With LiveScratcher I’m working a lot with JavaScript, and I’ve really grown to love the language. For example, today I stumbled upon this blog post. It’s a JavaScript implementation of a lot of Haskell tricks and functions, including a quick “curry” function (read the blog post to find out what it is).
Just felt that was worth sharing 🙂
LiveScratcher, and it’s early abandoned brother project Modumes, have been in the pipeline for months now. I think I had the initial idea of a modular extension platform for Messenger well over a year ago. Either way, I never really had a lot of time to put some real work into it. Until now, that is. Holidays have started two weeks ago, and I’ve been crashing at my parent’s place (free food 😉 ) and working on LiveScratcher non-stop since. I hadn’t quite expected it (what would you expect from a project that’s been in the making for months without any results), but I feel that the end of the road (or at least something worth showing) is near 🙂
I’ve put up the initial scaffolding for the Messenger API, and am currently filling in the functionality for the Messenger, Contact, and Conversation classes. The DirectUI (messenger’s user-interface library) module is in a somewhat usable state, and I’ve even written an old-style UIFile parser to it (written completely in Javascript). One package I haven’t started on is the Interop (= communication with external libraries) one, but the plan for that one is well established in my head, and shouldn’t be too hard to implement.
For now I’m aiming for something that is on-par with Messenger Plus!’s scripting, but once I reach that I hope to keep expanding and surpass it greatly. One of the advantages I have is the extensibility. Each package can export certain functionality, and as such anyone is free to extend the API as they wish. Someone could make a package solely dedicated to communicating with facebook or twitter, and other developers can then use those packages from their scripts, for example creating a script that keeps your facebook or twitter friends updated on how many contacts you have.
Here’s a list of a few things that are done and worth mentioning:
Now, it all sounds really great when I put it like this, but there’s also a bunch of things that are missing (but that I do plan to implement some day):
Well, now you know most of what it is and my plans about it. If for some reason you got excited (sure hope you did 😉 ) and want to take a look and give some feedback, please don’t hesitate to contact me. Just leave a comment and I’ll get in touch with you. I’ll gladly send it over and give you all the help you need to get using it. At this point however I’m not quite comfortable with just uploading it here (as it’s still very very crude and rough around the edges), so you will have to personally ask me if you want to take a peek 😉
A lot of Messenger plugins, addons, and scripts nowadays use some form of memory patching. Some are quick patches like disabling the nudge limit, others like the chat-only name of StuffPlug 3 are much more complicated. But no matter how simple or complicated, they all have the same downsides: the location of the patch changes with almost every new release (even minor ones) of Messenger. Most developers simply keep a small table of locations in different versions, but this forces you to update your software with each and every messenger update. With StuffPlug 3 I opted to write a quick search routine that would search the messenger executable for specific patterns, and would find patch locations using that. This pretty much garantueed StuffPlug to keep working with minor messenger
updates, and sometimes even major updates.
One of the downsides of my implementation in StuffPlug 3 was however that the search routine was pretty simple and as such slow. With each new pattern that needed to be looked for, the time it took to search increased, and at some point this reached a full 3 seconds on my machine (which is pretty high-end compared to my average user). I solved this partially with caching, but for some patterns I needed all hits and caching was not possible. In the end the searching generally took 1 second, or 3 if you just updated messenger. Now even though 1 second (or possibly 5 on slower PCs) doesn’t sound like a lot, it bothered me, and it hasn’t even stopped bothering me. I’ve always wanted to look into other algorithms to speed this up, but generally I had other priorities or didn’t have time at all.
Somehow that changed a week or so ago, when we revisited string matching algorithms in my current course. I just had to try, and I did. As I’m looking for multiple patterns at once, Aho-Corasick should be the ideal approach. One downside: I need wildcards (characters that match anything) in my patterns, and Aho-Corasick wasn’t really made for it. I did see a suggestion somewhere to simply split your search string on the wildcards and search for the constant sub-patterns, but this sounded a bit silly. Especially as there was no motivation about why this was the best approach, I felt I could do better. And today, I thought I had. I had an Aho-Corasick implementation working, with wildcards and everything.
Or so I thought. Yes, the algorithm works. Yes, it can take a wildcard or two. But once you add a few more wildcards, the number of states in the state tree just explodes. With just two memory patterns (38 characters in total, of which 12 wildcards) needed a whopping 7007 nodes, and generating the tree alone took a full 12 seconds. I also tried with all 20 patterns in StuffPlug 3, but that just didn’t seem to finish, ever.
In conclusion: For Aho-Corasick with wildcards, just use the suggested technique of splitting the patterns up. It is possible to adjust the algorithm itself for wildcards, but the number of states needed gets so big that it’s no longer feasible, and will most likely not run on any current computer when you use more than 5 wildcards in total.
I’m not giving up though 🙂 I’m currently working on the Aho-Corasick bit with splitting up, and I have another tree/state-machine based approach in my head that I want to try. At least if I finish this I can truthfully say that I can’t possibly make that part of StuffPlug any faster…
There’s quite a lot of people out there that absolutely hate JavaScript or ECMAScript, mostly because the different DOM/DHTML implementations in browsers are often incompatible. Yet it appears there are also people out there that love the dynamic nature of the language itself, and I think I’m becoming one of them. To me it’s a language that allows you to hack small things together relatively easy (when writing some exercises that were supposed to be written in pseudo code in JS a professor noted that it resembled pseudo-code really closely, and I should recommend it to the lecturer), whereas you’re also able to write bigger projects by leveraging the OO capabilities.
Anyway, enough about that, ever since I started using Google’s V8 engine in LiveScratcher for the scripting I’ve been experimenting with JS, and after having done some Data structures exercises with it, I started getting passionate about implementing some data structures in JavaScript. I’ve currently written a Heap (with a PriorityQueue using it), and have just finished an AVLTree implementation (which I will use for a map), and will probably move on to implement all structures from my book 🙂 I’m not sure if I’ll ever release this into the wild, or if it’s even worth releasing into the wild, but I’m pretty proud of it so far, and it forces me to learn more about the data structures involved, as well as keeps my JS skills up to par.
On a different note: I’ve set up a website for LiveScratcher with a wiki and an installer for an alpha version. Check it out at http://www.livescratcher.com/
My current boss wanted to know if the LiveScratcher Script-to-DUI interface would work with Windows Live Messenger 8 too. I’d kept in mind that I wanted it compatible with WLM8, but hadn’t tested it yet. To my suprise, there were only two tiny (non-fatal) errors, and I could get the advertising removal script working with just one extra line.
Behold, the Windows Live Messenger 8 *and* 9 compatible advertisement patch:
//Compact method
function CL_onCreatedElement(resid, root) {
if (resid=="mainContentResID") {
var ads=root.FindDescendent("TabsAndAds") || root.FindDescendent("AdBanner");
ads.LayoutPos=-3;
}
}
//Verbose method
function Convo_onCreatedElement(resid, root) {
if (resid=="convframeresid") {
var adbannergutter=root.FindDescendent("adbannergutter");
if (adbannergutter)
adbannergutter.SetValue("LayoutPos",Value.CreateInt(-3));
}
}
//Patches contained in this file
Patches=[
{
id: "ContactListAdvert",
name: "Remove Contact-list Advertisement",
version: "1.0",
author: "A. Nonymous",
website: "http://www.google.com/",
onCreatedElement: CL_onCreatedElement
},
{
id: "ConvoTextAdvert",
name: "Remove Conversation Text Advertising",
version: "1.0",
author: "A. Nonymous",
website: "http://www.google.com/",
onCreatedElement: Convo_onCreatedElement
}
];
//Register patches
for (var i in Patches) {
RegisterPatch(Patches[i].id,Patches[i]);
}
The whole thing started off as an extension to a DUI compatibility layer I wrote for Iminent, but with every hour I stick in I’m falling in love with it more 🙂
… You could write Messenger patches in JavaScript? I guess it could look something like this:
function CL_onCreatedElement(resid, root) { if (resid=="mainContentResID") { var TabsAndAds=root.FindDescendent("TabsAndAds"); if (TabsAndAds) TabsAndAds.SetValue("LayoutPos",new Value(-3)); } } function Convo_onCreatedElement(resid, root) { if (resid=="convframeresid") { var adbannergutter=root.FindDescendent("adbannergutter"); if (adbannergutter) adbannergutter.SetValue("LayoutPos",-3); } } //Patches contained in this file Patches=[ { id: "ContactListAdvert", name: "Remove Contact-list Advertisement", version: "1.0", author: "A. Nonymous", website: "http://www.google.com/", onCreatedElement: CL_onCreatedElement }, { id: "ConvoTextAdvert", name: "Remove Conversation Text Advertising", version: "1.0", author: "A. Nonymous", website: "http://www.google.com/", onCreatedElement: Convo_onCreatedElement } ]; //Register patches for (var i in Patches) { RegisterPatch(Patches[i].id,Patches[i]); }The above code works just like you’d expect it to, thanks to a new project I’m working on. For now it features only a very very small subset of the DirectUI library, just enough to make the above work (+ some debugging, obviously), but I plan to expand it to create an incredibly flexible platform for writing patches, skins, and later maybe even plugins.
It’s the spiritual successor of the abandoned Project M or Modumes project. Basically Project M was too complex, by using Windows JScript and allowing any other language to write modules in, I faced some problems (mainly threading) that I could not reliable fix.
To create something that could reliable interface with the DirectUI, I needed to have an enviroment where everything, or at least the parts interfacing with DirectUI, would be running from the main thread. My eye first fell on LUA, later on Squirrel, but in the end I figured that although those two scripting languages were incredibly powerful and small, I wanted something a tad more manageable. Eventually I figured the best language would be JavaScript, and Google’s V8 Engine allowed me all I needed:
A weekend plus several hours in the evenings further, and I have a working prototype, yay! 🙂
My current goals:
Since the new version of Messenger 9, none of the major Messenger add-ons have been updated to support it: I myself have attempted to port the current StuffPlug 3 code to WLM9, but concluded that there have been so many changes that for it to be fully compatible I’d have to do a re-write. Patchou had made a quick beta compatible with the earlier WLM9 beta, but he hasn’t posted anything on his own forums since December, and as far as I know his latest version of Plus! is not compatible with the (January released) WLM9 Release Candidate. Messenger Discovery only states “limited support for 9.0”, and to top it all off all current patches (with the notable exception of A-patch, who did a limited version) are not compatible with the new messenger file format.
Basically I think that the comment absorbation made on my earlier post was probably dead on: everyone seems to have moved on to other projects. I’ve seen my own interest in Messenger getting lower at times, resulting in no updates for StuffPlug, but now it’s not only me: even Patchou, the one person who’s kept updating Plus! for ages even when SP and MD would not, seems to be moving on to other projects.
I sometimes wonder how it is that old developers are moving on while no new ones are taking any interest in Messenger anymore. Is messenger development going too slow? too fast? is it because they completely abandoned all the APIs available? Is it because the messenger team has been more and more secretive, and the only real outwards communication being mainly focused on normal users while no longer appealing to developers? I’d really love to hear people’s opinions on this, and would be especially interested in hearing what people at Microsoft think of it. Please, if you read this and have any thoughts about this subject at all, share them with us through the comments below.
On a slightly different note, I’d like to comment on what warmth said in reply to an earlier post. Yes, StuffPlug currently is pretty much dead: the code I have is just no longer compatible with the changes in WLM9, and I’d have to start a re-write sometime. Problem is that most of StuffPlug’s features aren’t really relevant anymore on Messenger 9, and so trying to re-write the entire beast for WLM9 won’t really get me anywhere. I’d much rather start off with something small and build it up from there, much like StuffPlug was in the beginning. So if you have anything, anything at all, that bothers you about Messenger 9, please do tell me, and it might spark that required bit of passion to start working on something again.
As for helping development of other projects; I have actually helped and contributed to both Plus! and MD in the past, and if I can help them again I’d still love to, but setting up an environment for different people to work on the same (hobby) project takes time and effort, and I’m not sure either of us are really ready to make that kind of effort.
So, if you read this: please do leave a comment if you have any views on the whole lack of third-party development on Messenger 9, or if you have something that you’d like to see changed in Messenger 9 by a third-party add-on.
I know most of the previous posts have been technical, but I started this blog as something where I just write anything that I felt like sharing. That also includes non-technical stuff, and today that includes religion.
I’m not religious. My mother has been raised a protestant, I’m not sure about my dad, but from an early age I’ve basically been raised with a general idea of not doing to someone else what you would not want to happen to yourself. The laws and morals in the Netherlands are highly based on christianity, and I agree with almost everything that’s still part of those. That’s about how far my grasp of religion goes: I’ve never attended church, and I’m just not sure if there’s anything out there. Maybe there is, maybe the christians are right, maybe there is a god. But hey, maybe the buddhists are right, or maybe the muslims. I could’ve picked any of those, but I’d rather just admit that I don’t know and will most likely never know.
Now, lately I’ve been reading a lot of articles on reddit.com, and someone the whole thing about atheism keeps popping up. I totally agree on opposing proposition 8, and I am completely against trying to spread faith. And that’s what most atheists are saying: Just let people make their own decisions, be it gay or heterosexual, christian or muslim, religious or not religious. It’s their own decision, and who the hell are you to judge that ?
What does however piss me off about this whole atheist hype nowadays is how they’re not acting as they’re preaching. For example, I’ve been watching “Religulous” today, and it just pissed me off. Yes, Bill Maher has a valid point. Yes, I totally agree with his point of view. But I don’t like how he’s almost attacking each and every religious person he’s interviewing. Take the jew-turned-to-jesus guy for example[1], he says that he’s seen some miracles and to him that is enough prove that there is in fact a god or a jesus. Surely we can accept that? Not Bill though, he asks what kind of miracles and, instead of simply having a few side-notes or a small monologue afterwards, actually tells the guy that his “bar for miracles is pretty low”. Come on? He believes in God, that’s his constitutional right, just as it’s your right not to, you have every right to disagree with him, but it’s just nasty to attack him like that.
If Religulous would have been a movie looking at christianity, proof of some of the flaws in the bible, and proof of other theories, it would’ve been all right with me.
However, going around publicly ridiculing everyone is something that I, for one, do not condone. Sorry Bill Maher, but this is one hell of a crappy documentary. I highly doubt that it’s done anything else than simply insult a whole lot of people.
[1] If you haven’t seen it, google it, it’s all over the web.
When I started StuffPlug, it was my hobby. Messing around with messenger was something I liked doing, and getting a useful program out of it was simply a pleasant side effect. However, lately my interest in messenger hasn’t been what it used to be, and as such no real update on StuffPlug has taken place. I sometimes feel I should try and force myself to work on it just for the sake of getting out a WLM9 compatible version and keeping it alive.
At the same time I’m currently working for Iminent on a temporary consulting job, and today I suddenly realised the whole “but I want StuffPlug to stay a hobby or else it won’t be StuffPlug”-feeling that I’ve carried around since my parents have been pushing me to commercialize it wasn’t just a feeling: Whenever you specifically work on a project, your goal is to get out the product. If you have to cut corners, you’ll do so. If you need some specific research, you’ll probably only research as much as you need. But this goes directly against how StuffPlug started: I’d do some research, mostly for fun, and stumble upon things I could use. Sometimes I’d dig in a little deeper with a specific purpose, but I’ve always just researched stuff for fun, instead of with a specific feature in mind.
I’m doubting now about StuffPlug. Should I just push myself to write something for WLM9 that resembles StuffPlug and try to replicate features, or should I just let it be until something new triggers my interest? I’m afraid that with the first option I’ll never be able to make StuffPlug in what it used to be, simply because I’d be doing it with a completely different mindset…
I love messing around with Messenger, but lately it seems that the whole community is falling apart. MSN Fanatic, once one of the biggest communities of messenger hackers, is mostly just an archive of time long gone. Mess.be only rarely updates with something worth mentioning, and seems to have an enormous amount of advertising compared to the actual news, and only the forums are of any real value to me nowadays. The only forum still really active seems to be the Messenger Plus! forums, but they seem to cater more to the average joe that wants a random script done instead of people genuinely interested in doing some more advanced stuff.
So I’m asking myself (and, through this blog, you), what are good places to hang around as a messenger hacker these days? And what are good news sources when it comes to the more underground what-microsoft-doesn’t-want-the-public-to-know stuff ?