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WLM Plug-InsFinally they are here, WLM Plug-Ins. Boy boy boy. It took about an hour to figure it all out (including dinner ;-), but the result is here. A pre-made example and a nice post on Mess.be by the one and only Inkeh. Yeah.. right, let's not get too worked up about them. I still feel a lot is lacking in the MessengerClient 'API' for plug-ins. Right now there is almost no "advanced support" for stuff. Either way, to keep things from becoming too technical I spared Mess.be the protocol details. For some reason I dont think most of their (or should I say "our" by now?) readers appreciate ramblings from some Computer Science guy. Here's the deal: Whenever someone sends a message or does something with a Plug-In, your client will notify you of this by promting the message "xyz is using plugins, which may be sending messages for them". How it does this? Simple: It sends a "PlugIn-Context: 1" with every message. Also, it sends a P4-Context header with every message sent by the plugin. Besides plug-ins, three new ClientID bits have been added. One has been identified as MSNC6, 0x60000000. Other bits that were added are 0x100000 and 0x400000. Their meaning is still unknown. Let me know if you figure out the meaing of these bits, and while you're at it, also check out 0x1000 and 0x80000 which were added earlier on in the BETA ;-) Most annoying things about Messenger contacts<ranting mode on> So, once more some random person from "ZEH INTERNET!" has added me to their contact list. Now I usually don't mind, but this person once again confirmed the great thing IM has brought us: too much use of txt-typing and abusive use of emoticons. Yes, that's right, those are, I think, two of the most annoying things about my Messenger contacts. Another, somewhat annoying, feat is people who use nicknames like this: "†°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸(_MÏ¢ĦÃÊL_)°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸†", but I can live with that. Now let's talk about txt-typing for a minute. While I'm sure its
very convenient to use txt-typing on a mobile phone, I think it should stay
right there. I don't even use it on my phone, anyway. Either way, a PC
is not a mobile phone. In fact, I could argue that txt-typing is probably slower
on a PC than it is on a mobile phone. You have a whole keyboard, rather than 10
(or 12) keypads stuck close together. If one would learn to type properly, they
wouldn't have to resort to txt-typing to "type faster". Nevermind the
fact that READING it is probably 10 times slower if the contact is using
extensive txt-typing. Luckily, not all of my contacts use txt-typing,
and those that don't also seem to be the err.. more intelligent people (gee,
what a coincidence!).
Either way, I'm just ignoring people that txt-type constantly
now.
Soo, what about them emoticons? Now, I don't mind emoticons. In fact, I
think they are pretty cool.. Including animated emoticons. Okay, except
the size of animated emoticons. They shouldn't have extended the size
of the emoticons to 49x49 pixels, because it looks a) ugly and b) makes text
harder to read. To make it even worse, some people put emoticons under normal
letters or punctuation marks, or even common words. Things like "hi", "?" etc
are then hardly recognizable, and it takes a while before you figure out the
meaning of those insane, animated emoticons and what they represent. To give an
example, someone said THIS to me the other day.. First one to decipher it gets a
cookie.
 I blame the emoticon stuff on the nasty installers that are going around these days. They promise "loads of free emoticons" (nevermind that they are also bloody annoying), and some of them probably even add the emoticons with common words etc as shortcuts. To make matters worse, most of these installers (and I've seen a dozen of them by now) also usually install spyware, adware, or some intrusive messenger hook which sends "To get cool emoticons, go to ..." every time someone opens a converstation. Now that I think about it, I get really annoyed by "ASL?" as
well. I mean, what is up with that? People add me, or come into
BOT2K3's chat and the first thing is "ASL?" or "Who are you?".. Well excuse me..
but YOU added ME. You tell ME who YOU are first. Besides, if you add me, I would
claim you pretty well damn know who I am, why add me otherwise? Besides, what do
you need my ASL for? If you can have a good conversation with me, who cares
really? Do you walk up to random people in a mall and go "hey, ASL?"? No, of
course you don't.
I hope someday everyone will need to do a required exam before they can
even get anywhere near the internet. Proper typing, netique, etc,
will all be part of the exam. And of course a lesson in maintaining a PC,
so they won't install all kinds of spyware, etc. At least that will keep
the idiots out. Bah.
<ranting mode off> PHP PP3 Example codeAnd another snippet of example code was added to MSNPiki for Passport 3.0 authentication, this time written in PHP by Mark. Thanks Mark! Click here to view the source code. Java & Perl PP3 Example CodeIt's a good thing to see people help out the MSN Proto community again. Tom van der Woerdt sent me the following Java example today: clicky. I haven't tested it myself, but I take it it works properly ;-) I figured I'd add a little myself as well, and have uploaded a reworked version of the PP3 module BOT2K3 uses (that I wrote myself). I haven't tested it, but I changed very little, so it's bound to work correctly. Let me know if there are any problems. Clicky! PP3 Example C# codeHere is a snippet of C# code written by Darkener Daemon EX for authenticating using Passport 3.0 "SOAP" requests. Also, if you are interested in authenticating using PP3, the comments made by ZoRoNaX on my previous blog entry might interest you. Clicky: http://siebe.bot2k3.net/docs/files/PP30_SecurityToken.cs. The $$ math on BOT2K3Disclaimer: this is in no way a little blog post trying to sell BOT2K3. BOT2K3 won't be sold, ever (unless you pay us a couple of million bucks). So I think for about 99.9% of my readers there is one simple message: don't even bother ;-). Either way, we had a couple of bids in the past of people who wanted to buy our source code. No big deal, they figured they couldn't afford it anyway. But how much is BOT2K3 really worth? I have done some really rough calculation before, and decided to do it again to get some insight in it myself as well.. And why not share it with you? So, to determine how much BOT2K3 is worth I'll take a look at man-hours first. On average, a fresh bachelor Computer Science graduate earns roughly $50,664 anually, according to CollegeJournal. I know that to be a little less in the Netherlands, where the average salary is somewhere around €27,500, or $33,341. So let's take the average of that, seeing as BOT2K3 is a US-Dutch cooperation... $42,002.5, or about $3500 per month. Next let's look at how many hours we spent coding BOT2K3 v4.1. BOT2K3 works with a "build system", where ever build increment is a code-swap between me and Nick. Simple, but sufficient. Usually this also means that every build swap means 1 day work. On average I spend about 6 to 8 hours a day working on BOT2K3, I will assume Nick does roughly the same amount of work. Currently I am working on build 385, assuming there were a couple of double builds (multiple builds per day), let's say we spent 370 days working on it. So that's 370*7*2(=5180) man-hours, or about 32 months. So, looking at man-hours alone, BOT2K3 v4.1 would be worth around 32*$3500=$112,000. Not bad for a couple of students, eh? I think we can add up to that the "market share" (ohh that sounds neat ;p) we already have, including the name, etc. Right now we have roughly 23,000 people who have added us, of which 20,000 have been assigned a mirror spot. I'm picking a random number here, but let's say each user is "worth" $0.5. That means we can add another $10,000 to our previous amount, now totalling $122,000. Another five grand for the name, plus domain, etc etc, should just do the trick. So we're looking at a final price of about $127,500. Sweet holy moly! ;-) Again, these are just rough estimates. I have no clue about the actual market value of BOT2K3, someone with the proper training & degrees might figure that out. For now I'll settle with $127,500 ;-). 401 Unauthorized? I don't think so.Hmm. Well, something is changing, although I cannot exactly pinpoint
what. This weekend all of the sudden BOT2K3 refused to sign in. At
first I thought we were the only one (after all, it would only be "logical" if
BOT2K3 couldn't sign in.. being an illegal MSN bot and all that), but
then I read a few posts on Hypothetic of people claiming the exact same thing.
When trying to authenticate, the server would bounce back an "Account locked
out" error, regardless of whether the account was actually locked out or
not.
Some claimed that switching to SSL helped. Until recently many people who
built third party clients did not use SSL, but instead relied on the servers
also being available on the default HTTP port 80. I decided to switch BOT2K3 to
SSL, too.. And while at it, make it "clean" and "proper" by using LWP (the old
code was rather quick & dirty using nothing but IO::Socket). At first I
thought it was working -- All BETA accounts could sign in fine all of the
sudden. So, I uploaded the code to the server... Nothing. No account could sign
in. And the strangest part was, when trying them on my own PC they
did work. Strange, huh?
So, I came to the conclusion that we should perhaps try the new way of
authenticating. Passport 3.0. Recently launched, I figured that perhaps
Microsoft is busy removing Passport 2.0 servers. And whatdya know! After a bit
of messing around, tweaking things etc, it worked! BOT2K3 can now succesfully
sign in again, and so can all my other test accounts, etc. I suggest
everyone who works on their own third party applications to switch, before
it's too late ;-) So you thought you could make a buck from MY code eh?Wrong. Thanks to Tom, who brought this to my attention: apparently some guy decided to rip my (albeit very old) code for Visual Basic 6 I once published to show how to do basic P2P transfers for MSN Messenger. The code clearly included a message saying "Copyrighted *blaat blaat* May not be sold or used for personal gain *blaat blaat*" or something along those lines. Well, I guess people just don't read those messages anymore. The guy (I assume it's a guy) blatantly ripped the code, added P11/12 support (congrats, but you got some nasty bugs in the code, pal) and republished it.. But there is one catch.. You have to pay €1,60 for it. I contacted him a while ago and am still waiting for a reply. If I have not yet received one by tomorrow, I think I'll publish his code somewhere so people can dowload it for free, and contact his host for hosting copyrighted material. Fire with fire and all that, you know. You'll be the first to know what happens next! ;-) Update: That was quick. Source code was removed. Underpants Man.Did someone steal your undies? Is your g-string not quite dry yet and you really need it? If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find him, maybe you can hire... Underpants Man! * UM flies around the room (woosh woosh!)  Yeah, I'm bored. Bite me. Oh and if you are my future employer, please ignore this post. Everyone does something weird in their lives, this is what I do! Besides, we can all have a good laugh about this later, right guys? |
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