This being more of a generalised post about the shitcocks lovely people who use the Underground everyday. The people who seem to be in their own little world of acceptability who think that they are the sole being on the planet and that they could do no harm… those are the people who I choose to write about now.

So yes, the tubes all went to hell this morning (a tad worse than usual, with a fire causing the closure of the Paddington Underground entrances for the District & Circle and Bakerloo lines). Which means that the only Underground station running of out Paddington would be the Hammersmith and City line, which it appears the world is trying to get onto at the same time. Due to this massive number of people coming and going there were extreme numbers of people moving off and onto the platform. So the Underground staff decided to give priority to people trying to get off the platform, which is usually a sensible idea, since otherwise its just going to end up with someone under a train. But due to the slowness of these people who appear to be oblivious that there’s about 200 people waiting to get down onto the train that’s waiting, by the time they were off the platform, the next incoming tube had arrived. So just as we were about to move down, we would get stopped and have to wait again. Repeat this for roughly 30minutes and you have some pissed off Londoners trying to get to work. But as if the annoyance of waiting for 30minutes wasn’t enough, people were pushing their way up the queues to also get down onto the Hammersmith line, queue shouting and screaming here for at least 5minutes. Luckily at this point the TLU staff had realised that the crowd was getting.. unamused to say the least, and stopped people getting off the incoming train until we had a chance to actually get out of Paddington.

Also following onto the list of annoying people, are the people who have backpacks (ok, I have one too but…) decide that when at rush hour on the Tube, they should keep their bag on their back and take up double the space! Rather than taking it off and putting it between their feet. It seems people have forgotten that bags can in fact go on the ground and the floor!

And finally, there’s the people who try to get on the trains before letting other people off, however this one is easily combated with a “oh I am sorry did I stomp on your foot” or “I am sorry, did I just fall off the train elbowing you in the chest.. I am SO sorry”.

The Underground is fun

For those who know me for my World of Warcraft addons, you’ll know I created a very popular extension which was called EnemyCastBar. What this allowed you to do was to see your opponents casting bar for their spells, therefore allowing you to (and if you could) interrupt them at the last possible second. This was especially effective for rogues fighting any healing class so that they would save a stun for when they attempted to heal. Having this tool to see not only the length of a cast time, but also what they were casting at you made PvP a lot more interesting, as effectively everyone knew when you were doing something, and subsequently how to counter you…

“Ahh, Mr. Warlock there is casting Shadow Bolt, I’ll cast Shadow Ward to protect myself from part of the damage”

“Ahh, Mr. Priest there is trying to heal himself, I’ll fear him to cancel the heal”

However the addon didn’t start as a pure PvP mod, it started as a proof of concept addon just to see if I could do this. The idea was generated from the original Boss Mod scripts from CT_RaidAssist, which alerted you to when a certain boss event was about to occur. As all the raiding encounters in WoW are based on timed events, this meant showing warnings was very simple once the timings had been worked out.

I then “ported” over the Boss Mod scripts into EnemyCastBar to provide a full PvE raiding section, for the whole of Molten Core, Blackwing Lair and some of Ahn’Qiraj. These visual timers allowed for some encounters to be near trivialized as you knew exactly when an ability/event was about to occur. Where as before EnemyCastBar you only had about 5seconds notice, as all warnings were done in a text alert format…

“Fear in 5seconds!”

Providing a visual timer allowed you to monitor the situation completely, it also allowed you to keep checking when a special event was going to occur, so that you were not caught off guard at any time.

So why am I writing about ECB? Well, after I stopped playing WoW, I handed the maintenance of the addon to Natur so that it could still keep running after patch releases etc. He did a great job of maintaining it, and subsequently took my addon to levels I couldn’t imagine. But that isn’t, again, why I am talking about it.

In about 2months (maybe less), the expansion for WoW called The Burning Crusade will be released, and within this, there will be my addon, or rather my idea. As the idea behind EnemyCastBar has been integrated into TBC, this gives me mixed feelings regarding the whole situation. It means my coding or idea, no idea which, was good enough to be merged into the most popular MMORPG in the western market. Meaning that an estimated 7million subscribers to WoW will see my invention in their game play everyday now, rather than it being a percentage of the market who actively researched and installed addons.

As good as that is, as I am quite proud, but theres only one part of this which eats away at me. Which is the fact that I, nor Natur, receive any mention of the creation and maintaining of the addon in the first place that I can find. Ok, the integrated version will never compete with the version we make, but even then, a quick “hi, since your addon impressed us so much, and the fact its being widely used, we are going to merge it with the game for The Burning Crusade”. But no, Blizzard have sent me nothing of the sort, which is why I am slightly annoyed. Ok I agreed to the terms and conditions, and I knew that, but I thought Blizzard was a but more community oriented. Also I know I am no longer the official maintainer, and I don’t create releases anymore, this isn’t about that. It’s more just the general principle. I just really hope that they don’t screw it up completely, although they seem to be making a good attempt at killing off the addon community with the changes they are making for TBC.

Bottom line, they must respect the authors, creators and maintainers, even if its only a small amount, perhaps they think integration is good enough, I don’t. The respect is still needed because without us, addons such as CT_RaidAssist (probably the most downloaded addon for WoW), Scrolling Combat Text, and now EnemyCastBar, wouldn’t have existed in the first place for them to effectively.. “steal”.

On a final note, it will be interesting to see if other MMORPG’s will pick up on the idea of seeing enemy spell cast times, and to see if they put similar functionality into their games as well… damn me for not copyrighting it!

So another week of work goes by, and along with that a miniature world of delays and problems on the tube. I can hear you now, “well what’s new about that one?”, unfortunately as im learning very quickly that this isn’t some freak occurrence that the tubes don’t run on time and can’t be relied on for keeping time or even running. So, to combat this situation, and hopefully make my life a little easier I knocked up a little app to get the service status of the London Underground from the Transport For London web-site and display it in, yeah you guessed it, a client side application!

Again, it all started off being very simple, but then progressed and gained features. Currently it fetches the service status every 5minutes which is configurable via the command line when you start the program. For example..

tlu-status.exe 60

…would mean it goes and fetches the data every 60 seconds. Although I wouldn’t recommend you set it that low, I think the TFL webmaster might have something to say about it otherwise. Again, like the other apps I have created so far, they minimise to the tray, as I don’t see a reason for a background program to remain on the task bar other than when your using it. So for those who are interested in seeing this wonderfully uselessful app…

I have already has people asking why I made this into a app if the information is already available on the internet? Well.. I’m lazy and I can’t be arsed to load up a web-site if I want status updates, I just want it on my desktop, always being available quickly. It also means I can just put it on another screen, and glance at it occasionally during the day to see how things are going.

Download Links

TLU Status (937kb) - (Sorry, this doesn’t work any more since they changed their website)

After creating some very simple applications in WinBinder to test to see how things worked out, I decided to try and make something a little more challenging. So I came up with the idea of a Winamp interaction application, starting off slowly with just the plan to get the current track and artist name from Winamp and displaying it to the user. From there, if I wanted to, I could expand the program to possible do statistics on what you’ve played. (I do realise that there are applications that already do this, but this is a learning process).

So after getting the WinampCOM object working, I managed to get what I required out of Winamp, and was displaying it to the user. Then I had a mini-brainwave about people using Winamp, more specifically using it while in a full screen application, where you can’t see the Winamp window any more. I know myself I load up my winamp and let it loose on random play with my mp3’s, but if I was in a full screen app, I wouldn’t be able to see whats playing (short of alt+tabbing anyway). So I dug around some more with COM objects and then suddenly remembered about the SAPI.SpVoice object.

So 5minutes later, the application is now reading out the track names as you switch, and also reading in the ID3 tags if they exist. Not only that, but after a suggestion from Jace Arnold to make it pause the track while its talking, another 5minutes later and that was in as well! So after starting off, this is what it ended up looking like…

It also minimises to the tray, as I have a serious pet peeve about programs taking up taskbar space which could easily run from the taskbar in the background.

Download Links

Winamp Readout (906kb) - winamp-readout_setup_1.0a.zip

I’m currently mainly coding in PHP still (love live PHP!) because I find being able to mock up pages or programs quickly is a god send, especially since Rubem Pechansky created a wonderful extension called WinBinder. Which allows you to create client side applications extremly quickly, think how easy mIRC dialogs were, and then put that with PHP, and you can make some very powerful programs. Rapid client side application development with PHP *glee*. Here’s a quote from their web-site about it…

“WinBinder is an open source extension to PHP, the script programming language. It allows PHP programmers to easily build native Windows applications, producing quick and rewarding results with minimum effort. Even short scripts with a few dozen lines can generate a useful program, thanks to the power and flexibility of PHP.“

Well, after being exposed to a blog at my new job, I decided it was probably about time I had my own to scrawl down anything I felt like. However, I will refuse to allow this blog to decent into the madness of “omg, my life is crap, wahh wahh wahh” because well.. thats sad. So this place will probably be used for exposure for various Plan B programs i’m writing. Plan B being the “organisational” (loosely put) name for little programs I create nown and again.