ShadyServer

Hey everyone we realize we haven’t updated Shady much lately, but its mostly because of http://haloapi.com . We are now thinking of our next big project. We will however have to put it off until clsoe to the summer as Sticky Keys gets out of school around early-mid May, and TheIronChef doesn’t get his summer break until the first week of June. EEEK! Anyway we really want to start a new project, a bigger one but do not have an idea yet. If for some reason you are on our site and by chance have an idea, leave us a comment on what would be nice. The main point of this message is that there probably won’t be any updates until at least one of us finish this year. Turns out school is really hard, and more important. So thanks, see you in the Summer!

Small new project, but looked like no one has really done it. I put together some xbox live status images here. There are only a couple up right now but if anyone makes one just send it in and ill add the status information to it!

I did some googling and it didn’t look like anyone has something like this available. I am easily the most inartistic human on the earth (Sticky Keys being a close second). So really if anyone wants to make one do so. Here are some guidelines..

• Size: Up to you
• Spacing: Make sure you leave space for gamertag, status, last game or none
• Credit: If you want to put your name on it then “okay”. But it really takes away from the image.
• Make sure the image shows if they are off or on
• Multiple images - You can submit a online version and an offline version ( yes 2 images)

http://live.shadyserver.com

Over the past couple weeks, we have done a mountain of updates to Halo API. If you don’t know what it is I recommend you check it out. After just a month from its release, we have seen a surge in usage. As the requests grew, problems were noticed and fixed. I just wanted to share a couple of the upgrades we made.

First, the average person on Halo API will notice the  . I realized how much of a pain the old site was to work with. Since it all loaded at the same time it would take a while, or simply not work. On top of that, it wasn’t too functional. I decided to do a whole new site. It runs from word-press using a template I found. I kept the guy’s name at the bottom who made (give credit where credit is due!). Either way this style site is MUCH easier to maintain. In addition, I added a word-press forum that integrates the wordpress user system into a neat forum.

Second thing updated was the content. If you have looked at the “status”page in the past, we showed which mirrors were up or down. We cleaned up those images a bit. We also added the ability to easily create a mirror and help the project. The last amount of content updated was the API documentation. I gotta hand it to Sticky Keys, he has really been making some amazing code lately (I’ll explain in a second). He updated the documentation to go with it, including a TOS.

Then there was Sticky Keys. He’s a programming animal. This past week we introduced the SKCS (Sticky Keys Cache System). He created this great setup to cache certain pages that do not need updated often. This saves bandwidth and time. So far it works like a charm. Hats of to that magical man.

Another implementation Sticky Keys added was the use of API keys. I know we had said we didn’t want to use them, but after seeing the explosion in usage, we would like to keep track of who is abusing the system and who is playing nice. You have until February 13th to use the API without one. No worries though, the keys take a second to get and anyone can get one. If you need one just head over to the site.

All in all we are more than pleased with the success of Halo API so far (just google it ). Hopefully we can keep maintaining the code and continue to offer the number one and only api for halo on the net!

Sticky Keys did it again. After receiving over 6000 hits in less than a week on his last script (Time Wasted), he decided to pound out an even better one.

Summary

This one uses the Halo API to compare two gamertags. It uses these statistics and weighs them appropriately so that all gamertags are somewhat comparable. He also built in a couple cool features. The major one is that the ouput is formatted so that you can easily paste it into the forum of your choice. Secondly is that in the output is a link that people can click and your gamertag is automatically placed in one of the text boxes of the compare script.

How It Works

You won’t find any documentation about how it works anywhere except maybe on the Bungie Forum, so I will try sum it all up. As stated before, the script pulls the stats from the Halo API. These stats include…

Nothing is perfect, but we tried as best we could. The script just computes the totals with factoring in the weight and then compares. Using the point spread, the message is chosen. Any suggestions, just drop us an email. Have fun and see how you size up!

Site: http://www.shadyserver.com/haloscripts/compare

StickyKeys made a sweet little script to calculate time the amount of time you wasted wating to respawn and revenge your killer. You can also calculate how much pain (time) you inflicted on others. Not to much more to explain. Check it out for yourself! Not to mention it was a great way to introduce the HaloAPI that I couldn’t help but meniton :-).

Site: http://www.shadyserver.com/haloscripts/wasted

Kudos to StickyKeys for this. He did a sweet job, especally the neat little ajax loader. I like it if you couldn’t tell. If you want to post your simple output in a comment here feel free!

StickyKeys and TheIronChef have started another project called Halo API. We are the first API open for public use (that we know of) for gathering stats on Halo 3 . As I post this, the site is nearly at gold status.

The API allows you to retrieve tons of stats, more then you will most likely need. Hopefully the API grows even after its release, coming in early January. For now the stats can retrieve…

• Whether a game ID exists
• General stats of a certain game
• Player stats form a certain game
• Gamertags’ overall stats
• Gamertag’s current status
• List of games that a gamertag has played (with parameters)

This API is balanced over several servers to handle the load. We do need mirrors. It is a very, very small script so if you would like to support our project and become a mirror please let us know. You can find the contact information in the About Tab on the site. Anyway, check out the documentation on Halo API for usage. We are trying to keep ShadyServer seperate from Halo API, so any questions should try to be pointed at HaloAPI.com. However, if you leave something in the comments here, I will probably get back to you.

SITE: http://www.haloapi.com

Good Luck!
-TheIronChef & Sticky Keys

Before I get into my new program iTunesHoax, I would like to note for the history books this is the first post of the new shadyserver, and a decent one at that. It has been a long time since we have really put our site to a good use, but I think we may have finally stopped our streak of uselessness. Now on to iTunesHoax!

This program is used to spoof network itunes libraries. You can name them nearly anything (some special characters mess things up). If you are creative you could draw things (see ascii art). It’s a really easy program to run, and it at leasts gives you a couple minutes of enjoyment until you realize you should be doing homwork. Let the screenshots and explainage begin!

Directions

1. Download iTunesHoax.exe
2. Start iTunesHoax (in Vista you may need to run in Administrator mode)

  Screenshot 1 - iTuneHoax at startup
3. Now type any message/draw in the textbox. Remember that each new line is going to be a new network library. Its better to use more lines and keep it rather slim to everyone can see without adjusting their screen.

 Screenshot 2 - main screen with text added. ready for hoaxing!

4. Hit “Display” . The program will appear to stall for a bit (this is a good thing).

5. Check progress. Open iTunes on your computer and look at the network libraries. It should show up slowly. It will take longer to show up on the network, maybe a minute or two.

 Screenshot 3 - itunes with hoax

 Screenshot 4 -close up of the hoax!

6. Enjoy. It will timeout eventually. Haven’t done too much testing with the timeouts, but it looks like the messages go away after about an hour. Let me know what you think!

 *you need java runtime installed, which you most likely already have. If not download here.

-TIC