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A few months ago I wrote about Internet as a high-stakes game played by millions of people.

The Internet, you see, is an enormous, three-dimensional gaming surface. This gameboard consists of billions of nodes (web pages) joined by trillions of connectors (hyperlinks), fluctuating and evolving in real-time. It helps if you visualize it as a physical thing, and to do that, we'll need to put on our magic decoder glasses.

In the comments to that post, I said I was working on an Internet visualization tool or agent. Today I'd like to introduce that tool, code-named Inviz, short for "Internet Visualizer". It's the piece of software responsible for the images you're about to see. They were generated entirely inside this tool, in a matter of a few minutes.

Get those magic decoder glasses ready. Our first Internet snapshot is in black and white:

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Show of hands. How many of you remember the Dark Age of Software Licensing, when you could defeat time-based software trials...

...by setting back your system clock?

Well. Sooner or later the software licensing people caught on, and started employing other mechanisms—such as file timestamping or online verification—so as not to be fooled by so simple an exploit. And if you download a fully-functional evaluation of (for example) Adobe Flash CS3, you'll find that setting the system clock back doesn't help. Once your trial has expired, it has expired.

Stick a fork in it, it's done.

So the question I have for you is this:

Why am I able, in the year 2008, to download a fully-functional 90-day trial of what is (arguably) the world's foremost software development suite (and an $800 dollar piece of software): Visual Studio 2008 Professional, use it for 90 days, set my system clock back, and continue to use the (fully-functional) product in perpetuity?

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Introduction

Today we're going to build a simple online poker bot—the simplest possible online poker bot—in just a few hundred lines of code.

But first: have you ever tinkered around with an erector set?

You remember. Colorful cardboard boxes with see-through fronts. Girders and gears, nuts and bolts, even the occasional electric motor.

A classic brand with over 90 years of building experience, Erector introduces an incredible 50-Model building set. It has a whopping 605 pieces for building 50 different models, including a helicopter, a construction truck with crane, a scooter and more. A powerful 6V motor brings life to your creations, and special mechanical functions create unique and exciting movements.

Set includes an assortment of construction materials and fasteners, plus detailed, step-by-step instructions with photographs -- no reading required. Requires 3 "AA" batteries, not included.

The thing that always appealed to me about Erector Sets? Ingredients. Dozens of components, each with a specific, and yet generic, purpose. Not to mention the recipes: instructions for assembling those components. With a little time and some careful screwdriver work, you could build just about anything. 

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To those those who have expressed their doubts about the authenticity of the poker botting series or the motivation behind it: I appreciate and applaud the skepticism. 95% of online poker-related material is dubious, spammy, get-rich-quick, Vegas pipe dream BS designed to get you to sign up for online poker or otherwise invest your hard-earned money in something which may or may not be appropriate for you. And some of you have interpreted this series as another attempt in that vein, which is understandable.

What bothers me is the accusation, however infrequent, that I'm hoodwinking people for personal gain. And yet, tellingly, you won't find online poker signup links, invitations to purchase botting tools, or any other such garbage, anywhere on Coding the Wheel. You won't find obnoxious, in-your-face, above-the-fold advertising. What you will find is a lonely sidebar ad, installed months ago and forgotten. I'm not even sure how I make money on it. PPC? CPM? Both? All I know is I've earned approximately enough money in ad revenue to buy myself a cheeseburger with fries and a Coke.

And it's like, as much as I appreciate the burger, a few pennies of dubious PPC revenue is not what I'm after. Coding the Wheel is a programming and technology blog, not some fly-by-night affiliate scam site. Employers see the blog. Clients see it. Friends and family see it. People in the community whose opinion I very much respect see it. I don't need the few hundred extra dollars per month that "selling out" would afford and if I were really interested in PPC or affiliate revenue, there would be a dozen better ways to do it.

So what's my motivation? One thing: community, and the unlooked-for benefits, the random knowledge, the occasional email offer to work on a side project, the ability to reach and converse with some of the best-informed people in the world on this topic. That may sound hokey to you, but to me it's worth far more, both in dollar value, and in other valuations, than any make-money-by-talking-about-botting scheme could ever be. So while I don't expect you to trust me completely just yet, three posts deep into a huge subject, I do at least ask that you give me credit for having a healthy amount of self-interest. Enough to know, for example, that real success is not to be had by posting a thin smear of content and somehow tricking people into clicking on my non-existent poker signup links.

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Introduction

I'm a big fan of pet projects. You know the ones I mean: the projects we love to start and hate to finish. The two-week remodeling gig that takes two years. The '69 Mustang sitting on cinderblocks in the back yard while seasons rotate. The unfinished novel lurking on the nether regions of your hard drive. And for programmers and poker players around the world, a million unfinished tools and libraries ranging from the ingenious to the depressingly obscure.

Today, I'd like to talk to you about a pet project which is actually worth your time.

When I say worth your time, I mean a project which is financially, professionally, and personally rewarding in a way that pet software projects almost never are. Everybody likes money, of course; and this project, properly executed, is worth a small fortune. In fact, building and successfully running even a flawed and break-even version of the bot for several years is worth a decade of paychecks (for most people). But the money is (or should be) an afterthought, a nice-to-have.

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