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.

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 :-)

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 :-)

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

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.

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 :-)

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.

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 :-)

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.

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...

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!!