Tom Riddle's Magical Diary Comes to Life with AJAX
Crash Course in Magic
If you haven't read the book, nor watched the movie, Harry Potter finds this diary with nothing written in it. When he starts writing in it, the diary erases what he just wrote. Then the diary itself writes a reply back on the same page.Being a hobby magican, I thought it would be nifty idea to create such a diary myself (although I'm not evil). The diary has been approved by the head magic teachers FireFox wand 1.01 and Internet Explorer wand 6.0. The magical diary can be seen at Tom Riddle's Magical Diary. A zip containing the source files can be downloaded from here.
How it Works
It's all really simple. I'm simply displaying a background of an open book, looking old and used. On top of it is a transparent html textarea. Whenever you stop typing for more than 1200 ms the secret spell XmlHttpRequest is triggered, posting your typing to an A.I Chatbot. The Chatbot's response is then displayed letter by letter to give the feeling that someone is actually typing it in real time. Each letter is outputted with a random interval to make it look even more human like. After the response text has completely been displayed, it slowly fades away before it disappears, just like in the movie. Ideally, i tried to get the text to become transparent but there are some issuses with cross browser interoperatbility on transparent text so I decided to go with fading instead.
The response display area is simply a <div></div>.
The innerHtml property is used to populate it since the response back from the chatbot contains HTML. The div area and the input text area are both defined to be in the same location on the screen.
Problems Encountered
I found it annoying that javascript doesn't provide a sleep() function, which would have reduced the complexity of the javascript quite a bit.
When the response from Tom is displayed, the letter by letter display on FireFox is flickering. I haven't had the time to think of how to fix this yet, if you know of any good way, please let me know.
Another problem I ran into was that I orginally hosted the diary on the icegreen server and doing an offshore HTTP request to where Tom's brain lives. An offshore request is when accessing a document on a domain different from the one the original document was retreived from. FireFox fails with the following exception
Error: uncaught exception: Permission denied to call method XMLHttpRequest.open
If the HTML file is run from the local file system and by adding the following in the script
if (typeof netscape != 'undefined' && typeof netscape.security != 'undefined') { netscape.security.PrivilegeManager.enablePrivilege('UniversalBrowserRead'); }
will cause FireFox to ask your permission to proceed.
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Tom Riddle's Magical Diary Come to Life with AJAX
function loadXMLDoc(url, text) {
// branch for native XMLHttpRequest object
if (window.XMLHttpRequest) {
req = new XMLHttpRequest();
// branch for IE/Windows ActiveX version
} else if (window.ActiveXObject) {
req = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
}
if (req) {
What is the value of 'req' if both conditions fail? Oops, it doesn't exist.
Re: Tom Riddle's Magical Diary Come to Life with AJAX
I think the primary purpose is a proof of concept thing, connecting a chatbot with a web client using AJAX.
The chatbot server is a thirdparty running an opensource chatbot. The XML AIML files I'm using are pretty much the standard ones based on Dr. Wallcence's.
The chatbot server is a thirdparty running an opensource chatbot. The XML AIML files I'm using are pretty much the standard ones based on Dr. Wallcence's.
Re: Tom Riddle's Magical Diary Come to Life with AJAX
I thought the book was pretty cool although your "employer" asked me for my credit card number, and then type corrected my grammer back at me. I thought that was rude and uncalled for as it doesn't give you enough time to make corrections before it sends.
Re: Tom Riddle's Magical Diary Come to Life with AJAX
It's cool.. But I have question for you... Are you some weirdo, who made this diary hoping for the goverment to sit there and tell you stuff so you can throw down the goverment? (only asking)... The diary also says that he's from IKEA, what does he mean by that?
Re: Tom Riddle's Magical Diary Come to Life with AJAX
This is a really amazing demonstration. It is the #2 most popular bot on Pandorabots right now, maybe in the world.
If you wanted to create a totally unique bot personality with knowledge about a specific domain, such as Harry Potter, without using any of the ALICE responses, we recommend starting with the Superbot
Re: Tom Riddle's Magical Diary Come to Life with AJAX
Very cool. but i must mention to the others who will read this. it does have some what a memory, (but i've just been on it for a few hours). And how you need to be specific with you answers and replies, (interesting but doesn't seem like his character)...
Re: Tom Riddle's Magical Diary Come to Life with AJAX
I also have a problem, i can write on it but it doesn't answer, what should i do? please, some solution for "stupid" like me, i don't understand what to do with: Java has a sleep function: try { Thread.sleep(1000); // 10 seconds delay } catch (Interru...
Re: Tom Riddle's Magical Diary Come to Life with AJAX
I think that this is amazing but I didn't like was that, it said some things that had absolutely nothing to do with what the current topic was! also another was that, after what I wrote had disappeared, I would not get a response back from the diary
Re: Tom Riddle's Magical Diary Come to Life with AJAX
I thought the book was pretty cool although your "employer" asked me for my credit card number, and then type corrected my grammer back at me. I thought that was rude and uncalled for as it doesn't give you enough time to make corrections before it send things off