My bots went through a bit of a perfect storm of unfortunate events. When the client finally went from Beta to mainstream everything was working fairly well. Then they released a bunch of updates to the ways trades and trade windows are shown up on the screen. This of course managed to break my bot but not in such a way that they wouldn’t run. However, they did fail more than they would succeed and that was unacceptable for me so I took them offline.

When I left for vacation I wasn’t sure my bots would stay online and keep doing work especially during two separate update days. But everything seemed to have worked pretty well. They made a reasonable number of completed trades (reasonable being relative). I did have one person manage to find a little loop hole in my pricing so they got a few extra tickets for a card that was being bought for about twice its price. Oh well these things happen and their exploitation helped me figure out what I had done wrong and fix my auto update pricing code.

I guess I had wanted to figure out how to handle downtimes and the EULA screen so today’s work was a good thing. However, my first pass at the EULA screen caused the application to shut down. It did agree but something else happened. I think I tried to read the screen mid click while pressing the agree button.

So I’m not quite sure where I left off before I left for Mexico and what I’ve gotten done since I got back. But I’ve added some key new features for sure.

I have to leave town for a few days to do some goodwill work in another country. So I’ve decided I’ll just leave my bots online and let them either run out of money or cause the client to crash.

I want to apologize for some of the bad user experiences that you guys have had using my bots thus far. As I mentioned I wrote this in a little under five days while working full time. So my quality control in a few areas is somewhat lacking.

Today I managed to wrap up what I considered to be a few of the missing features. I wanted to lock down the specifics on how the bot would know which user to run as and log in as if someone wanted to us that option.

It has been a while since I was completely anti-apple. During the nineties when the only machines I could use were the Power-PC mac clones in school I was supremely pissed with the quality of the product. The first introduction of the iMac and its bubble case with its ridiculous colors didn’t inspire any more confidence any me. However, after the third generation of the iPhone and multiple iterations of their pro series laptops I finally decided that the quality may have reached the level their cost. Since then I’ve gone through multiple iPhones with mixed feelings and three laptops. After using these products and my lack of success with different high end models of wireless routers I decided to try out the airport extreme.

I’ve been a little off the radar for a while in regards to my automated bot project. I’ve decided to put up what I worked on in Github with the hopes that someone else can improve upon my initial code. Also it seems like a bit of a waste to spend a lot of time on this project and then not have anything to show for it.