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.

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?

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 :-)

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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 :-)

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.

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 :-)

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.

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).

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.

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 ....

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.