Joe Fleming dot net

I recently started playing the game Fallout 3 a little more and I came across a terminal I could actually attempt to hack. After a few failed attempts at it, I thought I would poke around on the Internet and see if anyone had any guides for hacking the things. Instead, I found this online terminal hacker, among others (this was the best one though). I thought, “man, that’s pretty slick, but I wish I has something that I could run locally in the event my Internet was down.” I poked around online a little and found a bunch of people claiming to be prepping downloadable, standalone versions, but nobody had yet delivered. Then I thought, “I bet I could write me own,” and that’s exactly what I did.

The rules for hacking the terminals are:

• You get 4 tries, after which you can never try again
• If you exit before the 4 tries are up, your available tries reset to 4, but so does the puzzle
• For each word you pick, you will be told how many matching letters you got
• That count is how many matching letters there are in the SAME position of the correct word

Originally, I was going to write it in Python. That way I could potentially execute it from anywhere I could install the Python interpreter and it would give me a reason to dive in to Python. Then I decided I wanted it done quick, and in an even more portable way; as a raw HTML page. So, I decided to write my version in Javascript, and here it is!

I used the one over at mediumexposure.com as a benchmark and honed mine down a bit (I didn’t catch that last rule when I was playing the game, which is why I could never figure the puzzles out). I will admit, mine isn’t as smart as his since it doesn’t take past guesses and matches into account, only the most recent guess and the remaining list of possible words. So, there’s a chance mine won’t guess correctly in the 4 attempts, but in the handful of tests I ran, I always managed to get it.

Now, I know what you might be thinking. “Hey, this is just another online file, how is this portable? How can I run it from my machine?!” Simple, save the html file to your computer and open it locally. All of the magic happens in the Javascript code (which I commented so you can follow along), which will run from your machine without the need for any extrernal processing or server. Go ahead, give it a spin and be sure let me know what you think in the comments. It’s a work in progress, so when I make it smarter, I’ll update the file and post again. Enjoy!

I’ve always been a “do it yourself” kind of web developer, but after reinventing the wheel time and time again and struggling to make my code work in the various different browsers out there, I’ve come to appreciate that I can save a TON of time through different libraries and toolkits. I’m no Javascript pro (though I am the resident guru at work), but I find the language interesting. Ever since Google came along and showed the world that Javascript can be used for more than just popups and other web annoyances, I’ve been enthralled with some of the cool things people have done with Javascript. From AJAX to Comet, simple DHTML to animations, it’s simply been an amazing evolution.

About a year ago, Aaron tipped me off to the magic of Javascript toolkits, specifically Dojo. For a while, I was a proponent of it, opting to use it exclusively to drive an internal application that I had written from the ground up at work. It’s an extremely powerful toolkit which has been steadily adding more functionality as it ages to that point that it’s arguably the most powerful toolkit on the market. Unfortunately, I’ve also found it to be one of the most poorly documented toolkits available as well, which I’m sure was due in part to my lackluster understanding of some of the more advanced Javascript concepts. Still, looking at some of the more advanced Dojo examples I’ve seen from Aaron and other sources online, most of the syntax escapes me completely, even as I continue to learn more and more about Javascript.

Well, as you can plainly see (assuming you’ve been here before), the site has gotten a facelift. Now that Aaron has his blog up and his looking really nice, I felt compelled to try and jazz up mine a little too. It’s not done, but it’s nicer than it was. I’ll probably add a touch of color to the theme, but it’ll work for now. BTW, it’s based off the Milc 3.5 theme. The code isn’t super pretty, but it was a good start.

While I was working with the design, I realized that I needed to send over my old bit of code that opened links in new windows. As anyone trying to make valid XHML pages can tell you, the target attribute is no longer valid, so if you want pages to open in a new window and you still want your design to validate properly, you have to do a little scripting. I actually found this script a couple years ago to make MediaWiki links open in new windows and it’s served me quite well ever since.