X, she also did the same thing (gender guessing) to her best friend's son (under 2 years of age). And when asked if he want a little brother or little sister, he wanted a little sister. But when asked if X has a boy or girl, he said boy.

I checked Google, and it was said there could be mistakes on the doctor's part. If it turned out to be a boy, this would be rather amazing. One kid knows it even before X's baby is conceived, and the other is also confident that the unborn is a boy. Of course they could both be wrong, it might just be some garbage that kids are spitting out, but if it turned out to be true, what the odds that several kids can know what we as adults don't? What could cause this? It will be very interesting if we could also be trained to have the same abilities. Of course instead of baby guessing, we will use it on the stock markets, that could really screw this ability up.

I will keep an close eye on this one :-)

Thursday, December 18, 2008

Need help from Blizzard

At current rate I might need to suspend the bot and WOW soon. My wife is getting more and more angry over my playing WOW. This afternoon after I get home, I spent about 5 minutes to res my baby and she got unhappy. I don't want to get upset over those tiny things any more, very annoying.

I remember the days of Diablo II, when me and my wife both play, she never complained me playing too much. One big reason is she likes to combine the diamonds, skulls etc, but she hate the 3d interface.

I wonder if Blizzard could give the people who hate 3d interface a fixed 3d view (i.e like in Diablo), and make tailoring/jewelcrafting more interesting, create complex patterns that combines different outputs into dazzling dresses.

Of course that is only my dream.

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

How abut that!

After reading this post by Patrick J. Buchanan, I think Buchanan is not a fiscal conservative. However this comment posted by everyman is very interesting:

Any bailout plan I have read about so far appears to be a bailout of the UAW, not the companies. I MIGHT back a Big 3 bailout, IF:
1. The companies agree to restructure, including but not limited to new management teams.
2. GM in particular needs to downsize to perhaps three divisions: say GM, Buick, and Chevrolet. They then need to eliminate the duplication of models; can anyone really tell the difference between a GMC Jimmy and a Chevy Blazer?
3. The unions make concessions, not only on current wages, but on the killer retirement funds that add (I've read) $1500-2000 to each GM car.
4. Bring back Lee Iacocca from the dead. Reinvent the original Plymouth Caravan and the original Jeep Cherokee.
Giving the Big 3 without some concessions like this is a waste of time and money.
If Congress is determined to dole out $35 Billion or so without these concessions, they should do it by giving $35,000 each to 10 million taxpayers,allowing them to vote with their wallets onh who survives and who doesn't.
The ten million winners could be determined by a lottery run by the state of Illinois. The only requirement would be the filing of a tax return for the fiscal year 2008. The winners would be required to buy a car (any car, any manufacturer) within the next two months.

Danger!! Read this!

That is if you are using IE 7.0 on XP or windows 2003 server.

the 0 day exploit.

I uses firefox mostly, and from now on I will always run it as guest.

So always have a backup browser. Let's see how long it will take MS to fix this bug, and how big (if any) a share FireFox will gain.

Monday, December 15, 2008

NO DRM

This link on tomshardware, I think that is a good step forward.

I believe DRM hurts legit buyers more than the pirates, and the people who wants to copy games are the ones who don't have money (students etc). If they can't copy they won't play.

I am a fun of blizzard games, can't wait to try out StarCraft II. But if Blizzard installs DRM, I will hold my urges and save the money.

And the game developers should stop making the original CD in the rom thing mandatory. It kills me to try to find the original broodwar CD from the pile when I want to play it. With CD burners so common, they should save the trouble and just relax.

Sunday, December 14, 2008

Final exam

Yep, I had to prepare final exam for my students during the weekend, and was not able to do much. Someone has submitted some valid bugs to me but I will have to deal with them tomorrow.

Saturday, December 13, 2008

Chained/quest levelings

I got sometime to try to make a chained quest leveling profile.

All I can say is, it is so boring!! Need to note the location of every npc and objects, take the fun out of everything ....

Now I need to think a better way of doing it.

So I guess I will put it off even more :-(

Friday, December 12, 2008

been busy

didn't do much for the entire week. My job is taking most of my time.

Did a release and botted some just to make sure the release works, but can't afford any other activity that are time consuming

Friday, December 5, 2008

Better Mine/Herb methods

The next version of zoloFighter will have better Mine/Herb methods. I changed the way waypoint notes are implemented (so your old waypoint notes will dispear).

Before, waypoint notes are used for people to fish (so they know where to stop once a pool disappears). Now, a new property is added to allow you to access all waypoint notes. I will add a new button to one click add notes, and when you found a herb/mine you can add a note. Later on instead of let fighter randomly running, you can control fighter to go through all noted locations.

Thursday, December 4, 2008

Another reason for not to bail out

As seen on Yahoo, Laura Rowley Money & Happiness.


"Unintended Consequences

In a Freakonomics column earlier this year in the New York Times, Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt offered a few potent examples. One study that examined the effect of the Endangered Species Act found that property owners who suspected their land might attract protected species rushed to clear-cut the trees (despite low timber prices) to avoid losing their investments.

Another study found that employment of disabled people actually fell after the Americans with Disabilities Act was adopted, because employers -- afraid they wouldn't be able to discipline or dismiss an incompetent worker who happened to be disabled -- stopped hiring them altogether. This isn't to say these weren't worthy laws, only that they can engender unintended results."

Ban panhandling

Pan-Handing, also called begging is bad. Here is a quote from the above link:


"According to studies, giving money to panhandlers does not help those in need because:


  • Cash given to panhandlers will most likely be used to buy alcohol or drugs.
  • Most panhandlers are NOT homeless.
  • For some, panhandling is a profession and at times, studies show, a lucrative one.
  • Homelessness is not the problem for truly needy panhandlers, but rather a symptom of underlying problems. They need help, not handouts."



Well, but I am not talking about the panhandlers in downtown this time. It is the big three auto CEOs. They are asking for billions of tax payer dollars. The same principles applying to panhandlers in your downtown also applies to them! They flew to DC in their private jets, that alone shows how much they care.

The Big Three has bad Union contracts, pays average about $80/hour while other foreign car makers who also have factories in US only pays half of that. Their management don't care about cash either, check out their jets and how careless they spent money. I won't be surprised that they have a safety nest of money waiting for them even when their company tanks. Delta CEOs did that.

And just look at how Delta at its bankruptcy. That was not bad at all.

Let them bankrupt, get ride of the fat CEOs and Union contracts. Give the taxpayers a break.

Tuesday, December 2, 2008

more problems

Not much to say. After I forced everyone to the latest version (0.8.4.9) and thought I could rest a bit, more problems are found.

First I confirmed sales/repair is broken. This is a script fix, I forget that the sales/repair npc list in javascript contains a simplified npc object, not the full object, and broken repair.

And several people reported res is not working. Now I have to kill myself again :-(

Friday, November 28, 2008

Disasters on Thanksgiving day

Thanksgiving day was chaotic for me. We have a big party planned and I know I can't do much for the day. So I wanted to zolo the entire day but I can't start the bot. Turned out the ISP my offset server and forums server is on had a heart attack and the whole thing is down.

Went on to mmowned and several people are reporting the same. It took my ISP about 2 hours to finish fdisking (the partition went read only for some reason).

But I don't have time to wait for them to finish the scan. I have to go buy stuff for the party. Right in the middle of that wife told me she forget to order pizza!!! Now I am facing a total meltdown, because it will be mutiny if there is no food (the people we invite are mostly grown ups but there are young kids involved).

I have to drop in a nearby Pizza house and the line was not bad. Of course once I come back home my car is blocked out of garage. And one of my guest's hand was burned by hot water while she tried to prepare something. So there were frantic search for medical supplies, while a bunch of kids skip out of the door and started playing in our backyard.

Finally we start to eat and the conversation was good. Suddenly I heard loud cries. Several of the kids got wood stick in their hands while playing at the structure in our backyard (from the previous owner). Now more needles and etc. I almost fainted for that.

Out of time, more later if I could.

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

New release soon

I am in process of implementing a bunch of features, including auxiliary waypoints (a waypoint holder where you can put any waypoints in there without checking of distance etc. Good for muck up waypoints so the toon can run smoothly on loot), one way and two way sequential waypoints (Where bot will follow the waypoint excatly to the end).

The one way and two way sequential waypoints will be good in places where it have tight corners, inside caves or near cliffs, where you want the bot to go exactly as you recorded, or go one way only. some of them are needed in order to go to tight quest areas.

However time is tight and I don't have much time to test it out...

Monday, November 17, 2008

New hope for man kind

Turkey in radical revision of Islamic texts

This is amazing. This is a tiny news that not many people are aware of, but this might have HUGE implications that not many of us could truly understand. We might be able to compare what is happening in Turkey to the revolution of Martin Luther. From the surface the two are different, but I think it is just as ground breaking. I think Martin Luther's revolution has much to do with the development of Europe and US, and might be the key to the industrial revolution. This is all because Martin Luther give the spirit foundation to the revolution against the catholic church.

The new interpretation of Islam could help Turkey make a new leap, and hopefully the other Islamic countries could follow suit. It is my observation that if a country is too conservative, it will not move (countries in Dark Age). But if a country is too liberal, it would rot.

With the declining of the western culture, Turkey might be the next shining beacon after US.

Thursday, November 13, 2008

Caught a chipmunk

Noticed something cute near our house. And it is a chipmunk! It dig several holes around our house, and my friend told me and my wife that it could damage the foundation.

So we decide to lay a trap. We bought a $20 trap from lowe's to make sure we won't hurt it. After 2 days, wife was excited fund the trap door closed and a chipmunk inside :-)

I went out and took pictures (will post later), the chipmunk does not appear to be afraid of me, but jumped around the cage left and right trying to escape. From time to time it sit and watched me.

We put it in our garage for the night. My wife's boss warned here not to name the chipmunk, "Don't get too attached" she said, "God knows what they carry".

The next day, I drive to a lake side hill. The moment I open the trap door, the chipmunk jumped out and disappeared into the bushes, didn't even look back.

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Found Beethoven

I was with my wife at a store, and found some classical CDs on sale. One of them is Beethoven's 5th and 9th combined (imagine that!).

When I was very young I loved classical musics. Initially I heard a shortened piano piece of Beethoven's 5th, and that leads me to others. I like the 5th, 6th and 9th. I could recite most of the 5th and 6th, but some how can't remember the rhythm of the 9th.

While driving home, I tried to impress my wife with the CD. Naturally I picked the 9th because I remember it was the easiest to get on. But I failed badly. The 9th has some sudden changes that wife didn't like, she liked 5th more, but the 5th has too much strong elements. Later on we turned to FM stations.

I am very happy about the discovery, because it has been so long since I heard classical music. Next step would be to find the violin piece by Mendelssohn, I am sure wife will love it :-)

Friday, October 31, 2008

Trickle down econmics of food (part II)

Now let's see why I think Supply Side Economics is right in US. Let's assume we don't use money, we use food as way of exchange wealth.

When food is not a concern, the wealth comes from people's creation. The more people create, the more wealth we have. For example, If you have enough food for the year, and a lot of extra, the extra food doesn't do you any good (no real value to you).

Now let's assume someone could make the food taste better. All the people with extra food would give food to that guy in exchange for him to cook a meal. Now the food that is rotten in your backyard has extra value for you!

That is called wealth. Your extra junk can give you something you want. The more stuff you want, the more value your extra food has. People's desires match with material is wealth. If someone who can create stuff others want, and others have the material in exchange for return, that creates wealth.

Now let's step back to our world. There are certain things that we are too lazy to do for ourselves, and it is to our common good to do it as a group. So there is the government and taxes. The more the government does for us, the less we need to worry. Sounds good but everything come at a cost. All service we receive comes at a cost (could be hidden cost). The services we receive from government has a hidden cost. and the bigger the government, the far removed we are from it, the bigger the cost. Sometimes the cost is not so hidden (i.e the bridge to no where ), but because it is too far removed from us, no one cares.

The taxes that lay on you and me, each of us maybe only paying $10 a month, has tinny effect to us. But the tax that are paid by industries could be huge, and those money could cost us the next google.

My suggestion will be, a flat tax (or better, fair tax) on everything. Only hit rich people with extra progressive tax/regulations if that guy has became a monopoly.

Trickle down econmics of food (part I)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply-side_economics

Economics is very complex, and no one understand it totally. That is why the stock market is a gamble ground for most people, because no one can understand the entire economics situation.

Trickle down economics is the idea of reducing taxes of rich people and hope it will flow down to everyone. It is basically people who hate rich people call Supply side economics.

All economics ideas works to a certain extend. For example, if our food supply can't met demand by a large amount, most of the governments in the world will melt down, and people who survive will be depend on "Loot economics", basically the strong will win.

Now assume the food supply just meets demand. At this point, the most important thing on everyone's mind will be food. All the other stuff (Gold, entertainment) doesn't matter. The best type of government will be communist government. Because if someone became rich, that riches could mean death to others.

In case of food supply far exceeds demand, i.e. modern US/EU. There is a balance. It is better to have a progressive tax system so riches pays more, but it is hard to calculate how much. I think it is best to determine by experiment, but start from lower brackets. One thing you need to avoid is, never tax too much. Taxing has a effect of stamp creation. Most of us are honest people, and no matter rich or poor, we deserve the same treatment. To me (or the libertarian thinking), as long as the rich man's riches doesn't affect you physically in anyway, let them be rich. The more the wealth are created, the more the chance you will get some of them, and you might be rich one day too. However don't put your hope too high, because the system will always be pyramid shaped, the only difference is in developed countries, the bottom layer is actually enjoyable while in not so developed countries, even the middle layer could be rather bad.

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Why you should vote for Bob Barr

This is related to http://brokentoys.org/2008/10/28/as-political-a-post-as-you-are-likely-to-see/#comment-40385

The Demos and Republicans are both corrupted. Both of them are not interested in working class people any more. They court leechers instead. There are 2 school of leechers, the demos courts the poor welfare mothers with 8 kids, and republicans courts failed wall street execs.

Don't tell me someone is not working because they can't find a job. Millions of illegal immigrants come to this country, they can support themselves and their family overseas. A lot of them don't even need to work full time.

Republicans pour billions to failed (and stupid) executives who should be bankrupted and broken right now. And they tell us it is for our own good. If we don't want it, they will try to scare you.

The best way to share wealth is lower taxes, let the good people create wealth, let the bad ones bankrupt and their wealth will be managed by more capable people.

Want to lower debt? instead of raise taxes, stop pork first! Those in Washington will prefer to spend what ever amount is raised first.

Under Bush, the government has expended so much. We can safely call Bush a Marxist. Palin is not so conservative on spending either. The only thing she did to education is increase spending (the easy way to go). The only good candidate is Bob Barr, not perfect, but better. http://www.nolanchart.com/article3849.html

Monday, October 27, 2008

Geting vots for my candidate

And that is Bob Barr. The minute I told that to my parent and my father in law, they all laugh at me. They told me it is wasted vote.

Well it is not. This is how democracy works. If more people do this, the major parties will stop fooling with us and get serious to what we want.

My parents, with their doctors degrees, is going to vote for Obama, no matter what I do. All credit on that goes to Bush though. I have finally able to get my father in law to vote for Bob Barr, after explain to him the difference between the parties.

We will see how it goes.

Thursday, October 23, 2008

paypal stupidity

My primary email used for paypal is now full of junk mails. So I created another one and added/verified the second email, and make it the primary.

Too bad when someone donate something, the notification is still sent to the old email account.

Turned out the button I created is locked to that email. Now I have to create new buttons ....

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

So long, suckers. Millionaire hedge fund boss thanks 'idiot' traders and retires at 37

This post truly made me laugh. It does takes longer (usually 3 generations) in capitalist countries to rotate riches vs revolution, but at least it is bloodless.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/oct/18/banking-useconomy

Truly remind me some of the idiots on the internet who thought higher taxes is good for you. 75% of them must be from rich families who has never feel the pain of earn their living.

Joel on Software

This is a great read, taught me a few new tricks :-)

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckies.html

Monday, October 20, 2008

Teaching kids is hard stuff

Yes, especially when it is voluntary job.

Me and wife attended Sunday school teacher's meeting last Sunday after classes, and the group of us talked about problems/solutions.

Since I am new, a lot of those ideas are new to me.

Some parents just put off their kids to us, they don't want to take any responsibilities at all. Epically the bad ones. Turned out just one of those bad students in a class can ruin the entire class. In most of the classes they have to select a "Class Mother", who will coordinate some parents as assistants in the class.

Several teacher said they wish to see what the trouble maker and their parents' reactions are when their parent is in class, or when the parents saw their kids making trouble. But their parents usually won't be able to make it, for various reasons.

Friday, October 17, 2008

Burned out

I am a little bit burned out. This week I beat a big dead line yesterday, got all offsets for WOW 3.0.2, completed midterm for my Sunday school students, installed extra power plug on attic (for all my ethernet connections upstairs) and the ether net connection in guest room. It sounds simple but there were so many mess in between.

I will relax this weekend, hopefully play some WOW :-)

Thursday, October 16, 2008

Black Silicon

Got this news http://www.tomshardware.com/news/black-silicon-photography,6485.html from toms hardware.

Looks like I might get a much better camera in a few years :-) I hope it is not too expensive. I love good SLRs. You have to have a SLR to full enjoy the beauty of digital photography. Fast response time, artistic impressions.

Final touch on wow 3.0.2

Last night I released the new bots, both fighter and fisher, because there is a tiny bit of not so often used information that is changed in WOW. I hate to do that when I have to bump the version number and let everyone re-download the bot, it is a huge waste on the bandwidth, and it forced fisher to be re-downloaded as well, even though it has nothing to do with fisher.

And today someone has found one more offset is bad, and it is fixed now. So I hope I can forget about those offset for now.

One more thing, since all the points has been refunded, it will be a major headache to pick what to do with them now :-(

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

WOW 3.0.2 again

I did manage to update most offsets yesterday night before wife's argo kick in. Looks like a new bot is also necessary due to some WOW client changes.

Right now zoloFighter should work on 3.0.2 clients, with some broken functionality. I will try to squeeze some in today, but since that will require a recompile of both figher and fisher, it will be a pain for sure.

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

I am so lucky!

Just got home form busy work, the amazing thing is, I didn't miss a thing. Blizzard still haven't up the realms yet, so I will go help wife with her projects :-)

This is actually good, as it shorten the gap between US/EU and asia updates.

WOW 3.02 is out

And this patch is released one day before the due date of a big project at work. Can't blame Blizzard on that one.

The up side is, at lease Blizzard didn't release at the same time my Sunday school student's mid term. Nothing kills a inexperienced teacher faster than pressure.

I will try to work on it as soon as possible, depend on what time I could go home from work. One sure thing is I will receive complains about bot stops working, first from US then aboard. No matter how many times patch happens, some people never seems to have a memory of it.

Monday, October 13, 2008

DOW is up

I have already posted that I am expecting the stock might seen the bottom, too bad I was too busy and didn't get in on Friday. All the bad news from media should be a cue that we are bottom out now, becase after all, the rich guys need to pay them to scare off all other investors so they could make money!

But anyway, it is not too late. I have increased my 401k when the dow first sink, and increased again last week with all the bad news. I don't expect stocks will go back to where they once were soon, depend on who the next president is and what he does, it might be another 10 to 20 years before all the funds make some good investments. But that is not important, the important thing is, I can wait :-)

I finally recovered a bit after last week's frentic struggle with my sunday school's midterm, it took me 3 days to finish, and hours after hours of typing to finally make it up. That is why it almost break my heart when one of the student's parents need to pull her son our for something else. After all it is sunday school, not official class.....

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

More on teaching

Turned out my ways of teaching is not as good as I thought. My last assignment turned out to be too tough for the 9 to 11 year old and instead of making them interest, most of them pretended that they lost the homework!! Also I got scolded by wife because I didn't teach enough basics.

So last week, I went back to the material on the book, and the kids was bored and wanted to get out as soon as possible.

Part of the blame is on me, because I was not experienced, too busy to create some interesting topics for their material and a bit too soft on the students.

I have to prepare an exam this week, I am praying I could come up with sometime to do more preparation.

And on the bail out and stock market. Even with the 700b bailout, market is crashing. It shows that the money is not been used yet, or if it is used, not been used effectively. I think a lot of the companies who needs cash has to sell some of their stocks to raise cash while the people in DC trying to figure out how to spend this massive amount of money.

There is an interesting post by bughunter on PTSOFT, he think we might be near the bottom now. I have to agree with him though. There might be an inflation down the road with all that money, but most people will be happy to get out of this sink first.

Friday, October 3, 2008

Bail out is passed

http://money.cnn.com/2008/10/03/news/economy/house_friday_bailout/index.htm?postversion=2008100309

I admit that I don't have a full understanding of the current crises, and I don't know what's in this bill. I don't even have a position on if we should have a bail out or not.

The upside: With the current situation of banks, if there is no bail out (or fresh money), lending could freeze and a lot of people could be out of their jobs.

The downside: The rich men who screwed up (who are supposed to be knocked out in a free market) are now in charge again and possibly got richer. The entire country could slip further into socialism.

Thursday, October 2, 2008

Bad news all around

All bad news.

At work we just discovered that because some other messed up, we got about 15 days to complete a task or risk losing big money for our company.

At home because some situation, it is a mess and no one had time to fix anything.

Wife also got a big one on her plate from her boss.

And I was told I had to make the mid term exam for my Sunday school students... So I can't have much fun stuff for my students this week, I will have to prepare them for the exam, which leaves small space for me to put some fun and interesting stuff in there. You just can't have as much fun when things are limited.

Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Teaching kids and MMO

They seems to be unrelated, yet related in some way.

I have became a voluntary teacher for kids in Sunday schools, in the morning is 4 year old, and in the afternoon 9 to 11 year old. Here I am talking about the 9 to 11 old kids.

First I watched and learn from the previous teacher. She try to teach the kids by let them repeating or act the lesson out. While there are some success, the kids are not that interested, even during acting. Because the lesson are generally boring.

So before my first class last week, I did some preparation. I go for the internet, find some more interesting teaching material, and tried my best to make them a bit changeling as well (by rearranging them in a way that the answer will only show up indirectly, or some other unconventional way).

I can feel my last Sunday's teaching experience is an success. I could grab most of my student's attention, and they are eager for their homework!

So, I think if you pay attention to teaching, even learning can be fun! There is no way to totally avoid the boring part, but there are ways to make learning exciting. You can let your students by break down and manipulate the boring parts to make them challenging and interesting (usually if something is challenging to a certain degree, it is interesting).

The same can be said about MMOs. If the designers change the boring grindings to a bit more challenging, a bit more indirect, the game will be interesting. It is hard to do that, but if you put your mind into it, most things are possible.

Monday, September 29, 2008

False premise of Milgram Experiment

Stanley Milgram from Yale conducted this experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment.

In the experiment the participant was lead to believe he is teaching someone by electric shock. Another guy, the experimenter, will try to assure the participant that the student he is teaching is OK and let the participant continue on with higher voltages to shock the "student" for each wrong answer.

After seeing a large number of people who failed to stop the experiment and just follow the orders of the experimenter.

After reading about this on the forge, I was surprised. But last night when I thought about what I would do if I was the participant, I realize the test was flawed. Every human has a sub conciseness, and we are smart enough to take cues from our environments. When the student (the one that was supposed to be shocked) was only banning on the walls but didn't say anything else, i.e "STOP!", it implies that he can take more. And it is human nature to explore the untested. The participant, who was lead to believe that he is given some one electric shocks, would start to question the effectiveness of the shock, and experiment to see where is the tester's limit (as long as the student is not objecting verbally, it is a cue to him that he can continue).

And I am suspecting that Stanley initially let the "student" to give verbal demands to stop, but all participants stopped, so to make the test a success, Stanley just let the "student" to ban on the wall.

So indeed, somethings might not be what they look like.

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

I will be busy

Due to some unexpected development on my part, I am now the cook in my house hold, and have volunteered to teach some kids on weekends. The teaching part is rather nerve breaking, took up the entire weekend, and the kids has an age gap that will make it rather difficult.

For that reason I will not be able to do much to WOW anymore, for at least 3 month.

The only good part is I know I am doing this for the better good of this world, so the sacrifice is well deserved.

Sunday, September 21, 2008

0.8.3.22 Test release

This one has AB and Eye of storm battle field bot. This release requires BG addons, such as SSPVP or SmartQueue.

More test still required on AV, and I don't have time for wsg scripts yet.

Friday, September 19, 2008

Big Government = Bad Government

This is my post to a discussion on AmberNight.org
http://ambernight.org/2008/09/12/over-morning-coffee/#comment-5472

Government, like supply and demand, has an optimal size. When it is too small, it can’t provide the nessessary services. When it is too big, the internal corruption will be overwhelming.

In US, the problem is the government that is big and corrupted. To prove my point, just check how much money is spend on pork by congress each year (and yet not many people angry about it because it is so far away from them that they just want a piece of hand back).

The government spend billions on bad projects and then have to spend billions to bail them out, good examples will be Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Market will go up and down. The less governent intervens, the bigger the waves but usually the faster the economy grows.

If you want a market that is ultra stable, North Korea is a great example.

Next target: BG bots

I will soon start work on BG bots, thanks to some people who helped me understand how SSPVP and QuickQueue works. It will be much easier to use an queue addon instead than recognize the state of battle field via pre-recorded images, which doesn't scale and hard to port to other languages.

Thursday, September 18, 2008

Super conductor or NOT

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/cpu-superconductor-resistance,6376.html

I got interested in the headline, but after reading the post I seriously doubt the research. Negative resistance??!! Must be a joke. That means there are actual energy coming out of it from no where.

What I thought is it is a flawed experience, and because the wire has almost no resistance, any slight movement will generate small amount of current due to the wire been cutting against earth's magnetic field. And the scientist got excited amid his over thought/over worked head and reported it as new discovery.

Of course maybe I am wrong and the scientist has found cold fusion :-)

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Global ... Cooling?

Check this:
http://www.dailytech.com/Sun+Makes+History+First+Spotless+Month+in+a+Century/article12823.htm

The sun has been spotless for a entire month. From the post, previous such events "have all led to rapid cooling. One was large enough to be called a mini ice age".

This could be bad for us, as a cooler temperature will result in lower farm outcome, and could lead to global famine. Yes, no matter how technologically advanced we are, we as humans are still depend on FOOD!! Just because right now food is abundant, doesn't mean we won't have shortage later.

So I started doing some climate research, and read this:
http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/climate-change/dn11659
Never mind about the other claims, the important one is, since we are on the peak of the warm period, it will take another 100 year or so before we officially enter an ice age (but not include the mini ice ages, such as the one during American revolution).

I am glad to declare that we are safe :-)

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Others are copying my security steps now

Yep, just saw the first bot (I will not name it) copying my run under less privileged user security :-) Too bad the other bot is attacking mobs by TYPING actual /script commands into WOW, which could be a dead give away. The upside for that is you don't need to depend on your key bindings, but since no player will do that, it will take Blizzard little time to crack that up :-)

The good news is Blizzard is busying with WOTLK right now, and after the release they will have to put all their resources on bug fixing, that will give most public bots with little security some time to survive.

Thursday, September 11, 2008

Browser javascript speeds

Check out this link, I got it from cnet.net:

http://www.rybazoom.com/browsermips/

It shows how fast your browser's javascript engine is. Chrome got 7000+, firefox got 2000+ while IE is only 300 LOL

Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Two Years of ZoloFighter

Just noticed I have zolo fighter released to public for 2 years now! From my own fighter history, fighter was released to public 2 years ago. I used it for myself for a while too. This is amazing. I remember when I first created the bot, I have to add way points one by one, it won't loot either. I was happy to have something just to kill the mob.

Now the bot is totally different than the old one, with all the security, javascript, Orbiter pathing.

Here are some statics that might be of interest:
Total number of different IP addresses that used the bot: 20000+
Total number of users that has paid: 300+
Total number of payments: 400+

Total $ amount I got in my paypal account: $200+ (because paypal take about 40% out of the dollar).

And because every year I just use the total dollar amount as my income from the bot, I am paying duplicated taxes on those (each year I will pay tax on the total amount, because I don't have time to deduct the amount that I already paid tax on from previous years, not much either). All income is donated of course, so this is just a money loser.

Friday, September 5, 2008

Google Chrome second try

Well I like the speed of the Chrome browser (It feels snappy), so much that I downloaded the browser twice, reinstalled it 3 times and trying to get it to work. I submitted bug reports etc, and finally decided to try google it.

Sure enough, problem found. It is a common problem, and to fix it, I need to add a " -no-sandbox" startup parameter to Chrome.

Now I am witting this blog in Chrome. Chrome is so fast and light weight (only 25mb in memory, a new tab is 12mb), and it has very cool tools (for developers). I can perpend viewsource: to anything and view their source, a build in javascript debug engine :-)

I love it. There is not status bar, but I am sure it can be brought out with something.

google chrome

Yes, I downloaded Chrome and run it. I really want it, I want a light weight browser that is fast and safe (fast is a must, they can make it safe like Microsoft did to IE).

Well I got a picture of it, you will see what I meant.



After that nothing I can do, can't even go to google.com

zoloFighter 0.8.3.15 released

Hastily released yesterday night with some testing. Small changes, the one that pushed me for the release is the z Compatibility mode was broken. The bot was matching z positions even when it is set to false in settings.txt.

The big reason for z position matching is the bot can pick the correct roads when falls a 1000 yard down on that bridge in AV. All the normal waypoint don't need that, especially the glider profiles which don't have z position.

Another fix is the bot will try to optimize key pressings, which matches closer to human behavior.

Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Micro$oft Patent page up and down functioality

This is from tomshardware.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/microsoft-keyboard-patent,6307.html

I don't think this will ever hold up in court, but it just shows how stupid the patent office are. The patent thing really needs to be reworked.

Thursday, August 28, 2008

My first tenants

This is totally unrelated to World of Warcraft or zoloFighter. Last week we have closed our first rental property (a cheap one, thanks for the recent down housing market). And after a week of hard work to clean the place up, we posted a for rent ad and within a day got a call.

Very possibly we could rent the unit out today to a nice couple. I am both excited and worried. We still need to get a microwave, a washer,a dryer and a refrigerator, all are expensive. And everything needs to be done by this weekend! It will be back breaking to install all 3 items.

With the payments on the loan etc, this will be a tough period for me and my wife. But we hope this investment will be worth it int he long run.

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

RIAA stupidity

Check out this link http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10026694-93.html

RIAA is messing with the couple again. This time because they formatted their harddrive.

Not too long ago I format my hard drive almost weekly at any sign of computer slow down. Now I don't do that as often, but I am going to erase another of my computer clean and install vista on it (My server is gone bad, and need to be transferred).

I have bought 4 copies of XP and my constant installing of windows on my 3 computers has forced me to call Microsoft evertime I reinstall windows (because I can't remember which copy of windows XP is installed on which computer). So many re-formats must meant that I have tones of MP3s on my computer by RIAA standards.

Too bad I don't listen to music (I had some CDs but they are rotting in my car), don't have time to watch much Movies on my digital channels either. Every day after work and all the other junk I don't have much time for anything. Maybe I should stop complaining about RIAA and get a life pronto :-)

Friday, August 22, 2008

Got overrun by Buffer overflow!

That was a newbie mistake. I was implementing dynamic mesh grouping and vendor/waypoing calculation logic for javascript (the complicated calculation needs to be done in native code, javascript would be too slow). After exporting a large calculated vendor waypoints to javascript, program hungs on access violation error. In debug mode the error happens upon program return from a function call.

Initially I thought it is javascript error, I was trying out with JS_SetProperty, and I thought to myself maybe I should use JS_DefineProperty instead? No luck. After some tries I found if I reduce the number of elements set in JS_SetElement call, the problem goes away. That was a big hint and I started to suspect the UI has some buffer problems. Sure enough, my rastly written UI code was using a buffer of size 1024, and doing _tscpy WITHOUT proper protection! I know that was bad for a veteran engineer to do that, but it was only an amature project with very limited development time (Still big slap on me). I spend 1 hour on this with majority of time debugging and suspecting the ability of memory management of javascript, all because I saved 10 minutes of my time initially to avoid buffer checking.

Make this a lesson to all fresh engineers/coder, don't cut corners.

Thursday, August 21, 2008

Didn't do anything last night

Nope, nothing. This is family politics, I let the bot run and watched some Japanese Anime with wife. The Japanese Animes are addictive, but they are very slow (If you ever watched you know what I mean). Sometimes the same sense just seems to drag on for ever. But it was a good funny one :-) No regrets. If I have finished my development I will be able to enjoy more, but this is politics we are talking about.

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Testing scares

A family friend come yesterday night, and we all went out to a Italian restaurant for dinner. The dinner was good and everyone was happy. After that we go back to our home, and I have to entertain the guests. Needless to say I was died tired when everything is done.

This morning after I wake up, I wanted to start the bot and test it more. I was surprised to find WOW still open and my toon is dead. Turned out I forget to stop the bot before I leave for dinner yesterday and the bot has run hours yesterday.
Natually I click the run button and want the bot to continue. To my surprise the toon turned, jumped and bot stoped. The first thing come to my mind is my ghost waypoint is broken. After 10 minutes of debugging (everything went wrong during that time, the setup, my windows etc), I finally found out it is my sales repair. My bag is full and my toon is trying to go to the sales repair waypoint while he is dead!!

So now one more thing to fix, don't let the toon go on to the sales repair waypoint if it is dead!

(And there is no logs, the toon tries to mount, which failed, then try to fly by jumping, which failed to, without any log to indicate what it is doing).

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Yet another release and more testing

Yes, I released 0.8.3.9. turned out I forget to put the fix over to 0.8.3.7 and during a test the bot is running around again. I was shocked and found out I didn't sync the changes over (that is what happens when you don't have time and have to broken development down to pieces and multitasking).

So another release and more testing. I also got guests this week and can't do much again.

Monday, August 18, 2008

Orbiter is finally stable

Yes, after almost daily updates for zoloFighter for the past week (and I had to work over time at my real work, including Saturdays and Sundays), Orbiter is finally stable.

Expect another possible update sometime this week, as I will start AVbot work :-)

Saturday, August 16, 2008

Huge memory problem

Yes even I was surprised. I was testing zolo+orbiter this morning before wife wake up, and zoloFighter died due to memory problem.

The first time I saw the memory foot print of fighter, I thought it was my database...

Anyway, the fix was simple too, GC the javascript from time to time.

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Holy crap is this real?

http://capoliticalnews.com/s/spip.php?article824

I would give up and just pay my taxes, but that guy got some guts :-)

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

2.4.3 version archived

Yes I finally make a fixed 2.4.3 zoloFighter, so people in non-US countries can use the bot when US is patching to next version. In 2.4.2, I forget about it and didn't do it till 2.4.3 is released, and can't test it in any way, end up with a bad version (several people on private servers reported the 2.4.2 fighter is not usable).

It is not a big deal, but took me a long time to release it (and I still haven't tested it yet). So much stuff to do, so little time.

Monday, August 11, 2008

Attack all problems

I have implemented something to record all factions ids, the next version of fighter will save the faction ids you added to a file, and that file will keep growing every time you add a new faction.

However I am a bit conflicted on how to use it. It can be used as your own private database for what to attack, but should I used it only when attack all is used? I know some people don't like to select stuff (they use glider profiles), but attack all has several draw backs (attack snakes/npcs on own side etc).

And I don't want to add another check box so the bot can select which faction list to use. Maybe I will just destroy the attack all check box and let it use the saved faction list.

Friday, August 8, 2008

Next steps

There are several thing I need to next:
1. Figure out a way if a target is attack able. It is very convenient to use "Attack All" feature, but the bot will try to kill guards that are on my side when it goes to sale and repair.

2. Improve the bindings files. Some user raised valid points, that priests should not sit down and drink. It should heal itself. The change should be easy, but I (or someone else with good script knowledge) has to implement it.

3. Figure out a way to check if some menus are up.

Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Vista screen capture problem fixed

Yes, after much searching etc, I actually found a good solution. Can't believe the answer is simple and easy, when I was all over the new Vista DWM and try to check if thumbnail can do the trick. But the user better stay in windowed mode, which is much easier than turn off Aero.

I am working on Fighter now, need to finish the step with fighter to integrate Orbiter pather to sales/repair/ghost waypoints, also make the new auto login working (strongly not recommended though).

Monday, August 4, 2008

Fisher (screen capture) problems

Nope, I never have those problems, but some people (at least 2 now) have.

What happened is, on their system, fisher can't see the screen. It seems fisher capture the first screen successfully (used to find the blubber), but later on when it tries to capture the screen, it got the same screen every time??!!

And one of the really good users is helping me to solve this, so far no luck. (besides been dead tired caring for babies over the weekend. Yep, when wife gets a party, who is the best to care for young kids? The only one that seems to be playing games!)

Sunday, August 3, 2008

phpBB down again

Yep, and just in time for one of my bug fixes for fisher. I had several message with another user on the board yesterday, and after I finally released a test to him and thinking that could be the fix, I can't get any reply back any more.

After release it to the user and go to bed, I was anxious to see if the user had any feed back to me this morning. But, my forum is totally down!! So I opened a ticket to my ISP immediately, and the reply was to contact the phpBB dev team.

So I started to do debugging myself. turned out in session.php, a query was causing the problem: SELECT u.*, s.* FROM phpbb_sessions s, phpbb_users u WHERE s.session_id = 'fcc36259f92c0f8e29a87f7e4e4d55d1' AND u.user_id = s.session_user_id
The select statement is blocking the entire site!! And I can't do much else either, because the phpMyAdmin tool provided by my ISP is down as well.

Anyway, I have sent those to my ISP, and let's hope the forums will get back up soon.

(EDIT: the final solution? Restore the old phpBB2 database. The lessons learned? Take care of your databases from time to time, and back them up!)

Friday, August 1, 2008

Republican joke

I was busy for the past week, so the only update is this job I heard this morning. I was told it is a true story.

On a party, a guy asked a little girl (whose parents are liberals) what she want to do after she grew up. The girl said she want to be the president of US so she can give all the homeless people a house. So the guy told the girl, she can help the homeless people now, by going to his home, cut his lawn and in turn, he will give her $50, which she can give to a homeless man to be his home found.

The little girl asked "Why can't the homeless man do that for you and you give him the $50?". And the guy said "Now you are a republican".

Monday, July 28, 2008

finally, 0.8.3.0 (Orbiter pather)

Yes I finally decided to release it yesterday, after some extended testing.

The goodies include:
1. Orbit pather and Bastos movement engine. Now zolo will move randomly, and if waypoints are close or crossed, it will go across them instead of follow the same order again and again (if your waypoint goes across entire area in as a mesh, the movement will be totally random). In a way it is similar to IS, except you define the mesh.

2. bot will run to mobs near by actively (if orbit pather is enabled)

3. Ghost res will be smarter now, instead of run the entire normal waypoint to get corpse, now it will select the shortest path to corpse.

4. Turn with mouse now.

With Orbiter pather, you can export the WOW mesh data as waypoint and the bot will move in the 3D world freely. However I think that might put me in risk of violate copy right law (I think that is the reason Judge ruled against glider, as I read the copy section, the violation is not in memory reading, but the use of WOW internal data), so the users should map their waypoints themselfs, not use WOW mesh data.

Friday, July 25, 2008

So many stuff to do

Yep, I got several fixes that are almost ready, but still need facial changes. The moving with mouse also needs some tuning, and if you want to move with mouse, you better install some kind of hot kill program to kill the bot on key stroke, else it will be VERY hard to use the mouse to stop the bot.

And no, I won't add that functionality to the bot, as it will show up as a virus on some of the scanners on virus total.

Yet another fix

Yep, the bot will attack totoms made by itself in attack all mode. That will have to be fixed. Will have to fix that in the next release as well... So many stuff.

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Busy day

A lot of stuff form work, and I was not able to do anything today. The algorithms are pretty much done since yesterday after a tiny fix, but I don't have time to publish it.

And another down side is the server is crashed, this will need sometime to fix. I hope all users got their keys correctly. I will try to get to it sometime tomorrow.

Sunday, July 20, 2008

Failure on bastos engine

Yep, was not able to get it to work as expected. Will try some more. And to not make Blizzard put too much attension on me, I will test the engine with emulator instead of on WOW. I will take the time to do some grinding while I debug the bastos engine on emulator.

Saturday, July 19, 2008

Orbiter pather and Bastos movement engine

Yep, after some tries again today, I found just the pather is not enough. So my original idea of a "propulsion" system is still needed. I will have to allocate additional system resources for that.

Tonight is again raid night, so I will start the implementation tomorrow on the propulsion system, and I will name it bastos movement engine, credit to John Bastos, who got banned using zoloFighter. The difference of his ban is that he is a long time user, and used carefully, but was still banned. The new system will not totally prevent bans, but at least it will be good enough that it won't follow the same waypoint the same order again and again and other can tell that you are a bot by observing you for 2 minutes.

Friday, July 18, 2008

The Orbit engine is born!

Yes, I have finally made a good model of a smarter path finder for zoloFighter, and I named it Orbit :-)

The implementation has been changed several times, the main goal is to make a smart path finder and scheduler. Initially I thought of a propulsion based system to "push" the bot forward, but that is a bit complex in turn of memory usage. And after some tweak and fixes, I finally decided for our current model.

I am still in the stage of tweaking. The first try, duel to some internal bug, I was using the old system instead, and because some of the randomization in the javascript, it looks like Orbit was working, but was not. I was so happy (at the time).

Anyway, right now Orbit is doing well at times and doing bad at other times, but the main part is working now. So I will give myself a pat on the back and catch the raid on my guild :-)

I will have a very busy week next week, so the release of ZoloFighter+Orbit will be sometime next next week.

Thursday, July 17, 2008

Current progress

I am still working on the new waypoint system. Here are some of the new features of the new bot (some implemented and some not):

1. Improved attack all. Attack all will now restricted by level limit, so when you are at higher levels, you no longer need to worry about frogs etc.
2. configurable waypoint margins on each profile. On wide open areas you can set it to a large number to make the bot roam more randomly.
3. new javascript call backs during running, for better unstuck (right now sometimes at end of loot the unstuck routing will think we are stuck).
4. possibly if I got time, a much complexed navigation system, that acts more human like. I am looking at possible solutions from either daju11's mapnav or most likely a personal mapping. I will avoid copy right violations at all costs, so it will not be a build in. I will just provide a interface, and you either map it yourself, or possible we can use a shared user created mapping data.

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

A Big Ban

No not the theory. Today I was surprised to find John, a long time user has been banned. In his report he did all recommanded stuff, bot while watching TV, didn't use public profiles.

But he is banned.

This comes to be a big shock to me, because I don't think I could have done any better (actually I was afk bot while work this morning, and run back home to shut down my bot during lunch).

So the only possiblities are user report and blizzard might be using waypoint to check if a bot is running. I need to do something to make sure the bot doesn't always going follow the waypoint exactly.

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

A dark day for all of us

Yes, I am talking about this, http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-9991451-93.html?tag=nefd.top

Apparently Glider lost the legal battle on copy right?!! So the judge ruled that examing another program is in violation of copy right.

Does that mean the end of zoloFighter? A detailed check on US copy right law, it appears to be that the Glider defense team is making the wrong judgment. The team is defend the work based on section 117, which is assuming Glider is copying the program, while in fact (at least for zoloFighter) nothing is copied, and nothing is modified (unlike other hacks).

So at least for now zoloFighter will continue on, and I hope Glider defend team will pick up some steam.

Friday, July 11, 2008

Possible cause of why some users not able to get offsets

2 or 3 of them reported that it won't get offsets for them, just hung there.

Beside some who got virus on their system (worked after reinstall windows), I found the rest might has something to do with low level drivers.

I use XP both at home and at work. And at home, when I debug my code, the connection to zolohouse will drop if I debug it slowly. But it will never drop at work.

I am assuming it is because I have a cheap ISP that disconnects quickly, and some hardware or driver buffer the tcp/ip traffic while others don't.

So I am doing my own buffering instead, which should solve most of the offset data downloading problems.

Thursday, July 10, 2008

I am on another project now

No, that is not the other big secret project I was on, I still haven't start that one. I just found something new and exciting and I am all over it right now :-)

I know constantly moving from project to project is bad, but I can't help it. The other big secret project is too hard and although I am interested, the hardness is preventing me from touching it. This one is different, I love the projects that I can jump in and making it better over time.

zoloFighter bot for WOW was hard, but I just had to do it. Everytime I wanted to abort, I was pulled back and dig some more because I just can't stand the constant grinding.

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Updating of graphics card canceled. Now AVbot!

Yes, thanks to the nice comment on my previous blog, I will not update my graphics card. I was thinking about getting a quiet directX 10 card but that is scraped.

So next goal is adding ZStorm's unstuck script and make AVBot testing friendly.

Tuesday, July 8, 2008

I have been had by Matt from BrokenToys

CRAP!! Now he give up AOC after the great review about it!! http://brokentoys.org/2008/07/01/burning-of-an-entirely-different-type/

My second day of playing. The character is a bit gray, and tends to blend to the rich background, so it is not standing out as much as I would like to. The fighting is not as exciting either, the worst part is there is no auto attack, so if I want to go help wife on something, the char will stay there and get beat to death.

The part I like is, game play is easy (maybe because I am in level 1 area), I can rush to any mob or two and beat them to death (in WOW an add meant death).

If I can't progress far after my trial period, I will give up too.

Or unless someone can prove to me it looks better with a directX 10 graphics card.

Monday, July 7, 2008

AOC impressions

Yes, over the weekend I bought Age of Conan, the reason is this blog:
http://brokentoys.org/2008/06/25/gaming-journalism-is-an-oxymoron-the-endless-series/

My first impressions are not so good, where is the graphics goodies? And why am I not slash and set thing on fire??!!!!

My graphics card is not directX 10 compatible, could that be a problem?

Sunday, July 6, 2008

AVBot is back (almost)

Yes, I updated AVBot a bit, together with zoloFighter 0.8.2.6.

The updates are:
1. BGScreen.exe is no longer needed. It is provided as a tool to capture the 3 screen parts (join/queue/leave battle) if the user has customized UI mods installed.

2. AVBot has a new waypoint calculation algrithm, that favors ghost waypoints only if it is near the start of the ghost waypoint, to avoid stuck problem.

So now it is much easier to use AVbot, just download AVBot.txt and select it as your profile, go near your AV battle mater and go!

However there is a catch, that is it is best to create your own main waypoints, else blizzard will find all the users who are on the default waypoint and BAN!

I will delay release the news on my forum, to avoid questions. Want some peace and quiet in the holiday :-)

Saturday, July 5, 2008

Happy birthday America!

I am not an American, but I appreciate very much what America has provided for me and my family, and I am proud of this great country.

No I don't agree with everything Americans do, and I do think some things this country has done are stupid. But to this day, there is still no one other country that surpass the freedom and liberty America provides, and no other country will surpass America's prosperity any time soon either.

To all the Americans who feel ashamed because what this country does, don't be because there are non other could do better. To all the people who hate America, don't hate, learn from it.

I have to say this is a great country, and God bless!

Thursday, July 3, 2008

On Gay marriage

Well, I don't hate gays, but I am against Gay marriage. If there is a vote on Gay marriage, I will give up the vote to save gas, that is how important the issue is to me.

The more interesting part will be, how far should we go to extend the idea of marriage. If we allow Gays to marry, how about polygamists? Do we also want to legalize for a man to marry several women, or a woman to marry several man? How about the age to marriage? I know a story about a female teacher and her student who has several kids together, and she got thrown into jail. It is the voters that give the government the power to do that, but is that really want we want?

Maybe the government should not have any power over our marriage issues, but if that is true, what about the ones who want to avoid their responsibility in a marriage, i.e. support the children?

Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Audit tool on Glider

Just for fun, I downloaded Glider and another bot and run my tool I used for my internal audit on them. Both them fail. If blizzard hired me I could really do some damage. It will be fun to hack the hackers, it is like PVP, both sides will pump up exciting ideas.

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Horrible things

I am referring to this link: Woman dies on ER floor

That was just horrible. A woman died on hospital floor, and no one cared. None of the people in the same waiting area does anything to help or report it.

There are situations where nothing will help no matter how much money you throw at it. That are the situations when the people involved just don't have a hurt.

Monday, June 30, 2008

Kongfu panda

Yes I went to see the movie, against my wishes. My wife's brother, want to see the movie with his 2 year old, and despite my argument of the baby might not like the movie, we all went.

We were supposed to see the 1o'clock one, but was postponed because the baby fall asleep. Just as we all thought the movie is off, he wake up so we went to see the 2o'clock movie, with about 15 minute till the start. As you guessed we missed the start of the movie by 20 minutes (long drive), and the first scene I saw in the theater is my brother in law holding a crying baby.

All I can say is the movie is average with some funny moments, but mostly got interrupted by the frequent going and sitting of my brother in law's wife to check on the baby outside, and some crying. It was worth the $8 I think. After we left, they managed to stay and check the next panda movie, not to steal but because my brother in law was out of the theater most of the time, and the baby finally fall asleep.

From a phone call later on we learned that the baby wake up again half way during the movie, and they end up didn't watch much for the entire afternoon.

Friday, June 27, 2008

Just something to make you feel good

Here is the story. http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/06/25/heroes.gross/index.html?eref=rss_topstories

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Time to relax

Yes, I will relax a bit after last weeks updates, and will try to make myself some gold for my new toon :-)

Monday, June 23, 2008

Some reasons why I think GOD exists

1. I can't find a logical reason for the chicken/egg issue.

2. There is no way true intelligence can be produced on computer (just my personal believe).

3. If we are really evolute from something lower, we should not only use 10% of our brain power, it is just too wasteful.

4. There is no evidence of vertical revaluation. A common example will be dogs. through thousands of years of manual breeding, still no dogs with wings ...

And on a off note:

1. God is not all powerful. The logical reason for that is, if there is someone who is all powerful, can that someone create a problem that he can't solve?

2. There is absolute truth. The logical reason for that is, if there is no absolute truth, then the statement itself will not be true.

So God is the set of absolute truths.

MpqNav and dejavu11

I found this link on MPQ and ADT reading: http://www.mpqnav.com/

Seems he helped IS on blizzard MPQ data mapping. This will be very helpfull for bots, because bots will know the terrain info and will be able to make intellect decisions on how to recover (i.e not moving into walls/hills etc).

Saturday, June 21, 2008

Finally fighter and fisher both online

I updated fighter Thursday night, wife was already asleep and I have to decide if I want to test and release then or wait till tomorrow. More delay means more chance of getting argo, but I just can't wait any more so I tested and uploaded fighter. The test took a little bit more than 30 minutes and I let the bot run through the night. Everything looks fine and wife was not argoed :-)

Wake up early this morning and updated fisher. One of the users was asking why can't I just use the old code while I do the update. The answer is security. The old fighter has "features" that Blizzard can use to gain suspection of that the program is running. Right now zoloConfigUtil and bgscreen still does that, so don't use them when WOW is running.

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Most functionalities added back in now

Just an brief update. The UI is 50% finished, with some dangling dialogs floating around but the major functionalities (Fight/Stop/Add Mob/Add waypoint) restored.

Still missing a lot, for example Save profile, clear waypoint/mobs, fishing, item distances and mine/herb.

Will try to finish up and release a partial one late tonight or tomorrow.

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Bot maintenance continued

Sorry all, thanks for all the kind word. I am still doing the overhaul of the bot, once it is released it will be ride of most of the unaligned UI components etc, and easier to use (no more flipping around tabs during setup).

I am still in the process of coding, and right now the bot is not in a usable state for most users (the interface is totally messed up and I am only boting rely on old profiles).

I am setting up the release target to be this Saturday.

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Yet another audit

Yes, I have to bring my wow bot down again.
This time there are some windows, which will popup during program crash or in some demo situations, that has bad information and could be used by Blizzard to detect us.

They occurs rarely, but will be more often for demo uses. However because there is no way for me to just shutdown the demo users, all users, even the ones who donated will be affected.

And this one will take sometime to get ride of as well.

Sunday, June 15, 2008

Very annoying

Here is another example of the troubles I am going throgh every day. Below is an email sent to me:


    hey i wan't to get this bot to test it out but how can i check that this is no scam, how can u guys proove that when i will give u my master card u will charge $200 or more???
    please write back as soon as possible, and is there a tutorial for this bot

    thanks a lot
    hope u will answer my quest


And my response:

    Please read the website and my forum first!!
    this is a donate, you don't need to pay to play
    and it is paypal (do you even know paypal?), how can I charge you $200?
    And there is an open forum, you can post anything wow related on it, if I am a scamer all others will post crap about me on it.

    Please do your homework before ask the questions.

Thursday, June 12, 2008

Internal audit in progress

Yes I have put fighter and fisher off line for an internal audit. Estimated backup time will be sometime tomorrow or later tonight (I still have to work during most of the day and help my wife on some of her stuff during the night).

What happened is, as I keep pumping out new features, I ignored my own advices on some features, and haven't done any probing on fighter and fisher for a long time. As a result there are enough unique signatures that could lead to detection. Blizzard still can't read our memory if set up properly, but they could rely on those signatures and I am in the process of sealing them.

From now on I will do an audit for each release, to make sure there are no such leaks. I will not discuss the details, but for now I will be the only one bot with zoloFighter till the next release :-)

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Mystery solved

Yes, I was really confused when a user told me he was not able to modify the config files. After several emails back and forth, I finally found the problem. He is opening the config files directly inside zip files and trying to save them (Thanks to Windows for making it so convenient).

And I think that also explains why so many people asking me about the bot complains "Can't find settings.txt", yep, they must tried to run it in the zip file as well.

Monday, June 9, 2008

Bad economy then what?

Yep, right now the economy looks not so bright, housing plumb combined with higher unemployment rate and high gas price. Just bad.

However there will always be good thing in almost any condition. Back in 2000 when all the rich people got crazy with their greed and keeps pouring money into the startups, a lot of engineers got great salaries with that. The people who keep a cool head and shorted the stocks can make a lot of money even if they are poor (of course I never encourage shorting stocks, that is just bad).

Now we are in a situation similar. People who has a lot of money (banks, investment firms) made huge mistakes by been too greedy and now their lose could be your gain. Some foreclosed houses are just a bargain. Their loss can be your gain, if you have the smarts and guts to catch it.

Friday, June 6, 2008

zoloFighter is the only bot that has no ban wave so far

Yep, Just heard that mimmcbot has a temp ban wave, so we are the only one that has not been hit.

The credit goes to that we are using the most straight forward security measures (so can only be caught if Microsoft windows is not safe), and we offer no advanced features (no background boting).

Thursday, June 5, 2008

Virus totals again!!

Well, this time is not eSafe. Yesterday after my new release, which added some intelligence to resurrect near mobs and allows javascript check on combat sequences, one of the virus total checks failed again with "Blockreason.0". Have no idea what that means.

So I started to back out the changes, piece by piece, and recheck every time a back out is made, in hope that I can find the offending pattern and change it. Doesn't work, after I reverted everything back, it still fails. It took hours and argoed wife greatly.

So I checked my previous version, which passed virus total with flying colors. Sure enough, it failed too. So I guess virus total has upgraded one of their suppliers and now I am flagged without hope of unflagging it.

Tuesday, June 3, 2008

price hike in the future

I got nabbed by several friends about doing my bot way too cheap. And I do get emails of mistrust because people don't believe something real can be free.

I am thinking about hiking the price, to maybe $3 for 6 month or $5 for 5 month.

Friday, May 30, 2008

Found a buddy

Found this blogger, BugHunter
He is similar to me in a lot of areas, i.e. both are engineers, both likes games and both has wife argo...

Well at least I am not alone.

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

unfair competition?

I recently noticed that, while I am making my bot free mostly, other bot makers are charging from $5 to $12 a month.

The question I want to ask is, does my low price give me an unfair advantage in this? Well I had a day job and set up this bot mainly for fun, there are others who sale the bot for a living.

Just imaging that you have a shop, and some other guy who are playing around setup a shot near you and sales everything you sale for nothing.

Of course the comparison is not valid, as Merc has sold millions of Glider and is much richer than me. But how about the other players?

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Hope in sight

Just read a very interesting piece in http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/06/02/080602fa_fact_wright

Does it mean a new start for Egypt? I don't know. It almost sounds like the protestant reform of the Christians. The protestants freed them selfs from the corrupted church, which used God as their weapon to gather money and power, while Dr. Fadl's refute of the violent ways could free the radical Muslims from the wraith of some of their leaders who uses God as their justification to inflict pain on people and gather power at the same time.

I don't know. With the democracy in Western countries getting old and corrupted (well, the population started to vote stuff for them selfs and demand government taken care of everything for them), the hope lies in the new ones :-)

Saturday, May 24, 2008

Loot problem not so small.

Well, I did notice a strange repeat loot problem recently, but never really cared, as long as it loot most of the time and works, don't want spend time on that.

Recently more and more people start to complain on that. Maybe some glider users who paid $25 and got banned switched? I did a investigation, and found the loot problem might be the cause of the strange program abort on generic error.

What happened is at some version I introduced javascript call backs during wait, but it was not handled in script.js, so everytime there is a loot, during the wait, the call back will occure and cause the find corpse to loot function in script.js to fire, in turn it will find a corpse right in front of it and start loot again, which will again trigger the call back and loot. On slower computers it will show up as multiple loots, on faster ones it will likely cause javascript stack overflow problem.

Thursday, May 22, 2008

No, we are not affected by the ban wave

And please stop send me emails asking me, read the forum or my blog first :-) Even thought zoloFighter development is pretty much a one man army and I don't have money to hire developers/auditors, we are still undetectable and safe, make sure you follow the rules.

And on a side note, here is what the politicians doing to the high gas prices. Shouting murder and increasing tax at the same time:
http://cbs2chicago.com/politics/gas.prices.taxes.2.729939.html

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

New Ban Wave

I learned about the ban wave yesterday, minifss posted on my thread on mmowned and I was surprised that there is a ban wave. I thought Blizzard has give up on bot detections and focused on law suits a long time ago.

Anyway, another user suggested I should blog on the matter to give some comfort on zoloFighter users.

Yes we are safe, as long as you follow the rules, list on the security notice on fighter support forum (thanks the moderator who put it up as announcement). We don't inject, we don't hack WOW by change its memories. We don't do background mode either, which leaves small holes that could be traced. The security is generic (so it persists across patches), and nothing fancy (standard windows security model, which is tested by hackers across the world and patched by Microsoft).

If everyone follows our model, there is nothing Blizzard could do except resort to player reports. I am a little bit surprised that the bots which uses background mode (openbot, glider elite) could last this long. I think Blizzard might been focusing on lawsuits instead of bot detection.

Anyway, that said. It is safe to using zoloFighter during the ban wave, as GMs will rely on software detection to ban players. I was botting non stop during the last few days, trying to reproduce a bug in newer version of fighter that randomly stops on some players machines. (which was stupid of me).

But the period after a ban wave is not safe. As the masses of bots clear out of WOW, GM will have time to deal with player reports because there will be few. So watch out.

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

GenErr bug continues

Over the weekend I reproduced the bug once, which pointed to a corrupted javascript stack. The only possibilities are either javascript engine got a bug (which is highly unlikely) or some unhanded exceptions in native code by pass the stack clean up code in javascript engine.

The bad news is, after plug all the holes in my native code, John still finds the newest release doing the same thing.

That is just bad.

On a side note, CA Supreme-court ruled gay marriage ban is unconstitutional. Gay marriage is legal or not is really not our business and most of us could care less. However the power of the court is rather obvious in this case. Any thing or any law can be marked unconstitutional and out ruled by court, I could foresee one day US will be ruled by court instead of President. Is it a good thing or bad thing? The good thing is a rule of law might be better than mob rule, but if the person who is interpret the law is corrupt, then the rule of law became tyrant rule, especially in established democracies, where the elected leaders are becoming increasingly incompetent.

Friday, May 16, 2008

Strange bug

Recently players reported a bug that stops the bot at random. The bot catches a generic error and stops. I was not able to reproduce it till yesterday. And for now all my code inspections has not produced a good result.

A generic error can be anything, divided by 0, access out of bounds etc. If it is c# this one will be easy, as the stack traces are readily available. But this is good old C++ we are talking about.

So we will see how fast I can track this one down.

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

other news

China bloggers cook up quake conspiracies. This one looks interesting too. On one end I am happy that the Chinese people finally has some freedom to blog, on the other end the communist party in china deserved it for its original lack of freedom.


An warning to all Americans. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080513/ap_on_go_co/congress_iraq_funding
Democrats want to increase tax on anyone who earn 1 mil plus. Either me nor my friends earn that much, but consider when income tax is initially issued 99% of US residents don't need to pay (the limit was over 10k or something), now only about 10% of Americans don't need to pay that. Even the poor immigrants from India/China are earning 50k at least upon graduate .... I would expect in 20 years, that 50k will be 500k and they will have to pay up.

High price of gas might not be bad

Look at this link, http://www.news.com/8301-11128_3-9939613-54.html?tag=nefd.lede

It is amazing how humans can adapt to new environments. Raise the gas prices by another 100% and we could definitely live in a better environment, less trash and less pollution at the same time!

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

WOW 2.4.2 is out, and the usual again

Yep, 2.4.2 is out. There are so many patches went out in the past, and still there are players keep telling me "My bot works fine yesterday and today it won't loot now". Didn't they even notice the big downloads? I found out this noon, and after some messing around most offsets are fixed. But again there will be offsets that I don't use often and forget. Just post a message on the forum and I will check them.

On a unrelated note. I remember when McCain proposed a gas tax cut, a lot of economist keep shouting it will do nothing. When he proposed oil drill, most of them said it won't do any good in the short run.
But when Obama/Clinton proposed the windfall profit tax on oil companies (which will raise price of gas and do more harm to the economy), no ones said anything.
Conclusion, most US economists are useless :-)

Monday, May 12, 2008

AVBot released, again

Yes, last Sunday I have finally released the new AVBot, this one has horde support. Next week I will try to add more horde/alliance battle master names (Yes, the new one only require add of battle master names instead of the original name/position combo).

I think my job is largely done, and I will try to focuse on my own projects for now.

Saturday, May 10, 2008

javascript compiling error not reported

in javascript embedding (spidermonkey of Mozilla), there is a way to register an error call back to print out script errors.

Yesterday while I was testing out the new AVBot, a compile time syntex error was not caught. A close inspection revels that in error report, if exception is enabled, an exception was raised instead of calling the error reporter callback.

Since I can't find any code to print out the exceptions on google, I publish my version below (the part getting stack is from mozilla's js code):
jsval val;
if (JS_GetPendingException(cx,&val) && JSVAL_IS_OBJECT(val)) {
JSObject* obj=JSVAL_TO_OBJECT(val);
jsval stack;
string strstack = "";
if (JS_GetProperty(cx, obj, "stack", &stack)) {
strstack = jsValToString(stack);
}
jsval msg;
string strmsg = "";
if (JS_GetProperty(cx, obj, "message", &msg)) {
strmsg = jsValToString(msg);
}
string strfileName;
if (JS_GetProperty(cx, obj, "fileName", &msg)) {
strfileName = jsValToString(msg);
}
string strlineNumber;
if (JS_GetProperty(cx, obj, "lineNumber", &msg)) {
strlineNumber = jsValToString(msg);
}

So there you go, you have the line number, fileName and stack :-)

Thursday, May 8, 2008

Lawers = Bullies?

I found this interesting link:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/04/bullies.html

In there John Stossel listed cases where people got bullied by lawyers, because there is not a "loser pays" law and lawyers can throw cases against you without worrying any backlash.

I agree with that idea, but with some modifications, that is restrict the loser payout to certain "standards". The reason? A rich guy can hire an ultra expensive lawyer to defense him against a poor guy. The poor guy might withdraw just because he can't pay the other sides expense in case he loss.

So US definitely needs a "Loser pays" rule, but with small modifications.

Wednesday, May 7, 2008

DNA for Platypus uncovered

Interesting story. Scientists has mapped the DNA for Platypus.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7385949.stm

However it will be even more interesting if we could find out how the DNA tell the cells to replicate and form an actual Platypus ....

I believe this is the only area that public founds are needed (instead of market driven). Because we all will be interested in this and the use of it will be hardly seen till later stages (i.e medical uses).

Tuesday, May 6, 2008

ER Story

I have no idea how did I come across this site, but this story is interesting too:

http://erstories.net/?p=138

It just might be some of the reasons why America is in such big trouble.

About Global Warming

well, a interesting one on the register:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/02/a_tale_of_two_thermometers/

Very interesting, the comments are good too, both sides fight nail and tooth.

You decide.

Friday, May 2, 2008

windfall gas tax

This is grade school economics and yet we have senators who are dumb enough to draw votes with those!

Right now what happened to Gas prices is:
1. Supply and demand
2. Falling dollar.

By enacting a windfall gas tax, it will not solve either of the above, and in turn, has the following disadvantages:
1. Leave the oil companies less incentive to explore for new gas.
2. Make it harder for new companies to enter oil market (less profit)
3. Make gas prices even higher (the tax will be transfered on to consumers)
4. Increase government waste (as to any other, more resource, more waste).

And if you try to give that tax to people with lower income, you have the following added disadvantage:
1. Some may not need it (people who live near their work, who are on welfare and don't work)
2. Increase fraud (I know people who cheat on welfare, and people will cheat on this too)
3. The tax might be there to stay and harm the next generation. We all know how government loves to keep taxes. The telephone tax from 1900s are still around. The current income tax is only meant for extremely rich people, and now it is affecting all of us.

Since I love the environment, I do think this high gas price is a God given to fix our environment problems. People are going away from SUVs, newer energy sources are been developed. I do prefer finding the new energy sources via free market, instead of government incentives, because you just don't know if the incentives are done to the right thing. Right now bio fuel is hot, but it causes food crises and I heard reports about 1gallon of bio fuel need about 1 gallon of gas to produce ....

Thursday, May 1, 2008

bad luck again on virus total

Yesterday I was fixing some bug on the reverse travel part of zoloFighter, tested and released. Before release there is always the part to send it to virustotal, and I am confident that it will be another totally clean result.

Well, behold, http://www.virustotal.com/analisis/db096ba616ca72c95b8213571f9da431. Webwasher-Gateway shows a red "BlockReason.0". I googled and have no idea what is it. I hate a non-clean result, so I started to roll back my changes one by one. Turned out the one that triggered it is my checking for UTF8 character markers! That is one stupid anti virus check. Eventually I found a way to by pass this condition (move the part to a function). So I guess the way to make anti virus software happy is make your functions small?

Anyway, not a big deal but now I need to release it again and retest it. Has to postpone my new AVBot.

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Yet another bug

Yesterday I run zoloFighter with my toon to grind some gold, been tired has to run back manuly, I created a new waypoint to run back. After sale and repair, I selected "Reverse" as run mode and hit fight, thought the bot will travel back. Well, didn't happen. Bot showed me "Waypoing too far".

Turned out there is a bug in the code when reversing a travel waypoint. Don't know how come I didn't check that out!! Anyway because I was out of time, I was forced to abort the gold grind and left for work.

Will try to fix that tonight, and maybe make a easier way to invoke the sales waypoint instead of letting the bot do it when bag is full.

Monday, April 28, 2008

update coming out again soon

I did a small update on the past Sunday, added wowAlert() and another method to clear global action timers (used to call after a death so zoloFighter can reapply all bufs).

Today I read some post on mmowned and is scared. Some user saw zoloFighter and wow running under admin account (not first time it happens). Turned out to be the user's problem (started wow by hand), but it happens before that user put administrator user name and password in settings.txt to start WOW!!.

So another fix goes in, to check if guest name in settings.txt is a guest or not. If not, don't start WOW with it :-)

Sunday, April 27, 2008

I don't know everything!

I got an email from a user. He told me he can't download some waypoint packs off the forum, and ask me if I know where the downloads are. I told him to ask the poster. Well, in his next email he explained that he thought I already tested those profiles and have them.

Actually not. Who ever posted those profiles/script on the forum posted them as is. And I don't have time to test them out, and I don't want to either. Each week after work/life/dev, I only got about 5 to 10 hours of free time, and those free time are best used to play and relax then testing :-)

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Chaos

Just found I have slipped into chaos, with so many things to do yet I got no time for anything.

On the zoloFighter side, I need to
1. Implement a no loot option to skip all loots
2. AV BG for horde and a better tutorial
3. Release the damn stop utility
4. Add a logging for whispers to remote control (right now all messages are buried in the logs, hard to find)
5. Better tutorials for foreign languages.
6. My big secret project

Monday, April 21, 2008

ebay scams

Saw this link on ebay scams from this blog. Pretty funny, all of them are bad guys get an ebay account, outbid others on ebay and want the seller to ship to Nigeria. Most sellers got suspicious as the buyer has no feed back, or the cost of item plus shipping are more expensive than a new one. Still some got greedy and shipped the item.

I still don't know why all the scamers are from Nigeria.

Friday, April 18, 2008

Candy for password and my analysis

I saw a news on CNN yesterday about women are more likely go give up passwords than man for chocolate. It states that when lured by candy, 50% plus women will give out their password, and the report indicates that most people only use one password for everything.

Looks like an ordinary report right? Gives you some interesting statistics.

But think again and you will know the report is flawed. If it is you, and someone (a pretty woman) try to trade her candy for your password, what will you do? I will just give her a fake password and smile :-)

And think deeper, who is wasting time and money for those meaningless tests? Who are the ones who can benefit from this report? The answer is obvious, the security companies.

So there you go, it is just an cleverly disguised AD :-)

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Food shortage

Just saw this:
S Africans march over food prices on CNN.

"the protest would send out a message that the cost of living was too high." What messages? To who? This messages should be sent to their corrupted leaders, who turned many regions of Africa from the fertile lands just 10 years ago to this poor place. They must be kidding. No amount of protest will make production higher. The real actions should be look at what went wrong and fix it.

"Robert Zoellick, has called for immediate action to deal with rising food prices." So what's the action?
"Mr Zoellick called on governments to provide the United Nations World Food Programme with $500m in emergency aid by next month. "
Of course, more money. But wait, did we heard any nature disaster that caused food production to drop? Or the greedy store owners keep charging higher even when they know people won't be able to pay and will riot?

Nope. It is a nature disaster. It is all caused by man. The primary ones responsible are those corrupted rulers who disrupted the normal flow of market for their own gain, and reduced output dramatically.
The secondary cause, US is starting to raise the production of bio fuel, which makes less farm products available (which the report failed to mention). Supply and demand.

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Paul Graham

Here is a link to Paul Graham's Essays.

I really respect him after reading his Essays, and I hope by reading those, more young people can became founders.

Monday, April 14, 2008

javascript engine and thread safety

Well, I was doing some simple AJAX at work and was wondering how will the engine handle script safety.

I remember when I was debugging the javascript engine for zoloFighter, the engine appears to be single thread only.

Some search on the internet, I found this : http://odetocode.com/Blogs/scott/archive/2007/01/08/9734.aspx
The author seems to agree with me but still it is not clear.

So it is time to try it out! Sure enough, both IE and Firefox serialize everything on one thread only :-)

Thursday, April 10, 2008

easy unicode support

I was thinking about making zoloFighter display in different languages. The first push for it is sometime last year, where the internal workings are done, so for Chinese/Japanese WOW, the bot will properly print out mob/herb/mine names.

Yesterday I did a simple process to let the UI components (buttons/labels) to display foreign languages. Actually it is a way to allow customization to be done to the bot, so you can have the buttons display whatever you want.

The process is simple, a file named translate.txt must exists in lang folder. There are several default ones available (for German/Chinese fonts). The file must be UTF8 format, with alternating lines of English and its translation. Rather simple but very effective.

Tuesday, April 8, 2008

IMAP (bug again)

Wife found she missed several emails recently, and I found all the missing emails are in the inbox, and my IMAP server is sending the headings. After dump the output to a file, I found the subject line has a CRLF in them!! how did that happen? Apparently some email client does allow that to happen (outlook express and Thunderbird only have 1 single line).

So I changed the IMAP server, when it checks for invalid chars on subject, any non-letter char excluding "." will be tagged and the string will be prefixed with length.

Problem solved. What will be the next bug?

Monday, April 7, 2008

Sales waypoint fix

Finally got sometime to fix the sales waypoint. Several users want that fixed fast but I just don't have the block of time for it.

So a first look I found my toon find a random NPC instead of the repair guy I recorded . What happened is the javascript property was not auto refreshed when pass in and I need to initialize it explicitly. It does make sense that the property will have its previous value, but the actual implementation of the property is just a passed in variable that has to be set to whatever the internal implementation is, and I was assuming the variable is random and is initialized to NULL. Now everytime I have to make a new empty string and pass it back...

Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Fool's day joke

Well, I announced that Blizzard has send me a letter and I will be forced to shutdown the site by tomorrow.

The amazing? Some users take it as an excuse to bot AFK!!

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Patch 2.4 left overs

This morning I found out I forget to give fisher download a proper title, so it is still labeled as 2.3 ...

And users reported ghost waypoint not working. Of course it is the offsets that are forgotten to be updated.

So more work tonight.

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Patch day confusions

Well, today is the 2.4 patch day. A lot of users reported the "Player not found" problem, which is normal after any patch.

The problem is some users said they are EU servers and they got that before patch.

Componding the problem is I did some unnessessary maintaince by deleteing/moving some offset files which I thought was not used on the server.

Now I have lost track of what's going on. Good news is this is an easy patch and I managed to make the offsets working.

The bad news is we will never know what's going on. For EU/Asian servers, they can download the old 2.3.3 version in older downloads and get past this 1 day lag between US and EU servers.

Lesson learned: Never fix what's not broken. (I learned that lesson several times, but this time I just can't control the impulse)

Monday, March 24, 2008

Time spent on supporting zoloFighter

Recently I noticed that now more and more time are spent on supporting the bot instead of personal fun.

So before when the bot is not so popular, I used to bot and watch TV. Now from time to time I have to answer emails, answer questions on different forums (including mine). And more and more people asks me to add them to msn.

That is just a bit NO-NO. If I ever do that then this charity project will became a full time job. At least now I can still choose to answer the questions on my spare time.

Anyway for all new bot users, before you submit a question, please check out my forums first, your question are most likely already been answered. And if you do have a different question, please submit detailed information. Nothing annoys more than "hi man my bot is not working can you help" etc. The excitement of "Oh I got a new user!" has long passed ....

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

IMAP4REV1

My imap server still has some problems with Outlook express, and was not fixed in the previous release.

What happened is Outlook express keeps saying it didn't poll some folders, while I can see the emails and all other operations is OK. It is very annoying.

Some digs and I found if I set version to IMAPV4rev1, OE will not give me those non-sense. However there are extra parsing that I need to do, especially the Envelope info. Which I think is a big waste of time.

After the implementation, the messages start to show up as "Not available on server". Found out in the return, instead of BODY[], I just said BODY, and the client doesn't like that much.

Anyway, I have finally got a good IMAP server that can store/receive my mails correctly. And the emails are all stored in a easy to recover way (as individual files), so if I ever need to reformat my server, I know where to back up and restore.