Last night I finally got around to upgrading my Blackjack to Windows Mobile 6.0. I’d been delaying because they didn’t have an updater that ran on Vista and I don’t have an XP machine available. Once the Vista updater arrived, I put it on the backlog.

I had an old WoW theme for my Blackjack but I decided it was time to make a new one. Here’s a photo of it running on my phone:

If you’d like to download it, here’s the ZIP file: LichKing_SmartPhoneTheme.zip (26KB)

At Microsoft we’ve been using SmartCards for remote and building access for quite a while. This kind of authentication is called two-factor authentication because you use two different things to prove who you are, instead of just one (e.g. a password).

Two-factor Authentication on Wikipedia:

An authentication factor is a piece of information and process used to authenticate or verify a person's identity for security purposes. Two-factor authentication (T-FA) is a system wherein two different factors are used to authenticate. Using two factors as opposed to one delivers a higher level of authentication assurance. Using more than one factor is sometimes called strong authentication.

Recently the game of World of Warcraft has been plagued by a rash of accounts getting hacked. Typically this is caused by a combination of things:

• The user is probably running as an administrator on their machine (I don’t do this)
• They probably doesn’t have all their security software up-to-date (I do this constantly)
• They were probably browsing websites that have either been compromised by a hacker or are specifically there to attract WoW players (I don’t do this)

The end result is that they get a keylogger trojan installed on their machine. Apparently, this costs Blizzard a huge amount of money to address, so recently they announced a new two-factor system that uses a One Time Password token that the user must use with their regular password.

One-time Password on Wikipedia:

The purpose of a one-time password (OTP) is to make it more difficult to gain unauthorized access to restricted resources, like a computer account. Traditionally static passwords can more easily be accessed by an unauthorized intruder given enough attempts and time. By constantly altering the password, as is done with a one-time password, this risk can be greatly reduced.

There are basically three types of one-time passwords: the first type uses a mathematical algorithm to generate a new password based on the previous, a second type that is based on time-synchronization between the authentication server and the client providing the password, and a third type that is again using a mathematical algorithm, but the new password is based on a challenge (e.g. a random number chosen by the authentication server or transaction details) and a counter instead of being based on the previous password.

Blizzard’s token system is based on the time-synchronization method. The token is a small USB keyfob with an LCD display and a button. To use it, you first configure your account using the token’s serial number. Then when you login, after providing your username and password, you press the button on the token and enter the number displayed on the screen.

Is this kind of thing foolproof? No, of course not. But since most WoW hackers were having their keyloggers post the username and password to a server somewhere for illicit use later, the number will most likely have expired before they get to it. (See Bruce Schneier’s article The Failure of Two-Factor Authentication for more information about the vulnerabilities in these kinds of systems.)

Even though I’ve never had issues with my account security, I ordered mine the day they became available. Apparently so did many other WoW players… Blizzard sold out in an hour. Mine came on Friday and it works great.

I've been a tequila sipper for years. When I was young I had an incident with whiskey that put me off it, possibly for life, and tequila has nicely filled that gap.

I know the difference between good tequila and bad tequila. Good tequila is 100% blue agave and has a little number on the label that say NOM ####. That number if the distillery registration number. Look for it.

My good friend and fellow tequila sipper Aaron Mikulich sent me this great article today that sums up good tequila better than I ever could:

bbum’s weblog-o-mat » What is good tequila?

A choice quote from the beginning:

First, Cuervo Gold is not good tequila. It is actually a really terrible product, quality wise, backed by some brilliant market. Sadly, most of the tequila consumed in the United States is Cuervo Gold or something equally as bad. And by “bad”, I mean bad taste and vicious hangover.

Amen brother!

Here's an interesting little app for those of you who worry too much about death, disease, world population, etc.

http://www.chippynews.com/worldclock.htm

Enjoy!

My wife and I each have our most hated English language abuses. One of her favorites is "these ones" (you should omit the "ones" and just say "these"). One of mine is "I'm good" (it should be "I'm well" or "I feel good" because "well" is an adverb and "good" is an adjective.)

Anyway, for some reason last night I looked up "these ones" in Google and found this excellent list of common english language errors. Take some time digging through it... you never know what you will find.

UPDATE: I am now maintaining this script over on my Warcraft Wiki site on pbwiki. Please go there for documentation and the most recent updates.

I couldn't resist. Sometimes I don't even know why I do these things. Last night I decided to start playing with System.Net.WebClient from Windows PowerShell and four hours later I had something close. A few more hours today and now I have a PowerShell script that:

• Updates Subversion working copies (can be disabled w/ a switch)
• Can be configured to check for updates from wowinterface.com using a simple data file in your addons folder called addons.ps1 (see the comment header below for a sample of this file) and a nice XML endpoint provided by the guys at wowi (thanks Dolby!)
• Will check to see if an addon is one of the WowAce family of addons and will try to update it from their using their RSS feed for information.

I know I can add more addon sites to this later, but now that Auctioneer is up on wowi (ID: 4812) I don't know if I have any addons that I use that can't be updated by this script. Perhaps one or two, but that isn't bad given that I have 169 addons in my Addons directory.

This script has a few dependencies for extracting ZIP and RAR files. You will need to get unzip.exe from Info-ZIP and UnRar.exe from RARLabs and put them both on your path. Both are free.

Anyway, here is the script. There is a download at the bottom of this post for those of you who just want to have it.

DISCLAIMER: This script is supplied without warranty or support. If you play WoW and don't know anything about PowerShell, this might be a bit much for you. Take a look at WowAceUpdater or WUU instead.

  1 #########################################################################
  2 # Name: update-addons.ps1
  3 # Version: 1.0
  4 # Author: Peter Provost <peter@provost.org>
  5 #
  6 # Usage: update-addons [-skipSvn]
  7 #
  8 # Remarks: This is a simple powershell script for updating your
  9 #   World of Warcraft addons. It will autodetect SVN working copies
 10 #   and update them. It will look for a file called addons.ps1
 11 #   in your Addons folder to define special locations for downloading
 12 #   addons (see below for a sample addons.ps1). After that it will test
 13 #   if the addon can be updated from http://files.wowace.com. Any addon
 14 #   still unmatched will be skipped.
 15 #
 16 #   This sample addons.ps1 hows how to configure updates from 
 17 #   wowinterface.com:
 18 #
 19 #   $wowiAddons = @{
 20 #     'FlightMap' = 3897;
 21 #     'Clique' = 5108;
 22 #   };
 23 #
 24 #   At this point only wowinterface.com is supported in this data file
 25 #   but more may be added later.
 26 #
 27 #########################################################################
 28 
 29 param (
 30     [switch] $skipSvn
 31 );
 32 
 33 # Configuration - change these as needed
 34 $wowAddonDir = "C:\World of Warcraft\Interface\Addons";
 35 $stateFile = "PSUpdateAddons.state";
 36 
 37 function update-addon($addonSource, $downloadUrl, $remoteVersion, $fileName)
 38 {
 39     if ( $remoteVersion -ne $localVer) {
 40       write-host "$_ : ($addonSource) Update required: Current ver=$localVer, Remote ver=$remoteVersion";
 41 
 42       $tempFilePath = join-path $tempDir $fileName;
 43       downloadextract-addon $downloadUrl $tempFilePath;
 44 
 45       write-host "`tUpdating state file..." -noNewLine;
 46       $remoteVersion > $stateFilePath;
 47       "done." | write-host;
 48     } else {
 49       write-host "$_ : ($addonSource) Addon up-to-date. Skipping.";
 50     }
 51 }
 52 
 53 # Helper function for updating a single addon]
 54 function downloadextract-addon ([string] $uri, [string] $tempFile)
 55 {
 56   write-host "`tDownloading $uri to $($tempFile)..." -noNewLine;
 57   $wc.DownloadFile( $uri, $tempFile );
 58   write-host "done.";
 59 
 60   $ext = [System.IO.Path]::GetExtension($tempFile);
 61   switch ($ext) {
 62     ".rar" {
 63       write-host "`tExtracting RAR Archive..." -noNewLine;
 64       & unrar x -o+ $tempFile $wowAddonDir;
 65     }
 66     ".zip" {
 67       write-host "`tExtracting ZIP Archive..." -noNewLine;
 68       & unzip -o $tempFile -d $wowAddonDir;
 69     }
 70     default { write-host "UNKNOWN EXTENSION TYPE!" }
 71   }
 72   write-host "done.";
 73 
 74   write-host "`tDeleting zip file..." -noNewLine;
 75   remove-item $tempFile;
 76   write-host "done.";
 77 }
 78 
 79 function test-wowaceaddon( [string] $addonName )
 80 {
 81   return ((get-wowaceaddon $addonName)-ne $null)
 82 }
 83 
 84 function get-wowaceaddon( [string] $addonName )
 85 {
 86   $xpath = ("//item[title='ADDON']" -replace 'ADDON', $_.Name);
 87   return $indexXmlDoc.SelectSingleNode($xpath);
 88 }
 89 
 90 # Setup a few things before we get started
 91 $wc = new-object System.Net.WebClient;
 92 $tempDir = join-path (get-content env:\temp) "PsWowUpdater";
 93 if (-not (test-path $tempDir)) { new-item -type directory -path $tempDir; }
 94 
 95 # Load in the WowAce Index file
 96 write-host "Downloading latest.xml from http://files.wowace.com";
 97 $uri = "http://files.wowace.com/latest.xml";
 98 $rssData = $wc.DownloadString($uri);
 99 $indexXmlDoc = [xml] $rssData;
100 
101 # Load in the WOWI config database
102 . (join-path $wowAddonDir "addons.ps1")
103 
104 (get-childitem $wowAddonDir | ? { $_.PSIsContainer }) | % {
105 ## SVN UPDATE
106   if (join-path $_.Fullname ".svn" | test-path ) {
107     if ($skipSvn.isPresent) {
108       write-host "$_ : Skipping SVN working copy";
109     } else {
110       write-host "$_ : Updating SVN working copy";
111       svn up -q $_.Fullname;
112     }
113   }
114 
115 ## WOWINTERFACE.COM
116   elseif ($wowiAddons.Contains($_.Name)) {
117     $stateFilePath = join-path $_.Fullname "PSUpdateAddons.state";
118     $localVer = "";
119     if (test-path $stateFilePath) { $localVer = (get-content $stateFilePath); }
120 
121     $uri = ("http://www.wowinterface.com/patcherXXXX.xml" -replace "XXXX", $wowiAddons[$_.Name]);
122     $wowiXml = [xml] $wc.DownloadString($uri);
123 
124     $downloadUrl = $wowiXml.UpdateUI.Current.UIFileURL;
125     $remoteVersion = $wowiXml.UpdateUI.Current.UIVersion;
126     $fileName = $wowiXml.UpdateUI.Current.UIFile;
127     $addonSource = "WowInterface.com";
128 
129     update-addon $addonSource $downloadUrl $remoteVersion $fileName
130   }
131 
132 ## WOWACE FILES
133   elseif (test-wowaceaddon $_.Name) {
134     $stateFilePath = join-path $_.Fullname "PSUpdateAddons.state";
135     $localVer = "";
136     if (test-path $stateFilePath) { $localVer = (get-content $stateFilePath); }
137 
138     $elt = get-wowaceaddon $_.Name;
139 
140     $downloadUrl = $elt.enclosure.url;
141     $remoteVersion = $elt.version;
142     $fileName = $downloadUrl.Substring($downloadUrl.LastIndexOf("/")+1);
143     $addonSource = "WowAce.com";
144 
145     update-addon $addonSource $downloadUrl $remoteVersion $fileName
146   }
147 
148 ## Unknown addon source
149   else {
150     write-host "$_ : Can't figure this one out. Skipping.";
151   }
152 }

Download update-addons.zip (2KB). And here is my addons.ps1 data file to update my wowi addons. Create a file like that in your Addons folder and the script will find it.

Have you ever suddenly gone into World of Warcraft and found yourself wondering, "what the hell is that button?" It happened to me a while back after a patch day update and I couldn't figure out which addon had put it there. It really started pissing me off.

I jumped over to the #wowace IRC channel on Freenode.net and asked if anyone had any ideas. They didn't, but they did have a cool trick for figuring out the Frame's name. Assuming you have any one of the Ace addons installed on your system, you can just use this slash command in game:

/print GetMouseFocus():GetName()

That will tell you the name of the frame which might help you figure out what addon created it. (It sure helped me.)

Enjoy!

Today Brad Wilson and I presented this talk at Seattle Code Camp 2.0. Here is the session description for those of you who didn't make it:

World of Warcraft is arguably the most successful massively multiplayer game in history. Millions of players from hundreds of countries all playing together to kill monsters and each other. What could be more fun? Well, for many geeks one thing that is more fun is taking advantage of the very extensible nature of the user-interface by writing addons and extensions in a programming language called Lua. Join Brad and Peter for this fun session where you will learn how to bend the WoW UI to your will. (We promise to leave some time at the end for a little game-time demos and Q&A.)

As promised, here are a number of links to the information we discussed today. I hope you enjoyed the talk as much as we enjoyed giving it.

Lua Information

• About Lua @ Lua.org
• Programming in Lua 1st Ed. @ Lua.org
• Lua 5.0 Reference Manual @ Lua.org
• Lua Tutorial @ Lua-users.org

World of Warcraft API Information

• Official World of Warcraft Interface AddOn Kit @ Blizzard.com
• World of Warcraft API @ WowWiki.com
• World of Warcraft System Events @ WowWiki.com
• Wow Client Version Changes @ WowInterface.com

WowAce Libraries Information

• Ace-OO 2.0 Documentation @ WowAce.com
• Ace-OO 2.0 Tutorial @ WowAce.com
• Welcome Home Tutorial @ WowAce.com

A little over nine months ago, much to the dismay of my wife, my addiction to World of Warcraft began. At first it was just another game to play in my spare time, but I quickly fell in love with the teaming aspects of playing in an online world with dozens of my friends and thousands of other people.

Shortly after that I discovered that the WoW client isn’t just a game shell, but is a fully customizable smart client environment. I started downloading mods from sites like WorldOfWar.net and WoWInterface.com. I started out simply with a set of addons called CTMod and slowly progressed into more and more addons.

Feb 08, 2006:

Mar 31, 2006:

Apr 01, 2006:

After that I discovered how amazingly configurable the environment can be when I discovered a set of addons called Discord Mods. DiscordFrameMover let me move, hide or resize any visual element on the screen. DiscordUnitFrames let me create very rich frames of information about my players, my targets and the members of my group. DiscordActionBars let me create button bars that change as the environment changed around me. This was amazing stuff.

Apr 04, 2006:

Apr 06, 2006:

Apr 16, 2006:

Then I decided I was ready to see how these addon things really worked. I started exploring the Lua language, the WoW API and the XML-based widget language. I started working on my first Addon: a simple reminder to tell me when my rogue’s poisons expired. What I found was that writing well designed modular code was frighteningly hard using the out-of-the box tools and API. Frustrated, I started looking around for alternatives and finally stumbled on the Ace libraries.

Using these libraries I was able to recreate my poison addon with a dozen or so lines of code and I didn’t come away feeling dirty from all the spaghetti in my Lua files. I felt like my code was nice and modular. The object-oriented nature of the Ace approach felt good.

As I explored Ace I learned that these folks had spent a LOT of time thinking about performance and memory consumption in their addons and had rewritten a number of important addons using their framework and thereby consuming a lot less resources. Another thing I liked that aligned well with my philosophically was the Ace attitude about using more small single minded addons instead of a few large monolithic addons. I immediately started systematically trying to replace all of my non-Ace addons with Ace replacements.

I also continued to expand my Rogue poison addon eventually turning it into a full blown ItemBuff management addon for all classes called FuBar_PoisonFu. When I finished that I realized that even though Ace is easier than stock WoW, there wasn’t really enough tutorial information to help people get started, so I wrote WelcomeHome - Your first Ace2 Addon over on the Ace wiki. I’m also working on two or three other addons that I will be publishing to WoWInterface.com via my authors portal.

Aug 21, 2006:

Aug 29, 2006:

Sept 06, 2006:

Sept 07, 2006:

This is where I am today. That last screenshot has changes I made to the Unit Frames today. I still use DiscordUnitFrames and DiscordActionBars, but most of my other mods are Ace addons. My framerates are up, my memory consumption is down and I’m having as much fun being an addon author as I am playing the game.

Since I know people will ask, here is my Addons list at this point:

Many of these you can get from www.wowinterface.com or ui.worldofwar.net. Others you have to dig a bit harder to find. Since most of the Ace developers use the same version control system, you can get up to the minute versions of many of the Ace mods from www.wowace.com/files. You should assume, however, that those are betas. If you prefer stable stuff, stick with the stuff published to the main sites.

Best of luck! If you play on Dragonblight, look me up. I’m Quaiche, Gaskett, Mirabel and Clavain in the Lithe guild.

Yeah, yeah. I haven’t been blogging lately. I’ve been hard at work on the the SC-BAT project, the kids have been taking turns being sick for more than a month, and when I get any spare time at all I’ve been playing World of Warcraft.

As a geek, one of the coolest things about WoW is that it is a completely customizable UI. It is basically a very good user customizable Smart Client. There is a back end server that keeps the world data and there is a rich interpreter on the front end that provides the user experience.

The shell of this application uses an interpreted scripting language called Lua and XML files (that look remarkably like XAML) to describe the frames, panels and UI elements. And… you can extend and customize this UI with your own plugins. In fact, there are whole community sites out there (like the one at WorldOfWar.net) that track and index all of the addons that are available.

Of course as a Smart Client geek, I can’t have all this power and not take advantage of it, right? So after spending the last month or so playing the game, learning how it works and trying out a number of different addons (aka ‘mods’), I decided it was time to start over and make my own custom UI.

Here is the result:

Here are the Add-ins I have installed right now:

For those of you who play WoW, I’d love to know what you think.