Friday, February 27, 2009

Vacation

I will be on Vacation, so no more posting for a week.

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Obama's speech and Republican's response

I tried hard to focus during Obama's speech and he did a good job with a speech that has almost no substance. Have no idea what his plans are.

On the other hand Bobby Jindal looks not as at ease as Obama, but I do agree with most of what he is talking about ("But the way to lead is not to raise taxes and not to just put more money and power in hands of Washington politicians. The way to lead is by empowering you, the American people. Because we believe that Americans can do anything." ... Bobby)

The only thing I don' agree with Bobby is on energy issues, I want the price of energy higher so the market can be pushed toward new energy sources instead of oil.

Friday, February 20, 2009

Stupidity overwhelming

The government will starting to taxing on us how much we drive. See this link.

It will make more sense if they just make higher taxes on energy, i.e gas and electric.

Anyway, the good part of this bill is, it will make my wife less likely to go out shopping :-)

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Starcraft II will be 3 games

Yes, instead of warring about my job and this economy, I can't wait for Starcraft II to come out. And some googling later I got this link:

http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/55267

Starcraft II will ship in 3 parts, 1 terran campaign and 2 expansion (zerg and toss).

Have to say I am a little bit disappointed, to save cash I will just buy the first one and wait till the other 2 drop in price.

How NOT to help your friends

You should never help your friends the way those people did.

See this link on yahoo.

Finally fixed the old glider profile

Old glider profiles has only x,y positions, and zolo Orbiter uses x,y,z positions to track where the toon is. The reason is at some point, I found a great spot under water for farming and it makes much more sense to not only move left/right but up/down as well.

OK, I think all old glider profiles broke on that one, and I always want to fix that because so many people keep telling me it is broken (usually new users).

The fix requires 2 steps. First I added z position check in my code.
And I added a fixer to the old profiles. Once the old profiles are converted, run it through the fixer, it will fix all irregularities in glider profiles, make it Orbiter compatible.

The funny thing is, I lost my original code for the converter, Glad minifss has included the converter in his download, so it is easy for me to decompile.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Sorry about previous post

I come home and checked the windows, it is very likely that it was a windows update that forced me to reboot, not from Blizzard. Right now I only got confirmation from one guy, will try to re-install wow to make sure.

For now fighter/fisher is re-enabled.

Blizzard is going to get us with 3.0.9

I know this day would come, but never thought so soon.

This morning I did a routine check on WOW, never thought there could be an update because 3.0.8 was just out last week (or something like that).

And there is a patch. Again was not patchable with guest account.
So I patched it on my other computer.

Before go to work I went to check the computer. There is the line about device driver installed reboot required!! What driver??!!

As many of you know, I pioneered the guest account mode to give zoloFighter the best security one can find. But now they have a device driver running in parallel, while WOW can't do anything, the driver are not restricted.

So unless the user know what to do (i.e. make sure he patch and play on different OS installation), he will be caught.

So I have no choice but to disable the bot for now, and confirm with users one by one to make sure they know what to do. I barely had enough time to disable bot, but have not update the website and remove the donation button yet.

Again, I am sure next time, blizzard will REQUIRE the "supervisor" driver to be running to run WOW. At that time we will be really messed :-(

Monday, February 9, 2009

Bad Sunday

Not a good day on Sunday.

First I got a headache.

Then after I come home I found my bot dead, only run for a couple of minutes (I was expecting it to level).

Since I don't have much time and have to leave for a party soon, I just kick start the bot.

Only come back and found the bot is dead there again.

Turned out there was a bug in my targeting system and 2 mobs on the map is spoofed.

Which forced me to fix the code while having an headache.
Let's hope the next Sunday I can relax.

Friday, February 6, 2009

Thursday, February 5, 2009

The right way to come out of a recession (Part III)

The way to come out of a recession is to raise productivity on producing things people need. All other methods that might give us a lift in the short run is secondary.

You might think, why productivity help us? In a time of recession shouldn't we limit productivity?

Think about this way. Long time ago, a watch took a man several month to make, so to wear a watch, you have to pay for several month of labor, and only the richest man can own a watch. Nowadays, with help of automated assembly lines, a man can produce many many watches a day. In return the watch became much cheaper and affordable. Almost everyone own a watch today.

Another example is food. Not too long ago, farm work are backbreaking, and every family has to work hard just to make enough to feed themselves. Now with the help of tools, food are so cheap, most of us are freed to work on other better things (like software engineer, helping making people's life more convenient).

So productivity helps to free us from simple work, so we can move on to higher level of work that are more important, or more fun. It also helps to bring things that used to only be enjoyed by a few to the masses.

An argument I often heard is, if you don't pay the auto works to be able to buy a car, who can afford a car? Right now the problem is not the pay of the workers, it is the factories are forced to retain all workers even though only a portion of them will be enough given the automated manufacture process.

That is why I dislike today's unions. Yes they have done good things in the past, but the things they do today is anti productivity. Resist to automation (because that will lay people off), make non-flexible rules, artificially inflated wages. This is the reason why out sourcing is so prevalent. Instead of using the advantage of knowledge of advanced manufacture abilities to max productivity, factories are forced to compete on cost of labor.

We should never rely on jobs protecting us. All the tools, watches, cars, computers are just tools, they should be automated and carry little cost. Humans as the smartest animal in the world should learn to adapt new environments and challenges, instead of resist productivity, embrace it and the new world productivity could bring us.

The right way to come out of a recession (Part II)

Some people argue that to come out of a recession, government need to do massive spending to create jobs, green jobs, long term jobs. An example will be home energy usage inspector, who inspect homes to point out ways to increase energy efficiency. The problem with those jobs are, those people won't be create much stuff, and everything they do can be archived through public education. Government created jobs usually ends up as a sink for tax dollar, and as we see with big governments, much of that are wasted on things you and me don't need, which will eventually drag us down further.

when disable teller or bic for branch, also try to close busdates of the same ecl.

Monday, February 2, 2009

Been busy lately

I feel very sorry for all my users. I have been busy recently (both from work and life) and was not able to do much to resolve your issues (usually problems relating to the profile packs).

This weekend I got some extra time, but I played with my guild instead. Sorry but I have to have some fun, else I might commit suicide.