My Internet access has been a bit unreliable recently, and in my boredom I decided to re-install Total Annihilation. Unfortunately I forgot how boring the stock AI is, even in a 9 vs 1 game there isn't much of a challenge. I decided to see if I could hack the game speed to some crazy levels to spice things up a bit, and well, here is the result (558 KiB). This modified TotalA.exe allows you to crank the game speed up to +50. I don't recommend trying this on networked games as it will most likely desynch, but it certainly makes skirmish mode a bit more insane :).

I recently lost my Internet connectivity and found that a number of programs still tried to use my non-functioning connection, taking the order of minutes to time out before they would let me continue. Valve's Steam was the worst offender, taking just under two minutes before allowing me to enter Offline Mode. So naturally I made a program to fix this. NoNet will inject into a running application (or, optionally, spawn the process and inject) and disable Winsock functions by calling WSACleanup and overwriting the WSAStartup code. Steam went from 110 seconds to 4 seconds, a considerable improvement I think :).

For those dedicated Quake II fans, I also released a new version of R1Q2, R1GL and anticheat earlier today.

I'm also back to the good old Perl-based CMS for r1ch.net. It took me forever to create a custom theme for Wordpress, only to likely have to redo it during an upgrade, and the dubious security history didn't fill me with joy either. This time around though, there is *gasp* a database backend for the news! Such technology...

Well, it's almost official -- I've been working for some time on an anti-cheat solution for Quake II, and R1Q2 users can now benefit from it as of b6806, released earlier this month. The module supports three clients - AprQ2, EGL and of course R1Q2, giving players a little bit more flexibility than traditional anti-cheat clients. Server side, testing is still limited to a select few servers but anyone is welcome to download and try out the client on an anticheat-enabled server. There are still a few bugs, as with anything this complex, so please post any feedback in the feedback forum.

Downloads and additional information in multiple languages is available on the official anticheat site, http://antiche.at/. Please link people to that site if you wish to share any information about the anti-cheat and post any bug reports or feedback in the forum!

The recently released new version of the foobar2000 audio player has resulted in quite a few people asking me when my foo_winamp_spam plugin would be updated to support the new 0.9 API. Well, good news... it's updated and currently in beta with good feedback so far. You can find the download and provide feedback in the thread on the hydrogenaudio forums. Once I'm happy with it, I'll post it onto my plugins page also.

Lack of internet access can make a man do strange things, such as code stuff for .NET 2. Anyway, Windows 2000 users should enjoy Win2000TrayPatch, a utility designed to patch Explorer to remove the annoying 16-color limitation for tray icons and replace it with glorious 32-bit goodness. I also found the need to change my MAC address and noticed to my dismay that my NIC drivers didn't have such an option, so I coded up ChangeMAC to allow simple and quick editing of the network address of any interface. Just be sure you've got the .NET Framework 2.0 before trying to use either of these.

UDPXfer is my latest utility, designed for transferring files over high packetloss connections. It works by constantly transmitting random portions of the file and waiting for acknowledgements of each segment from the receiver. This avoids the high retry times associated with TCP on high packetloss lines, at the expense of some wasted bandwidth due to duplicated transmissions. I mainly wrote this utility just to be able to send files when my connection decides to enter 50% outgoing packetloss mode but I figured I'd release it anyway in case anyone else suffers from a similar problem. It's based on the .NET framework, supports both active and passive connections and includes SHA1 hashing for error-free transmissions. Enjoy!

On another note, ForceBindIP was updated recently to include support for all of the functions in WS2_32.DLL that implicitly or explicitly bind to an address and an optional delay provides compatibility with applications that don't like load-time DLL injection.

After many incarnations involving import address and export address table intercepting (which WinSock apparently does not like), I'm pleased to announce version 1.0 of ForceBindIP, a program to let you force any Windows application that uses bind() or connect() to use a specific network interface / IP address.

Unlike GNU/Linux apps, many programs in Windows do not offer the option of choosing which network interface to use. When you have multiple IPs, often you will find programs always using the "main" IP for connections and not having an option to change such. Using code interception and DLL injection, ForceBindIP changes this by rewriting the bind() and connect() functions in memory.

See the ForceBindIP page for more information and downloads.

R1Q2 b5920 is out. As some of you are probably aware, my Internet access over the past month or so has been anything but existent. During this time I actually sat down and added some features to R1Q2 that I'd been planning to do for so long :). Namely, HTTP auto-downloading and automatic protocol demo translation. Now the real question is if anyone will actually bother setting up the HTTP stuff server-side :). It involves a fair bit of work, but if done correctly can allow a client who has never even heard of a mod before to download all required content, default configs, etc at the same speeds they would get with a downloadable installer. Of course, even without any config, you can still drop .bsp files etc onto a webserver and point the client at them, giving a significant improvement over UDP downloads.

I've been toying with .NET a bit more too, it's definitely growing on me. I've released several small utils such as Quake2HandlerSetup for associating a quake2:// URL handler and FileListFinder for recursively generating a list of files which just so happen to be in a format compatible with R1Q2's filelist support. Hmm... :).

I've been getting complaints I don't update enough! So here's an update. Diablo II has regained it's grip on me. This is bad. I need to be finding and applying for jobs right now, but I still don't know what the hell I want to do. I guess I'll pick something randomly just to get a feel for it at this point. I have my eye on several things right now although typically they all want the infamous "experience". Time seems to be disappearing faster and faster, it only seems like yesterday that I'd finished University but god damn, it's been a month.

New side projects of the moment include Guardian, an "intelligent" (perhaps) IRC services network security bot and a few other miscellaneous undeserving things. StarHack² has been pushed off the back burner and is now splattered all over the floor behind the stove. As has everything else I've been working on :). Still doing the odd bit of work to R1Q2 now and then but I'm feeling it's coming near to the end of it's development cycle. Beyond a few idealistic features such as TCP downloading and Q2Tv, I'm not sure what else needs working on. I'm sure I'll find something though.

A lot of people use blogs to comment on current events. I've already given up before I've started. Nothing people say seems to have a damn any more. The UK election came and went with no real change of power, Real ID™ was blundered through congress in a military spending bill, everything just seems to be going completely ass backwards and no one gives any concern to those people who are speaking out. Religion is chosen over science, fear over security, isolation over unity. Yes this is a thinly veiled attack on America and various other parts of the world but it makes me sad. Seven or eight years ago I would have jumped at the chance to go and live and work in the USA. Now, I'm not so sure. I don't know any more. I don't know what I want to do, where I want to be, what I want in life. God that sounds depressing, because it probably is.

Well I haven't been up to too much recently. Trying to figure out what I want to do with myself in the next few months. I'm pretty sure I'll end up staying in the UK for a while at least as I'll need work experience before I can start looking elsewhere, although "elsewhere" is becoming a whole other problem in itself. Two more exams, one tomorrow and one on Thursday and then it is over. Four years of University, gone in what seems like hardly any time at all. After that, it's time to finally get around to writing up a CV and then begin looking for jobs. Right now I'm pretty open to anything - Linux systems administration, LAMP, C/Perl programming, security research, that kind of stuff. I just hope there is demand out there still :).

In other exciting news, R1Q2 was chosen as the official Quake II client for the QuakeCon 2005 tournament! It's great to see all the effort I've put in over the years finally get some large-scale recognition. I'm hopefully all set on attending QCon '05 and I've got myself a spot in the tournament, so let's see how that works out...

Also in Q2 related things, I coded up a quick PHP class yesterday to dynamically generate Quake I/II pak files. See the classPak homepage for more information and usage instructions. It's hopefully easy enough to use so that anyone with basic PHP experience can offer up dynamic pak files on their website. Please post any feedback in the forum thread. I also did a bit more work on my Q2 exploit - I patched the 3.20 binary against the setenv overflow and the exploit still worked! After a bit more examination, I realised I wasn't even overflowing the buffer I thought I was and a 1024 byte buffer on the stack in Cbuf_Execute was actually the target. Oops.