OwlManAtt’s Blog

Today started like a normal day. I wake up, hit some keys on kato, move the mouse on bell, and watch the monitors come back to life. I get on Wesnoth, lalala, all normal.

Then during my testing of Stoss’ Bloodbath2, I hear a gAIM beep that isn’t from Wesnoth. I change the game from full screen, to find some random dipshit sending me ICQ messages.

Now, normally this wouldn’t piss me off. Just one moron sending me messages, right?

Wrong. Not too long after that, another idiot adds me to his MSN list and starts bothering me. So I’ve decided to write a short HOWTO on contacting OwlManAtt. It’s rather simple, too!

First, ask yourself if you fit the following criteria:

• Are you an idiot?
• Do you use chatspeak?
• Are you asking me to code something for you?
• Are you an idiot?
• Are you going to use my contact list as a billboard?
• Are you an idiot?

If you said yes to any of the above questions, DO NOT CONTACT ME UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED. You will just waste your time.

So, if you’ve gotten past the first ‘test’, you just need to follow these simple rules when contacting me over some sort of messanger service.

1. Identify yourself in your initial message. Say something more like ‘Hello, I am xxx from xxx. You don’t know me.’
2. Give me a reason why I should waste time talking to you. Not just ‘because’. You need a reason.
3. Don’t just add me to something that will request my authorization and not talk. That’s just stupid. In thirty seconds, I’ll just block you for failure to identify yourself.
4. DO NOT USE YOUR DISPLAY NAME AS A BILLBOARD. Plugging your shitty website in your display name pisses me off. My contact list is not a fucking billboard, asshole.

In some cases, if you add me and it tells me you added me, I’ll demand identification and a reason why I should waste time on you instead of waiting for you to tell me first. But not always.

If you fail to identify yourself within thirty seconds, you will be blocked!

And of course, WHEN IN DOUBT, DON’T TALK TO ME!

Nothing of great intrest has really happened in the past few days, hence the lack of updates.

However, I did find a game. Opensource. Turn-based. Works on every OS known to man.

Wesnoth.

Before I get to anything interesting, I’d just like to take a second and note that Kato is now KDE/GNOME free. I am using WindowMaker for my GUI because it seems a lot less bloated (KDE), seems to be stable/fast (GNOME), and is the underdog. I’d also like to make note that several updates have been made to OwlSock, the IRC bot, including the ability to read the output from /usr/games/fortune and say it in the channel. This now requires you to be using a UNIX or UNIX-like operating system and have fortune-mod installed.

And now, on to the interesting bits, reposted from eC.

Thanks to this unlimited amount of free time, I’ve been bored to the point of actualy writing an IRC bot and SSH scanner in PHP. I’ve got absolutely nothing to do, which pretty means means I refresh slashdot every few seconds in hope that some new story will be posted.

And this brings me back to January, a month of late night coding sessions. Of course, the coding I was doing was no small thing, nay! It was my first Crown of Evanion release, which I shut down after it was in a decent stage. I killed the project due to both lack of support and the fact that my coding standards went up as I was finishing the final bits.

So, who can guess where this is leading?

Yes, I once again have some small ambition for the project. I even have that base for it done. But, I want some support this time. People participating. Drawing items. Coding along with me. Making decisions. Shaping the plot. Hell, I’ll start a bloody mailing list and CVS server for it if it makes you happy, although many people might prefer a forum to a mailing list.

It would, of course, be an opensource project.

Anyone think they might be interested in participating, even if it were just helping to make decisions?

I decided to tinker around with sockets more today, and learn a tad about the IRC protocol. I ended up producing this mess. Not sure if the pong function works, and the simple question answer thing is broken, thanks to my lack of any regex skill whatsoever. I’m an anti-regex demon. They just don’t work when I write them.

But as you see, it would be simple enough to add some stuff to recognize my host name, add some password stuff, and have a useful PHP based IRC bot. And no, I’m not following the ‘trend’ to write things PHP wasn’t designed for. Sockets are just fun.

Oh, and this is another public domain script, because I’m once again to lazy to GPL it.

I was bored and wired tonight, so I did something. You see, Uberuser asked me if I knew how to do something or other with PHP sockets, and I did a bit of research to help him with his problem. Whatever the problem was, I have forgotten already. But this is beside the point.

First I made a simple script that made someone connect to irc.prison.net and join #nixsec. Then I started on an SSH scanner. Which reminds me, uber wanted to know how to make a port scanner wth PHP sockets. That’s how I got started…

But yea. I got the scanner working nicely. Read the source code to figure out how it works. I even added comments!

And this script is public domain. I would of GPL’d it, but I’m tired and can’t be bothered for something so trivial. I mean, who the hell is going to do anything of much intrest with this script I wrote to learn a bit about PHP sockets? Ooo, microsoft is going to put it in windows to add more bloat! =X