Divine Lunacy

It’s been well over a month since my last entry (valentine’s day). While I do tend to blog less during the school year, this large period of silence can be mainly attributed to Mafia [Returns]. One cloudy day in August, I got bored and decided to begin a recreation of what mafia.org was in the old days. (it’s horrid now. Makes me puke.) Through the remaining four months of 2005, I managed to write more than 2000 lines of php; the game was far from complete, but in January of ‘06, it was released for public beta. Advertisement on Hitmen brought a fair amount of users. With the influx of users, I was pressed to develop at a rapid rate. The code base quickly doubled in size, but was still far from complete. Come late-January, I ‘took a break’ from the game.

On the first day of February vacation, word of Mafia Returns leaked out to a group of old Mafia.org players who still hung around on IRC (irc.jaundies.com #divinelunacy, #mafia). News that “the old world had returned” spread quickly across Jaundies, and within a day, 100 new members registered. Again, I was forced to code rapidly. After playing the old mafia, these users had expectations; my inbox was flooded with feature requests, support requests, (thank you)s and the like. Development continued a heightened pace and within a few weeks, the game grew by 3000 lines of PHP, and about 100 lines of Perl. The game is far from done, and will be such for a long time to come. (we need more users. Advertise. Join. Make your friends join. Make your boss join. Make your teachers join. make your mother join.) The game is currently 7146 lines worth of .php files and about 100 lines of Perl.

With the increase in users came a very large increase in bandwidth usage and SQL disk usage. During February vacation, the game began consuming about 2 GB of bandwidth a day, more than half of which was images. This posed a problem as my account is only allotted 20GB per month. This problem was partially conquered by IzzyCreamcheese who offered to host the images on his own server until a permanent solution could be arranged. (he’s part of the permanent plan as well.) Even with the images on izzy’s server, I still lack the bandwidth to last the month. Unless the host gets back to me about upgrades by tomorrow, Mafia will go down for a time. (either until the end of the month, or until I have another chat with izzy.)

…and they really do walk around like they think they’re normal people. A year and six days ago, I was the victim of comment spam. These unsolicited comments were not made by a computer, as most are; they were made by an idiotic seventh grader, who I am told, stumbled upon my blog whilst searching for diving websites. A small world it is, as this witless seventh grader had yet to realize that he was sitting next to the brother of the person whose blog he was spamming. My retaliatory email to him was ruthless; he was pwned and was therefore speechless. Many ages passed, and this spammer, as all things insignificant do, slowly faded into darkest depths of my mind. From time to time, that which is thought to be lost resurfaces. As I quietly sat eating dinner tonight, a name popped into my head, a familiar name: it was the name of ‘the spammer’, but it is much more familiar now than a year ago. A month ago, a new scout joined my boy scout troop. Coincidentally, he has the same name as ‘the spammer’. (and he’s in the eighth grade…) Let this be a warning to all bloggers: the spammers walk among us!

Filtering internet content serves two purposes: It keeps blood-thirsty lawyers off the schools back, and it makes the school eligible for additional funding. I have previously blogged about how exploitable the schools filters are (manufactured by: 8e6); today we add another chapter to our book of exploits.

Google Talk has been around for a while now, though with the recent additions to gmail, many people are just realizing that they’ve been able to use their gmail addresses as jabber accounts for all these months. Perhaps the school (or those persons who update the master blacklist) have come to the same realization. As of today, gmail is blocked at school. My running joke is that they’ll someday block every website, even Google. This day, it seems, is nearer than many of us would like to believe

I’m perfectly fine with the school blocking offensive content, but what on earth could they have against gmail? If a student isn’t going to do his work, he might as well waste time sending emails, right? And what about those of us who email documents to ourselves? Oh well, I’m sure they’re not smart enough to block SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol: port 25) and POP3 (post office protocol: port 110) (actually, they probably need those. [Sorry, I’m too lazy for acronym tags.]), so I can just install thunderbird in my student folder, right? (they’ll never figure that the students are that smart…) It turns out that there’s an even easier way [for the time being]. The filter blacklists domain names, ip addresses or keywords that may appear in domain names. Google has servers all over the world, and they don’t share domain names, or IP addresses. google.co.uk, for instance, is a server that is local to the UK. The Google personal homepage can be configured to show a preview of one’s Gmail inbox. Accessing one’s gmail account is as easy as displaying this preview and, accessing the Google personal homepage by going to: google.co.uk/ig, and clicking on ‘Inbox’. For now, we bask in the glory of simplicity; later on, perhaps, more complicated exploits shall be sought.

Yes, folks, it’s time for another episode in my Dunkin Donuts epic. If you’ve been reading for long enough, you’ve probably figured that Dunkin Donuts messes up my order every time I buy coffee there. Their coffee isn’t that good, so the least they could do is actually make it to order. With Mike as my witness, i said, at least three times, “medium french vanilla no cream no sugar.” Despite my repeated attempts to tell them to hold the cream and the sugar, I ended up with cream and sugar instead of coffee. I kid you not: my coffee tasted more like sweet cream than it did coffee. After drinking black coffee for several years, I am led to wonder how people can possibly stand it with cream and sugar. Americas supposed ‘coffee drinkers’ are merely wimps who drink sweetened cream and call themselves connoisseurs. Coffee just isn’t the same when diluted with cream…

Pardon my french; I meant to use the green can, but I accidentally used the red can. (think coffee). I’m rather hyped up right now, so it seems the perfect time to shove some of my conservative rantings down your throat:

This whole charging people with involuntary manslaughter for the station nightclub fire is one of the biggest loads of liberal bullshit I have heard in my 18.333… years of existence. Shit happens, people; (that’s a direct address…) yes, people died, but it was an accident. Do these idiots really think that sending a few people to jail will ease the passing of their loved ones? Yes, unfortunately, they do, and they should be slapped upside the head for thinking so. Why don’t we turn our attention to a real problem: The Rev. Mr. Jesse Jackson. Now, there is someone who should be locked up for several eternities. (Just because absolutely no one likes him.) Perhaps Michael Savage says it best. (Look him up on amazon and you’ll catch my drift, d00d.)

Now that I have actually posted, I think I’ll post again tomorrow. Be sure to tune in for a less caffeinated version of my shit. Oh, and landoverbaptist.org has a pretty interesting array of crap. (hat tip: April [Ooh. I get hat tips. I’m cool now. {yay!}])

There are ninety-two ways to place eight queens on a standard chess board such that no queen can take any other queen, but what are they? This is the question that I have spent the last three days pondering. I surely could have ran to google crying, but what fun is in that? Being the weirdo that I am, I took it upon myself to think up a fairly good algorithm and then put it to code. If you value your sanity, you should skip reading the rest of this post…

The algorithm I decided to use is a simple breadth-first search algorithm. It begins in the first column of the chessboard, by placing a queen in the first available row. In each subsequent column, a queen is placed in the first available row. When a column that doesn’t have any ‘available’ spaces is encountered, the queen in the previous column is moved to the next available row. When a queen is successfuly placed in the eigth column, the column is cleared and the queen in the (n-1)th column is moved to the next available row. When the first column is reached, and a queen cannot be placed (because there are no rows left to test), all of the solutions have been found. The bit of PHP I threw together to do this for me can successfuly find all ninety-two solutions to the eight queens problem in .27 seconds. It took me five periods to find the first one by hand…

And now for that anecdote I said I might include. Josephus and forty other jewish people were trapped in a cave surrounded by romans. Rather than give themselves up to the romans, all but Josephus and one other man resolved to committ suicide. Josephus proposed that this be done in an orderly fashion: they were to stand in a circle and kill every third person. The remaining person would then committ suicide. Josephus lived to tell the story…

It’s been a while, and quite frankly, I lack content. Looks like it’s time to go LJ style… OK, well not quite LJ, because I’m much cooler than sixteen-year-old girls.

I recieved my official /\/\i|<3 3/\/\Py|23 title yesterday. I’m too tired to write anything more… See the title at: My Biography. If livejournal does not post this, I am going to beat brad over the head with a billy club. It’s not my code—it’s his! it’s never mine!!!

I figured since Greg hasn’t posted about it, I would.

A few years ago there was a hit game at school located at www.mafia.org. It’s still there today but since the admin IzzyCreamCheese gave it away it just hasn’t been the same. In saying, that a few months ago (I had no knowledge of this til sometime after) Greg and our friend Tyler found Cache files from the old mafia.org and decided to try to piece it back together and restore it to it’s former glory. In the last few weeks Greg has made great progress with the site and the debugging is beginning. We’re changing the look and feel, as well as a few features, so not to infrige on copyrights and to make it more interesting. If anyone wants to help with the debugging email me and I may let you try and help depending on how I feel- wizard2012@gmail.com.

It has come to my attention that there is a rumor about me having a pet robot who likes to gamble…

(20:35:24) ImNotMexican 14: you have a brother and a sister
(20:35:28) ImNotMexican 14: mom and dad
(20:35:33) SFX Soup Nazi: Hm. Basic.
(20:35:38) ImNotMexican 14: and for a strange reason a pet robot
(20:35:52) SFX Soup Nazi: My candriod?
(20:35:53) ImNotMexican 14: that likes to gamble at that

Before things get out of hand, I feel it is my duty to inform you that I do, indeed, have a gambling pet robot. He is a candroid purchased from thinkgeek.com. You too can own one…

I’m afraid this gambling addiction is my fault. For my eighteenth birthday, I recieved, among other things a candroid and a scratch ticket. Thinking nothing bad of it, I let the candroid scratch part of the ticket. To my great dismay, he stole the scratch ticket, and used his winnings to start a life of gambling. He lives in my room, on top of my computer. Each night when I go to bed, I am extra careful to take all my money with me, as well as a knife to guard against candroid attacks. The candroid is a dangerous creature. Read more at thinkgeek.com…