Archive for December 2009

G’day Peepz; You’re Awesome

Monday, December 21, 2009

Totally unrelated photo of the moment, just because. May the warmth of the flame carry us through the long winter nights of finals preparation?

It is morning and I have two final exams later today back to back… and I’m slightly ill. As a result, I have been taking a lot of time off to think about random things. Today will be a disaster, but I’ll survive. I know that whenever I think of my wonderful friends. Because of you, I feel that I am not alone in the world. Because of you, I feel that I am special. Because of you, I have an audience for my silly exploits. Because of you, I can pour my mind out onto the internets. If you’re reading this, I thank you very much for sharing in my thoughts.

Sometimes I feel that I have not spent as much time with you as I could have. While I am not studying, I am your regular hacker and script monkey, instead of being useful. I might even have offended you at times when I am not feeling my best. And during the past few days I have not been keeping up at all with what’s going on around me. It is my ultimate goal to be useful to society… but how could I, if I could not even help my closest friends? As I partake of this wild life’s journey, there are those that I would not, could not forget. I hope you can forgive my selfishness.

It may sound strange, but I’m going to say this anyway: I love you and I treasure your friendship. Knowing you has made my life meaningful in so many ways, and I have grown so much because of you. I am proud to know you all.

Bark with me if you’re my dawg?

Posted in General | 2 Comments »

Omegle Group Chat, Revisited

Thursday, December 10, 2009

Since the introduction of Omegle Group Chat, a netizen by the name of OmLeif (presumably Leif K-Brooks of Omegle) joined my IRC channel and expressed his dissatisfaction with both the spam bots and my solution. Although he declined to discuss his plans for improving Omegle, he did promise to work on the problems. We knew that change was afoot.

When I checked my chat bot this morning, I discovered that it was being subjected to reCAPTCHA challenges. This welcome change has drastically cut down the amount of spam seen on Omegle. While it appeared that Group Chat was no longer necessary (its original purpose was to create an oasis amidst the spam) or viable, those in my IRC channel asked for more. Knowing that Group Chat still had a place, I set out to rewrite the entire framework.

The fundamental changes are:

  • the bot no longer needs to maintain tens of simultaneous connections, since the spam rate is much lower
  • IRC support sits at the core of the system instead of having been added on as an afterthought
  • should the bot encounter a reCAPTCHA challenge, users present in the channel will be able to solve the challenge via the reCAPTCHA API

To see Group Chat in action, feel free to join #inportb on freenode. Or if you want, you might just luck out on Omegle… Have fun out there!

Posted in Computing, Hacks | 10 Comments »