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.