Technolo-babble

Sharpen Up

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 18:46:17 GMT

Poker, anyone?

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 21:03:38 GMT

I recently had an amazing thing happen: I was presented with a paycheck for which I had spending money after paying my bills!¹ And, thanks to my successes at local Saturday gatherings with friends (one of which plays on PokerStars), I decided to invest some of that in some online poker.

I looked into 3 online poker rooms: PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, and Absolute Poker. Unfortunately, due to some unjust legislation in the US, it is particularly difficult to transfer money to these online poker rooms from the United States. In fact, attempts to use my Credit or Debit cards on any of these 3 sites all got declined. Ultimately, PokerStars is the only one I could deposit to (using the Instant eCheck option, which has a $10 minimum deposit). Some bank wire options looked decent enough on the other two, but then their minimum deposits ranged from $50 to hundreds of dollars and, starting out, I wasn't looking to invest quite that much.

Anyways, I've been playing on PokerStars a fair amount over the past week. I've become pretty good I think (I wasn't bad off when I started, as noted to being why I started playing online poker), and am in the process of reading a couple of books by Harrington and Sklansky.

I was curious if anyone here plays online poker as well?

¹ Really, there are several other things that money ought to have gone to, but I like to invest in entertainment sometimes if I can.

Oh! Humanity

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 23:46:49 GMT

Well I was just watching some nice, uneducational TV and saw a clip about this really smart girl who had the answers to all of California's problems. She should run for guv'ner!

If you want to watch about the same amount of content from her, but with some other people contributing their knowledge:

All this reminds me of a beautiful blond girl who outlined a plan for boosting education in Africa, the Iraq, and the Asian countries:

As for the former two: I still plan to move to California...but I think I just may steer clear of Santa Cruz.

Dropbox

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 01:24:15 GMT

Dropbox, which ranks well on maximumpc.com's list of "32 Totally Essential Apps," is actually a really nice service. Here's the idea:

Dropbox integrates with your computer shell to provide you a "fake" folder on your computer. It is "fake" because the folder is not actually on your computer---it seamlessly synchronizes what you put into the folder with what's being stored elsewhere (in your "dropbox"), and lets you grab it from your dropbox as well. The whole thing is intuitive---it looks and acts just like any other folder on your system!

There are several account types available, but I'll be sticking with the 2GB that comes with the free account. Also, you can earn up to 3GB more through referrals.

Aside from making a simple, free 2-5GB extension to your hard drive space, Dropbox also comes with some nice other features. First, you can access your files in the dropbox from anywhere. Just login to the web client (or download the local client) and you're set!

As well, you have a "public" folder that can be accessed by anyone. When you put files in there, you can right-click and get a public access link, and voila---free hosting! For an example (that I'll eventually delete), this file is in my public folder (it comes in there by default): http://files.getdropbox.com/u/1617350/Top%20Secret.txt

The other feature I'll mention is of particular interest to BYOND developers. You see, software developers oftentimes work in flocks. And a flock of developers needs some way of privately sharing the developments among one another. With Dropbox, you can create "shared" folders that are available to a list of users you choose. That means if you were putting your game's project files in the Dropbox, you could share that folder with the rest of your team, and you'd all have access to the same folder of files. Imagine the possibilities!

It's available on Mac, Windows, and Linux, so I suggest you check it out now! Oh, and if you're going to register, use my referral link---we both get the extra space! :]

Inspiration

Sat, 25 Jul 2009 15:12:52 GMT

I'm not sure exactly what I was doing, but somehow I stumbled upon a small, somewhat strange site called iNith. One of the videos there struck me as particularly inspirational. The strange thing is, this one actually gave me some inspiration (whereas most inspirational videos suck). Judge for yourself!

Live, if only for your dream

IDE Project In Motion

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 08:43:19 GMT

After finding out that Qt is now available under an LGPL license (well, as of March 3), I've decided to revive work on my thus-unnamed C++-based cross-platform DM-IDE project (compare to Crashed's Python-based DMIDE). Previously I was using wxWidgets (which I'm not particularly fond of), but now I'll be restarting the project under Qt (which is much more elegant!). Initially I'm probably going to keep the IDE closed-source but may free it up after it's been polished a little.

I've not done much for the IDE quite yet (I'll have more free time soon), but I did manage to nearly complete a syntax-highlighting routine. All that's left is to add multi-line functionality to strings and preprocessor commands per the escaped-newline sequence and {""} blocks, and handle embedded string objects "[rawrVar]" --- neither of which will be at all difficult (surprisingly). After that I can start working on other (less-interesting?) aspects of the IDE.

I'm not making any suggestions at any kind of release cycle, and I probably won't be making regular updates on the project's progress (especially after my membership expires and this blog becomes unusable), but I'll leave off with a small teaser of what I've been toying with for just a little while now:

Membership Expiring

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 18:22:47 GMT

My membership expires in 26 days, 2 hours, and I likely won't be renewing it (for quite some time, at least), so here's my poof post. Grab the libraries while you can if they interest you; you won't be able to access them once my membership expires.

Not getting anything done

Mon, 18 May 2009 09:33:05 GMT

I previously posted that I would be participating in IainPeregrine's "Get Something Done" event. Unfortunately real life has intervened. My relationship with my girlfriend of the past year---anniversary was last Friday---has been going rapidly downhill and I'm afraid we might soon break up. For that reason, I haven't been developing much of anything, and I'm officially withdrawing from the event. Sorry guys.

Update: We broke up.

Stack Overflow

Tue, 12 May 2009 16:50:23 GMT

A long, long time ago, I stumbled upon Joel on Software, where Joel Spolsky blogs about things of relevance to techy programmer peoples like myself. I haven't followed every post thoroughly, but today I decided to follow my e-mail (I subscribed to get e-mails of updates to the blog), and came to Joel's Stack Overflow DevDays post. Now, I hadn't known about Stack Overflow before, but after some exploring, I'm already in love with the site.

If you're a programmer, odds are at some point you've hit some kind of snag. Here's a community where, regardless of your language, problem, or whatever, you can post and likely receive instant feedback (I got 5 responses basically within the hour of the post on my C++ question!).

Now, this community isn't exactly geared towards BYOND, but as it is independent of language specifics, I imagine you could simply use "byond" as a tag when you post your question, and it'd be easy enough for other BYOND users to find the question. This may not be useful without a large BYOND following on that site, but if you program in other languages (C++, Java, whatever), you'll find a rather large community of users there willing and able to cater to your problems. And you can of course always provide help in return. :]

Reverse Engineering Tools - Hex Editor

Fri, 23 Jan 2009 20:29:12 GMT

For binary-diving reverse engineers, the hex editor is of great importance. It allows you to perform a deep inspection on every byte in a file, and as such is one of the first tools any reverse engineer should grab.

Up till now, I've been using XVI32; it's a rather simple hex editor, and when I'm digging around in hexadecimal, the last thing I want to do is mess with an unruly tool. Normally, I would recommend this program to anyone.

Today I was thinking about my choice of hex editor, and I was wondering if anything new had come along over the years that was worth looking into. Sure enough, 2 minutes with Google and I found exactly what I was looking for:

010 Editor
Now, normally I don't get overly excited with this kind of software. IDA-Pro and SoftICE can barely get a smile at me. With 010 Editor, the fun still hasn't ended. Let's take a look at it.

After you've been delving around with a binary file for long enough, you often find yourself repeating the same tasks over and over again. 010 simplifies this with a built-in C-like scripting language, with the usability of Python. You simply create a script file, type in some code, save, and it's ready to execute!

When reversing file formats, the goal is usually to map out all kinds of arbitrary structures. 010 Editor supports a template system, by which you can use the aforementioned scripting language to essentially map out the structures of the file format. The definitions look just like C-structs, and you can even use typedefs and enumerations to help make the data that comes out more easily understandable. What's more, the struct definitions support inline code, so if, say, the first byte of a structure determines how the rest of the structure is laid out, you can put that logic right into the structure definition!

This all sounds well and good, but how practical is it? Well, after I downloaded the software, I put about 5 minutes into reading the documentation on scripting and templates. After that, I used various file format definitions I have laying around to write a set of templates (with the format spec. in front of me, each took about 2 minutes). That's fast! I can already tell how this type of functionality will greatly improve future reversing endeavors.

Of course, the templates feature and the scripting aren't the only cool things that 010 packs, but they certainly were what made it stand out. If you want to look into this nifty piece of software, you can try it for free for 30 days, or buy it for $50 for a home license. Here are a couple shots of my play with it:
Viewing a file with a custom template
Looking at my templates (not too many...for now)