Universe's Blog

EA Origin has a buddy and chat system similar to that of Steam. Luckily, EA employs XMPP to act as the transport agent for chat communication. This means we can use third party XMPP clients to connect to it!

Server Details

The settings are geared towards the Pidgin XMPP plugin. You may have to adapt them to get them working with a different XMPP client.

Username: Your numerical EA ID. (See later on how to find this!)
Domain: chat.dm.origin.com
Resoure: origin
Password: Your origin password.
Connection Security: Use encryption if available.
Connect Port: 5222
Connect Server: chat.dm.origin.com

Finding Numerical ID

1. Visit the following page in your browser: https://profile.ea.com/myprofile.do
2. Login using your origin username and password.
3. You should land on a page titled “EA Account Manager” and see two sections – My Info and My Preferences.
4. View the source code of this page. (This will depend on your browser – on Firefox, right click on the page and select “View Page Source”
5. Search for the following: “s_ea.prop1=s_ea.setUserState” (without quotes)
6. The number you see on the that line should contain your numerical ID.

Downsides

* Logging in via XMPP causes a logged-in Origin session to detect the second login and go into offline mode. I’m not too sure if this affects your ability to play games.
* The Origin servers tend to kick you off after a random period of time. This various between 1 and 20+ minutes. I’m guessing the Origin client does sends out some sort of periodical keep-alive message. I’m investigating if its possible to solve this problem via Pidgin perl script.

Screenshots

Sources:

* Wireshark of Origin login process.
* This post revealed that the numerical version of your Origin ID is used for login.

Just quick bug-fix release of No$GBA Profile Manager today. Release 12 fixes an issue where with the ‘raw’ save-game compression type.

Thanks to the person who emailed me about the bug.

My backups procedures on my computer are mostly automated. I have scripts that collect my data from across my computer and the internet (IM Logs, Emails, SMS etc) and copies them into one centralised location on my machine. This folder is then kept mirrored across all available local HDD’s. However, I also take the smaller files (i.e. excluding photos and videos) and make daily differential backups. This allows me to upload this data off-site to Amazon S3 (where I subsequently keep data mirrored across three buckets in three geographical regions – US, Europe and Asia Pacific). However, I would normally have to manually initiate the upload of the differential backups to Amazon S3. In order to better automate this procedure, I took advantage of CloudBerry S3 Explorer and its PowerShell extensibility.

Configuring PowerShell
Running unsigned scripts is disallowed with PowerShell by default. To fix this, run the following command in PowerShell: (Note: Please read up on what unrestricted means before doing this.)

Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted

Configuring the Cloudberry SnapIn
You will need to register the Cloudberry SnapIn with Windows PowerShell. Open PowerShell, navigate to your CloudBerry folder and run one of the following commands depending on your OS:

C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\installutil.exe CloudBerryLab.Explorer.PSSnapIn.dll (x86)
C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727\installutil.exe CloudBerryLab.Explorer.PSSnapIn.dll (x64)

The Folder Backup Script
You can now use the following code in a PowerShell script (.ps1 file) to initiate folder backups to Amazon S3: (Remember to customise the target bucket, source folder location, and S3 AccessID/Secret Keys)

#Register the CloudBerry Extension.
Add-PSSnapin CloudBerryLab.Explorer.PSSnapIn

#Copy ChatLogs_S3
$local = Get-CloudFileSystemConnection
$source = $local | Select-CloudFolder C:\Logs
$s3 = Get-CloudS3Connection YourS3KeyHere YourS3SecretHere
$target = $s3 | Select-CloudFolder -Path yourbucket/logs
$source | Copy-CloudSyncFolders $target

Calling PowerShell From Batch/CMD
You can call a PowerShell script from a batch script or command prompt as follows:

powershell.exe C:\Logs\s3_upload.ps1 (Absolute Path)
powershell.exe .\s3_upload.ps1 (Relative Path)

References: [1], [2]