The Harry Potter series is, by all accounts, the most successful fiction in history.

With a few flicks of his magic wand, Harry Potter has turned Rowling into a billionaire (we estimate she's worth $1 billion). She's one of only five self-made female billionaires, and the first billion-dollar author.

This is apparent to anybody who lives within earshot of a dedicated Harry Potter fan.

"Expelliarmus!"

"Wingardium leviosa!"

And even the dreaded "Avada kedavra!"

If you're anything like me, you've had imaginary versions of these Harry Potter spells flung at you by over-zealous Harry Potter children, spouses, friends, and neighbors, oh, approximately since the first book came out way back in 1997.

So in the name of all things holy, and on behalf of anyone who's ever stared down the wrong end of a Crucio spell, I beg whoever is responsible for the Harry Potter empire to relent, and give these people a place to put their encyclopedic knowledge of Harry Potter to use.

Give us a Harry Potter MMORPG.

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I've always thought that programmers should know how to drive a stick shift. 

Pop the clutch, wrestle it into 2nd, finesse the gas, let the acceleration plaster you into those plush, faux-leather seats.

This is driving.

Now, I don't have anything against automatic transmissions. In fact, I love automatic transmissions:

• C#
• Java
• VB.NET
• PHP
• Ruby
• Python

But a programmer should know, or at least be familiar with, the low-level stuff.

• C/C++
• Assembler

That means: pointers. Threads. DLLs. Import tables. Memory allocation. Nuts and bolts. Stuff that's often abstracted away for us quite nicely by the .NET framework or the JVM. In a recent Stackoverflow.com podcast, Joel Spolsky makes the point:

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Introduction

Lately I've been doing some programmatic graffiti.

Maybe I have too much time on my hands, but sooner or later every programmer wonders:

• How to extract text displayed by other applications.
• How to draw your own text in the windows of external applications.

Maybe you've even wondered:

• How to hide the text displayed by other applications.

That's fun, too. Minimalism.

I like it.

But why stop with a single application? Let's replace every piece of text drawn anywhere on the system with our tag, creating a harmless "graffiti bomb". Scroll down if you're curious.

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Introduction

How to write code to detect when any software application on the machine accesses any file on the machine, and how to extract and view any data read from or written to that file in your own application, in real time, using C# and a little bit of C++?

That's the subject of today's article: how to build a file monitor on steroids (or a rough draft of one).

In the above screen shot, we're monitoring the Yahoo Messenger application. And as you can see, it reads and writes quite a bit of data. Public keys, log file snippets, some XML filtering stuff, and so forth. We could have as well chosen to point the tool at Microsoft Word, Grand Theft Auto, or the humble Notepad.exe. But the real power of these techniques is incorporating them into your own applications.

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Introduction

Since this series began, I've been asked one question over and over.

How do I build a poker bot for Poker Stars and/or Full Tilt? How do I extract text from the game chat window? How do I snoop on hand history and log files as they're generated?

Today we're going to answer that question.

As of this writing, Poker Stars is the most popular poker venue not only in the world, but in the history of poker. Online or brick-and-mortar, it doesn't matter. There's not currently, and there never has been, another card room in which so many people congregate so routinely to play poker for such sums of money. If you took one of the largest buildings in the world—for example, the Lockheed-Martin manufacturing plant in Fort Worth, Texas...

...and filled it with tables, stretching off into the distance, you'd have yourself a casino which could handle maybe 1% of Poker Stars traffic. Maybe 5% if you pack them like sardines.

With well over 120,000 players at peak hours, Poker Stars isn't really a card room at all.

It's a small city.

Controlled by a mysterious group of investors, operating behind the veil of privacy.

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