Its Purpose

Xbox Tracker was my solution to trying to workout my friends’ status on Xbox Live whilst I was away from my Xbox on my PC (programming usually).

One could argue I should use www.xbox.com instead, but my argument is similar to that of twitter: using the website is fine, but when you are busy doing other things do you actively go back to a webpage and refresh it to see what’s new?

For most people, the answer is “No”. They use a client which alerts them to when they receive a twit or have updates in their followed accounts (TweetDeck as an example).

Similar to the alerts you get from Windows Live Messenger and TweetDeck, having alerts as to when someone comes online on Xbox Live can be useful. Also being able to see what people are up to is useful, especially if you have to move (its in another room for example, or a family area) to play an Xbox.

History

Version 1 – VB.net

Original Xbox Tracker.

My first implementation of my idea, using a simple xml file storing the names of the user’s friends, it showed only a small amount of information about the friends.

Version 2 – C#

More information shown.

My second implementation of my idea, has simple caching of images, a GUI (Graphical User Interface) for configuring who to follow, and it now shows some more information about the friends.

Version 3 – C#

‘Classic’ display style.

‘Avatar’ display style.

My third and current version of my idea its pretty much the same as the second version, but with improved code as well as multithreading support to keep the UI (User Interface) from freezing. It also supports quite a number of customization options such as how to display the gamer’s details (some shown above) and various back end options as to how it runs.

Limitations

The current implementation requires the user to manually enter their friends. This means it could be abused to track people not on the user’s friend list (one of the reasons its never been made public).

Another issue is, because it uses a feed someone else made public, it is unable to update regularly enough to actually be useful (once every 1 – 2 hours which as you can imagine is far too long between updates), which is a real shame.

Future Plans

The plan for my next implementation is to rebuild the application from scratch using a completely new basis and logic to how it operates. A list of proposed features of what I’d like to implement follow.

•    Build a system which uses a user’s Live ID.
•    Download the user’s friends list from Xbox Live.
•    Update from the Xbox Live service (3 – 6 minute intervals).
•    Give notifications when a friend is online.
•    Change the UI to be more compact and show friends status.
•    Add the ability to group users by their current activity.

There are some optional features which would be nice to add, but aren’t really a priority for me, such as allowing the user to view and send messages to his/her friends.

Methods of Implementation

Web Browser Object

The first method I could use would be similar to one Xbox Live Friends uses, in which there is an embedded web browser. The user logs into www.xbox.com through it and then the application uses it to retrieve the information it needs. This also allows it to send and receive messages.

This method implementation could use large amounts of the user’s bandwidth if not correctly configured. Also if www.xbox.com was to change its layout drastically, it is liable to having issues. An example would be when www.xbox.com split the friends list over multiple pages which would require different logic when ‘harvesting’ the page.

Xbox Live and Windows Live APIs

The second method I could use would be to directly access the Xbox Live and Windows Live APIs (Application Programming Interface), giving the information from the user (authentication) and downloading the information required. Images will most likely need to be downloaded separately; however, having the ability to use the ones the Xbox uses would be better (as they have the correct transparency for gamer and game pictures).

The biggest issue with this method is gaining access to the respective APIs, as well as working out how to use them to get the information required. The other big hurdle would be trying to make sure it is secure, so that both the user and Microsoft are protected from both malicious code and malicious intent towards their service, (an example could be DOS (Denial of Service) attacks), which would add greater complexity to the design and implementation of the project.

Conclusion

The project in my mind has hit barrier in how far it can go in its current state. In order for it to continue to evolve into what I hope for it to be, I need to change how it fundamentally works.

I believe that in the long run, going with the Xbox Live and Windows Live APIs would be the better route, mainly because you should only be getting the information you need; not wasting bandwidth downloading unneeded graphics or information which will not be processed. As such my hope is to work with Microsoft so that I can start working on implementing my ideas into a valid community application. Unfortunately I’ve currently heard nothing back from my attempts to contact them.

It should be noted, that should Microsoft choose not to work with me, development on this project will mostly likely cease.

Fin.

Added a twitter flash feed to the side bar of the blog. For those curious my account is NatSciene.

Also updated the blog, altered the side bar so its now created from widgets, no more having it lost when upgrading the blog. I must say I quite like 2.8 of WordPress looks completely, different from the last version I actually used a while ago! Should hopefully lose a lot less picture and upload content in future also.

Hopefully I’ll find the time to actually populate this blog more often.

~ Lakie

Recently some people may have noticed a decline in the amount of time I’ve been online on WLM (Windows Live Messenger) and on IRC (Internet Relay Chat); this is mainly down to my system primary system being down for the last two weeks due to getting a new graphics card (XFX GeForce GTX 280 XT) which caused my system to cut out. After replacing the old 750W (turned out to be a 600W) PSU (Power Supply Unit) with a 900W higher end one (OCZ ModXStream 900W for those interested), which seems to have stopped the graphics card killing my system dead. So I should at least be on WLM a lot more now, as for IRC depends on my mood and then if I actually start up xchat.

Whilst old news, I remind people there is a newer version of WLM out now, version 2009 which has quite a different graphical look, though the layout should be fairly similar. Grab it from download.live.com.

Finally after quite some pushing for some time from my brothers and friends I decided to pick up a copy of Square Enix’s FF XI (Final Fantasy 11) MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) for £9.99 (around the same cost as a months subscription) with all 4 of its expansion packs, to try it out, so I may be a little more unresponsive than usual because FF XI tends to crash if it loses focus (which will no doubt annoy me to hell as I prefer playing games windowed so I can switch between the game and chat clients whilst waiting on loading screens).

That’s it for now, hope to put up more when I find time around all the things I do in my spare time.

The day started off at 7am, were I woke up (after 4 hours sleep) and found my way to Taunton to catch the 8:19 to Paddington station, apart getting confused with where my reserved seat was and ending up at the back of the carriage taking a non-reserved seat (which was quite nice, next to a window and everything) and almost falling asleep during the 1 hour 50 minute journey, which was smooth no delays or anything, was interesting going full speed through smaller stations.

At Paddinton things got slightly more confusing, apart from the fee on the toilets (30p) which was minorly annoying, the map at the main tube (subway) entrance was rather confusing, I couldn’t find the route I wanted and planned to go on the ‘yellow’ line and swap to the ‘blue’, however it became apparent upon reaching the ‘yellow’ line that the map wasn’t quite correct and Paddington does indeed have a platform on the ‘brown’ line, so I ran (literally) to the platform and managed to get on the train just before it departed (took me like 20 minutes to workout the map and get to the right tube line).

Upon reaching Piccadilly Circus, I was confronted with the horror of trying to work out which exit to use (there are 4 – 5 which was really confusing), so after a call to Owen and lots of asking people I finally emerged from the tube through exit 4 and walked in a straight line towards Lester Square where I found (it was quite obvious) members of the TT-Forums Meet, of which Andel and Owen were late!

Once everyone had turned up, talked and gotten their name tags “<Real Name> (<Username>)” style with a very small TT-Forums logo above them, team leaders got more advanced versions which were larger, clearer and had country flags! With rain starting we headed into Yates’, a pub near by and proceed to colonised quite a number of tables, some of us ordering food and drink whilst Dominic (Andel) rewrote his list of Teams for “The Game”, and Ben (Sacro) went out in search of Mark (welsdragon) and others who may have been lost, finding Gavin.

At about 1pm, “The Game” started after Dominic gave the team leaders some rather bulky looking paperwork and a list of train classes to take pictures of at certain stations as well as a bonus bus to photograph. So we set out under the lead of Brian who knew how to get round the tube quite well, had a little talk about how he got so good at navigating it, after some of the team got tickets for the tube we headed towards Waterloo station (the tube was quite empty we could all sit down quite conformably and everything even if not all of us did), our target station.

Upon reaching our target, we had to sign in, which proved to be minor pain, paperwork and such but we got nice badges saying “Visitor / Contractor”, I think “Manager” or something would have been more awesome though. We then found and took several pictures (well Brain took all the pictures…) of some Class 450′s which were parked, I believe the winning picture had two side by side (from when we went to the end of the platform to find the 459 and 455), the left one was on the verge of leaving in the below picture.

Winning photograph – © Brian Ronald
(Creative Commons)

After finding all the trains we had been asked to find (even taking a picture of a drivers cab in the 450 and the model and build specs of a 455), we returned our badges (which would have made a nice souvenir) and decided to look for a bus (a RV or a bendy bus), which we found (RV1) and Brian photographed as we were boarding, and we decided to have a picture of us riding it as we headed for Covenant Gardens to walk back to Yates’ to end “The Game” and submit our work.

We found Owen’s team waiting for us (and we thought we did it nice and fast too), and waited for the final team to catch up before Andel looked over the submissions and pronounced our team the winner which netted me a T-shirt (same as the default but with “The Game Winner” on the back), and giving a toy subway train to Brian for the best photograph (see above), whilst I got a drink and some food to eat (well, having nothing since 7am leaves one kind of hungry at 3pm)! After another 40 minutes of talking we decided (mainly because of my 17:06 train home), to take the group photograph (we asked some girl to do it for us, she was kind of embarrassed but took two pictures and then left looking even more embarrassed when we offered to buy her a drink for helping us), picture below.

Final Group Photograph

After staying with the gang a little longer, I left for the tube worried about missing my train by getting lost in the tube, which I managed to navigate quite easily, and it was quite quiet which was nice), upon reading Paddington and walking out of the wrong exit (I had hoped to come up in the middle of the station), and consequently walking round the the front, back into Paddington Station, I looked for information about my train. Which was early, I boarded it on platform 2 (it has some stupid little ticket scanners like the tube) at 4:50pm, and found my seat on the train after realising my mistake this morning and went home. The only minor thing this time was a broken signal which was constantly red and held us for 5 minutes before going through it! Which lead to being 10 minutes late, but overall it was a very pleasant experience and I hope to attend the next meet depending on location, date and funds accordingly.

[Edit] Look forward to seeing Owen’s little meet film and a ‘subbed’ (usernames marked against the people) version of the Group photograph. There will be plenty from others about the meet so don’t worry about me not going into enough depth for you!

~ Lakie

My old version:

Picture of the original Xbox Tracker.

And my new version:

My latest version of Xbox Tracker.

Changes from my late version:

• Multi threading – to stop the GUI locking up whilst downloading or updating.
• Graphical Interface to change the gamer tags ‘monitored’, now also shows last 5 played games.
• Better download queuing.
• Ability to cache downloaded images.
• Better code to ‘solve’ issues with downloading and updating the feed information.

Might release this to the public but I’d imagine there are some hidden bugs which others would find because of doing stupid things, maybe after I make it more ‘resistant’ to issues. That and I don’t think anyone would have an interest in it, btw, if you know a feed which updates more regularly feel free to drop me a line so I can experiment with it!

~ Lakie

~ Lakie

Currently deciding if I’ll go as £55 (which is what I reckon the travel fees will add up) is quite a fair amount of money, (also I’d need some money for food, drink etc). That coupled with the fact I’ve never travelled so far away from ‘home’ without family or someone to help guide me around (moral support) so I’m not sure if I’ll get lost, panic and basically suffer a mini-breakdown from feeling totally lost and alone (which I can assure you would not be very pleasant for me). I’ve got to decide within the next 2 to 3 days if I’m going or not before the fares shoot up in price! I’ll try to update this blog as soon as possible after I decide.

As always feel free to post comments,

~ Lakie

So after finding my trains had zero capacity which was rather annoying I decided to ask him for a TTDpatch workable version (give the MU passenger wagon a capacity) to which that still didn’t work (apparently it was him mistaking weight for capacity), so I started working on trying to make Callback 36 support Train Variable 14 whilst waiting for a fixed version.

First I started by trying to work out how the macros’ which Callback 36 now works with / through (DaleStan wrote the macros to fix some bugs with vehicle structure), it turns out for what I wanted DaleStan had to revise his macros’ and made r1963 which was designed around my plans. Using the new “FIRST” macro with my hooks in the “buyRailVehicle” and “buyWagon” I discovered, with help with DaleStan that I had to call “patchendstrucinit” for each instance of my subroutine which had had the “FIRST” macro used on it.

Fixing this I decided to go on and hook the attach/detach subroutine in TTD, writing the functions to do this was surprisingly easy after studying the idb closely to work out what the values stored in the “tempvar” storage. Finding a suitable place to hook took me longer however, I decided to hook just after it’s refreshed the first train consists window (if the said window is open), thus allowing for it to be called after a successful movement of a wagon. This lead to one minor issue however with the same train consist sometimes being run through twice or a crash, I decided that if the vehicle pointer wasn’t a consist head to abort changing the said consist based off lots of debugging the values and what they point to.

Finally when testing my changes I uncovered a rather old bug [see above], (which apparently DaleStan made when he was adding his “windatabox_sizerextra” structure definition to TTDpatch), initially I only noticed the double ‘edi’ which seemed off to me, and however upon closer inspection it turned out that DaleStan had used the wrong part of the structure, which was causing the window to become very malformed after my “ResizeOpenWindows” function was called, thankfully I was able to correct this mistake before anyone had reported it as a bug with TTDpatch (after a lot of confusing with DaleStan’s structure names not matching the names of the ‘variables’ which store the constraints and sizing information). r1965.

After fixing my poor 32px mode and CloneTrain code, I started on trying to iron out the last bug I’d found with my Callback hooks, Articulated vehicles ‘trailers’ being copied until the end of the vehicle array [example above], which with morevehicles 4 is an awful lot (around 2,000 ‘clones’)! I discovered this was actually due to the Callback variable being the same as the ArticulatedVehicleCount (“articulatedvehicle”) which was causing the buy routine to constantly rebuild the trailer because Callback 36 reset its counter back to 0. To fix this final issue I decided to use a push and pop system, which should work as long as other calls clean up after themselves. See the finished version r1966, expect to see it in the next nightly!

And because there is so much boring text in this post, I’ll attach a few pictures of Purno’s set which I was using to help me test my Callback36 variable support (credits to Purno’s 2cc set’s authors)! As usual feel free to comment.

~ Lakie

Hopefully I won’t spoil too much for those of you yet to see the films, however to be on the safe side, if you haven’t seen the films and don’t want any spoilers, skip to the bold Finally section now, if you read my film sections and feel that I’ve spoilt it for you then don’t blame me for it, you had your choice of whether you would read them or not!

Kung Fu Panda
Kung Fu Panda is about a Panda (unsurprisingly) who dreams of one day being a Kung Fu master. He starts off as nothing more than a cook at his family noodle store, he finds his way to becoming a Kung Fu fighter, but is is rejected by his colleges and master (I can relate to how that feels to be ‘isolated’ because you are different and don’t fit in with the ‘crowd’ straight away), however through determination and his love of food, he finds his path to become the "Dragon Warrior". I highly recommend you watch this film if you liked Sherk, as it has a lot of comedy and some rather nice messages for those who look or think about what its telling them.

Wall·E
Probably the most hyped film of this summer, Wall·E, if you don’t know what it is already I suggest you visit Wikipedia or just look the news websites. Wall·E is a robust robot who basically acts as a trash compactor and builds ‘trash towers’, now on his own after the other Wall·E robots have long since failed he collects things and appears to feel lonely (not sure how a robot can feel lonely but he does), Of course the story really starts when he meets EVE and falls in love with ‘her’, ‘he’ ends up chasing ‘her’ quite a lot of the film (to and were Humanity has ‘fled’ to, to hide from the garbage problem on Earth), without ‘her’ really realising how much ‘she’ liked him (until ‘she’ sees parts of here memory which she wasn’t able to be conscious for, that and she sees Wall·E get badly damaged because of ‘her’). There is a minor conspiracy (which I could relate to, about the attitude of politics) and eventually Wall·E and EVE return home to Earth with the humans. Again quite a good film with quite a few good messages in it, not quite so much comedy in it as Kung Fu Panda though.

Finally
Next on my hit list is "Star Wars: Clone Wars" which should be showing sometime in August, I’m looking forward to that film quite a lot, being a Star Wars fan, I enjoyed all the films, though I think the first 3 (Episodes IV to VI) where probably the best. Won’t see anything else really though, until I decide I want to get a job. Feel free to comment as always on what I’ve wrote.

~ Lakie