cool tweak to the silverlight pie chart

http://community.irritatedvowel.com/blogs/pete_browns_blog/archive/2008/12/04/Pie-Chart-Styling-in-the-Silverlight-Toolkit-_2D00_-Cross_2D00_Slice-Gradients.aspx

Yep, he did a nice shade using absolute values. Haven't found any good use of it yet, but I will try to see if I can change it dynamically.

That could be amazing!

A close relative of mine (Let's name her "X") is about 2 month pregnant. This morning she went to doctors for a check out. She was excited because she know they will be able to tell her the baby's gender today. The doctor told her she had a girl, and she called everyone about it me included.

Baby One
X's brother has a boy (Baby One) who is two and a half year old, and his mother told Baby1 that his aunt will have a girl. And the 2 year old said "No". So his mother asked him "Why, is it a boy?" and he said "yes". Not long ago when we have a family reunion, X who is pregnant asked Baby One if he want a little brother or sister, and he said he want a sister, but when asked if it is a boy or girl inside of his aunt, he said it is a boy.


Baby Two
About two years back, another relative of mine come to visit. They also had a two year old boy (Baby Two). X was also present. At the time X is trying to have a baby for some time with no luck. After the relative returns home, Baby Two one day wake up and said "Aunt X give birth to a boy".


Baby Three
The above two cases I know personally. According to X, she also did the same thing (gender guessing) to her best friend's son (under 2 years of age). And when asked if he want a little brother or little sister, he wanted a little sister. But when asked if X has a boy or girl, he said boy.

I checked Google, and it was said there could be mistakes on the doctor's part. If it turned out to be a boy, this would be rather amazing. One kid knows it even before X's baby is conceived, and the other is also confident that the unborn is a boy. Of course they could both be wrong, it might just be some garbage that kids are spitting out, but if it turned out to be true, what the odds that several kids can know what we as adults don't? What could cause this? It will be very interesting if we could also be trained to have the same abilities. Of course instead of baby guessing, we will use it on the stock markets, that could really screw this ability up.

I will keep an close eye on this one :-)

NO DRM

This link on tomshardware, I think that is a good step forward.

I believe DRM hurts legit buyers more than the pirates, and the people who wants to copy games are the ones who don't have money (students etc). If they can't copy they won't play.

I am a fun of blizzard games, can't wait to try out StarCraft II. But if Blizzard installs DRM, I will hold my urges and save the money.

And the game developers should stop making the original CD in the rom thing mandatory. It kills me to try to find the original broodwar CD from the pile when I want to play it. With CD burners so common, they should save the trouble and just relax.

Final exam

Yep, I had to prepare final exam for my students during the weekend, and was not able to do much. Someone has submitted some valid bugs to me but I will have to deal with them tomorrow.

Chained/quest levelings

I got sometime to try to make a chained quest leveling profile.

All I can say is, it is so boring!! Need to note the location of every npc and objects, take the fun out of everything ....

Now I need to think a better way of doing it.

So I guess I will put it off even more :-(

been busy

didn't do much for the entire week. My job is taking most of my time.

Did a release and botted some just to make sure the release works, but can't afford any other activity that are time consuming

Better Mine/Herb methods

The next version of zoloFighter will have better Mine/Herb methods. I changed the way waypoint notes are implemented (so your old waypoint notes will dispear).

Before, waypoint notes are used for people to fish (so they know where to stop once a pool disappears). Now, a new property is added to allow you to access all waypoint notes. I will add a new button to one click add notes, and when you found a herb/mine you can add a note. Later on instead of let fighter randomly running, you can control fighter to go through all noted locations.

more problems

Not much to say. After I forced everyone to the latest version (0.8.4.9) and thought I could rest a bit, more problems are found.

First I confirmed sales/repair is broken. This is a script fix, I forget that the sales/repair npc list in javascript contains a simplified npc object, not the full object, and broken repair.

And several people reported res is not working. Now I have to kill myself again :-(

Disasters on Thanksgiving day

Thanksgiving day was chaotic for me. We have a big party planned and I know I can't do much for the day. So I wanted to zolo the entire day but I can't start the bot. Turned out the ISP my offset server and forums server is on had a heart attack and the whole thing is down.

Went on to mmowned and several people are reporting the same. It took my ISP about 2 hours to finish fdisking (the partition went read only for some reason).

But I don't have time to wait for them to finish the scan. I have to go buy stuff for the party. Right in the middle of that wife told me she forget to order pizza!!! Now I am facing a total meltdown, because it will be mutiny if there is no food (the people we invite are mostly grown ups but there are young kids involved).

I have to drop in a nearby Pizza house and the line was not bad. Of course once I come back home my car is blocked out of garage. And one of my guest's hand was burned by hot water while she tried to prepare something. So there were frantic search for medical supplies, while a bunch of kids skip out of the door and started playing in our backyard.

Finally we start to eat and the conversation was good. Suddenly I heard loud cries. Several of the kids got wood stick in their hands while playing at the structure in our backyard (from the previous owner). Now more needles and etc. I almost fainted for that.

Out of time, more later if I could.

New release soon

I am in process of implementing a bunch of features, including auxiliary waypoints (a waypoint holder where you can put any waypoints in there without checking of distance etc. Good for muck up waypoints so the toon can run smoothly on loot), one way and two way sequential waypoints (Where bot will follow the waypoint excatly to the end).

The one way and two way sequential waypoints will be good in places where it have tight corners, inside caves or near cliffs, where you want the bot to go exactly as you recorded, or go one way only. some of them are needed in order to go to tight quest areas.

However time is tight and I don't have much time to test it out...

Geting vots for my candidate

And that is Bob Barr. The minute I told that to my parent and my father in law, they all laugh at me. They told me it is wasted vote.

Well it is not. This is how democracy works. If more people do this, the major parties will stop fooling with us and get serious to what we want.

My parents, with their doctors degrees, is going to vote for Obama, no matter what I do. All credit on that goes to Bush though. I have finally able to get my father in law to vote for Bob Barr, after explain to him the difference between the parties.

We will see how it goes.

paypal stupidity

My primary email used for paypal is now full of junk mails. So I created another one and added/verified the second email, and make it the primary.

Too bad when someone donate something, the notification is still sent to the old email account.

Turned out the button I created is locked to that email. Now I have to create new buttons ....

Burned out

I am a little bit burned out. This week I beat a big dead line yesterday, got all offsets for WOW 3.0.2, completed midterm for my Sunday school students, installed extra power plug on attic (for all my ethernet connections upstairs) and the ether net connection in guest room. It sounds simple but there were so many mess in between.

I will relax this weekend, hopefully play some WOW :-)

Black Silicon

Got this news http://www.tomshardware.com/news/black-silicon-photography,6485.html from toms hardware.

Looks like I might get a much better camera in a few years :-) I hope it is not too expensive. I love good SLRs. You have to have a SLR to full enjoy the beauty of digital photography. Fast response time, artistic impressions.

Final touch on wow 3.0.2

Last night I released the new bots, both fighter and fisher, because there is a tiny bit of not so often used information that is changed in WOW. I hate to do that when I have to bump the version number and let everyone re-download the bot, it is a huge waste on the bandwidth, and it forced fisher to be re-downloaded as well, even though it has nothing to do with fisher.

And today someone has found one more offset is bad, and it is fixed now. So I hope I can forget about those offset for now.

One more thing, since all the points has been refunded, it will be a major headache to pick what to do with them now :-(

WOW 3.0.2 again

I did manage to update most offsets yesterday night before wife's argo kick in. Looks like a new bot is also necessary due to some WOW client changes.

Right now zoloFighter should work on 3.0.2 clients, with some broken functionality. I will try to squeeze some in today, but since that will require a recompile of both figher and fisher, it will be a pain for sure.

I am so lucky!

Just got home form busy work, the amazing thing is, I didn't miss a thing. Blizzard still haven't up the realms yet, so I will go help wife with her projects :-)

This is actually good, as it shorten the gap between US/EU and asia updates.

WOW 3.02 is out

And this patch is released one day before the due date of a big project at work. Can't blame Blizzard on that one.

The up side is, at lease Blizzard didn't release at the same time my Sunday school student's mid term. Nothing kills a inexperienced teacher faster than pressure.

I will try to work on it as soon as possible, depend on what time I could go home from work. One sure thing is I will receive complains about bot stops working, first from US then aboard. No matter how many times patch happens, some people never seems to have a memory of it.

DOW is up

I have already posted that I am expecting the stock might seen the bottom, too bad I was too busy and didn't get in on Friday. All the bad news from media should be a cue that we are bottom out now, becase after all, the rich guys need to pay them to scare off all other investors so they could make money!

But anyway, it is not too late. I have increased my 401k when the dow first sink, and increased again last week with all the bad news. I don't expect stocks will go back to where they once were soon, depend on who the next president is and what he does, it might be another 10 to 20 years before all the funds make some good investments. But that is not important, the important thing is, I can wait :-)

I finally recovered a bit after last week's frentic struggle with my sunday school's midterm, it took me 3 days to finish, and hours after hours of typing to finally make it up. That is why it almost break my heart when one of the student's parents need to pull her son our for something else. After all it is sunday school, not official class.....

Bad news all around

All bad news.

At work we just discovered that because some other messed up, we got about 15 days to complete a task or risk losing big money for our company.

At home because some situation, it is a mess and no one had time to fix anything.

Wife also got a big one on her plate from her boss.

And I was told I had to make the mid term exam for my Sunday school students... So I can't have much fun stuff for my students this week, I will have to prepare them for the exam, which leaves small space for me to put some fun and interesting stuff in there. You just can't have as much fun when things are limited.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Got overrun by Buffer overflow!

That was a newbie mistake. I was implementing dynamic mesh grouping and vendor/waypoing calculation logic for javascript (the complicated calculation needs to be done in native code, javascript would be too slow). After exporting a large calculated vendor waypoints to javascript, program hungs on access violation error. In debug mode the error happens upon program return from a function call.

Initially I thought it is javascript error, I was trying out with JS_SetProperty, and I thought to myself maybe I should use JS_DefineProperty instead? No luck. After some tries I found if I reduce the number of elements set in JS_SetElement call, the problem goes away. That was a big hint and I started to suspect the UI has some buffer problems. Sure enough, my rastly written UI code was using a buffer of size 1024, and doing _tscpy WITHOUT proper protection! I know that was bad for a veteran engineer to do that, but it was only an amature project with very limited development time (Still big slap on me). I spend 1 hour on this with majority of time debugging and suspecting the ability of memory management of javascript, all because I saved 10 minutes of my time initially to avoid buffer checking.

Make this a lesson to all fresh engineers/coder, don't cut corners.

Didn't do anything last night

Nope, nothing. This is family politics, I let the bot run and watched some Japanese Anime with wife. The Japanese Animes are addictive, but they are very slow (If you ever watched you know what I mean). Sometimes the same sense just seems to drag on for ever. But it was a good funny one :-) No regrets. If I have finished my development I will be able to enjoy more, but this is politics we are talking about.

Testing scares

A family friend come yesterday night, and we all went out to a Italian restaurant for dinner. The dinner was good and everyone was happy. After that we go back to our home, and I have to entertain the guests. Needless to say I was died tired when everything is done.

This morning after I wake up, I wanted to start the bot and test it more. I was surprised to find WOW still open and my toon is dead. Turned out I forget to stop the bot before I leave for dinner yesterday and the bot has run hours yesterday.
Natually I click the run button and want the bot to continue. To my surprise the toon turned, jumped and bot stoped. The first thing come to my mind is my ghost waypoint is broken. After 10 minutes of debugging (everything went wrong during that time, the setup, my windows etc), I finally found out it is my sales repair. My bag is full and my toon is trying to go to the sales repair waypoint while he is dead!!

So now one more thing to fix, don't let the toon go on to the sales repair waypoint if it is dead!

(And there is no logs, the toon tries to mount, which failed, then try to fly by jumping, which failed to, without any log to indicate what it is doing).

Yet another release and more testing

Yes, I released 0.8.3.9. turned out I forget to put the fix over to 0.8.3.7 and during a test the bot is running around again. I was shocked and found out I didn't sync the changes over (that is what happens when you don't have time and have to broken development down to pieces and multitasking).

So another release and more testing. I also got guests this week and can't do much again.

Orbiter is finally stable

Yes, after almost daily updates for zoloFighter for the past week (and I had to work over time at my real work, including Saturdays and Sundays), Orbiter is finally stable.

Expect another possible update sometime this week, as I will start AVbot work :-)

Huge memory problem

Yes even I was surprised. I was testing zolo+orbiter this morning before wife wake up, and zoloFighter died due to memory problem.

The first time I saw the memory foot print of fighter, I thought it was my database...

Anyway, the fix was simple too, GC the javascript from time to time.

Holy crap is this real?

http://capoliticalnews.com/s/spip.php?article824

I would give up and just pay my taxes, but that guy got some guts :-)

2.4.3 version archived

Yes I finally make a fixed 2.4.3 zoloFighter, so people in non-US countries can use the bot when US is patching to next version. In 2.4.2, I forget about it and didn't do it till 2.4.3 is released, and can't test it in any way, end up with a bad version (several people on private servers reported the 2.4.2 fighter is not usable).

It is not a big deal, but took me a long time to release it (and I still haven't tested it yet). So much stuff to do, so little time.

Attack all problems

I have implemented something to record all factions ids, the next version of fighter will save the faction ids you added to a file, and that file will keep growing every time you add a new faction.

However I am a bit conflicted on how to use it. It can be used as your own private database for what to attack, but should I used it only when attack all is used? I know some people don't like to select stuff (they use glider profiles), but attack all has several draw backs (attack snakes/npcs on own side etc).

And I don't want to add another check box so the bot can select which faction list to use. Maybe I will just destroy the attack all check box and let it use the saved faction list.

Next steps

There are several thing I need to next:
1. Figure out a way if a target is attack able. It is very convenient to use "Attack All" feature, but the bot will try to kill guards that are on my side when it goes to sale and repair.

2. Improve the bindings files. Some user raised valid points, that priests should not sit down and drink. It should heal itself. The change should be easy, but I (or someone else with good script knowledge) has to implement it.

3. Figure out a way to check if some menus are up.

Vista screen capture problem fixed

Yes, after much searching etc, I actually found a good solution. Can't believe the answer is simple and easy, when I was all over the new Vista DWM and try to check if thumbnail can do the trick. But the user better stay in windowed mode, which is much easier than turn off Aero.

I am working on Fighter now, need to finish the step with fighter to integrate Orbiter pather to sales/repair/ghost waypoints, also make the new auto login working (strongly not recommended though).

Fisher (screen capture) problems

Nope, I never have those problems, but some people (at least 2 now) have.

What happened is, on their system, fisher can't see the screen. It seems fisher capture the first screen successfully (used to find the blubber), but later on when it tries to capture the screen, it got the same screen every time??!!

And one of the really good users is helping me to solve this, so far no luck. (besides been dead tired caring for babies over the weekend. Yep, when wife gets a party, who is the best to care for young kids? The only one that seems to be playing games!)

phpBB down again

Yep, and just in time for one of my bug fixes for fisher. I had several message with another user on the board yesterday, and after I finally released a test to him and thinking that could be the fix, I can't get any reply back any more.

After release it to the user and go to bed, I was anxious to see if the user had any feed back to me this morning. But, my forum is totally down!! So I opened a ticket to my ISP immediately, and the reply was to contact the phpBB dev team.

So I started to do debugging myself. turned out in session.php, a query was causing the problem: SELECT u.*, s.* FROM phpbb_sessions s, phpbb_users u WHERE s.session_id = 'fcc36259f92c0f8e29a87f7e4e4d55d1' AND u.user_id = s.session_user_id
The select statement is blocking the entire site!! And I can't do much else either, because the phpMyAdmin tool provided by my ISP is down as well.

Anyway, I have sent those to my ISP, and let's hope the forums will get back up soon.

(EDIT: the final solution? Restore the old phpBB2 database. The lessons learned? Take care of your databases from time to time, and back them up!)

finally, 0.8.3.0 (Orbiter pather)

Yes I finally decided to release it yesterday, after some extended testing.

The goodies include:
1. Orbit pather and Bastos movement engine. Now zolo will move randomly, and if waypoints are close or crossed, it will go across them instead of follow the same order again and again (if your waypoint goes across entire area in as a mesh, the movement will be totally random). In a way it is similar to IS, except you define the mesh.

2. bot will run to mobs near by actively (if orbit pather is enabled)

3. Ghost res will be smarter now, instead of run the entire normal waypoint to get corpse, now it will select the shortest path to corpse.

4. Turn with mouse now.

With Orbiter pather, you can export the WOW mesh data as waypoint and the bot will move in the 3D world freely. However I think that might put me in risk of violate copy right law (I think that is the reason Judge ruled against glider, as I read the copy section, the violation is not in memory reading, but the use of WOW internal data), so the users should map their waypoints themselfs, not use WOW mesh data.

So many stuff to do

Yep, I got several fixes that are almost ready, but still need facial changes. The moving with mouse also needs some tuning, and if you want to move with mouse, you better install some kind of hot kill program to kill the bot on key stroke, else it will be VERY hard to use the mouse to stop the bot.

And no, I won't add that functionality to the bot, as it will show up as a virus on some of the scanners on virus total.

Yet another fix

Yep, the bot will attack totoms made by itself in attack all mode. That will have to be fixed. Will have to fix that in the next release as well... So many stuff.

Busy day

A lot of stuff form work, and I was not able to do anything today. The algorithms are pretty much done since yesterday after a tiny fix, but I don't have time to publish it.

And another down side is the server is crashed, this will need sometime to fix. I hope all users got their keys correctly. I will try to get to it sometime tomorrow.

Failure on bastos engine

Yep, was not able to get it to work as expected. Will try some more. And to not make Blizzard put too much attension on me, I will test the engine with emulator instead of on WOW. I will take the time to do some grinding while I debug the bastos engine on emulator.

Orbiter pather and Bastos movement engine

Yep, after some tries again today, I found just the pather is not enough. So my original idea of a "propulsion" system is still needed. I will have to allocate additional system resources for that.

Tonight is again raid night, so I will start the implementation tomorrow on the propulsion system, and I will name it bastos movement engine, credit to John Bastos, who got banned using zoloFighter. The difference of his ban is that he is a long time user, and used carefully, but was still banned. The new system will not totally prevent bans, but at least it will be good enough that it won't follow the same waypoint the same order again and again and other can tell that you are a bot by observing you for 2 minutes.

The Orbit engine is born!

Yes, I have finally made a good model of a smarter path finder for zoloFighter, and I named it Orbit :-)

The implementation has been changed several times, the main goal is to make a smart path finder and scheduler. Initially I thought of a propulsion based system to "push" the bot forward, but that is a bit complex in turn of memory usage. And after some tweak and fixes, I finally decided for our current model.

I am still in the stage of tweaking. The first try, duel to some internal bug, I was using the old system instead, and because some of the randomization in the javascript, it looks like Orbit was working, but was not. I was so happy (at the time).

Anyway, right now Orbit is doing well at times and doing bad at other times, but the main part is working now. So I will give myself a pat on the back and catch the raid on my guild :-)

I will have a very busy week next week, so the release of ZoloFighter+Orbit will be sometime next next week.

Current progress

I am still working on the new waypoint system. Here are some of the new features of the new bot (some implemented and some not):

1. Improved attack all. Attack all will now restricted by level limit, so when you are at higher levels, you no longer need to worry about frogs etc.
2. configurable waypoint margins on each profile. On wide open areas you can set it to a large number to make the bot roam more randomly.
3. new javascript call backs during running, for better unstuck (right now sometimes at end of loot the unstuck routing will think we are stuck).
4. possibly if I got time, a much complexed navigation system, that acts more human like. I am looking at possible solutions from either daju11's mapnav or most likely a personal mapping. I will avoid copy right violations at all costs, so it will not be a build in. I will just provide a interface, and you either map it yourself, or possible we can use a shared user created mapping data.

A Big Ban

No not the theory. Today I was surprised to find John, a long time user has been banned. In his report he did all recommanded stuff, bot while watching TV, didn't use public profiles.

But he is banned.

This comes to be a big shock to me, because I don't think I could have done any better (actually I was afk bot while work this morning, and run back home to shut down my bot during lunch).

So the only possiblities are user report and blizzard might be using waypoint to check if a bot is running. I need to do something to make sure the bot doesn't always going follow the waypoint exactly.

A dark day for all of us

Yes, I am talking about this, http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-9991451-93.html?tag=nefd.top

Apparently Glider lost the legal battle on copy right?!! So the judge ruled that examing another program is in violation of copy right.

Does that mean the end of zoloFighter? A detailed check on US copy right law, it appears to be that the Glider defense team is making the wrong judgment. The team is defend the work based on section 117, which is assuming Glider is copying the program, while in fact (at least for zoloFighter) nothing is copied, and nothing is modified (unlike other hacks).

So at least for now zoloFighter will continue on, and I hope Glider defend team will pick up some steam.

Possible cause of why some users not able to get offsets

2 or 3 of them reported that it won't get offsets for them, just hung there.

Beside some who got virus on their system (worked after reinstall windows), I found the rest might has something to do with low level drivers.

I use XP both at home and at work. And at home, when I debug my code, the connection to zolohouse will drop if I debug it slowly. But it will never drop at work.

I am assuming it is because I have a cheap ISP that disconnects quickly, and some hardware or driver buffer the tcp/ip traffic while others don't.

So I am doing my own buffering instead, which should solve most of the offset data downloading problems.

I am on another project now

No, that is not the other big secret project I was on, I still haven't start that one. I just found something new and exciting and I am all over it right now :-)

I know constantly moving from project to project is bad, but I can't help it. The other big secret project is too hard and although I am interested, the hardness is preventing me from touching it. This one is different, I love the projects that I can jump in and making it better over time.

zoloFighter bot for WOW was hard, but I just had to do it. Everytime I wanted to abort, I was pulled back and dig some more because I just can't stand the constant grinding.

Updating of graphics card canceled. Now AVbot!

Yes, thanks to the nice comment on my previous blog, I will not update my graphics card. I was thinking about getting a quiet directX 10 card but that is scraped.

So next goal is adding ZStorm's unstuck script and make AVBot testing friendly.

I have been had by Matt from BrokenToys

CRAP!! Now he give up AOC after the great review about it!! http://brokentoys.org/2008/07/01/burning-of-an-entirely-different-type/

My second day of playing. The character is a bit gray, and tends to blend to the rich background, so it is not standing out as much as I would like to. The fighting is not as exciting either, the worst part is there is no auto attack, so if I want to go help wife on something, the char will stay there and get beat to death.

The part I like is, game play is easy (maybe because I am in level 1 area), I can rush to any mob or two and beat them to death (in WOW an add meant death).

If I can't progress far after my trial period, I will give up too.

Or unless someone can prove to me it looks better with a directX 10 graphics card.

AVBot is back (almost)

Yes, I updated AVBot a bit, together with zoloFighter 0.8.2.6.

The updates are:
1. BGScreen.exe is no longer needed. It is provided as a tool to capture the 3 screen parts (join/queue/leave battle) if the user has customized UI mods installed.

2. AVBot has a new waypoint calculation algrithm, that favors ghost waypoints only if it is near the start of the ghost waypoint, to avoid stuck problem.

So now it is much easier to use AVbot, just download AVBot.txt and select it as your profile, go near your AV battle mater and go!

However there is a catch, that is it is best to create your own main waypoints, else blizzard will find all the users who are on the default waypoint and BAN!

I will delay release the news on my forum, to avoid questions. Want some peace and quiet in the holiday :-)

Happy birthday America!

I am not an American, but I appreciate very much what America has provided for me and my family, and I am proud of this great country.

No I don't agree with everything Americans do, and I do think some things this country has done are stupid. But to this day, there is still no one other country that surpass the freedom and liberty America provides, and no other country will surpass America's prosperity any time soon either.

To all the Americans who feel ashamed because what this country does, don't be because there are non other could do better. To all the people who hate America, don't hate, learn from it.

I have to say this is a great country, and God bless!

On Gay marriage

Well, I don't hate gays, but I am against Gay marriage. If there is a vote on Gay marriage, I will give up the vote to save gas, that is how important the issue is to me.

The more interesting part will be, how far should we go to extend the idea of marriage. If we allow Gays to marry, how about polygamists? Do we also want to legalize for a man to marry several women, or a woman to marry several man? How about the age to marriage? I know a story about a female teacher and her student who has several kids together, and she got thrown into jail. It is the voters that give the government the power to do that, but is that really want we want?

Maybe the government should not have any power over our marriage issues, but if that is true, what about the ones who want to avoid their responsibility in a marriage, i.e. support the children?

Audit tool on Glider

Just for fun, I downloaded Glider and another bot and run my tool I used for my internal audit on them. Both them fail. If blizzard hired me I could really do some damage. It will be fun to hack the hackers, it is like PVP, both sides will pump up exciting ideas.

Horrible things

I am referring to this link: Woman dies on ER floor

That was just horrible. A woman died on hospital floor, and no one cared. None of the people in the same waiting area does anything to help or report it.

There are situations where nothing will help no matter how much money you throw at it. That are the situations when the people involved just don't have a hurt.

Kongfu panda

Yes I went to see the movie, against my wishes. My wife's brother, want to see the movie with his 2 year old, and despite my argument of the baby might not like the movie, we all went.

We were supposed to see the 1o'clock one, but was postponed because the baby fall asleep. Just as we all thought the movie is off, he wake up so we went to see the 2o'clock movie, with about 15 minute till the start. As you guessed we missed the start of the movie by 20 minutes (long drive), and the first scene I saw in the theater is my brother in law holding a crying baby.

All I can say is the movie is average with some funny moments, but mostly got interrupted by the frequent going and sitting of my brother in law's wife to check on the baby outside, and some crying. It was worth the $8 I think. After we left, they managed to stay and check the next panda movie, not to steal but because my brother in law was out of the theater most of the time, and the baby finally fall asleep.

From a phone call later on we learned that the baby wake up again half way during the movie, and they end up didn't watch much for the entire afternoon.

Just something to make you feel good

Here is the story. http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/06/25/heroes.gross/index.html?eref=rss_topstories

Time to relax

Yes, I will relax a bit after last weeks updates, and will try to make myself some gold for my new toon :-)

Some reasons why I think GOD exists

1. I can't find a logical reason for the chicken/egg issue.

2. There is no way true intelligence can be produced on computer (just my personal believe).

3. If we are really evolute from something lower, we should not only use 10% of our brain power, it is just too wasteful.

4. There is no evidence of vertical revaluation. A common example will be dogs. through thousands of years of manual breeding, still no dogs with wings ...

And on a off note:

1. God is not all powerful. The logical reason for that is, if there is someone who is all powerful, can that someone create a problem that he can't solve?

2. There is absolute truth. The logical reason for that is, if there is no absolute truth, then the statement itself will not be true.

So God is the set of absolute truths.

MpqNav and dejavu11

I found this link on MPQ and ADT reading: http://www.mpqnav.com/

Seems he helped IS on blizzard MPQ data mapping. This will be very helpfull for bots, because bots will know the terrain info and will be able to make intellect decisions on how to recover (i.e not moving into walls/hills etc).

Finally fighter and fisher both online

I updated fighter Thursday night, wife was already asleep and I have to decide if I want to test and release then or wait till tomorrow. More delay means more chance of getting argo, but I just can't wait any more so I tested and uploaded fighter. The test took a little bit more than 30 minutes and I let the bot run through the night. Everything looks fine and wife was not argoed :-)

Wake up early this morning and updated fisher. One of the users was asking why can't I just use the old code while I do the update. The answer is security. The old fighter has "features" that Blizzard can use to gain suspection of that the program is running. Right now zoloConfigUtil and bgscreen still does that, so don't use them when WOW is running.

Most functionalities added back in now

Just an brief update. The UI is 50% finished, with some dangling dialogs floating around but the major functionalities (Fight/Stop/Add Mob/Add waypoint) restored.

Still missing a lot, for example Save profile, clear waypoint/mobs, fishing, item distances and mine/herb.

Will try to finish up and release a partial one late tonight or tomorrow.

Bot maintenance continued

Sorry all, thanks for all the kind word. I am still doing the overhaul of the bot, once it is released it will be ride of most of the unaligned UI components etc, and easier to use (no more flipping around tabs during setup).

I am still in the process of coding, and right now the bot is not in a usable state for most users (the interface is totally messed up and I am only boting rely on old profiles).

I am setting up the release target to be this Saturday.

Yet another audit

Yes, I have to bring my wow bot down again.
This time there are some windows, which will popup during program crash or in some demo situations, that has bad information and could be used by Blizzard to detect us.

They occurs rarely, but will be more often for demo uses. However because there is no way for me to just shutdown the demo users, all users, even the ones who donated will be affected.

And this one will take sometime to get ride of as well.

Very annoying

Here is another example of the troubles I am going throgh every day. Below is an email sent to me:

hey i wan't to get this bot to test it out but how can i check that this is no scam, how can u guys proove that when i will give u my master card u will charge $200 or more???
please write back as soon as possible, and is there a tutorial for this bot

thanks a lot
hope u will answer my quest

And my response:

Please read the website and my forum first!!
this is a donate, you don't need to pay to play
and it is paypal (do you even know paypal?), how can I charge you $200?
And there is an open forum, you can post anything wow related on it, if I am a scamer all others will post crap about me on it.

Please do your homework before ask the questions.

Internal audit in progress

Yes I have put fighter and fisher off line for an internal audit. Estimated backup time will be sometime tomorrow or later tonight (I still have to work during most of the day and help my wife on some of her stuff during the night).

What happened is, as I keep pumping out new features, I ignored my own advices on some features, and haven't done any probing on fighter and fisher for a long time. As a result there are enough unique signatures that could lead to detection. Blizzard still can't read our memory if set up properly, but they could rely on those signatures and I am in the process of sealing them.

From now on I will do an audit for each release, to make sure there are no such leaks. I will not discuss the details, but for now I will be the only one bot with zoloFighter till the next release :-)

Mystery solved

Yes, I was really confused when a user told me he was not able to modify the config files. After several emails back and forth, I finally found the problem. He is opening the config files directly inside zip files and trying to save them (Thanks to Windows for making it so convenient).

And I think that also explains why so many people asking me about the bot complains "Can't find settings.txt", yep, they must tried to run it in the zip file as well.

Bad economy then what?

Yep, right now the economy looks not so bright, housing plumb combined with higher unemployment rate and high gas price. Just bad.

However there will always be good thing in almost any condition. Back in 2000 when all the rich people got crazy with their greed and keeps pouring money into the startups, a lot of engineers got great salaries with that. The people who keep a cool head and shorted the stocks can make a lot of money even if they are poor (of course I never encourage shorting stocks, that is just bad).

Now we are in a situation similar. People who has a lot of money (banks, investment firms) made huge mistakes by been too greedy and now their lose could be your gain. Some foreclosed houses are just a bargain. Their loss can be your gain, if you have the smarts and guts to catch it.

zoloFighter is the only bot that has no ban wave so far

Yep, Just heard that mimmcbot has a temp ban wave, so we are the only one that has not been hit.

The credit goes to that we are using the most straight forward security measures (so can only be caught if Microsoft windows is not safe), and we offer no advanced features (no background boting).

Virus totals again!!

Well, this time is not eSafe. Yesterday after my new release, which added some intelligence to resurrect near mobs and allows javascript check on combat sequences, one of the virus total checks failed again with "Blockreason.0". Have no idea what that means.

So I started to back out the changes, piece by piece, and recheck every time a back out is made, in hope that I can find the offending pattern and change it. Doesn't work, after I reverted everything back, it still fails. It took hours and argoed wife greatly.

So I checked my previous version, which passed virus total with flying colors. Sure enough, it failed too. So I guess virus total has upgraded one of their suppliers and now I am flagged without hope of unflagging it.

price hike in the future

I got nabbed by several friends about doing my bot way too cheap. And I do get emails of mistrust because people don't believe something real can be free.

I am thinking about hiking the price, to maybe $3 for 6 month or $5 for 5 month.

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.

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.

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 ....

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!!

Patch 2.4 left overs

This morning I found out I forget to give fisher download a proper title, so it is still labeled as 2.3 ...

And users reported ghost waypoint not working. Of course it is the offsets that are forgotten to be updated.

So more work tonight.

Patch day confusions

Well, today is the 2.4 patch day. A lot of users reported the "Player not found" problem, which is normal after any patch.

The problem is some users said they are EU servers and they got that before patch.

Componding the problem is I did some unnessessary maintaince by deleteing/moving some offset files which I thought was not used on the server.

Now I have lost track of what's going on. Good news is this is an easy patch and I managed to make the offsets working.

The bad news is we will never know what's going on. For EU/Asian servers, they can download the old 2.3.3 version in older downloads and get past this 1 day lag between US and EU servers.

Lesson learned: Never fix what's not broken. (I learned that lesson several times, but this time I just can't control the impulse)

Time spent on supporting zoloFighter

Recently I noticed that now more and more time are spent on supporting the bot instead of personal fun.

So before when the bot is not so popular, I used to bot and watch TV. Now from time to time I have to answer emails, answer questions on different forums (including mine). And more and more people asks me to add them to msn.

That is just a bit NO-NO. If I ever do that then this charity project will became a full time job. At least now I can still choose to answer the questions on my spare time.

Anyway for all new bot users, before you submit a question, please check out my forums first, your question are most likely already been answered. And if you do have a different question, please submit detailed information. Nothing annoys more than "hi man my bot is not working can you help" etc. The excitement of "Oh I got a new user!" has long passed ....

testing on new zoloFighter page

Yesterday I finally uploaded the new zoloFighter pages to the test folder. Originally wife did that, I did some modifications and destroyed most of the good things wife has done. She did it more than a month ago and I just can't postpone to try it out any more.

It is amazing even with a half finished product how long it takes to customize it. At least WOW patch 2.4 didn't come out today so I will have some free time to do the pages again tonight.

2.4 patch comming soon?

Some user told me Blizzard are now starting to push the 2.4 downloads to them now. I am hoping Blizzard have mercy on me and don't release 2.4 till after tax season. After all most of the players are adults and they will be busy around this time too.

IMAP fun again

Nothing about bots. My IMAP server got a small problem. Every time Outlook Express connects to it, OE does get the new mails, but always popup some warnings about "Inbox/Drafts" was not pulled etc.

So I did some trial/error, and found the CAPABILITY string has something to do with it.
I added IMAPrev4 to it and that solve the problem.

Or so I thought. Next day wife found she didn't receive emails, and I found all here emails are in the email folder, she just can't see them. Turned out if I set CAPABILITY to IMAPrev4, Outlook Express will do something extra on the requests, and break the server.

So everything back to normal. No more tries till tax season is off.

TAX overwhelming

Every year I do tax, and every year I forget how it was done, and need to search and search. This is getting stupid. I wish we can move on to fair tax (but in that case even if I have only 50 donations a year on zolofighter, I still need to count each of them).

Anyway, all development and fun has stopped, yielding to the federal and state tax.

Guild feud continues

The battle between the 2 founders of our guild continues. I feel more and more like dead meat between the two. Instead doing my taxes I have to call both to try to calm things down. This really sucks. I don't think I can get any time for bot development for the next week.

stop bot when bag is full

In last weeks's release, I added the function to stop bot once bag is full, which should make the bot safe.

Then I got this email: "zolofighter stops after a few minutes, I don't have a sales waypoint ...... the logs it says thread stopped". I was confused and thought he was doing some customized scripting and caused the bot to throw an exception.

Turned out he is leveling his low level toon and his bags were easily filled up.

So for lower levels, leveling up is much more important than trash drops. They don't care about if bags are full or not, They don't care about drops period.

Another config util entry has been added, it is a drop down to select if you want to stop the bot after bag full or not.

Remote view program simi release

The last release was bad (only a simple test prototype).
This one is much better, still no documents but at least it can now show/hid players, mobs and current game image upon select, continue showing them without need to click, and if you move your mouse over the the red and blue dots (red=>mob blue=>player) it will show their names.

I will temporarily stop development and have some fun, so next 2 weeks will be my vacation from bot development.

zoloFighter 0.7.9.38b, with flying & mine support

Original idea is from John.bastos. He want to fly and mine in outland. zoloFighter can mine but because mines usually are on edges of cliffs, mining is not easy with a bot. John's idea (flying around and land for mine) solves the problem.

The implementation is easy. First I added a file fightermodes.txt, you can add any new modes in there and it will show up in the mode dropdown box. I added fly&mine.

So select that, flying around and set waypoints (bot will try to fly back to waypoing when done), and click fight it will go flying and mine.

When a mine within 30 yard is detected, bot will turn to it, slowly fly to top of it (you will see it does that step by step), slowly lands on top of mine, mine/mount/fly back to waypoint.

Right now it is only a beta, need more user to test it.

I tried it in Nagrand, because that place is full of Fel Iron and Adamantite deposits. Debugging is not easy. It is a slow process. First you need to find a mine and second you need enough time before it is looted by others.
While I was testing on the first mine, another player beat me to it while my toon is landing slowly...

Essays by Paul Graham

http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html

The above link are essays by Paul Graham. I am posting the link here hoping more people can be influenced by his thinking.

People everywhere in the world should be more creative and independent, especially young people who has nothing to loss. God knows how many new wonderful things can be created, and in the process of benefiting others, they them selfs might became rich too :-)

Ban!!

Recently there are 2 banned user reports on the forum. When they first appear I feel the pain.

One guy farmed primal life and crashed server economy (He did get his account back though grats to him), the other simply bot for 2 weeks and get his char from 10+ to 50+. I think that is moderate... When I was rushing to level 70, I got impatient at the end and starting to run it full night, and my speed was about 1 month for 2 chars from 60-70 (and with me questing too, because it feels very slow to just grind).

Anyway, more steps will be build in to prevent banning. I will add back whisper auto reply (replaced by javascript but no one is implementing their own...), and add remote control so we can monitor/reply while at work or school.

Guild drama

Well, recently our small Guild was rippled with tiny frictions between 2 of the more active members. Even though my wife still doesn't like WOW, she was draw to my email like fly over wet sugar.

For my own security I will not disclose the details, I just have to say the drama played out rivals that of Shakespeare quality. Quit amazing how tiny things can rapture relationships :-(

Supporting pains

As zoloFighter got more and more popular (now way surpass zoloFisher), the pain of supporting is also getting bigger and bigger. Every day there are people asking the repeating questions such as how do I start, why can't it be started (even tough I have made the forum avaliable.

And also sometimes bot won't start on someone's computer even though they followed all steps. But you never know what was the user doing, sometimes they do things that are surprising to you. I remember one instance when I helped one of my friend's friend on his internet connection (he kept complaining about how slow his cable modem was), and eventually found out he was using someone else's open wireless connection (and his 1MG+ bandwidth was totally wasted).

The locale problem is solved, I have posted on my forum. Basically MS set locale to "C" in C++/C programs, but use native locale in .Net apps. So I just set locale to en-us in .Net and now their outputs are compatible.

floating number format issues

It just come to my attention that in Europe and Russia, floating numbers are displayed differently. For example, 1.0 in US is 1,0 in Europe, and 10,000.00 is 10.000,00 is Europe. So basically my action delay of 1.5s (1 and a half seconds) could be parsed as 15 seconds!!

I am getting conflicting reports on this one. User reports says it is taking the '.', and a friend of my also told me Fortran and C++ libs uses '.'

Microsoft's website indicates other wise. It indicates to use locale independent atof,I need to use atof_l.

So I am really lost. And to write my own implementation means I need to find every place where printf, ostream, atof are used and replace them. Too much work.

And also my configuration utility, which is written in .Net, always print out in the format of the current locale.
This makes me sick!

Set ACL

While searching for a way to open WOW's directory to guest access and protect bot's directory from been poked by guests, I found SetACL, by Helge klein's

So I reused his program, and wrote my own to generate scripts to add guest access to WOW's directory, and remove guest access to bot's directory.

http://www.zolohouse.com/wow/wowFighter/tutorials/troubleshoot.html

German guest account name

Today another user on mmowned posted about can't use zolofighter to start WOW.
Since there are quit a few people complaining about it, I decided to try it myself. Doing it over lunch, what I did is add a guest user named Gast, and set GUEST:guest in settings.txt to GUEST:gast.
Surely enough I got the "Can't start WOW" message.

What happened is, a few month ago I switch the entire program to UNICODE based, so Asian players can see the correct outputs. But since settings.txt is still ascii, I used a windows api to convert it to Unicode. The problem is I specified the type to be UTF8 instead of ascii. So while it converts all ordinary ascii chars correctly, Gast is not one of them. It got converted into "gst".

So, another release.

busy days

I was so busy recently that I had to do something I recommended my users not to do: bot AFK. Start from morning till I got home at noon, so 4 hours each day is not that bad, generate some extra cash :-).

I have been doing this for 2 weeks now, with some days I don't even have time to start the bot. Well that is not exactly bad, because it generate some randomness on my bot patterns.

0.7.9.29

0.7.9.29 is released. Since I am so busy this is a temp release. Covers fixes for looting and typing issues (LOOTDELAY and KEYDELAY configuration added for config util). Some computer have problems looting because the cursor moves too fast for the game to react.

Also configUtil had exe rename config on global section. It will ask new name for zoloFighter.exe and zoloConfigUtil.exe, when you save it copies those files to the new name, and add a entry in settings.txt to specify the new name.

zoloFighter will use the name in the config file to launch configuration utility, so the process name will be different.

WOW blogger's forum

Found this from Full time WOW addict:

http://www.blogazeroth.com/

Found I saw most of them already :-)

Native Vista support added

I got sometime tonight and 0.7.9.24 is released, it has vista support, you can either right click zoloFighter and run as admin, or you can use startInVista.bat, which will prompt for admin privilege.

And after that you can use the "Start Wow" button to start WOW. No longer do you have to launch WOW yourself :-)

So far vista give me a good impression than my first time, it is secure! If WOW want to do something stupid, vista will prompt you and all you need to do is decline Of course you need to click the accept thing a lot, but that is life.

The best is zoloRunAs.exe is no longer needed. It gives a warning by one of the scanner at virus total. Now it is clean!
http://www.virustotal.com/analisis/4a654ff1c91d76be5bab109a9120c758

Fixes and worms

Yesterday I did a new release, add the ability in define action statements to pass a javascript string to wowApproach. The string can be a function, if returns false, the approach is aborted.

This is used to abort the initial approach of a mob. For example if you are a warrior, you must approach the mob to range before you can fight. But in the mean time if mob is tagged by another player, you need to abort the fight.
While doing that some minor loot and print problems are also fixed.

And today I found a strange issue. My new release is classified as a worm (feeds) by eSafe when I did a virus total scan.
After break everything apart, individually scanned all exes and later txt files, I found it is the AVBot.txt that is causing the problem.
Still not sure what triggered it (only eSafe reported it among 32 scanners), so I am going to assume it is a eSafe problem.