Finally Back

I am finally back after a REALLY long week without posting, but sadly, I don't have much to report on. BBot is closer than ever to achieving multi-network support.

However, I do have a political rant to share with you all.
I have been watching C-SPAN recently, and for those of you who don't know, C-SPAN and C-SPAN2 are the channels on which live sessions of congress are broadcasted to all of the United States. Congressmen and women are allowed to give general speeches at various times, so I decided to watch a few.
A republican senator (I will not reveal his name because I don't wish to harm is public image) stood up and started saying "Stimulus Bill" in a sarcastic way, and then he continued to complain about how the democrats have not created jobs. Finally, to prove his point, he pulled out a graph that proves that democrats haven't created jobs.
Well, for one, the graph was the wrong type of graph for the data he was trying to represent. Anyone who did not realize the type of graph he was using would surely think that the democrats have destroyed jobs which is not the case! They also tried to blame the massive job loss at the start of the depression on the democrats, but in fact, this started during a republican controlled term. Lastly, they removed government jobs from the graph, so it looked lime democrats didn't create any jobs, but in fact, they created plenty of jobs, way more than the republicans can count.
As for saying "Stimulus Bill" in a sarcastic way, well they obviously dong know that The stimulus bill is an INVESTMENT that America MADE MONEY off of! Not to mention that this senator has used stimulus money to hold job fairs in his own state!

Finally, while watching C-SPAN2, I see that a democrat is trying to pass a bill that would give money to banks so they could loan to small businesses and get capital flowing and creating jobs, but republicans are the primary opposition to the bill! They claim that it is a program like TARP, which it is NOT! There is NO strings attached, it is a VOLUNTARY program, and the loans come from PRIVATE BANKS, not the government themselves. Everything in this bill is something that republicans support in general, but they oppose the bill because it was written by a democrat. And the republicans accuse the democrats of not being bipartisan...

Well, this blog post is long enough. I'm sure more propaganda will come up soon for me to share. Thanks for reading!

Wireshark and hard-drives

This morning a tested out Ubuntu Studio, a rather interesting version of the regular Ubuntu project. Ubuntu Studio is a fork of the Ubuntu project aimed at production of audio, video, and games. I tried it out, but it didn't work well. The audio did not function at all despite some trouble shooting, and the graphics were a bit glitchy. I am not trying to discourage you from trying it out, hopefully it will work on your system, but I'm back to Ubuntu 9.10 Where everything works as I expect it too.

I am making some progress with BBot and asynchat. BBot now manages to connect to the server and send its NICK and USER lines correctly, but the server does not seem to see them. I was using Wireshark to test it, but no luck.
You can now get the latest BBot release via git from Sourceforge as well as the development copy from Github. However, the regular downloads on Sourceforge have some security bugs, so don't download those until I get version 2 uploaded.

And finally, before I go, I have a rather interesting link to share:
http://xkcd.com/394/

Announcement of mRat

I've been trying to find a good live memory inspector like MHS or Cheat Engine for Linux, but I haven't really found much, so I have decided to create a program called mRat. mRat will search through a /proc/mem file for values matching your search and hopefully allow you to modify these values an the fly and later do more advanced searches like pointers, strings, and floats. It will be quite a challenge, but hopefully I can manage.

Today, I decided to have BBot use Asynchat instead of the socket module to reduce the blocking and the make the rpg module run more smoothly. From what I can tell so far, it will let me read each message sent from the server by setting \r\n as my terminating string so it will split the messages for me and call a function every time I get a message. This will also remove any possible bugs that might occur from overflowing the send_wait variable which could allow for exploitation of the bot if you set it too low in your config file.

Unblacklisted! Finally

2 days ago I was finally removed off of those blacklists I mentioned and can resume life as usual being a non-exit node on the Tor relay. My bot has really been doing well since I can now test it properly.
The ?math command works completely now, and I have started writing some unittests for BBot to speed up the debugging process. I have also moved all the modules into their own files in the modules folder. That should make installation of modules much simpler.
I am now working on a rpg module, rpgbot(), which is coming along nicely. Hopefully I'll have something playable in a week.

BBot and Blacklists

BBot, my IRC bot, is going well. I am currently working on the mathbot() module which will allow calculation of just about any python math statement including things like pi, mod (% in python), floor, ceiling and so on. I was just about to test this module out when my IP was added to the Tor proxy blacklist which the efnetrbl coppies. I will not link to them. They don't deserve the page-rank from google.
I have contacted both the blacklists and asked for my removal, but neither of them has complied and it has been over 13 hours. Meanwhile I am baned at my favorite IRC network, irc.fossnet.info as well as freenode and efnet not to mention everyone else who uses this blacklist. I tried resetting my IP overnight by unplugging my router, but no luck their either.

Welcome

Hello, I'm aj00200, a computer programmer from Kaukauna, WI. I'm making a blog that I will hopefully have enough content to update it with regularly.

I have a few projects going on, like BBot the IRC Bot, my website, and Sniper 3D. I have a bunch of other projects that I am also working on and may eventually finish.

As my first post, I will tell you a little bit about me. I know programming languages like Python, Javascript, PHP, and I'm working on C++. I also enjoy things such as Linux (currently running Ubuntu 9.10 and Debian Lenny), composing, remixing, and chatting on IRC networks. Make sure to checkout #beat-masters on irc.fossnet.info.

Also, I am the official web developer of the Hero of Wiek project on Github.