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So far, I think it's a higher resolution Diablo II. Very little has changed except for eye candy and some game mechanics. Also, rares really are rare in D3 (not so much in D2)!

It's good fun though and we have more character classes to choose from.

I'm disappointed though, I would like to be a 'Villager' or 'Farmer' ... and why not? Some martial arts and weapons supposedly evolved for farmers that needed to defend themselves ...

[ever]

I've just finished school ...

10 years of school ...

Congratulations.  You beat me to it!

Don't ever get a job and write your dissertation at the same time. Just a stupid idea! It took me an extra year because I did that.

I've just finished school ...

10 years of school ...

If you're asking about salary, then you shouldn't get a Ph.D. Wrong degree for you.

If you want to do research, then get a Ph.D.

Market not favoring the Ph.D.? I'm seeing loads of them shipping off to Google. I personally know 3 people who went to Google. I know of maybe 20 more who all went to Google, Netflix and Amazon. All of them have Ph.D.s. Just my bit of anecdotal evidence.

Oh, and as far as salary goes, I think I heard figures of about $180k to work at Netflix with a Ph.D. I heard similar salaries for Google and Amazon.

But yeah, in my opinion, you should only get a Ph.D. if you want to do research. Otherwise the training is a complete waste of time.

What's this Yahoo! thing you speak of?

Sounds like Newby awesomeness.

I do hope we get to hear about any FreeBSD experiences he has (if any) ...

In addition to the basic BNX features, I've recently added (among a lot of internal code cleanups and added standards compliance)

• Channel flood protection
• rejoin command
• who command

I plan to add a seen command too. Any features you'd like to see in IRCBNX?

Why who and seen you ask? Firstly, everyone on most IRC networks I've frequented are automatically invisible (mode +i), so you can't actually make any practical use of IRC's WHO command unless you're in the channel you're querying! Secondly, IRC's WHOWAS is apparently sometimes disabled (e.g. on freenode). I originally thought, "Gee, IRC has WHOWAS, why bother with seen?"

IRC folk apparently have trouble understanding how who is useful. Aside of good debugging information, who allows you to list the users in a channel you may not be able to join to ask for help (for a variety of reasons: banned, channel limit, invite-only, keyed, etc...). And well, a historical Battle.net reason for who was that you could determine if a server was split. I remember those days when you could see users in a channel that no one else in the channel could see and bots' who command was useful for checking if the bot was on a partially split server. The same applies to IRC I think ... IRC has serious splitting problems like early Battle.net (I almost wonder if Battle.net 1.0 was a heavily modified IRCd!).

I'm not so certain I'll embed a scripting engine now (many people seem to find it a PLUS that it doesn't embed a scripting engine!). At this point, I'm looking for simplicity ... I look at eggdrop, for example, and it feels like you have to be an expert to set it up. But it's IRC bot ... who the fuck wants to read documentation to set up something like that? No, Battle.net bots were superior in that respect ... very simple, functional, and entertaining. These IRC guys are crazy!

I'll have to pick Invert's brain about his modified BNX's botnet support (if he remembers) ... is a botnet really useful enough to be troubled to implement it?

I'm also conflicted on SSL support. I think Unreal is the only IRCd that supports SSL and with the export/customs laws, I'm not really sure it's worth the trouble. It'd be pretty easy to setup with OpenSSL though. Comments?

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb762159(v=vs.85).aspx

Much appreciated!

Random:

Here's a picture of a Flemish Giant rabbit:

I'm currently in the planning stages of a conversational IRC bot based on IRCBNX (basically rewrite response engine).

This bot will use an online machine learning approach to tackle the problem (as it will be online, it will be able to learn from users in real time).

I have no idea how well it will work. I'm largely unfamiliar with NLP (I work with computer vision now). My guess is that my approach will be inferior ... but I'd still like to try.

Basic pipeline will be something like:
Input --> Response regression (online update) --> Response candidate ranking (online update) --> Final response.

Currently, I need to construct a training set. So I'm considering harvesting chatter from IRC channels. I'll have to annotate (input,response) pairs from the harvested chatter initially.

Another problem I'd like to solve is to classify whether (input, response) is feasible. It would be nice for the bot to be able to learn by watching other people chat in a channel (but you have know who is responding to who!).

Suggestions or comments are always appreciated.

Run it windowless with an icon in the system tray (or whatever they are calling it nowadays)?

Thanks for the suggestion. As I am largely unfamiliar with Windows API, can you refer (if you know) to an MSDN reference?

I released 1.0. It's mostly just tidying up what was there and writing documentation. No server-side ban list management yet. It's much trickier than I anticipated.

I compiled 32 bit and 64 bit (why?) versions with MingW. Everything is statically linked, so hopefully it works correctly out of the box. I'm especially curious if it runs on Windows XP. The "latest" download is the source code, so you'll have to navigate to the "ircbnx" folder to get the executable.

Once I remember how to use rpmbuilder, I'll package it in RPM too ...

In all honesty, I wanted the bot to background like a proper daemon but I'm not sure how to deal with this in Windows (I don't really want it to be a service). So, it'll just show an empty Command Prompt like the old one ...

Feedback and suggestions are appreciated ... if you care.

The lack of dependency fetching is a nice draw to the software, statically linking is cool.  And I'm not sure about the VS license and open source confliction...  (I figure I'd respond since you seem actively into this and nobody else is remarking on it.. I've been reading it without responding for the most part.  It's a really cool project, I just wish I had free time to appreciate it. :()

The bot is practically finished. Every major feature of BNX (except designate) is implemented (with some extra IRC-specific functionality).

For the past 2 weeks, one instance (nickname is enslay) has been sitting on three networks: binaryninjas (#dojo), betawarz (#dk187,#beta), freenode (#ircbnx).

No problems yet.

Though, I'd like to add server-side ban list management (since IRC severely restricts the number of ban entries) to wrap up the first version.

In future versions, I think I need to embed a scripting engine into it to make it competitive with other bots. It also needs more secure access (e.g. over DCC) since server ops can potentially sniff messages you send through the server (though, the server really ought to be trusted ...).

I'll keep you (the forum) posted.

It's just a shame we could never accurately reproduce a battle.net environment to continue our takeover wars and the pursuit of more advanced bots. That pursuit fueled our interest in computers and, well, here we are ...

Sure sounds like an interesting game ... team up with friends, program bots and try take over channels. This totally screams web game ...

It depends on your agenda.

If you want to force users who distribute your code/executables to also distribute modifications to your source (or derivatives of it), then GPL is for you (though GPL will force such changes and derivative works to also be GPL).

If you don't care, then go permissive (BSDL or MIT). It's not like anyone distributing closed source versions of your code affects the open source nature of your project (i.e. your project remains open source even if Joe Company uses it in their product).

Though, these are not the only two licenses (but the most common).

You might want to use GPL if your software could be sold to end users. Though, smart users would probably opt for your already free version instead of paying for a corporate version with added features.

Some companies/people use GPL strategically. You distribute a free version of your software as GPL which effectively disallows commercial use. For a small fee, you sell a proprietary licensed version of your code that can be used commercially.

Even if you might not make a profit, permissive software might be used in big/important/historical projects (due to its permissive nature). Your software ends up in major commercial operating systems, military software, space software, medical software, etc... and you become legendary. Take the TCP/IP stack for example ... the BSD TCP/IP stack is BSD licensed. It's also the reference implementation and probably used in every major operating system (except Linux because they're hippies).

I would have expected some insight into the US' doom and gloom by now.

How about that Nate Silver? Shouldn't you be simulating the election with Gaussian processes?

So, I'm ready to make some binaries, though I'm not sure whether I should statically link the libraries or not on Windows. Opinions?

A static ircbnx binary for 64 bit Windows is ~7MB ... kind of clunky. Still, that incorporates PCRE, libevent2 and libstdc++. Though, I like the idea of simply using ircbnx without needing to find runtimes ... and I'm sure any users (if any) would appreciate that too.

Also, I hear Visual Studio's license does not allow open source development ... that you must protect the source code when you distribute the executable. Any truth to this?

Either way, I've been able to produce mingw32/64 compiled binaries. I might try using clang + libcxx instead of mingw and GNU libstdc++ for fun.

Comments?