strange crashes give me headaches

I got an email from a user about program crashing. As usual they never include program version, os version, os language version. I do believe there is a crash, but debugging crashes that happens on a user's computer will be hard. It sort of ruined my afternoon, knowing that there are strange problems happens to users.

But all crashes happen with a reason. My steps will be to use logs (Yes, I tried DrWatson but the dmp file is always in use, and if I cancel the submit to Microsoft button, the dmp file will be deleted), and see exactly where the crash happens.

Good thing is users usually will be happy to go through some emails than spending hours fishing or grinding stuff, so I just got lucky.

Anyone else got better ideas as how to debug remote crashes without a debugger? This reminded me of the old serial port debugging days, upload a program, see the output of serial port (or sometimes even LEDs) and figure out problems. Could be fun :-)

bad script error

Just notice today while farming with zoloFighter. Someone speaks to me and the bot did nothing! so checked script file, and my whisper detection code is full of bugs LOL. Turned out I never tested it and was afk boting most of the time.

I have fixed it now and will put script.js on fighter website for download.

Funny WOW on TV post

Just visited http://casualwow.blogspot.com/ , the blog today features some of the TV appearences of WOW, and some of them are very funny :-) I will need to find out what the name of the show is, seems like a UK show?

patch 2.3 finished

Yes, WOW 2.3 is applied, and I have finally fixed all offsets. It was supposed to be an easy update, everything is working, users don't even need to download a new version. Very happy.

Then found out I forget to make message and whisper detection offsets. And found out one of the offset is hard coded and has changed.

So a new download is still necessary. I don't want to force users to do an update, so a new download page has to be written.

Again a simple update and a full night of work.

Bored

This is bad. During the weekend, I actually got some free time and wanted to play. Logged on and few of the high level guilds are on, so no way to make a guild run. Don't want to wait for a random group either. Tried to get some PVP arena but only practice ones are available (don't know why, I don't do those XvX often), so can't earn PVP marks. And not sure what AV marks can gain for me.

So basically nothing to do. So bored. Watching StarGate DVD while boting LOL.

Mistakes

Yesterday I found out from a user that my most recent update for almost 2 weeks has a random crash bug. I am assuming STL string are terminated with a zero, so if there are some random non-zero char at the end, C++ run time will assert on accessing past string bounds. I run for 2 weeks with the same code and always got lucky :-)

Well, that is not the first time such mistakes are made. For half an year after my initial release, I didn't realize that I was building the executable with dynamic link, which requires a dll that most of the users won't have (Unless they also are developers and install VC++). So the turn around time is pretty fast for my last weeks mistakes

phpbb forum problem solved

I had a post about spamers on zoloFighter/fisher forum, and how to deal with them (use admin approved activation, and delay the approval).

The only problem is with that, I have to manuly click on each application email sent from phpBB2 and approve them myself. That is not a pleasent process.

I finally got time last week and did some digging into phpBB2 (my php is rahter bad), and add my own script to do a mass approval. That way I no longer need to approve each email, all I need to do is one click and all of the pending applications will be approved.

So far it has worked wonderfully, and the program even found a bounch of previous applications that I missed to approve.

afk gamer

I found a real nice wow blog on afk gamer, Foton has been blogging a while there and some of the blogs are interesting! Nice job!

http://afkgamer.com/

Also I have updated offsets for RTP server today, let's hope there won't be too many patches for RTP any more