CyberShadow’s blog

Once in a while you’ll stumble upon a combo box which doesn’t allow you to type past the right edge of the control. When normally typing more text would just scroll the contents, you’ll just get back an annoying beep. The amount of text you can enter is actually bound by the on-screen width of the text – thus, you may be able to enter 125 “i” characters, but only 25 “W” characters.

The cause of the problem is that the combo box was not created with the CBS_AUTOHSCROLL style:

CBS_AUTOHSCROLL

Automatically scrolls the text in the edit control to the right when the user types a character at the end of the line. If this style is not set, only text that fits within the rectangular boundary is allowed.

Visual Studio’s resource editor has a different name and description for this property:

Auto

Automatically scrolls text to the left when the user types a character at the end of the line.

I was recently tasked to create a required-experience-per-level table for a game – that is, create a table which indicates how many experience points the player must earn to progress to a certain experience level. The requirement to reach the next level must continuously increase (the “double derivate” must be non-negative). Of course, it is easy to come up with a function to satisfy that requirement alone, but what about generating a level curve that’s also aesthetic? I mean, it’s much nicer to look forward to reaching 15000 points than, say, 16384.

So, I wrote a small program to attempt to generate experience ranks with the following properties:

1. Continuous acceleration
2. Smoothness (calculated as “roughness”, using the sum of squares of the “triple-derivate”)
3. Roundness (100 is more round than 150, 150 is more round than 160, 160 is more round than 165 etc.)
4. Emphasis on the roundness of the last level

The qualifying factor here is smoothness vs. roundness. (continue reading…)

There are a few ways to programmatically set the Google Talk / Gmail status via XMPP, however they have some problems if you are signed in into the same account with Google Talk or Gmail chat:

1. You need to keep the program running – otherwise, the status will revert when the connection is closed;
2. Other logged-in applications will not see the status change.

Enter Google’s Shared Status Messages XMPP extension. Here’s a short Python script which uses the extension to set the status from the command line (needs xmpppy):

#!/usr/bin/env python

USERNAME = "thecybershadow"       # don't include @gmail.com
PASSWORD = "hunter2"
RESOURCE = "gmail.com"

import sys

if len(sys.argv) < 2:
	print 'Usage: python gstatus.py <show> [<status>]'
	print '		<show> is either "default" or "dnd"'
	print '		<status> is the status string (optional)'
	exit()

import warnings
warnings.filterwarnings("ignore") # silence DeprecationWarning messages
from xmpp import *

cl=Client(server='gmail.com',debug=[])
if not cl.connect(server=('talk.google.com',5222)):
	raise IOError('Can not connect to server.')
if not cl.auth(USERNAME, PASSWORD, RESOURCE):
    raise IOError('Can not auth with server.')
cl.send(Iq('set','google:shared-status', payload=[
		Node('show',payload=[sys.argv[1]]),
		Node('status',payload=[sys.argv[2] if len(sys.argv)>2 else ""])
]))
cl.disconnect()

RABCDAsm (Robust ABC (ActionScript Bytecode) [Dis-]Assembler) is a collection of utilities including an ActionScript 3 assembler/disassembler, and a few tools to manipulate SWF files.

This package was created due to lack of similar software out there.
Particularly, I needed an utility which would allow me to edit ActionScript 3 bytecode (used in Flash 9 and newer) with the following properties:

• Speed. Less waiting means more productivity. rabcasm can assemble large projects (>200000 LOC) in under a second on modern machines.
• Comfortably-editable output. Each class is decompiled to its own file, with files arranged in subdirectories representing the package hierarchy. Class files are #included from the main file.
• Most importantly – robustness! If the Adobe AVM can load and run the file, then it must be editable – no matter if the file is obfuscated or otherwise mutilated to prevent reverse-engineering. RABCDAsm achieves this by using a textual representation closer to the ABC file format, rather than to what an ActionScript compiler would generate.

Read more on the project’s homepage on GitHub.