Use secondlife-chatlog-merger to sync your Second Life chatlogs.

Today I've released secondlife-chatlog-merger version 1.0.0.

Now let me explain how and when this tool can be useful for you. Let's say you are a person like me, who has both a laptop and a desktop computer, and use both machines to communicate with people in Second Life. I like to keep track of my conversation history, so I have enabled chat logging.

By default Second Life logs your chat files to something like: "C:\Users\Administrator\AppData\Roaming\SecondLife\" In there there's a folder for each Avatar you log in with. My Avatar's name is "Aidamina Hunt" so there's a folder called "aidamina_hunt" in that directory. See Torley's Video Tutorial on chat logs to learn more about this

The problem with this is that you will have to sort through the chatlogs on both machines in order to retrieve a previous conversation. secondlife-chatlog-merger provides the solution. With secondlife-chatlog-merger you can merge the chat logs of two locations together in one location. You are recommended to only use this when you have timestamps enabled for your log files.

It will match all the files line by line and merge colliding texts together, making sure that all your chat is preserved in one location. You can even choose to let one of your source directories to be your destination path.

Read more about this tool in the Documentation.

Note: This version of secondlife-chatlog-merger features commandline input only. Later versions will come with a fullblown gui.

Use Google for Favicons

When I was playing around with some OpenSocial gadget code and used firebug to debug the javascript caching, I stumbled upon something interesting. You can use google to retrieve Favicons from websites.

Example:

http://www.google.com/ig/c/favicons?domain=twitter.com

This will produce the favicon for the domain twitter.com ()

Try it out yourself:

Warning: SLProfiles unsafe!

[Update: 2008-08-19] The problem seems to be resolved, I removed the logs, I was amazed by some of the reactions i got from the community members though. They rather want me to not look at the security, with the motto. If we don't know about it, it isn't there. Seems a bit shortsighted but alright, can't help them all. It's lovely how people that have no clue what is going on have such a strong opinion about it.

Also the site is still far from secure, hence the reason I am not retracting this post. From my point of view the warning is still valid.
Aidamina out.


Warning

I want to warn everyone using slprofiles.com or profileslive.com these sites are unsafe! I tried to warn the admin about the vulnerabilities in the site, he did not take responsibility and after me pushing harder and building a testcase, he decided to remove my account still accessable here with google caching from the website.

I recommend everyone that has an account on either of the websites to change your password to something you do no use for any other services, because your password is not safe and vulnerable to the outside world!

Details

The problem on this website is simply lazy design! The profile fields are not checked on script tags and allow you without too much trouble to insert javascripts into your profile. On top of that a major design flaw loads the value of the users password automatically in the accountinfo1.asp page. Which means that when a user is logged in and he or she visits another user's profile its easy to retrieve that persons password or any other hidden details like date of birth, even if a user set it to private! Any information that you entered in your profile is available to the attacker.

Confrontation

When i confronted the admin with the problems he showed little will to solve the problem, he changed a few small things but ignored most of my request. He clearly showed that he had no real interest in the popular profile site anymore. He told me his focus is on a new project.

I even offered to help him solve the issues, but he declined my request. After pushing further he decided to delete my account and profile from the website. I've been a member of this website since 2006 and it makes me sad to see that he just bans a longtime member and supporter of this website, just because he feels like it.

He also tries to blame me for the problems with the site, and several people have reported me to the Lindens, clearly not knowing what is going on. Remember I tried to help him, yet he tries to smear my good name.

I have email logs to back up my claims, feel free to email me, and i will forward you the evidence.

Note

If someone uses the same password for Second Life and SLProfiles it's possible for other people to steal your Linden Dollars!

Advice

CHANGE YOUR PASSWORDS NOW AND COMPLAIN WITH THE ADMIN!

Contact

SL: Aidamina Hunt
Email: aidamina@gmail.com

Apologies for the harsh tone in my post, but people have been making slanderous statements in regard to me. Trying to hurt my reputation and threatening me as a person. This is illegal.

jSocket Upgrade

After I blogged about jSocket, some two weeks ago, Manfred Weber, developer of socketjs, contacted me. He pointed me in the direction of the Socket class in ActionScript 3. That Socket class allows you to have an genuine Socket connection, with proper data reader and writers and without the zero terminated packets. So i decided to give it a go.

I had some problems getting FlashDevelop to work with ActionScript 3, but after that was resolved, it took me about a day to upgrade the system to the Socket class. From the outside not much has changed. You will notice a collection of data readers and writers in the jSocket class. And the SWF file grew larger to around 2300 bytes, which is very acceptable for me.

I've also added an example server to the trunk to show how one would use a jSocket connection. You can find the repository here.

I expect to reach my first milestone in a week or so and then I will release version 1.0.

jSocket, javascript with socket connectivity

Inspired by socketjs made by Manfred Weber and XMLSocket made by Andrea Giammarchi, I decided to write my own socket library for javascript. Both have their limitations, socketjs is not Object-Oriented and XMLSocket is only available in a packed version.


Three days later I present to you jSocket. jSocket is a lightweight library that makes it possible to connect live to a listening socket. This allows you to stream data directly to your browser. This does not use AJAX. It's fully Object-Orientated. The the connection is live and instant and communication is possible in both directions. In able to do this it uses a feature of Action Script called XMLSocket (not the same as Andrea Giammarchi's XMLSocket). As many of you will know, Action Script runs in Flash/SWF files. jSocket effectively is a bridge between javascript and Action Script.


I published jSocket on Google Code under the open source MIT License. Remember this is still a work in progress, but it's very stable at this stage. It requires jQuery and Flash Player to run.


On the security front, Flash security does apply. This means however that, with the proper security policy server side, you are able to make cross domain connections.


The only drawback is that Flash expects zero terminated packets and because the sockets were intented for XML data, you can only send wrapped binary data, for instance wrapped in base64 strings. Flash also sends out zero terminated packets.

So check out jSocket on jsocket.googlecode.com where you can find information, documentation and examples.

jQuery

Javascript has always been one of my favorite languages, mostly because of it's flexibility, integration in modern browsers and usability. And over the past few years I've used it in several projects. Mostly browserbased weborientated applications.

About six months ago, i stumbled upon jQuery, a javascript library. In the past I've always stayed away from libraries like jQuery, because in my experience relying on 3rd party code, can become a debugger's worst nightmare.

But fueled by my curiosity I decided to give it a try. I was particularly interested in it's ability to "query" the DOM (Document Object Model), something that for me used to be a cross-browser compatibility puzzle. jQuery allows you to jQuery the DOM with css selectors such as "#BlogItem" to find the element with the id = "BlogItem" and ".Text" to find all elements with the class = "Text", but after some research i found out that this functionality is only the tip of the iceberg.

The library features cross-browser implementations for Event handling, Css manipulation, DOM traversing, Ajax, and more, as well as numerous utilities to lighten the life of the average javascript developer. On top of that it has a rigid plugin system with an active plugin development community that contributes to a rapidly growing plugin repository that already contains hundreds of useful scripts that plug in to the library.

All these features come with excellent documentation maintained in a public wiki. Even most of the plugins come with documentation. Documentation includes samples and detailed explanation of options.

jQuery is an open source project provided under the MIT and GPL licenses.

In September 2007 jQuery launched a daughter library called jQuery UI, a library that combined several popular jQuery plugins into a library focused completely on user interface interaction. Since the launch the UI components have been severely refined and there have been several additions to the library.

The most important property of jQuery is that it increases efficiency of the code and at the same time decreases development time drastically. jQuery is used on many websites and has proven itself very valuable in webapplication development.

Interested? Go check out their website at jQuery.com or go to the jQuery download page, if you are interested in contributing to their project be sure to got their development portal.

Also learningjquery.com contains some excellent tutorials on how to get started with jQuery.

Enjoy.

New year, new opportunities

Well it's 2007 and my site has been empty for quite a while now, so I decided its time for fresh start, so i opened up this blog. I want to start of with apologizing for my very crappy English, I'm working on it. If you see a typo or a grammatical error, please dont hesitate to correct me.

Maybe its good to tell a bit about myself. My name is Tjeerd Jan van der Molen and I'm a Dutch Computer Science student attending classes at the Hanze Hogeschool in Groningen. The last couple of years I've been working on several public and private projects on the internet.

One of those is Tatsumaki: Land at War, a promissing MMORPG, with a feudal Japanese setting. You should really check it out, you won't regret it.

Another project I am working on is Biosfear Reunion which is a reverse-engineered server, for the old, yet popular MMORPG Biosfear aka Laghaim aka Savage Eden which will go public this year.(So far we've only been doing private testing sessions)

Other then that I'm doing a lot of research in different areas, like: Artificial intelligence, compiler development, script parsing, network clustering.
Remember...knowledge is power.

Other then that I've been spending a lot of time on Second Life.
For the people that have been living in a cave for the last couple of years: is a so called Metaverse, a virtual world where people from all over the world can interact. Second Life has its own currency (Linden dollars) which can be traded with US dollars.

It's a great place to meet people and "waste" a couple of hours.
Contact me in world if you want, my user name is Aidamina Hunt.