ARSE

Observant souls may have noticed I've been messing about with AutoIt recently, and getting quite impressed. If you looked at AutoIt v2 and like me thought, "pfff", and quickly went back to Macro Express, then take a look at v3. Now THAT is progress! While nothing beats Macro Express for pure Windoze automation, imho, AutoIt has transformed itself into something quite different.

Thanks to RichE for once again stirring my interest in the beast. Turns out that AutoIt has become almost a complete scripting language in itself, with functions and arrays and all that jazz, and importantly sports a nice BASIC-like language. I always liked BASIC, ever since I got my hands on a ZX-81, circa '1981. As far as computing languages are concered, my opinion is that the higher-level the better. Less coding = more time for programming!

It's a RAID tool now, and all manner of wee things I've conceived are not only very possible with AutoIt, but very easy. Did I mention the ease of coding? An example: You want your appplication to draw a progress bar? What about this handy ProgressOn() command, just like that! smiley for :eek:

As well as the usual nuts and bolts, the new Beta adds loads of great features, like socket functions, and a growing library of user-contributed functions - for arrays, at least, you'll need probably 'em! - though I haven't succumbed yet, finding pleasurable novelty in having to do stuff like redim. It gives me that warm 8-bit feeling smiley for :lol:

So anyway, my first project was a rewrite of the old RAD script (the one that deletes all those pesky built-in rules on our beloved Voyager205 router), mainly I wanted to get rid of that ugly (and quite dangerous) sendkeys business, and code in some sort of background telnet facility.

That turned out to be simple, so it evolved into RAH, an application to send arbitrary hacks to your router, which evolved into what we have now, the..

Automatic Router Scripting Engine

Or ARSE, for short. This wee application can operate in dialog-driven or command-line (and drag-and-drop) modes, and makes hacking your router a piece of cake.

Of course I needed an installer. So that was project two. And before you know it, there's this fully-featured installer in-front of you with all the bells and whistles, but very little code indeed.

My installer adds multiple registry entires (remembers install options, etc), start menu items, shortcuts, explorer file-associations, right-click actions, the works! It also (once the app is installed) acts as an uninstaller/reinstaller and even deletes itself when it's done! Quite cute. smiley for :cool: Run it!

There's still things I'd like it to do with it, use a manifest perhaps, and maybe an archive of files, rather than the current "files" folder, and some sort of inflate facility. Though I quite like the files folder approach, too.

I'm hoping to "finish" it some time over the weekend, though I plan to thoroughly review the manual before attempting to code anything tricky. I spent over an hour the other day trying to figure out how to hook into Winsock.dll to get some DNS resolution, only to later realize that AutoIt has a TCPNameToIP() function! smiley for :roll: I swear, I searched loads of terms in the manual, googled, you name it! I found it later, looking for something completely different! smiley for :erm:

Ahh.. re-use of body text, almost as much fun as re-usable code! smiley for :lol:

Already there are loads of scripts for ARSE, port-forwarding setups for games, servers, p2p apps, some router tweaks and tricks. If you're interested, rake about.

Where was I? Ah right, devblog. You know, that's the trouble with developing, when you are in the mode, you're just too busy developing to write about developing, but I did promise I would do just that.

We have a lot of catching up to do.

for now..

;o)


one week left!

Well, if you want a chance to view my admin passwords and similar data, there's now only one script left onsite that will let you see it! Since I got around to installing some basic security in the textviewer script, that is.

Next weekend, I fix the other script.

The textviewer is looking great, by the way, and now handles all sorts of plain/text documents, the sort of stuff that's often found floating around the public archive.

Incredible that no one did anything nefarious, no? I was serious on the cbparser page; karma is more important than security, and you guys are straight up and down, r8!

One w33k h4x0r5!

;o)


Q2

The only part of my development system that really needs improvement, is the blogging part. Everything else is coming along swell!

I'm comfortable using the word "swell".

As well as a whole new pajamas modular plug-in authentication system thingie, corzblog 3 is rapidly approaching beta release stage - I'll get /blogtest/ up to the latest version soon so you can play with the groovy new prefs page). There's a sleek new distro machine (now xhtml compliant, supporting "infinite depth" (by request after request!) as well as a whole bunch of new tools, toys and updates.

In my defense, the text *inside* all the goodies are rather plump and nutritious, so I'll hopefully skim back through the most recent of those soon enough, and put together a proper update for the devblog.

This is just a notice to say "Have a rake!"
switch .org for .ath.cx for the latest of anything.

;o)


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