I’ve finished TromaNightAdventure, a WikiGame on RockMonkey. It’s at version 0.9, so far, because there’s still a few things I’d like to do with it (like add a “hints” page, for example!). But nonetheless, if you’re a Troma Night fan, you ought to go play it!
Kind: Articles
Windows XP SP1 Honeypot Breached In 200 Seconds
The internet is becoming a scarier and scarier place.
In a recent “honeypot” study, a Windows XP computer with Service Pack 1 was infiltrated in just 200 seconds, without even opening a web browser.
For the less techie-minded, a “honeypot” study involves setting up a new PC with a new operating system (in this case, a Windows XP SP1 machine) and connecting it directly to the internet to see how it is attacked and to what end. In this case, all they did was connect said computer to the internet… and less than four minutes later, it had been compromised by an attacker. Within half an hour, it was receiving instructions to act as a bridge to attack other computers.
Four minutes isn’t long enough to download and install ZoneAlarm. It certainly isn’t long enough to install Service Pack 2. And all across the globe, newbie PC users are buying off-the-shelf computers with no firewall, taking them home, and connecting them to the internet, basically ‘volunteering’ their computers and their bandwidth to be zombies and attack others around the world, relay spam, or share their files with anybody, anywhere.
If anybody needs help securing their system, just give me a shout.
Blogspam A Problem… No More
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’ve been getting more than my fair share of blogspam of late. I’ve been spending about twenty minutes every three or so days clearing out the ‘moderation’ queue and updating my keyword lists. Worse still, some spam has been getting through nonetheless (hopefully I’ve always been quick to remove it, and so none of you – my readers – have had to see any of it).
So: I’ve implemented a new anti-blogspam solution: whenever you post a comment to my weblog from now on you’ll be asked a simple question. The answer is usually obvious… to a human… but very difficult to automate a computer to answer. I appreciate any feedback on this (why not leave a comment to this post), and I’ll let you know whether it fixes the problem. And, of course, if it does, I’ll offer my code snippet back to the WordPress development team in order to include it, perhaps, with a future version: or, at least, offer it to friends of mine who use similar blog engines and are troubled by spam.
I need sleep.
In other (almost equally geeky) news, I’ve been spending a good deal of time working on my new RockMonkey WikiGame – TromaNightAdventure. If I can keep up a reasonable development rate on it this weekend (which could be tough – I’ve lots to do, and Gareth is visiting and keeps distracting me with cool technology like GPS devices and VoIP telephones), it’ll be ready on Tuesday evening. Watch this space.
More Letters After My Name
News of the day: (here I go, flooding you all with lots of small posts), I’m now Daniel Huntley BEng(Hons) MBCS, ‘cos I’m now a member of the British Computer Society. Not quite sure whether or not this is a good thing, yet, but hey.
Hmm… they’ll be sending me my membership card seperately from my information pack for “security reasons”? WTF?
Oh, and in other news, BBC News is reporting that Internet Explorer’s usage dropped for the first time to less than 90% in recent polls, with Firefox taking up most of the ‘switchers’. This is good news, indeed (as anybody who’s looked at Abnib in (a) Internet Explorer and (b) Any Standards-Compliant Browser will understand).
Popularity Of The Welsh Language
<ROFLMAO>
Want a giggle? Go to Google and type “old dead language” into the search box (with or without the quotes… either way), and hit “I’m Feeling Lucky!”.
This is the follow-up to my experimental googlebomb the other week. I’ve had my fun, now, and I actually believe it’s possible (I was skeptical when I first read about it, but it turns out that Google really is that easy to manipulate) to pull off a googlebomb of this scale with my limited resources.
In other (equally geeky) news, I’m starting to have trouble with blogspam, and my usual keyword/IP/link-count filters aren’t catching it all… might need a reprogram.
Somebody Writes Of Half-Life 2
Somebody on slashdot writes of Half-Life 2:
Doom 3 tried to generate atmosphere through the lack of light and the monster placement that was obviously designed to scare you. After a while it degenerated into one big black scare job to me, and wasn’t very interesting as a result.
On the other hand, I felt that HL2 did an awesome job of generating atmosphere, without the darkness. That last part was especially interesting to notice. When was the last time you were scared in a computer game while in broad daylight? Or in a peaceful zone? And to continue onto gameplay, when was the last time you had an idea of killing an enemy in the middle of a firefight, and that creative idea that would’ve been impossible in older games simply worked? Yes, I’m talking about the physics engine, and I haven’t seen gameplay this varied since wielding a cursed blanket in NetHack.
I’m willing to sacrifice bump mapping everywhere for the ability to throw bladed flying machines at enemies.
Yum.
Tell Me About Your Heterosexuality
Rediscovered this online – some questions for the heterosexual:
- What do you think caused your heterosexuality?
- When and how did you first decide that you were a heterosexual?
- Is it possible that your heterosexuality is just a phase that you will grow out of?
- Is it possible that your heterosexuality stems from a neurotic fear of people of the same sex?
- Heterosexuals have histories of failure in gay relationships. Do you think that you may have turned to heterosexuality from fear of rejection?
- If you’ve never slept with a person of the same sex, how do you know that you wouldn’t prefer that?
- If heterosexuality is normal, why are a disproportionate number of mental patients heterosexual?
- To whom have you disclosed your heterosexual tendencies, what reaction did you get?
- Your heterosexuality doesn’t offend me as long as you leave me alone. But why do so many heterosexuals try to seduce others into that orientation?
- Most child molesters are heterosexual. Do you consider it safe to expose your children (if you have any) to heterosexuals, especially heterosexual teachers?
- Why must heterosexuals be so blatant, making a public display of their heterosexuality? Can’t you just be what you are and keep it quiet?
- Heterosexuals always align themselves such narrowly restricted, stereotyped sex-roles. Why do you cling to such unhealthy role-playing?
- How can you have a fully satisfying emotional experience with a person of the opposite sex when the obvious physical, biological, and temperamental differences are so vast? How can a man possible understand what pleases a woman sexually and vice versa?
- Heterosexual marriage has total social support, yet the divorce rate continues to spiral upwards. Why are there so few stable heterosexual relationships?
- Since there are so few happy heterosexuals, techniques have been developed to help people change. Have you tried aversion therapy?
- Could you trust a heterosexual therapist / councilor not to try to influence you towards their sexual leanings?
- Do heterosexuals hate or distrust others of their own sex? Is that what makes them heterosexual?
- Why are heterosexuals so promiscuous; always having ‘affairs’ etc?
Made me smile.
Weekend
I seem to spend most of my time on this blog posting retrospectively about what I did on any given weekend. Will try to spice things up with a little more thought and debateworthy stuff in the future – I’ve got some ideas. In any case:
Friday was Andy’s gig – not as good as the last one I went to, but still a fab show (and, in particular, some great guitarwork this time around). Claire couldn’t come – she was in Gregynog on a Computer Science away-half-weekend (the replacement for what used to be the “second Aberdyfi weekend” that we used to have in the first year).
Saturday was Troma Night. Rory (visiting) and not-gay Gareth (recently discovered to be in Aberystwyth) came along, as did Claire’s friend Ruth, and a good time was had by all.
And, of course, Sunday was Geek Night. We played Hacker for the first time in ages, as well as a little Fluxx. Matt seems to be a huge fan of the latter – perhaps it apppeals to the mathematician inside him.
Oh, and: Yay!
My Very Own Googlebomb
Partially out of curiosity, partially to point out a flaw in the #aber multipass system, I’ve made my own little googlebomb. For those of you who don’t like reading, a googlebomb is where you manipulate the way that popular search engine Google into falsely linking with great priority a page that it probably should not. I’m sure you all remember “French military victories” and “Weapons of mass destruction”?
Go to Google, type in “Stuii should fix this”, and hit “I’m Feeling Lucky”. You’ll be taken to the #aber multipass page of a user who has never existed, a user called “Stuii Should Fix This”.
It’s a pain that when people search for ‘AvaPoet’, the first result is what should be my multipass (but it expired long ago). However, there’s obviously still a lot of places linking to it, so people keep getting that page whenever they look for me. Grr.
In any case; the theory’s been demonstrated plenty of times before… I just wanted to do it for myself. Yay.
Rory’s In Town
Met up with Rory this lunchtime in MGees: looks like he’s working on moving back to AberWorld whenever he can afford it, and running his business from here. I’m not sure how much of a market there is for payware RSS/ATOM newsfeed readers, but I wish him the best of luck in it anyway. Hopefully he’ll be able to find himself some part-time work to “keep the wolf from his door” <ahem> in the meantime.
Anyway; he’s promised that he’s going to drag not-gay Gareth along to Troma Night tomorrow night, so that’s all-good. On which note; does anybody have any objections to a long-anticipated reshowing Overdrawn At The Memory Bank (MST3k edition)? With Paul‘s co-operation, of course.
Str8Up, Fluxx, Liz’s Birthday, Etc.
Went to Str8Up at the Students Union on Monday night with Bryn, Claire and Paul. Paul complained a little about people (in general) who go to traffic-light parties (where you wear red, yellow or green to reflect your ‘availability’ and ‘desperation’ – Claire and I wore red, Paul wore yellow, Bryn wore blue), wearing green, and just sit in the corner and don’t actually talk to anybody, then complain that they’re still single. He’s right – relationships can’t be relied upon to “just happen”, particularly in such a setting. I retorted, though, pointing out that while he was perpetually complaining that he was still single, he was just sat here with his friends – a couple, and a heterosexual man – his chances weren’t that good.
Paul explained as he slowly got more and more drunk that he was particularly shy in situations like this – which I can entirely appreciate – so I decided to help. I started by bluejacking a few messages around to the nearby bluetooth-enabled mobile phones (they’re getting surprisingly common these days). I won’t embarrass anybody by sharing the messages that went back and forth on here, but suffice to say I bounced several messages to somebody, and back, before they “disappeared” themselves. They left with a photo of Paul, but missed their chance to leave with him.
Fluxx arrived, and we’ve spent several days playing games of it. It’s a funky, fancy, just-plain-weird card game in which the rules and goals are defined entirely by the cards in play, which in turn dictates what cards can be played and when. It’s also a lot friendlier than our games of Munchkin, with less backstabbing and shouting at each other… not that that’s not fun, too…
Last night we went out to celebrate Liz’s 22nd birthday. This was a lot of fun (although, even by the time we’d gotten to The Bay, I’d come to realise that it was only Liz, Claire and I who knew everybody there… and who they knew and how. We drank, we talked, we danced… then we all sat down exhausted and watched Liz and Kathleen carry on wiggling in that lovely way on the dancefloor for a little while longer. And even Bryn got dancing (I have a video I’ll have to upload at some point…), perhaps only the second time I’ve seen that (after Kit and Fiona’s wedding). Speaking of which, I’ve now finally got around to putting a photo of the bride and groom online.
In other news, I asked AQA: How cool is RockMonkey?. AQA responded: AQA: RockMonkey.org.uk is very very cool indeed as the Wiki-powered site is run by Aberystwyth’s number one dude & mountain-lover Andy Keohane. Predictable, but sweet nonetheless.
SmartRacer
Yesterday lunchtime I finished writing a program that suddenly makes our working day that little bit more exciting – SmartRacer.
SmartRacer runs quietly in the system tray of as many users want to run it – currently Matt, Haagen, Gareth and me… but I’m trying to get Alex involved, too.
When you click on the system tray icon, the race begins! A couple of quick UDP broadcast packets are passed around the network, and everybody on the subnet who’s running the program is presented with racing-style “start lights”… 3… 2… 1… GO!
At this point, all participants will race – on their wheely-chairs – around the central ‘island’ of tables, in a clockwise direction, and attempt to be first to return to their own place and click the “Finish” button. Overtaking is rare – but permitted – and usually quite aggressive. As each player returns to their desk a “score” table is presented to everybody, with all participants times appearing in ‘minutes’ (heh), ‘seconds’, and ‘hundredths’.
Of course, players can choose not to participate in any particular race by clicking the “I’m Not Playing” button. The wimps.
You can download SmartRacer here, to play at your own workplace – SmartRacer.exe (64kb). It runs on Windows 98/ME/2000/XP/2003, and requires the Microsoft .NET Framework.
Another Fun Little Weekend
Another happy fun little weekend. Troma Night on Saturday was particularly good: we watched both Kill Bill films back-to-back, along with the usual collection of other crap. Not-gay Gareth couldn’t make it, in the end (his parents are visiting this weekend), so we may have to see him some other weekend.
We’ve proposed a few more traditions for Troma Night. The first of these – and the one most likely to be implemented – is that of the “Honourary New Person”: following in the traditions of “Honourary Kit” and “Honourary Claire”, this tradition would dictate that whenever somebody comes to Troma Night for the first time, another person (a regular) is nominated “Honourary New Person”, and has the rules and traditions explained to them, and is teased mercilessly for the real new person’s lack of knowledge.
Other proposed new traditions were ‘tried out’ at Geek Night, on Sunday, such as an “Honourary JTA And Ruth” – the latter of which punches the former every time anybody insults the real Ruth. Of course, the real Ruth is eligible for nomination to be “Honourary Ruth” or even “Honourary JTA”!
Geek Night itself was fun, but a little drawn-out. We started with a longer-than-usual game of Carcassonne, this time with both the expansion packs that we have. The latter, “Traders And Builders”, really does add an extra something to the game. I won (miraculously, I thought Andy, just one point behind me, was going to!), after a long battle over a few key farms and two large cities.
We went on to play Munchkin. A very long game, with all of us waiting on level 9 for a long time. I spent most of the game as a woman, after an early sex change. Ruth looked most likely to win for a long while, then Andy and I tried to gang up and “win together”, just to get the game over with! Eventually, I won with a lucky draw at just the right time. A little luck had me win twice this Geek Night. Good-o.
We should have played Hacker, but for some reason everybody else seemed to think that Munchkin would be quicker. Ha!
In other news, after my revelation about ACME Computer Games I gave them a bell. They have none of my stuff in stock and it may be several weeks before they do. Five minutes later the called me back and told me that, actually, he had just found a copy of Fluxx and would be posting it to me ASAP.
Oh, and JTA‘s moved his blog over to it’s new home. Go take a look: I’m quite proud of the design I helped him with.
I Don’t Think ACME Get Many Customers
I recently bought three board games (Munchkin 3, Fluxx and Puerto Rico) from ACME Computer Games in Bangor (yes, I know, the same guys who got confused over my order before…). Somehow, I don’t think they get many e-customers: I just grabbed this screenshot from their web site –
Notice that I’m looking at Munchkin 3, and the Customers Who Bought This Also Bought says… yes, my two other purchases. And nothing else. Hmm.
Still no sign of my order, or any word from them (I placed the order over a week ago). Better give them a bell, I think.
Bubba Ho-Tep
What’s everybody doing tommorow (Thursday) night? Wanna go see Bubba Ho-Tep at the Arts Centre cinema? It scores 7.6 on the IMDB, so it’s better than most of the crap we watch. I’m trying to avoid learning too much about it in case I ‘kill’ it, but here’s the plot outline according to the IMDB: “Elvis and JFK, both alive and in nursing homes, fight for the souls of their fellow residents as they battle an ancient Egyptian Mummy.” Sounds like a must-see to me!
Thanks to Not-Gay Gareth, who I saw for the first time in years, yesterday, for this recommendation.
In other news, the U.S. election is looking very tight. Just three states left to call, two votes in it (lead to Bush), and a recount underway in Ohio… which will make the difference, one way or another…