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.

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

testing on new zoloFighter page

Yesterday I finally uploaded the new zoloFighter pages to the test folder. Originally wife did that, I did some modifications and destroyed most of the good things wife has done. She did it more than a month ago and I just can't postpone to try it out any more.

It is amazing even with a half finished product how long it takes to customize it. At least WOW patch 2.4 didn't come out today so I will have some free time to do the pages again tonight.

Thursday, March 13, 2008

2.4 patch comming soon?

Some user told me Blizzard are now starting to push the 2.4 downloads to them now. I am hoping Blizzard have mercy on me and don't release 2.4 till after tax season. After all most of the players are adults and they will be busy around this time too.

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

IMAP fun again

Nothing about bots. My IMAP server got a small problem. Every time Outlook Express connects to it, OE does get the new mails, but always popup some warnings about "Inbox/Drafts" was not pulled etc.

So I did some trial/error, and found the CAPABILITY string has something to do with it.
I added IMAPrev4 to it and that solve the problem.

Or so I thought. Next day wife found she didn't receive emails, and I found all here emails are in the email folder, she just can't see them. Turned out if I set CAPABILITY to IMAPrev4, Outlook Express will do something extra on the requests, and break the server.

So everything back to normal. No more tries till tax season is off.

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

TAX overwhelming

Every year I do tax, and every year I forget how it was done, and need to search and search. This is getting stupid. I wish we can move on to fair tax (but in that case even if I have only 50 donations a year on zolofighter, I still need to count each of them).

Anyway, all development and fun has stopped, yielding to the federal and state tax.

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Guild feud continues

The battle between the 2 founders of our guild continues. I feel more and more like dead meat between the two. Instead doing my taxes I have to call both to try to calm things down. This really sucks. I don't think I can get any time for bot development for the next week.

Monday, March 3, 2008

stop bot when bag is full

In last weeks's release, I added the function to stop bot once bag is full, which should make the bot safe.

Then I got this email: "zolofighter stops after a few minutes, I don't have a sales waypoint ...... the logs it says thread stopped". I was confused and thought he was doing some customized scripting and caused the bot to throw an exception.

Turned out he is leveling his low level toon and his bags were easily filled up.

So for lower levels, leveling up is much more important than trash drops. They don't care about if bags are full or not, They don't care about drops period.

Another config util entry has been added, it is a drop down to select if you want to stop the bot after bag full or not.