I’m kidding about the title, don’t worry, you didn’t miss a Nintendo Direct. And even if you did, it’s probably just another Wii U port.

This has been a quiet but certainly busy month from me, in regards to this site and things, so I figured I would write this post as a recap of sorts and a preview of what could be to come.

First of all, the obvious: since the last post I’ve been in school, and trying to break some procrastination habits– though, apparently, that can’t keep me from calling it for the rest of a Friday night to write a blog post. Hey, there’s still a lot of work to be done. Figuratively, and literally.

With that said, here’s what I’ve been up to in and around September 2020 thus far:

• AutoSite is now on Download.com. Since it’s RC4 and they took that for a beta version, there are no options for reviews. I do kinda wish those 2 AV false positives were resolved too. (I sent RC3 to BitDefender back when I submitted to Softpedia a month or so ago. Sending RC4 wasn’t necessary afterwards, if I recall correctly.) In any case, it’s getting out there. Would like to do more stuff for it as it gets cooler.

• I want to put more stuff on this blog (or tumblog, depending on the time of day). It’s easy for me to get hung up on topics and what I’m gonna write about instead of straight up going for it. Speaking of which, I wrote a post earlier in the month for the group blog about my Android and Termux-based IRC bouncer setup that I’ve been meaning to do since June so if you haven’t read that, you may do so here. Excuse the technobabble.
• Truth be told, I’ve been practice doodling more. Mainly fluffy things because I guess that’s the kinda person I am now. Noticably, a particular Lince on my revised homepage:

Definitely gonna share more, when the time comes. Get some more little drawings on my site, make an interests page, keep that place from getting too rusty. Gonna be good. Branching out, trying new things, gaining confidence. That’s been the goal for this year, and it’s finally starting to pay off in these couple of months. Love it.

• Escargot got a board on a new forum, that’s pretty cool. And I have a gut feeling we might have WLM 2009 by the end of the year. Sure, it might have been the same gut feeling I had in 2018 and 2019 but that doesn’t mean I can’t still be excited for it!
• Caby and Borb graced me on the 17th with some lovely birthday art! Click to view the images full-size.

• I’ve been playing on Somnol’s newly resurrected whitelisted Minecraft servers, this time on Beta 1.7.3 (my new favorite Minecraft version as of late; you don’t need more mobs than there are Pokémon to have a good time, lads) for survival and 1.8.9 for creative. If you’re cool and hang around our IRC, who knows, you might be able to join us. We’ll have a page to showcase what’s up there on our main site, keep your eyes peeled for that. The spirit of 2011 will never die.

• I’ve been thinking about 0x10c and listening to its music a lot. Might be a loose topic for a post in the future, not sure yet. Also wrote a bit about my X230 Tablet, that might surface sooner or later.
• I did a little bit of overdue tidying to w2krepo and added a changelog.
• This video. My kryptonite.
• Some Ceramics classwork:

I’d like to do this more, like a rough recap of where I’ve been and where I’m at each month. I get to put up some things I wouldn’t have otherwise outside of my smaller circles, and I can sorta keep track of it better as time goes on.

Homework tomorrow! Fortunately not a crazy amount, unless I make it that way. Then Minecraft. Then getting destroyed by Cammy at Tetris maybe. Willpower, lads.

(This is a follow up to my previous post about messing around with the current source for the Escargot server.)

Turns out the MSN itch never stops. I came across this thread on the MessengerGeek forums, which pointed toward ProxHTTPSProxy, a program that seems to fix many issues with Escargot and HTTPS sites in general on XP. I believe it’s a bit like WebOne in how you use it; except, that it runs locally, and still lets you use http:// urls as normal instead of serving as an http:// proxy.

Once that was set up, there was another change I needed to make in order for it to connect to my running server instance (which, with how I have it configured in VirtualBox, is the IP 10.0.2.2, as it’s referred to in my HOSTS file), and that was to make the proxy skip verifying certificates for those domains.

(I don’t believe this would be required outside of development when pre-patched installers come out.)

It was then when WLM could finally connect without spouting 80048862 or 80048820 errors, which for me was great to see, if only because I had never seen XP work right with Escargot in person before. To see 2009 will work on XP on release, while it probably shouldn’t be a surprise, is quite the relief. (And it also means I’ll be able to get Escargot 8.5 set up now on my own personal “XP machine”, a 2011 ThinkCentre Edge, in case I start using that full-time; part-time even.)

And honestly I’m quite excited about just how compatible 2009 looks to be with the utilities I use with WLM 8.5 now, with Messenger Plus! of course being available, and Craftplacer’s Messenger Activity Monitor (and other Messenger .NET-based projects) working just as well. Basically all of what I like so much about 8.5 is still gonna be here, like file transfers, handwriting and the mess.be games, and while I probably shouldn’t be surprised by it all still being here, as far as I can tell 2009 is mainly just more of what I like about MSN and I’m thrilled for that.

I’ll still need to contain that excitement as support isn’t out yet, but Soon™. Soon™ for sure.

I got Escargot‘s current development server working on my current machine with Windows Live Messenger 2009 support, and it’s looking very exciting so far.

I haven’t gotten it to work under a Windows XP guest, due to this error:

Exception ignored in: <function DevTLS.create_ssl_context.<locals>.servername_callback at 0x000001C9DCFDE510>
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Users\Eric\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python36\lib\site-packages\devtls\impl.py", line 26, in servername_callback
    p_crt, p_key = self._get_or_create_cert(domain)
  File "C:\Users\Eric\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python36\lib\site-packages\devtls\impl.py", line 43, in _get_or_create_cert
    crt, key = self._create_cert(domain)
  File "C:\Users\Eric\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python36\lib\site-packages\devtls\impl.py", line 52, in _create_cert
    csr = crypto_util.create_csr(key, domain = domain)
  File "C:\Users\Eric\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python36\lib\site-packages\devtls\crypto_util.py", line 23, in create_csr
    raise ValueError("either `common_name` or `domain` required")
ValueError: either `common_name` or `domain` required

XP’s always been kind of weird with Escargot, due to stuff with SSL, TLS and whatnot. I’ve fiddled with around with those settings in Internet Options to no avail. I imagine someone will likely figure something out come release.

I also played around with the Yahoo! Messenger frontend which works pretty well, all things considered. Seeing both of them communicating with each other is pretty sweet.

Neither WLM or YMSG support is available yet; gonna ask on behalf on the people working on it not to have them rush it. That being said, it seems there are just a few things before it’s production-ready and it really looks to be right around the corner.