MPM

You know, I bought this book and was really really looking forward to reading it, but now... :/ Go ahead and read it still. It's a fun read, especially if you grew up in/near that time period, it just won't have much lasting power because of its references. It's kind of like the Scary Movies. They're funny, but since they have very specific references, they won't age well.

I believe people farm clues from the HAM cave to gather pages quickly. Level 1 clues are quicker to complete than level 3.

I just finished "The Egg Said Nothing" and was shocked at how great it was. It's a book in the bizarro genre, so it's very absurd. Think "John Dies at the End". I wholly recommend this book if you want an amusing read involving time travel and romance and not knowing what's going to happen next. I'm also finishing up "Ready Play One" for the second time. I saw it in a bookstore the other day and grabbed it because it's a decent story. It's amusing and softly cyberpunk. It's not as amazing as everyone says it is because it's really just a nostalgia circljerk with a little story thrown in. But I've read worse. I grabbed "The Old Man's War" in the humble book bundle. I finished that and am currently halfway through the third book of the series. It's a pretty good series and I like the characters in them. I intend to finish off the series and read the complementary universe books when I get to it. Since I finished "The Egg Said Nothing", I started reading "Rampaging [bleep]ers of Everything on the Crazy Shitting Planet of the Vomit Atmosphere". I'm pretty sure the censor is going to break the link to Amazon, but meh... It's a collection of 3 bizarro stories and the first one looks pretty good. Amazon says the stories are satire, so I'm sure I'm going to love them. Ok, I think that's all the books I'm reading/have read in the last couple days... I'll head out after leaving my favorite quote from "The Egg Said Nothing".

In most *nix based systems, the character '~' is a shortcut to the user's home directory. So, if you go to your home directory and vi .emacs, you'll hop right into it. You can do this by typing "cd ~; vi .emacs" or just typing in "vi ~/.emacs" Files that begin with a '.' are hidden files. They aren't listed unless you "ls -a". The reason no one said specificly that '~' is the home directory is because it's basic, intro class knowledge. If I tell you to go to the /etc/httpd/conf folder, I don't need to tell you to "cd /etc/httpd/conf" because you should know how to do it already.

All these posts make me feel dated. I remember grabbing an inventory of food, a cocktail shaker and a glass and thieving palidines drunk. Now, no one steals from them at all.

After the first book, there are hardly any similarities between the show and the book. And the ones that are there are only vaguely similar.

I've already reached my book goal for the year. I was aiming at 52 and I'm a day or two away from 54. I'm finishing up the Dexter series and will be starting on The_Menstruating_Mall once I do. It'll be my first book in the bizarro genre, and it looks good.

Thanks everyone :) Kaphias, I'm trying to pop in a little more often. It seems like there are still a few older people still here. Tim, which doctor's is it?

I found a picture of myself before I lost weight, and I'm proud of it.

If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing. -- Malcom X If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever. --1984 There is no belief, however foolish, that will not gather its faithful adherents who will defend it to the death --Isaac Asimov

I actually read three+ books at a time depending on where I am. Home: The feed trilogy by Mira Grant. It's a cheap zombie thriller set in the 2040s about a small news blog team who gets drug into a conspiracy plot. I've read the first two books before and I'm rereading them because the finale came out and I would be a little lost without a refresher. Phone: I'm reading the 2nd book in the Amoral Bridge chronicles called "The Know Circuit". It's Ok. The series was an online serial novel and it seems self published, so there are issues that jar you out of the story. Work: When I have a couple minuets of break because a script is running, I read a paragraph or two of a story. Right now, I'm on Metamorphosis by Kafka. I haven't gotten very far in it yet, but it's looking like it'll be a good book/story.

An unicorn is not members only, it is south of the varrock east mine (there is a bear there too). And maybe on other places like north of barbian village too. I had no idea :| Well then, I withdraw 5, because it's obvious that you're already doing that.

For those of you who don't know what it is, LOIC is an easy to set up program that joins you into a voluntary botnet that you can leave at any time. Controllers will use these botnets to cause a DDOS on various websites/servers that they are currently protesting. Tonight, someone compared a DDOS using LOIC to the sit ins during the civil rights movement, and it can't be denied that there are some similarities. In both cases, the goal is to disrupt normal operation. In a sit in, the disruption is caused by protestors taking all the available booths/seats in a business so real customers can't be served. In a DDOS, the server is crippled by the huge numbers of requests to the website. Again, real customers can't access the site. Is this a legitimate form of protesting in the modern age? If you do, do you think that these modern protesters should be as proud of their achievements as the civil rights protestors? I personally think this is a great way to protest. It requires next to no effort on the majority part, but is just as effective(if not more effective) as a sit in. You also have the advantage of being mostly anonymous. Two of the problems with sit ins is that there wouldn't be enough protestors to make a statement or you could end up in jail. A DDOS mostly eliminates these problems. However, I don't believe that the individuals involved are as important in history as those during the civil rights movement. The civil rights protestors basically risked their lives being involved in a sit in. They could be thrown in jail. They could be beaten. They could be ostracized from their community if they were white. Another modern protest method is hacking. As a preface, I'm atheist. However, I think most religious people on these forums, as well as any unaffiliated other people, will agree with me when I say that the Westboro church is a intolerant and bigoted organization who are wrong(while they have the freedom to express themselves however they want...). At the end of Feburary, hackers targeted many of the WBC's websites and took them down. To this day, some of them are still inoperable. I believe that these hackings are the same as a protestor doing property damage. Both of them are criminal offenses, but are still considered nonviolent because no one is harmed. I don't think a hacking is quite to the level of throwing a brick through a shop window though, even though I would completely support both forms of protests in certain matters. I only think that a hacking is less effective than destruction because the information is digital. It's easier to fix a destroyed website than it is to fix a shattered shop window. How do you feel about the two different types of protests, and would you(or have you) support one of these if a matter came up that you felt needed heard? Sorry for the wall of text

Nice work Xena/peter(based on the code I think it's xena). This has been long overdue. I have a couple of suggestions. 1: Remove the current item groups. There are monsters that can drop multiple herbs for example. I'd like to know that the monster I'm killing can drop 2 rannarrs at a time. 2: Add a new item group function. Going off of the herbs example, there are some monsters that drop more than one type of herb or item in the standard drop table. When you hover over one item in the group, it should make the other items in the group more visible somehow. Bold maybe? 3: Switch the item image to a tooltip, like on the item index. I'm very easily distracted. I noticed when I moused over an item, the image appeared in the header box. Then, I forgot what item I was wanting to click the link for because I had to move my gaze away from the list too much. If you do #2, I don't know how possible this will be, because the tooltip might cover up an item group. There is a javascript object called offsetParent that you could use to check the position of the other links. I checked to see how far backwards compatible it is, and it looks like browsers made after 2006 should handle it without a problem. 4: essiw brought up images that don't exist. I'd suggest a php script that checks to see if the image exists, then displays either it or a "missing image" image. This would be useful if you have a .png of the item uploaded instead of the .gif. 5: Items that are dropped only in members worlds should be listed as members drops. A unicorn is a members only monster, so I'd expect all of it's drops to be members only. I don't know if there are any monsters that drop specific f2p items only on members worlds, so you would probably be safe checking the monster's p2p status.

You'll probably need some ducolax.

Procedural does not mean it requires guidance. It means that a set number of rules (physics) were followed to create the current universe. Gravity condenses gases together to form a sun. Solid materials condense and form planets. These planets revolve around a sun. On some planets that are in the "goldilocks belt" and have the right conditions, amino acids can form from the atoms that are available. These amino acids would become more complex based on their interactions with other molecules. These complex structures(coacervate) would be the first "life". They will compete for resources to become bigger and reproduce by splitting. Evolution has begun. Slowly, these coacervates become more and more complex by including various structures, such as a lipid membrane and become what we would consider cells. Again, this is done proceduraly, based on the rules of chemical reactions and physics. If a coacervate had tried to incorporate a membrane that would dissolve in the substance it floats in, that iteration would have failed. Now, you say that the universe and the rules that created it had to have a creator, but I disagree. Right now, we don't know how everything was created, but the idea of a creator is more preposterous than any scientific explanation that I've heard. The basic logic of people who believe in a creator is "The universe is too complex to happen 'randomly'. There must have been a creator". A creator completely defies that statement. If there is a creator, it would have to be more complex than what it is creating. Hence, who made the creator? Hey there wyrm, long time.

Holy hell, I didn't expect to see your name pop up any time soon. Wonder if some other retired players will be making a pit stop to say hi.

I've played for... 9 years now, and I've never been hacked. I've never had a bank pin, and my password is at least 7 years old right now. I agree with tripsis, normally it's the hacked persons fault for using an insecure password, reusing the password, downloading things without scanning them, or using bots.

Kelly bluebook says the price would be a bit higher than that. That was using some random assumptions about the condition and options of the car. However, thinking back to my second car. I bought it when it was 10 years old for about the same price, and I still have it 5 years later. You may as well get it. Either it's a great car that you can keep for years, or it is a mediocre car. Either way, since it's your first car and it isn't a piece of crap, you've got a solid ride.

If you work it down to a text list of names for each skill, GNU sort's -u flag removes duplicate values and -o lets you specify an output file. sort -u [list1] [list2] [list3]... -o mergedlist I don't foresee any problem with mpm's database, just add all the users and: SELECT DISTINCT username FROM highscores;(or some such) Is it a password generator, by chance? :D I've made a million password generators :P Edit: Ohhh, I just got what you meant. That's not my real password :P

Yeah, I realized that I could just make it sleep for a while if it doesn't find any users. But, I'm on another project now, so that'll happen some other time.

Weird that you aren't getting banned. I just did a test, and I was only able to get about 20k users before they banned me and suggested that I use the lite high scores.

How are you avoiding being banned from accessing the high scores list? Last time I tried to do this, I got banned from accessing the page(not the lite high scores).

Simple regexes. The first thing you'll notice that I do is grab the first user on the list and reload the list with that user selected. That user is highlighted with a different font colour than the rest of the users, effectivly splitting the list into two sections, one that i've already processed, and one that I haven't. Then I do a global regex search using /<a href="hiscorepersonal\.ws\?user1=(.+?)">\1<\/a>/ on the list of users I haven't processed and loop through the results.

Hey, with the discussion about all the bots voting on the wilderness poll going on, I thought I would make my own version of a high scores scraper. I'm a person who loves dealing with lots of data, so I decided I would download the 2 million users and their stats from the overall high scores. Sadly, I realized this wouldn't work after about 3 hours. Because I'm having to use proxies to get the next users from the high scores, this script runs really slowly. After 2 hours, I only had 3.5k users in my database. Either way, I thought it would be nice to show you my code. #!/usr/bin/perl require LWP::UserAgent; use Parallel::ForkManager; use DBI(); $pm = new Parallel::ForkManager(15); sub get_page { my ($page,$proxy) = @_; my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new; $ua->timeout(10); $ua->agent('Mozilla/5.0'); $ua->env_proxy; if ($proxy) { $ua->proxy(['http', 'ftp'], "http://".$proxy); } my $response = $ua->get($page); if ($response->is_success) { return $response->decoded_content; # or whatever } else { return 0; } } sub get_user_stats { my ($user) = @_; my $pagedata = get_page("http://hiscore.runescape.com/index_lite.ws?player=$user"); my @group = split /\n/,$pagedata; my $i = 0; my $insert_values = ''; foreach (@group) { if ($i<=25) { my ($rank, $level, $exp) = split /,/; if ($rank == -1) { $level = 1; $exp = 0; } $insert_values .= "$level,$exp,"; } else { my ($rank, $score) = split /,/; if ($rank == -1) {$score = 0;} $insert_values .= "$score," } $i++; } $insert_values =~ s/,$//; my $insert = "INSERT INTO highscores VALUES('$user',$insert_values)"; do_query($insert); } sub do_query { my ($query) = @_; $dbh = DBI->connect("DBI:mysql:database=runescape_stats;host=localhost", 'trent', 'password'); $dbh->do($query); $dbh->disconnect(); } do_query("truncate table highscores;"); #Step 1: Get a list of proxies. my @proxies = (); for (my $i = 1;$i<=15;$i++){ $i = sprintf('%02s',$i); $page_data = get_page("http://www.samair.ru/proxy/proxy-$i.htm"); while ($page_data =~ m/<td>(\d+\.\d+\.\d+\.\d+)<script/g){ push @proxies, $1; } } $pagedata = get_page("http://services.runescape.com/m=hiscore/overall.ws?table=0&category_type=0"); $pagedata =~ m/<a href="hiscorepersonal\.ws\?user1=(.+?)">\1<\/a>/; $user = $1; $page = 1; get_user_stats($user); while ($user) { $pagedata = ''; $attempts = 1; while (!$pagedata && $#proxies){ print "Attempt $attempts of page $page\n"; my $rand_key = int(rand($#proxies)); $pagedata = get_page("http://services.runescape.com/m=hiscore/overall.ws?table=0&category_type=0&user=$user",$proxies[$rand_key]); if (!$pagedata) { print "Removing proxy ".$proxies[$rand_key]."\n"; splice(@array, $rand_key, 1); $attempts++; } else { print "Got pagedata for page $page\n"; my ($used_users,$new_users) = split (/<a style="color:#F3C334;"/,$pagedata); if (!$new_users) { print "Removing proxy ".$proxies[$rand_key]." for spamming me...\n"; splice(@array, $rand_key, 1); $attempts++; } else { $user = ''; while ($new_users =~ m/<a href="hiscorepersonal\.ws\?user1=(.+?)">\1<\/a>/g){ $user = $1; my $pid = $pm->start and next; print "Getting stats for $user\n"; get_user_stats($user); $pm->finish; } } } } $page++; }