Useless Ninjas

My Current Projects

noreply@blogger.com (Austin Munsch) — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 18:52:00 +0000

Wow, it's been a year since the last post. Guess it's time to post something. In an attempt to try to at least temporarily revive the blog, I'm going to post a little bit about what I'm working on in my spare time.

First off are a couple of programs I'm working on for Halo Combat Evolved PC. I wanted a kind of stats thing to keep track of my stats between games, including things like kill/death ratio, kills/game, laps/game (I play a lot of race), deaths/game. So I figured out with C# it's possible to access Halo's memory and read those values directly, and I spent a while playing around with that. Now I've got a mostly finished program that keeps a running tally of your stats.

While playing around with Halo's memory values, I found out that you can see your (x, y, z) coordinates, as well as the coordinates of everyone else on a server. Although I'm not entirely sure how often those coordinates update, my eventual plan is to try to read those values and display them on a top-down view of the map, so you can have a live map of all the players in a game. This will probably take up most of the screen in order for it to be efficient, so it would most likely have to be on a separate monitor. Or, it would be even better if I can figure out how to overlay the map over the Halo window when you press Shift or something. But I haven't done enough C# to know how to do that, or if that's even possible yet.

And one last quick idea to add to the statistics program is to have heatmaps for each map for kills, deaths, shots fired or whatever. But I haven't started any coding for that yet, so I'm not sure how feasible it is.

The next C# program I'm working on is one I started a while ago in PHP, but PHP is much to slow to run it, and I'd like a nicer interface that PHP can't offer. Or maybe it could, but I decided to switch to C# anyway. The program parses through log files from MSN Messenger, which are XML and really hard to read, and outputs HTML to display them in a nice table. Eventually I would like to make an interface that lets you add people and custom emotes for people for it to display in the HTML files, since at the moment it just displays the custom emote code (ex :jump:). More on this later.

We have talked about providing a WPA cracking service, and I think we have most of the back end already, and a massive dictionary, I just need to work on the website and integrating the two. I haven't really started yet, but that's something that's on my todo list.

Another project I was working on, but am taking a break from at the moment is a TV show visualization-type-thing. I want a nice way to display how many episodes I have of certain TV shows in my web browser. I actually wrote a good bit of code for it, but I got bored and stopped working on it. But once I get back to it, I'd like a main page with a list of all the TV shows I have. I want to create a graph that shows the percentage of episodes I have out of the total number of episodes. And ideally I'd have a page for each TV show that displays info about the show, all the episodes, and which specific ones I have.

And that's about all I can think of that I'm working on for the moment. I'll probably make more specific posts on these projects as they progress.

I would like professional installation on this cable....

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Price) — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 21:21:00 +0000

Conversations with Weston: Music

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Price) — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 01:52:00 +0000

o a really good apacella song came on. really soulful and profound. i turned it up, thinking others around me should know of my good taste in music

next song: F**k y'all ni**as by DMX

quickly turned music down

Conversations with Weston: lololololol

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Price) — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 05:25:00 +0000

have you heard the comparison of girl gamers to guy cooks?
lololololol looks kinda like a fence
or a dead caterpillar
or teeth with braces brackets but no wire
or the tips of fingers next to each other
or a crowd of people with their arms up, like they're dancing
or a crowd of people with one arm up like they want to ask a question
or need to use the bathroom
or only have one arm, but still want to dance
or only lift one arm because they are at a rock concert and want to do that rock hand gesture

RSS Feed

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Price) — Tue, 04 May 2010 18:09:00 +0000

Please change your fee to http://blog.uselessninjas.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss since google decided we are not allowed to host our own blog anymore.

Flickr: My old Room

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Price) — Tue, 04 May 2010 17:27:00 +0000

So a very long time ago I started my workspace adventure. My main computer was a Gateway with a 3.0ghz P4 and 2 gb of ram. My laptop was a gateway c120x tablet. I had two phones a cingular 8525 and a samsung u740. I was using very old small form factor hp pc as a server and a low resolution projector I salvaged from my schools trash. I was still working for the geeksquad when I did this, in fact I started only months before this.

I know that this pegboard was featured on lifehacker at least once and also on hackaday.

This was my setup in I believe june 2008.

Awesome stuff from flickr

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Price) — Tue, 04 May 2010 17:13:00 +0000

Like many people I put pictures on flickr, however unlike most these pictures are not of vacations, family or friends. They are mostly of technology, my technology. Now I believe that almost all of it is cool and that people should frequent my page. But I'm a nice person so I will be posting stuff here.

So there will be lots of posts describing my stuff, I will start with the oldest first.

Game Development Diaries - 003: Yay for freetype issues!

noreply@blogger.com (zerotri) — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 18:33:00 +0000

Well, not really freetype's fault. Just my lazy/incomplete coding that doesn't have full support for font metrics yet. Still, it's pretty nifty considering all a developer using my engine would need to do is the following:

font = new CSFont(&WSImage::loadImage);

font->load("monaco.ttf");

...

font->drawString(T("Hello World!\n This is a multiline text."),42,42);

Also, I haven't posted info yet but the last iteration of the WynterStorm engine was thrown away in favor of a new one. I've started once again at designing the engine, though this time with a few key ideas in mind that are not related specifically to WynterStorm.

I'll discuss the current design of the WynterStorm engine at a later time.

iPaint ideas...

noreply@blogger.com (zerotri) — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 08:14:00 +0000

I'm gonna admit it. I too, just like Colbert below me, want an iTablet. It's not even officially announced yet, and I want it. I want it for ideas. I want to be able to write on it. To draw. To paint. iPaint.

At least, when I (or some other developer) decides to develop the app.

So in preparation, and because I had about 30 mins of boredom time today, I started outlining my specific requirements for a decent painting program. This is just a rough document, but it makes some of the ideas clear.

You can find this sketch and more information here: http://zerotri.net/wiki/doku.php?id=ipaint

Stupid internets look what you did.

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Price) — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 07:04:00 +0000

UN Network Maintainer Released

noreply@blogger.com (zerotri) — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 02:48:00 +0000

Today is the first release of our first Useless Tool, the Useless Ninjas' Network Maintainer. It is a .NET application that monitors a specific network adapter, and upon detection of that adapter losing internet, switches a backup adapter on until the primary adapter receives internet again. The GUI is a bit basic, and likely won't change much as simplicity is one of the key goals of our Useless Tools set of software applications. The application is very unobtrusive, fitting in at under 300K on your hard disk, and hides itself in the system tray while maintaining your network adapters to ensure that it does not get in the way of your work.

You can pick up the application here: UNNetworkMaintainer.zip

Feel free to comment here regarding questions, concerns, and any bugs you encounter during the execution of this application.

My network version 28.1.9

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Price) — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 09:16:00 +0000

So I wanted some faster internets to go along with my new server so made the most elaborate and ridiculous network I could with the parts on hand!

I have a second sb6120 for comcast and decided that I would add it to my current one for double the speeds, originally I was going to just use the multiple nics in my server to use the second modem along side my existing network however that didn't work how I wanted.

My next attempt was to use a ClearOS virtual machine and just bridge the adapters to the vm, the nic with the modem and my existing network, then connect another XP virtual machine to that with a virtual nic. This also didnt work out so well, the multi-wan in clearos didn't want to work with the direct modem bridge.

At last I arrive at my current configuration, poorly visualized by the image above. I will start from the top and work my way down.

But first I had to add another computer to my setup, so I used my old workstation, an old P4 with 2gb of ram with a couple bonus nics.

My main/first modem is connected to my dd-wrt router via gigabit from there it goes to
my main computer, a 24 port switch with various thing plugged in and my new ClearOS box
The second modem plugs directly into the ClearOS box with gigabit, the new box uses multi-wan to manage the 2 connections and then provides network access to a third nic

this nic is connected directly to my server via one out of its 2 nics, the second nic is connected back to my orginal network for file sharing and other local network apps.

In order to keep the local area network nic on my server from connection to the internet, I simply changed the dns server to the local interface creating a loopback, this allows the server to only connect to the internet by the second load balanced nic.

I get very good speeds using this config with usenet, torrenting I get good speeds but I have to work out some bugs. Here is a screenshot of newsleecher doing its thing, I am getting 9.24 megabytes p/s download

There is a configuration issue on the second modem that will only allow it to hit 2 MB a second with usenet, I need to talk to comcast because I think my account is on the wrong tier :/

My new 12TB server

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Price) — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 07:42:00 +0000

My old server was a MSI wind u100, it had 2 gb of ram a 1.6ghz atom with HT and a total of 2 TB of storage, well I ran out of space so I built a new one......
The new one kicks the old ones ass by far, however I deeply respect my old it went a whole year 24/7 without a single problem and still works great.

I named its replacement US which is a a shorter version of USELESS the name of its predecessor.

Its specs are as Follows:

EVGA Nforce 730i on board nvidia 9400
Core2Quad Q8400 2.66GHz
8GB of DDR2
Nvidia 9800GTX
650 watt silverstone psu
1 TB WD Black
6 2 TB Seagate 5900 HDs
Generic case

I built mostly with spare parts however I just bought all the 2TB drives for about 900$ from newegg.
It is running windows 7 Ult x64 because I dont like any of microsoft's server distros for my personal server. For thos of you asking why I used a 9800 in a server, its because I plan to run folding@home on it (Fold for team 135878 1.4 million points!).

I am running the 2 TB drives in a RAID 0 config and even though they are only 5900 rpm drives the performance from them is shocking, I used ATTO for a simple benchmark:

I nearly fell out of my seat when I saw that, here is another one

So thats all, let me know if you have any other questions!

I need a yellow sharpie!

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Price) — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 05:18:00 +0000

7, originally uploaded by steve_price82.

Input from a 2 AM perspective.

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Price) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 09:10:00 +0000

I just read Shelby's post on imput and I would like to add things or something *tired*.

I like the idea of information being derived from enviromental monitoring, however you can just stop there.
If a system is automagically adding things to your calender based on a conversation it is listening to, there is really no need for a retarded ass, wait sorry ridiculous gesture for a simple confirmation to add it. If you have gone through the effort of creating an algorithm that is intelligent enough to pull useful information from what is going on, why add a further complicated step?

However the gesture proposed is not defined or explained so I can't argue on that level, I can say however that a key phrase would be tolerable in a system of this degree, crap just got distraec and lost my train of thought um where was I.

In order to have something like running in realtime, it would take some heavy crunching noming threw the crap, so it would be idealy a thin client based system where as there are enviromental sensors such as a cell phone mic or a computer webcam that sends its data in a refined and precise manner to a server that crunches the data.

I had a similar idea a while ago that took this to a much further degree and was much more useful than adding thinks to your calendar. It was a algorythim that takes all the input it can for your life and finds patterns in what you do, it then optmizes and alters your enviroment to better suit your living style.

Of course this kinf of information could have so many applications, for instance if say you had data from most of the people living with in a city, the program could find patters on a larger scale, this information could then be applied to predictive systems, a simple system would be predicting traffic patterns to a such precision that once believed random events would be within a narrow range of possibility.

For this to be effective at a degree as large as a city or bigger it would have to not only collect incredible amounts of data in realtime but it would also have to process this in realtime and not only does it have to do current data it would also be going through the entire historyn of the system looking for connections and patterns.

So yes I think I just stole Shelby's Ridiculousness title and the more awesomer ide title as well :D

Now back to monitoring GPU temps!

Lolwut?

noreply@blogger.com (Austin Munsch) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 07:32:00 +0000

I don't think I have to say anything, I think this speaks for itself.

http://lifehacker.com/5403256/blockbuster-kiosks-to-rent-movies-on-dissolving-sd-cards

I don't like input.

noreply@blogger.com (Shelby) — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 03:33:00 +0000

I don't like input.
Not input, as to a program, but input methods. Keyboards are limited, mice are limited and touchscreens are limited (mind you, I'm writing this on an iPod Touch). I want to be able to input things with bodily motion. Project Natal, that thing for PS3 Sony is working on, ad infinitum, are all excellent, but they don't work, frankly. Don't work. As in, I can't use them to work. I couldn't bring my xbox360 with Natal's controller into work and use it to do all my work, I'd be laughed out of the building and then fired. The thing is, I'm inherently horrible at scheduling. I only know where I'm going to be at a given time if someone tells me. How does this relate to input methods? I blame current input methods as the reason I cannot have an organized schedule. I would love to use Google Calendar synced via Exchange to my iPod Touch as my scheduling system. But each time I try I just give up. Why? I simply cannot enter information to it. I don't want it to be modal, I don't want to type things into it, I don't want to pull out a laptop or iPod or Hipster PDA (don't know what that is? Search Lifehacker) every time an event comes up. I want to be able to just gesture ridiculously and have the event on my calendar. So I am hereby suggesting a constant passive input method; Ridiculousness. Best name ever, I know, but it's just a working title (it's still better than Longhorn, jeez). It constantly monitors information that is around you, like people talking or websites you're browsing, and when you make a ridiculous gesture, it stores that info in a super everything box. This is why it's called Ridiculousness; the ridiculous gesture. The information is then either further processed by you or autoprocessed by an adaptive algorithm that can make decisions on what to do with the information, such as add a new calendar event if someone just said that you're going camping on the weekend after Thanksgiving. The algorithm could possibly also accept specific ridiculous gestures to do certain things, like add a calendar event or submit a programming project.
I will continue to think about this in the coming weeks, and continue writing on this subject, if it so pleases anyone.

Signing off,
Shelby

(*cough cough* Steve, this is partly to explain why I never know what I'm doing at any given time *cough cough*)

I see I made the right decision

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Price) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 05:07:00 +0000

Game Development Diaries - 002

noreply@blogger.com (zerotri) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 02:55:00 +0000

Well, after much work on getting WynterStorm running in Mac OS X, it works, and quite well at that. I decided to give up my crazy dream of building a Cocoa platform layer for the engine and just used SFML to get a window up and running and handle events. All the graphics output is handled by OpenGL though, so SFML is used in only one file, which is the Mac OS X specific port. I may give up SDL for the Windows and Linux ports and just use SFML as the core of the engine, but for now I'm just happy to have it successfully compiling and running in both Windows and OS X. If you notice the FPS counter in OpenGL Profiler, it peaked out around 950 FPS during that run. Using a custom FPS counter would likely show a higher FPS as it wouldn't rely on cpu intensive development tools to slow down the program but I don't feel like running the built-in profiler on the OpenGL code just yet. Yes, I said "built-in profiler", as in I have a set of classes already designed for measuring the application's performance, as any engine should, but I have other areas to work on before I focus on speed. The scripting part of the engine, for example, isn't currently working in the OS X build, because I haven't put in the time to build V8 on that platform. For now though, I am quite pleased with the results of the engine and how well it runs on both platforms.

Photoshop huh?

noreply@blogger.com (Austin Munsch) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 05:12:00 +0000

So, apparently Photoshop looks at every thing you open in it. Try opening this file in Photoshop and see what happens.

That makes me sad. :(

Game Development Diaries - 001

noreply@blogger.com (zerotri) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 04:30:00 +0000

This is the start of a new series of posts I plan on doing, as an effort to get several posts out a week. For the past few months I've been working on a few projects, one of which is a Xbox 360/PC game and the other which I plan on being a 2D RPG for Windows, Mac and Linux(maybe PSP if you're all lucky, though no promises). So, without further adieu, here is the workload:

Project Tobias: A project I've been working on with another programmer and a composer/writer. This project is a 2D platform shooter, in a similar style to the Megaman series of games, and is aimed to run on the Xbox 360 and Windows platforms. Currently this is in the design and initial coding stage of development.

WynterStorm: My personal joy, WynterStorm is a cross platform 2D game engine currently in development. It will run on Windows(OpenGL, DirectX?) Mac OS X (OpenGL), and possibly Linux (OpenGL). As of right now the core only runs on Windows and Linux due to dependencies on SDL, and my inability to provide an entire compatibility layer for Cocoa or Carbon. As of Mac OS 10.6, Snow Leopard, several problems had arisen in compiling SDL software and as such I am currently contemplating using GLFW as either the backend for the Mac OS X side, or maybe I'll make all ports use GLFW. If anyone would however like to help contribute a Mac OS X compatibility layer to the project(written in Cocoa or Carbon) I would be ecstatic to have that bit of work out of the way. One goal I have with the Mac OS X port is to not require Interface Builder.

The engine does have a purpose; it will be used as my personal workbench for an RPG I've been meaning to create for many years now.

The picture above is the current screenshot after having implemented Vertex Buffer Objects (VBOs) in OpenGL.

I got a DROID

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Price) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 18:43:00 +0000

Following my normal trend of "If its shiny, I own it"

I got the DROID

Its a nice phone

I don't do reviews because too many people already do and I incredibly lazy.

The screen is amazing, the keyboard not so much, the top row of keys are too close to the edge of the screen and I find myself using the onscreen KB in portrait than much else.......

I also love the google voice integration, it didn't work properly last night but this morning it started working and its awesome.

And here are some pix.

HAL

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Price) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 07:04:00 +0000

The name is so cliched that it is perfect, anyway for my house the core of the network infrastructure will be this, rough sketch for now, sketchup soon.

Click for better pic.

Reader Poll

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Price) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 01:23:00 +0000

To the Wave-Mobile!

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Price) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 07:19:00 +0000

In other news, I like google wave (yes I has it) and also Batman!!!