Articles – Page 99

Burny Burny Firey Goodness

Gareth came over this weekend, and he, Bryn, Paul, Claire and I decided to have a bonfire and a barbeque on the beach. Sadly, Matt – who’s in town for resits – couldn’t join us, as he’s busy revising (best of luck to you, Matt!).

In any case, the food and the beer and the company was good, until it started threatening rain and spitting on us in short bursts, when we decided we’d better abandon the camp and go play some Super Monkey Ball. And I kicked arse. And then Gareth beat me.

It’s been a rich, full weekend: between a brief exercise in nudism, Troma Night (Indiana Jones-themed), Gareth’s visit, and the fire on the beach, it’s been great. And, better yet, it looks like next week won’t involve so many late work nights (fingers crossed).

What If Windows 98 Had Activation?

Or: Yet Another Reason Why ‘Activation’ Is Bad

There are already loads of articles out there explaining why ‘product activation‘, which made it’s first appearance in a piece of Microsoft software in their release of Windows XP, is a bad thing. Product activation, which you may already have experienced, works by making a ‘fingerprint’ of the unique hardware identifiers of your computer’s makeup. This fingerprint, and your unique serial number, are sent to Microsoft either over the internet or using an automated telephone service, after which Microsoft give you a response code that allows Windows XP to work normally. The theory is that this prevents software piracy – if you allow a friend to use ‘your’ serial number, Microsoft will see that the same serial number is now being used with two different ‘fingerprints’ and will deny your friend access to Windows.

Of course, this also means that if you repeatedly make significant changes to your hardware configuration, or you reformat your hard drive, you have to re-activate, and if you do this ‘too frequently’, you’ll look like a pirate, even if you’re not. The ‘activation’ system has come under fire for many reasons: that the ‘fingerprinting’ process being an invasion of privacy is a popular reason. That it doesn’t actually stop determined pirates, but imposes a great inconvenience on many honest users is another. But I’ve not yet seen an article anywhere that suggests a major issue with the system that I thought of while in the shower this morning:

What If Windows 98 Had Activation?

I have several friends who still use Windows 98. And why not? Apart from the fact that it’s still built on top of MS-DOS, it’s a reasonable and functional operating system. More to the point, it does everything they want out of an operating system, and it’ll serve them for years to come.

Microsoft were originally to discontinue support for Windows 98 on January 16, 2004, but this date has since been extended. But let’s pretend that, like all computer software, this particular version is no longer supported (it’ll happen). What then?

Well – that’s not actually a problem: my friends who use Windows 98 can carry on using it for the rest of their lives. If they have any problems with it, they can’t go whinging to Microsoft, ‘cos Microsoft won’t care (is this that dissimilar to their “supported” products?), but they can use it forever and ever for as much as anybody cares. But here’s the problem: suppose my friend needed to ‘activate’ his Windows 98 installation: what would happen? One day, he installs a new network card and it asks him to re-activate, but the internet activation fails. When he calls up the telephone activation service, he gets a recorded announcement stating that his choice of operating system is no longer supported, and he has to go out and buy a new one (and, probably, a new computer, too – on which to run it).

This is a scary thought. If I set up a Windows 2003 Server today (also requires activation), I want it to still be working in a few years time (upgrades aside). Perhaps I’m using it to deploy a centralised database for my business (I recently came across a business who are still using a thirty-year old piece of hardware to manage their data, running an even older operating system) – with Windows activation: this kind of longevity is no longer an option.

And, of course, the scariest point: what happens if, in the future, Microsoft goes out of business. Do we all have to “throw away” our then-useless (well… I say then-useless) copies of Windows?

It’s all very, very scary.

Troma Night Becomes Locally Famous

While doing a few errands around town, Bryn and I stepped into Pier Video to check whether Paul had already rented the three videos we’re planning to watch at this evening’s themed Troma Night: Raiders Of The Lost Ark, Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, and Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom, and – if he hadn’t – rent them ourselves, ready.

We browsed the shelves a little to see if their copy was still in stock, and, when the lady at the counter was done with the customers she was serving when we entered, we decided to quiz her, to see if she remembered renting out the three Indiana Jones movies to somebody this evening already:

“Hi,” I began, “This is going to sound like a weird request, but some friends and I are having a themed video evening tonight, and I was wondering if…”

“Yes,” she interrupted, “Indiana Jones. He’s already taken them out.”

Scary.

This Weekend : Nudism For Dummies

Following the theme of Parachuting For Dummies, last weekend, this weekend Claire and I spent the day at Morfa Dyffryn, a naturist beach between Barmouth and Harlech (about an hour and a quarter’s drive away – would be less, but Barmouth’s roads are comparable to Cambridge in their narrowness and complexity).

Which was an experience. And no, it’s not all about sex (although the women playing football naked were damned funny). It was actually good to be able to lounge around on the beach and sunbathe (and swim in the sea) without having to get changed, or erect shoddy windbreaks for privacy, or any such thing.

We also enjoyed a fabulous lunch (albeit a little expensive) at a pub called the Ael-Y-Bryn (pretty awful web site, though). If you’re ever driving past it, drop in.

On The Importance Of A Firewall

This is a graph showing the average amount of time between port scans against Windows boxen, and it’s change from last year to this year. It’s down from 40 minutes to 20 minutes over the last year.

If we take this and assume a few things:

(a) There will always be Windows security vulnerabilities – not an unreasonable assumption in a large piece of software like Windows, or any similarly large program.

(b) Windows security vulnerabilities will always be discovered and exploited long before they are patched by Microsoft – based on past experience, this is a fair statement.

(c) All of the script kiddies doing this port scans are knowledgeable in the most recent exploits against Microsoft Windows – a little pessimistic, perhaps, but with a several-month-long window (ahem) in which to exploit them before they get patched, acceptable.

Therefore, it can be assumed that a new Windows XP PC needs only to be online for 20 minutes before it becomes infected with a ‘push’ virus, contaminated with a trojan, or enslaved as a zombie. On a slow dial-up modem connection, that probably isn’t quite long enough to download a copy of ZoneAlarm…

Jeez. Thank Dog for SP2.

One Thousand, Two Thousand, Three Thousand… Check Canopy!

Wow: a most memorable weekend. As you’ll remember, I spent the last weekend on a crash-course in parachuting in Lancashire. Having spent plenty of time in light aircraft or coasting around in a paraglider, I thought I had it sized: but it turned out to be even more spectacular (and scary) than I could have possibly predicted.

Saturday consisted of an exhausting seven hours or so of training: standing around in a field, doing such activities as demonstrating that we can arch our backs into the “stable position” and shouting “One thousand, two thousand, three thousand… check canopy!”, only to have some instructor shout “Malfunction!” and therefore have to go through our emergency process (“Look, locate, peel, pull, punch, arch!”) for the seventy-somethingth time… or lying on our bellies on overgrown skateboards, wiggling our bodies into strange contortions in order to simulate airflow (somewhat reminiscent of the idea of learning to swim by lying on a bench and practising strokes – little real value)… or clambering into a mock-up wooden aircraft (imagination required), climbing out onto the wing, and preparing to jump… or hanging in suspended harnesses, fumbling with the controls of make-believe parachutes…

I made my first jump on Saturday, early in the evening. Despite having been cool as a cucumber for the entire training process, I was very apprehensive by now. But this apprehension drifted gently away to be replaced with blind panic the moment we’d spiralled up to 3500 feet and the instructor opened the door, filling our faces with a 50mph wind. The plane was a small four-seater single-screw affair, with all but the pilot’s seat surgically removed so as to squeeze five parachutists (four students and an instructor, in this case) at a time into it, kneeling down and getting pins and needles in their feet. The instructor tapped the pilot on the shoulder: “Cut,” he shouted, and the pilot obliged, cutting engine power to a fraction and causing the plane to lurch downwards in a stomach-gulping manner. Before I knew it, it was my turn to jump.

“Feet out!” shouted the instructor, unsympathetically, slapping my on the shoulder and making a last check of my static line (the device that automatically deploys your parachute – essentially a long nylon strap attaching your ripcord to the pilot’s seat). I knew the drill by heart, having practised it to death on the ground: I grasped each side of the aeroplane’s door and put my right foot out onto the step. Then, that secure (considering the head wind), I reached out with my left hand and held the wing support beam. Then my right hand. Then, finally, I moved my left foot out and precariously swapped it with my right, leaving my right dangling above a 3500 foot hole. I couldn’t help but look down, and see fields stretching out, little cars moving along the roads, and occasional stray clouds meandering by. I looked back into the plane to signify my readiness…

“Go!” shouted the instructor. I let go.

At that moment, I forgot everything that I had spent so long learning. For some time to come, I was unable to remember the four seconds that followed. I was later to learn (and, later still, to remember) that I let go gracefully, but then – instead of forming the stable ‘arch’ position (important, as it keeps your back facing ‘up’, allowing your parachute to deploy correctly) – I put my hands by my sides, causing me to fall head-first until my ‘chute deployed. I remembered hanging onto the wing, and I remembered my parachute opening, but the rest was completely missing for the next half-hour.

During the three further jumps I performed on Sunday, there was no trace of the fear that had gripped me during the initial phases of my first: and, in fact, I was able to get the hang of assuming the correct position and landing without crippling myself… moreover, I’m now qualified to a level at which I’m permitted to begin DRCP (Dummy Rip-Cord Pull) jumps, in which I would leap from a plane and pull what is effectively a glorified handkerchief from the back of my backpack, symbolising the correct pulling of a rip-cord. Doing this will eventually allow me to do a free-fall, and is a progressive stage towards certification as a skydiver. Which is nice.

I loved it. Everybody in a fit state should do this sometime. Wonderful.

This Weekend : Parachuting For Dummies

Parachuting For Dummies

The good news is that the weather looks fantastic for my parachuting trip this weekend. I can’t think of a better thing to be travelling for on a Friday 13th.

The downside is I haven’t spent more than a few consecutive minutes off the phone this morning talking my work colleagues through the code I’ve left behind for them to carry on with. At current rates, I should expect to be answering my mobile during a free-fall.

Executable Stenography… With A Difference

Somebody’s come up with a program that hides secret messages in executable programs. Well… that’s not so impressive – we’ve all hidden secret messages in JPEG files before by using programs to ‘flip’ certain pixels (example). This works by changing the image in subtle ways that the human eye won’t detect, but that the descrambling application will. But here’s the clever bit…

Typically, when encoding a ‘hidden message’ in an executable, one ‘pads’ the file, making it bigger. The technique used when encoding messages in graphics files can’t be used with executables, because ‘flipping’ bits of the file would stop the program from working (or at least, working as it should), which may arouse suspicion. But this new tool works by exploiting redundancy in the i386 instruction set, swapping instructions or blocks of instructions for other ones which are functionally identical. As a result, the original filesize remains the same, and the program maintains full functionality. It would take an eavesdropper to fully compare the executable with a known original executable in order to determine that there was even a message hidden within it, and (thanks to Blowfish cryptography) yet more effort to decode that message.

Marvellous.

Ferreting Out Piracy

The BSA Ferret CNet News has a story on the BSA‘s attempts to educate children that copyright evasion and piracy is wrong, with the help of their new cartoon mascot – a ferret (shown).

And yes, I’ve used the picture of their new mascot without their permission. <wink>

Is a ferret really the best mascot they could think of…?

Thrashing

Thrashing is a computer science term referring to an undesirable occurrence in multiprocessing systems.

When a processor is given multiple jobs to do, it services them a little each in a round-robin fashion (assuming that no priority system is in effect), until each is done. This is, of course, actually significantly less efficient than doing each job one at a time, but doing a little of each job, a little at a time is more productive when dealing with humans, who like – for example – their web page to download at the same time as they write a Word document.

Unfortunately, optimizations to this system can cause it to go wrong. By giving the processor more and more jobs to do, it eventually passes a critical point at which it is spending more time performing administrative tasks and managing it’s ’round robin’ scheme than it is actually performing the tasks you want it to. You’ve probably seen a system doing this. The solution, of course, is to either stop giving the system jobs to do until it can finish some of those it already has, or, better still, to kill some of the running processes to enable the processor to catch up on it’s workload. The solution is not to click irritably on the buttons, or repeatedly demand more and more of the processor.

Today, I feel like a thrashed processor.

How To Keep Up With The Latest Happings On Scatmania (or What Are All Those Pretty Buttons?)

If you’re looking for a way to keep up-do-date with the latest Scatmania happenings, it’s now really really easy. I’ve enhanced my weblog with a heap of useful syndication tools that make keeping track of my latest activities a doddle, even for those of you who are unenlightened and can still be caught using an awful choice of web browser.

You may have noticed that at the bottom of the Scatmania menu there’s a series of button. Most of these buttons (the top five) relate to subscribing to Scatmania, like this:

RSS	RSS is a popular format for syndicating news and views on the internet, supported by most weblog communities and applications, as well as by many news sites. To view RSS content, you will need an RSS Aggregator such as Pluck (a plug-in for Internet Explorer), RSSOwl (for most operating systems) or the attractive NewsMac for MacOS. The Opera web browser now supports RSS feeds, too, and it looks likely that other browsers will soon follow suit. The RSS : Journal feed from Scatmania provides you with the latest blog entries, as they happen. The RSS : Comments feed collates the newest comments and replies to my weblog entries. RSS is a great way to keep up with your friends weblogs and your favourite news sites.
Atom	ATOM, like RSS, is a simple way to keep up-to-date with your favourite sites. Just download an ATOM-enabled newsreader (some, like BottomFeeder, can read RSS feeds as well) and point it at the sites you want to watch. Scatmania publishes an ATOM feed of the latest blog entries.
ESF	ESF is a small, fast, and simple new way to publish content like weblogs. There aren’t really any programs for reading it right now. Why not consider writing one (see how simple the data format is).
CDF	CDF, developed my Microsoft as part of Internet Explorer 4, was supposed to be the future of the way we used the web and subscribed to the services of web sites… but it never took off. However, Internet Explorer to this day provides the means to subscribe to ‘active channels’, and for Internet Explorer users, this may be the easiest way to keep up with Scatmanian events. Just click the button in Internet Explorer and Scatmania will be added to your Favourites list as a submenu, automatically adding new items (and removing old ones) as new entries are added to the blog. Thanks to Aquarionics for suggesting this reincarnation of Internet Explorer ‘active channels’.

So, now you’ve got no excuse for not being up-to-date with my blog… or anybody elses!

The other buttons are mostly just me showing off because I can write standards-compliant code – click on them and see for yourself.

1984 Revisited: What If Apple Took The ‘Microsoft Route’

Daring Fireball has an article about “Apple vs. Microsoft” with a difference. Contrary to many, he argues that if Apple had taken the ‘Microsoft route’ in 1984, with their hardware and software (significantly superior to IBM-PC platforms running Microsoft software), by licensing the platform, they wouldn’t necessarily be the market leader today. It’s a well-written and compelling article, and if you’ve any interest in OS politics or parallel universes, it’s worth a look.

SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: Competing Directly Against Microsoft May Be Hazardous to Your Company

Weather Situation Unclear For Weekend’s Parachuting

As you may know, I’ll be doing a crash course in parachuting – hopefully climaxing in a solo freefall – next weekend, to celebrate my (finally) getting a degree, courtesy of my dad. The weather reports don’t look too favourable, though – potentially stormy at the end of this week. Hmmph. We’ll see. It’ll take more than a little lightning to stop me from throwing myself out of an aeroplane.

In other news, Claire‘s been using the student loan repayment calculator on The Guardian’s Education site, looking at different career paths and calculating how long it would take her to repay her student loans (at £18,000 + inflation only, it would take her about 40 years). She clicked on “Web Site Designer”, just out of curiosity, and the resulting page caused her browser to crash. Somehow, this is very funny.

Dan Breaks The Internet… Again

Whoops. You’d have thought I’d have learnt my lesson when I fucked around with BIND last year, and ‘broke’ a small portion of the internet, but no. I managed to ‘break the internet’ again while playing with the Domain Name System settings on big. That’s why Scatmania was inaccessible for the last day or so (to most people).

In other news, spent Sunday in the office, working on getting the database for the project I’ve been working on live and online, with some success, despite the power company’s best attempts to stop me. Those in Aber will have experienced the power cuts of Friday and Sunday (half an hour in the second case), which crippled one of SmartData‘s computers with a power spike to it’s PSU – one I’ll be glad to be rid of, admittedly (yet another cheaply made piece of junk from Microland UK). But nevertheless, the power cut was of great inconvenience to those of us trying to work to a deadline, on a Sunday, and wanting to get home in time to go out and see I, Robot. I sat outside in the sun-come-drizzle and read a book that was one of my recommended course texts but that I never got around to reading while I was actully doing my degree, and listened to the ocassional screams of the UPS bricks to let me know that I still couldn’t actually get on with some work.

I, Robot was OK… kind-of a re-hashing of the concepts put forward in Blade Runner, Electric Dreams, The Matrix, A.I., and Bicentennial Man, with an excessive use of bullet-time and slow motion. Coherent, though… but you will come out of the cinema saying “See every other robot movie for examples of this theme.”

Right; off to work…

I’m Surrounded By Idiots

Conversation with a co-worker, who shall remain nameless:

Her: Is anybody any good at Fireworks?
Me: Yeh; you just light the blue touchpaper and run. But seriously, you ought’a be using Corel Photo-Paint.

(I wander over to her desk, and see that she’s working with a bitmapped image of our logo – she’s trying to remove some of the text from it… using the text tool… the text is jaggedy and quite obviously bitmapped)

Her: Why can’t I select this text?
Me: Umm… because it’s not text; it’s an image. The same reason that if I scanned in some of my handwriting and gave you that as a file, you couldn’t select it.
Her: But it is text: look…

(at this point, I collapse into a blubbering heap on the floor… this person has several years of an internet computer science degree tucked under her belt, but can’t understand the difference between vector-based and bitmap graphics [pretty fundamental year one web design stuff])