• Basic Trade functionality is completed
  • Trade x for y (i.e. 4 Uncommons for 1 Rare)
  • Buy/Sell x for x (i.e. 6 Rares for 1 Ticket or 1 Ticket for 6 Rares)
• Smart Bot functionality is 70% Completed

Currently ApocBot is able to correctly identify cards that are selected during a trade and quote the stored price for the cards.  So far, so good!

Want some more info?

Okay, so here’s the big announce. I’m going to open source the Basic Trade functionality. I think it’s something that’s really fundamental and should have been included in the MTGO client to begin with. To that, I think it’s stilly to charge for such a basic function after writing it.

So now to answer some obvious questions:

Q: ZOMG! You’re going to open source it?!

A: Yes. ApocBot will be the first free, open source MTGO trade bot

Q: What license will it be released under?

A: I’m going to release it under GPL v3

Q: When?!

A: It’ll be available on this site by January 1st, 2010 I’ll need some beta testers to use it before I release the source, just to make sure I’m not going to cause more problems than good. I’ll send out a call for that within the coming weeks.

Q: What about SmartBot functionality?

A: I’m still working on SmartBot and to be honest, it has been more trouble than it’s worth. I’ll make a decision on that as soon as I think it’s at a functional point. Because I’m currently working full time, I’m only able to dedicate a couple hours a week to ApocBot so this might take a bit. Part of me open sorucing ApocBot in the first place is so the community can begin development of such a plugin or enhancement.

Q: What will I need to develop ApocBot?

A: ApocBot is written in Microsoft C# and you will need Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 (with .NET 3.5) to develop. And Magic: The Gathering Online.. of course

So that’s that! What’s funny is I was mulling this post around in my head and how to handle a MTGO bot that I knew (a) wouldn’t make a ton of money and (b) should really be free anyways.

Please feel free to e-Mail me or leave any questions you might have here on this post and I’ll be more vigilant in getting back to everyone.

Cheers!

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The case I’ve been using is a Morex 3677B case, which is fairly small but still allows enough room for a 2.5″ Hard Drive and a Slim Laptop CD/DVD drive.

A couple gotchas I ran into while upgrading from the VIA board to the new Intel Atom based board:

1. The Zotac IONITX board has only SATA connectors, no PATA connectors to be found! This was a road block as both my previous hard drive and slim CD/DVD drive were both PATA so I was forced to upgrade them as well. Luckily I was able to score a 320GB Seagate drive for only $79!
2. Zotac provides a small 50mm fan to use on the heatsink because the Dual Core N330 CPU as well as the nVidia northbridge require active cooling. Luckily the Morex case has a 50mm exhaust fan that sits close to the heatsink. I was able to flip it around and use it to blow onto the CPU.
3. Speaking of the heatsink, it’s about 1.5″ high and ALMOST comes too close to not fitting into the case. So it’s something to keep in mind when you’re working on your setup!

I’ve got everything hooked up and it was very easy to get the driver package installed. Because the Zotac IONITX came out so recently, the CD it came with had the latest drivers and the motherboard had the latest BIOS installed.

The ONE issue I’m having and still searching for a solution for is that using HDMI as the audio output, I’m getting audio distortion. I’ve tried different source materials and even tweaking the audio settings, but it’s still happening. Other than that, I’ve been super pleased with it’s performance! I mean, seriously, a computer the size of a shoe box showing four CPU’s (2 physical + hyper threading) and an nVidia graphics adapter!

Hope this helps someone out there in the market for upgrading their own HTPC as well!

Cheers!

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ME TOO AND IT WAS DRIVING ME UP THE FUCKING WALL!

After I updated my 15-inch Macbook Pro to 10.5.8 I noticed right away that my wireless performance was in the crapper. Ping times to Google jumped up to an AVERAGE of 300ms, sometimes as high at 1,500ms! Any other wireless device in the house? 40-50ms! So it was obvious, after pulling my hair out thinking it was an issue with my Airport Extreme base stations or Verizon FIOS.

Luckily my friend Joe (who has been suffering the same issue), pointed me towards a link on Apple Support that not only admits that the 10.5.8 update breaks “some” Intel based laptops, but they also released a fix! What was their fix?

It basically rolls back your wireless drivers to 10.5.7!

http://support.apple.com/downloads/AirPort_Client_Update_for_MacBook_and_MacBook_Pro

I hope this helps out anyone else who thought they were losing their mind!

Cheers!

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What are they not telling you? That the 40GB plan is $54.90! The comparable in price plan they’re offering to customers who currently subscribe to Road Runner standard for $29.95/mo? A paltry 5GB! That’s right! Time Warner Cable is going to be charging home users almost THIRTY DOLLARS per month for a pathetically small 5GB of data transfer. Don’t think the marketing genius stops there! In addition to these new ridiculous bandwidth caps, they’re going to be charging you $1 per gigabyte over!

To break down these numbers, I thought I’d throw out some AVERAGE usage from my household, who DOESN’T use P2P file sharing or sites such as The Pirate Bay:

Average Amazon Unbox video rental file size: 1GB

Average weekly Rock Band DLC file size from XBox Live: 150MB (500MB if it’s a full album)

Average Netflix Streaming (High Quality) video: 2GB

So by looking at these numbers, just downloading the OCCASIONAL Rock Band downloadable content and watching a movie every OTHER Saturday Night would cause you to incur bandwidth overages if you’re using the standard $29.99/mo plan from Road Runner.

Is this a mistake? You’re damned right it is! Time Warner has obviously missed the boat that the internet is the future and by limiting people’s access to it, it’ll only drive customers away to other services that make online content more readily available (and cheaper!). So let’s discuss alternatives!

Alternative #1: DSL (“I just want regular Internet Access”)

"The Man"

Personally, I’m not a super huge fan of DSL because speeds vary depending on your distance from the telco and their bandwidth compared to the offerings from cable companies can’t complete. BUT, desperate times call for desperate measures!

AT&T offers a high speed DSL plan for $35/mo that has speeds of 6mbps downstream & 1mbps upstream. Comparable to Road Runner in price, AT&T offers a DSL plan for $25/mo that features 1.5mbps downstream & 384kbps upstream.

I agree that these numbers SEEM weak, but let’s crunch the numbers really quickly. What I want to do is compare maximum monthly cost assuming you leave your internet connection ONLY downloading 24 hours a day for 30 days (one billing cycle).

As you can see, if you’re only concerned with monthly transfer it would seem that AT&T DSL is the best alternative to your bandwidth requirements. If you need speeds higher than 6mbps, then it would appear you’re tired to Time Warner’s draconian bandwidth caps.

Alternative #2: Dedicated DS-3 (“I want speed, no matter the cost!”)

My doctor said I need more..

This sounds ridiculous, but hear me out. I’m sure nobody out there will debate that a dedicated DS-3 is a viable alternative to residential internet providers, but the numbers add up versus Time Warner Road runner because it’d be much cheaper per gigabyte and over twice the speed!

There are many DS-3 providers across the country and each one has different pricing structures. I took the average of a cross section of quotes it would cost me to have a DS-3 installed at my home in a coastal California city. I’ll break down the price using the same table above:

So as you can see from the above table, as ridiculous as a dedicated DS-3 line sounds as being used for residential internet access, it comes out being cheaper than Time Warner Road Runner! Food for thought for those people who have nothing but money to spare and demand top speed access and unlimited monthly transfers to their favorite… recipe sites.

Alternative #3: Dialup (“I want more monthly transfer, I don’t even care about the speed!”)

+++ATAH0

Wait, wait. Don’t close your browser yet. Just hear me out on this one

Dial up is something a lot of us remember fondly as our first gateway to the net. Internet providers did limit our usage, but it was time limited (for example: 30 hours per month). Not because bandwidth was more expensive then (which it was), but because telco fees were so high when it came to installing additional POTS line to the ISP. This way they could operate on fewer POTS lines without having to charge users higher monthly rates.

Dialup modem technology has plateaued at 56kbps over your standard phone line (depending on distance to the telco, same as DSL). The average dial up plan these days is roughly $9.99 and can be found in almost any market. It’s a fantastic alternative because it can work virtually anywhere without much additional hardware, effort on the end user…. or trenching fiber down the street

How does this even make sense as an alternative? Total monthly transfer! That’s right folks! Did you ever stop and wonder “Wait, 40GB per month? How much is that in kilobits per second?” The sad and shocking answer to that is about 16.5kbps. You heard me! The best Road Runner plan you can buy offers you less monthly downloaded data than a 28.8 modem!

So now that I’ve got your attention, hows about that great service comparison table again!

Have I sold you on dial up? Probably not But I’m trying to make the point that Time Warner has gone completely off the deep end with their pricing structure compared to the services that you receive. Am I the only person who’s floored that dial up is not only cheaper than Cable Internet but now also offers better monthly transfer at a lower rate?

Is Road Runner bandwidth REALLY $100 more expensive than dial up? No, if anything, bandwidth has become many times cheaper than it was ten years ago. So what gives?

Well, my personal opinion is that the bottom line here is the cable industry is in trouble from competition who have more focused and more easily maintained infrastructure. Competition in the Television market from companies like DirecTV and DishNetwork have forced some cable companies into bankruptcy because upgrading and maintaining a physical network has overhead much higher than that of a single satellite floating through space.

In addition, you have internet competition from companies like AT&T and Verizon who are starting to offer Fiber To The Premises (FTTP) in newer housing communities, which bundles internet, television and phone all under one low cost bill.

I hope everyone takes these points to heart and contacts Time Warner and asks them “What gives?” And if it comes down to it, look into one of the alternatives I proposed above because that’s our rights as consumers!

Cheers!

PS: If you get the DS-3, invite me over to your house. I have some stuff I need to download

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Of course I pointed him over to my posting provider, InMotionHosting! Why? Because their cheap $6.95/mo hosting account has UNLIMITED transfer and UNLIMITED storage! So of course it fit his needs perfectly and I think anyone would be insane not to jump at a hosting offer like this at such a cheap rate.

I mean seriously, these are the features for their ‘low end’ business account:

• Unlimited Storage Space
• Unlimited Bandwidth
• Up to 7 domains on the account
• Free Nightly Backups of all your data
• Two MYSQL Databases (which are also of unlimited size)

All for only $6.95/mo! Seriously! I know, shameless plug but it’s seriousliy rediculous what you recieve for the price.

Use the link below and check them out!

Cheers!

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Well, the other night my wife was watching a movie through Netflix on the TiVo and about four times it just quit out to the main TiVo menu. What the frick?

I told my wife to give the XBox 360 a try and see how it handles. Well turns out that the 360 had a hiccup too, but you know what it was? A buffer underrun! That’s right! My internet connection for whatever reason couldn’t keep up with the Netflix stream and it ran out of data. Of course the XBox client was smart enough to realize this, displayed a message and buffered some before streaming again.

My TiVo client? Crashed out. Talk about two code bases not up to par with one another.

So if you’re having the same issues, odds are your network connection (for whatever reason) is not keeping up with the Netflix stream and it’s just crashing out to the main menu of TiVo.

My suggested work around for the time being is try watching it on your XBox 360 if you have the option. Otherwise, you might want to contact your cable provider or stop torrenting all that norwegian snow porn

Cheers!

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This week Microsoft rolled out Netflix instant streaming support with the new XBox 360 Dashboard (which they’re calling the “New Xbox Experience”) while TiVo is also rolling out Netflix support this week in their latest beta firmware update.

Netflix streaming allows people who subscribe to the (currently) $8.99 subscription to stream UNLIMITED movies available for Instant Online viewing to their XBox or TiVo for no extra cost on top of their monthly subscription. To sweeten the deal, Netflix also offers up to 300 movies in ‘HD’ quality at no extra charge.

So, let’s review the score. HD-DVD has gone the way of Beta Max and although both Apple and Amazon have offered rental and purchasing of movies electronically but are still bound to their respective platforms (Apple being iPhone/Pod and Amazon being TiVo) including the PC. I’ve yet to see either party partner with another distribution outlet which is expected from Apple but almost a shock with Amazon.

When I think about it though, Netflix is an obvious answer to the question of what company would be the first to provide movies to Microsoft for online streaming. Netflix partnered with Microsoft in the first place to provide online instant viewing of movies through Microsofts (at the time, new) Silverlight technology, which is a competitor to Flash (which popular video sites like YouTube use).

So now you have a company with an already established shipping and distribution system setup for physical media (both DVD and Blu-Ray) and has partnered with two ‘direct to TV’ companies who have in total over 30 million set top boxes already installed in homes across the WORD! Could this be the coming of the revolution?

I certainly hope so!

About six months back I finally decided to just sell my entire DVD collection. I personally was just done with physical media. I was tired of moving them, dusting them, having them take up space and never really sitting down to watch them. I mean really, I owned a little over 200 movies and sat down AT MOST one time a month to watch one. It got so bad that some of the movies were still in their original shrink wrap packaging. The industry had hooked me on the idea that I needed to COLLECT movies and I had come to the realization that it’s seriously a stupid hobby.

I became a personal flag barer for electronic distribution starting with the ability of renting a movie from Amazon unbox for only $.99 (when they’re on sale) but even then I’d have to wait about 30 minutes for the movie to buffer enough for me to be able to watch it the entire way through without having to pause and let it buffer some more.

Enter Netflix. Not only does it let me INSTANTLY begin watching a movie by detecting my connection speed and ability to download data at real time, but I can also ‘shop’ online for more movies to watch while not at home using Netflix.com. This means I can think of a movie while at work or on the go, queue it up and watch it instantly when I get home.

The bonus? This is all covered under my $8.99 Netflix account that I already had. Oh sure, there are more costs involved, but let’s break that down (and to keep it fair, I’ll break down as if I’m starting with NOTHING):

- Netflix: $8.99/mo ($107/year)

- XBox 360: $199 for Arcade Edition ($199/year, first year)

- XBox Live Gold Account: $7.99/mo ($49.99/year)

- Digital Cable: $39 for 10mbit down/1mbit up (in my area) ($480/year)

So even including your monthly Cable bill, you’re only looking at a monthly average cost of only $70 or only $29 pr month if you don’t include your monthly cable internet bill! FOR UNLIMITED INSTANT MOVIE VIEWING!

That’s pretty amazing to me! I hope more people hop on this bandwagon and we begin the revolution! Down with physical media!

I’ll step off my soapbox now

Cheers!

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I felt bad that I kept mooching off my friends bandwidth and had to keep asking them for help in setting up my services and whatnot. This way is going to be much better!

Also, I thought I’d pimp out the name of my web host because so far I’ve been super pleased with the service. The company is InMotion Hosting and what totally sold me on them was that they offered a hosting package with freakin unlimited bandwidth and storage for only $8.95/mo! This was dirt, dirt cheap compared to other hosts. Check them out if you’re looking for some sweet affordable web hosting.

I also Google-Fu’d for a bit and found a grip of positive reviews! So here’s hoping!

Cheers!

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“The Network Connect session terminated. Do you want to reconnect? (nc.windows.app.23711).”

I did some Googling and I came across this support manual from Juniper which discusses the error codes/messages returned by the VPN client software and what could be causing the issue. Error code 23711 Juniper describes the problem as:

“The Network Connect client disconnected from the secure gateway because the
client’s routing table was altered.”

I thought to myself, “What the hell could be changing my routing table?” At first I suspected it might have been a VPN tunneling issue with my Apple Airport Extreme but that known issue has been fixed since early 2007. The issue obviously was being caused by something on my company laptop.

I tried different media (wired vs. wireless) and also updated and rolled back different network drivers to no avail. Another long Google search put me upon this blog entry at kevinluck.com where he states:

After a bit of googling I found out that there were complaints about the early betas of CS3 and the Bonjour service that they installed affecting networking. And this is what was causing my problem. If you press Ctrl-Alt-Del and look at your processes then you will find a “mDNSResponder.exe” service running after installing Flash CS3. Ending this process allows you to connect through Network Connect.

Presto! Stopping that Process and eventually uninstalling the Bonjour application from my computer fixed my VPN disconnection problem! A big THANK YOU to kevinluck.com for being a great resource and I hope that this blog entry helps others trouble shoot the same issue I had with our Juniper VPN client!

Lord knows I was ready to pull my hair out

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Service Providers are companies such as Comcast, Cox Communications, Time Warner, AT&T and other companies that provide internet access to users via their network. I feel that these companies are in a better legal position on censorship because they can claim that the use of specific services, such as BitTorrent, are overloading their network or violating their Terms of Service. Albeit not fair to the users that these services be blocked because some third party software vendors do use BitTorrent to distribute their applications in order to save on their bandwidth cost such as Wizards Of The Cost do with their Magic: The Gathering Online game installer. But what I think the users aren’t seeing is that even legal methods of using BitTorrent aren’t as fair as they’d seem because now Wizards of the Coast isn’t footing the bandwidth bill for distribution of their software, the Service Providers are. So as far as outright blocking of a specific protocol, Service Providers are legally within their rights.

Content Providers such as Usenet Services, Torrent Sites, File Sharing Services such as LimeWire or Morpheus on the other hand face a harder moral and legal delimma. They can’t pick and choose to censor a single area of content without opening the door for legal action from others. A perfect example is if a service decides to target and censor illegal pornography while turning a blind eye to movies, music and pirated software on their networks. It’s obvious they have the ability to stop distribution of specific content, so now what they’ve done is say indirectly that they’re OK with some illegal content on their network, just not that content which they find morally wrong.

A few months ago I canceled an account with a Usenet provider because they didn’t stop the proliferation of illegal pornography into legitimate newsgroups. So what I did as a consumer is put this Usenet provider in a tough position of censoring their content at a risk of alienating their customers and putting their business at risk or accept that albeit the content their distributing is morally wrong and in some cases illegal, that they can’t pick and choose which illegal content they’re OK with. How my provider got around this issue was their policy on the data was strictly “hands off” and allowed users to report posts that violated the terms of service and then those posts would be specifically removed.

So what’s to be done? Do we allow Service Providers to block entire protocols only because a community of users have taken to distributing illegal content with it? Can content providers still be legally immune to distributing illegal content because they’re not responsible for the data on their network?

I’m curious to hear people’s feedback on this issue.

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