I recently wrote an BrainFuck interpreter in INTERCAL. I keep it here and it's an evil evil beast.:D
Several years back I also wrote a relatively full-featured BBS, complete with message boards, file areas and dropfile support for door games, in QBASIC, as well as a DataPac network scanner in same.:/
A QBASIC story. How embarassing.
on
Pet Bugs?
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· Score: 1
Yeah, yeah, it was a long time ago. But a friend and I were somewhat blown away to find out that the QBASIC code:
PRINT #2, INPUT$(1, 1)
Or some close equivalent to that, intended to write to file handle #2 a single byte from file handle #1, ended up outputting the single byte to stdout instead. We spent half an hour trying to figure out what our mistake was. It wasn't. It was just a strange, stupid interpreter error in a program language that's rife with them.
And to think I just went and downloaded the entire slackware-current source tree to try out RC1 only three days ago. -_-
Seriously though, Slack 8.1 looks great. There are a few little tweaks that really make a difference (for instance, I thought I saw ESD behaving at one point) and some of the stuff packaged with it is just cool (am I the only one who noticed the full-colour Lynx?:D).
My only complaint is one I can't verify with the actual CD release of Slack 8.1, but at least with RC1 it was very very hard to do a clean "upgrade" of my current system. In fact I eventually had to back up all my important configuration files and delete the entire filesystem except for the directory where I'd made a copy of the -current tree and the utilities I needed to "installpkg". Nothing short of that would make it work cleanly. This isn't really a big deal for desktop systems but it makes me very nervous about upgrading my servers, most of which are running Slack 8.0 or 7.1.
Still, a great release that was well worth the wait.
It would be fairly simple to hack up a little block device that would act like a 15Tb FS and look like a normal file./dev/zero looks like about 800 quadrillion bytes if you read it for long enough. Just as long as the device returned filesystem information where it needed to, it could fill the "files" themselves with repeating patterns. As long as it simulates a 15Tb filesystem realistically it'd be good enough for testing.
Of course, they probably actually did it with a real file, but there's no reason it couldn't work this way.
This guy states that Mplayer needs to be compiled with the GUI to view anything other than DVD's. Did he even look at the command-line arguments? You just specify a codec on the command line (like "-o odivx"... the actual argument could be different, I'm gapping o_O) along with the filename. In fact Mplayer's GUI is distressingly impotent, disallowing access to most of the features that are most important to anyone running it on a system that's just barely powerful enough to run it well (like my 667MHz P3), such as post-processing settings and video/audio output devices.
Mplayer is far better and more capable from the command line. His assertion is silly.:P
The last time I said "I thought it was funny", it got modded -1. But, come on, a laugh is a laugh. One day a year is hardly gratuitous. I think most of the stories posted today are hilarious. It's making my work day all the more bearable.
So don't bitch!:D
I've worked with these...
on
Netwinder is Back
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· Score: 4, Informative
Yeah, I once did random network administration junk for a small company that sold Nortel stuff. Our VP was a fat moron with a respiratory problem who used to print off every spam e-mail he got and make me "look into it and see if it offers any benefits to us". I used to just throw these things in the trash but a few weeks before they actually hired me someone talked him into buying a wretched Netwinder. Not only that, but he decided to try to distribute them. Damned if he had any idea what they were or what they did but that little brochure just had so many darn Internetty words on it!
The web-based interface was nice, frankly, but the modified Redhat distro it comes loaded with is ridiculously sparse, and the omission of certain little things like, say, GCC makes adding any functionality a real pain in the ass. Unless, of course, you can find all the binaries you need for its StrongARM architecture. Not that they encourage you to expand it anyway, but as far as I'm concerned that slashes its hack value in half.
At any rate, most of the functionality it promises is obscurely implemented (if at all) and I never did get most of it working (like the much-touted "VPN capability" which the thing has literally zero pre-loaded facilities for).
Maybe I'm just biased by miserable experiences like the time the fat idiot decided his accountant's office, a tiny LAN done with coax on which three of the desktops had a modem sharing a single line so that one person could use the internet at a time, could use a Netwinder and offered a "free trial". He had me make a list of the benefits it would offer the guy, and all I could really come up with was that I could get it to gateway all of them onto the Internet at the same time. That became the "selling point" and the privilege fell to me of going to the site, completely reconfiguring the entire office to access the Internet via a gateway (which involved actually installing TCP/IP on several of the Windows 95 machines, a task which resulted in one of the machines being completely stripped of functionality when someone failed to mention that it was running a slightly different version of Windows 95 than the one on the CD I had been given to do the protocol installations) and then setting up the Netwinder's ridiculous dial-on-demand "feature". Since they used the same phone line for Internet and fax, and since the Netwinder would dial out every time any program on any computer tried to do anything with an outside address, ever, it was a nightmare. Oh, and they thought they had to turn it off every night. It doesn't have an "off" switch, so they just unplugged it.
Also, rebel.com's tech support was godawful and frequently encouraged decisions which would cripple either our internet access or the netwinder itself.
I haven't worked there for six months and I'm still getting an e-mail every time the IP changes (a script I put on to help me track the dynamic IP from home) and they STILL haven't changed any of the passwords, including root. They probably don't even remember the beastly little thing is still humming away in their MDF.
The Netwinder is an underfeatured, overreviewed device which encourages incompetent administration and ruins people's lives. Trust me.
Heh, cool. A similarly predictable guess reveals that Member ID: memberid, password: password works too. That's even more intuitive than password/password.:D
Well, aside from the hard drive reference (which I thought was hilarious, by the way), these are starting to sound more and more like floppy disks. -_-
"No copyright infringement intended." -- quote from http://www.savedanieljackson.com/.
I really like that. We should probably all be putting that on anything we do, so the next person to be sued over the DMCA can at least say "but, look at my site, y'r'honour -- it was clearly unintentional, and I'm real sorry about the whole deal."
Actually, some companies do it the way you describe (with a database of known keys) but Blizzard does something slightly different, which Microsoft may do as well.
In Blizzard's games, the routines used by the installer to verify authenticity of a CD key actually checks for compliance to a much more broad algorithm than the keys are actually manufactured by. This means that methods of generating keys reverse-engineered from the game itself will produce keys that work for installing the game but are very likely outside of the real algorithm, which usually constitutes a tiny subset of the one used for installation. This REAL algorithm is used to manufacture the CD keys and is what is checked for on, for instance, the multiplayer servers. Since that checking is serverside it theoretically can't be reverse-engineered to a keygen. Lots of companies are doing this now -- most game keygens are fine for installing but won't play online, and while it's possible for the keygen to randomly hit on a key that falls within the real algorithm and thus allow online play, it's astronomically unlikely.
I remain a Slackware addict as of 8.0 and the only hardware autodetection it handles is for network cards (which is undeniably handy for getting a new box online quickly), which is implemented basically through a crude "modprobe *" which ends when a module loads happily.
Everything else -- configuring X, compiling 3rd-party drivers, hunting down the module and parameter combinations for sound cards, even manually editing isapnp.conf for legacy devices -- somehow feels like a natural part of the process for me.
Of course, I'd probably feel different about it if I spent most of my time setting up desktops rather than servers. Either way, Slackware works fine for me, and it does it without being either presumptious or patronizing. That's all I can ask.
"Modern medicine" in this case just represents an absence of environmental pressure, which is the only real selective agent involved in "natural selection". In that sense, sure, human evolution is all but over except in the most extreme cases (genes for, say, dropping dead on your first birthday are unlikely to get passed on). This idea is basically a truism...
The fact is that humans have been affected memetically rather than genetically increasingly more so in recent centuries -- we've come to a point where we can make conscious decisions that basically override genetic predispositions towards survival and propagation (simply being capable of choosing abstinence or suicide go to show how powerful the memetic capacities we've evolved have become over our simpler genetic influences). Humanity's "evolution" from this point on has basically just switched fields -- it'll be memetic from this point. The fact is that while bad genes may not be getting weeded out so efficiently, bad ideas (ideally:P ) are. While our physical form hasn't changed much in the last few thousand years, the human pool of knowledge has -- indirectly making us better survivors by means of technology and other non-genetic interventions. We're still evolving, it's just on a higher level of abstraction -- memes -- now.
I feel your pain.:P Just about all the nightmares I've had with Solaris 8 were in installation. In some ways it can be as much of a partition nazi as any Microsoft OS (which made setting up the Win2k/Solaris multi-boot machines for a college lab a real joy...) and even with the filesystem aside it seems to try to foil you in every way possible.
The Intel Solaris installation process is one of those things that can just go wrong in so many different ways that I'd be remiss to even wager a guess of what could be causing the crash.;) I guess it's a misnomer for your AMD, but there's a pretty decent Solaris on Intel FAQ out there. I don't know if it'll directly solve your problem but it's helped me out a bit in the past so it's probably worth a look.
For the record, logical partitions are a fictional creation of Microsoft and are extremely scary, unnecessary things which you should probably avoid when using a sane operating system. You can have up to four primary partitions -- extended partitions and "logical drives" exist to expand that. The (sane) idea was that, if you used your first three partitions and expansion to more was imminent or necessary, you'd throw an extended partition in the fourth and put as many logical drives in it as you needed. You know, hda1-4... then your logical drives are hda5 and up.
It's a nice idea but since MS-DOS you've only been allowed to make one primary partition, and after that you're forced to put in an extended partition and logical drives. Most operating systems need to be installed on a primary, so your best bet would be using the operating system in question to set up the partition table. Last I checked even XP won't let you add more than one primary partition, but I could be wrong.
I've had the same problem with Intel Solaris. Bleh.
I know that certain demoscene types have knocked off a demo or two for Linux over the last few years. Good ones, too. Since console demos have been so popular for so long (there's tons for the Dreamcast and Playstation -- people were even hacking up intros for the SNES), this could lead to a very cool cross-over.
Is that hard drive going to be used only for linux? can we save games to it?
I have no idea what kind of native support the PS2 has for saving games to a hard drive, but it's a pretty sure thing that once you install Linux on it it'll be right out -- none of the games you own have any idea how to write to an EXT2 filesystem. Any hard drive-save support would be highly proprietary. Now, as to whether it could be achieved with some partition magic... that's food for thought.
So plug a USB CD-R in with the handy-dandy USB support Sony has kindly hacked into the 2.2.1 kernel, throw in your favourite burn (the one the PS2's "native" DVD-ROM refuses to read), fire up Theoretical Bootloader and you're in pirate-land. ^-^
Slashdot Mirror
Cisco IOS isn't open source.
Idiot.
I recently wrote an BrainFuck interpreter in INTERCAL. I keep it here and it's an evil evil beast. :D
:/
Several years back I also wrote a relatively full-featured BBS, complete with message boards, file areas and dropfile support for door games, in QBASIC, as well as a DataPac network scanner in same.
Yeah, yeah, it was a long time ago. But a friend and I were somewhat blown away to find out that the QBASIC code:
PRINT #2, INPUT$(1, 1)
Or some close equivalent to that, intended to write to file handle #2 a single byte from file handle #1, ended up outputting the single byte to stdout instead. We spent half an hour trying to figure out what our mistake was. It wasn't. It was just a strange, stupid interpreter error in a program language that's rife with them.
Yeah. Heh. Well, I thought it was funny.
And to think I just went and downloaded the entire slackware-current source tree to try out RC1 only three days ago. -_-
:D).
Seriously though, Slack 8.1 looks great. There are a few little tweaks that really make a difference (for instance, I thought I saw ESD behaving at one point) and some of the stuff packaged with it is just cool (am I the only one who noticed the full-colour Lynx?
My only complaint is one I can't verify with the actual CD release of Slack 8.1, but at least with RC1 it was very very hard to do a clean "upgrade" of my current system. In fact I eventually had to back up all my important configuration files and delete the entire filesystem except for the directory where I'd made a copy of the -current tree and the utilities I needed to "installpkg". Nothing short of that would make it work cleanly. This isn't really a big deal for desktop systems but it makes me very nervous about upgrading my servers, most of which are running Slack 8.0 or 7.1.
Still, a great release that was well worth the wait.
It would be fairly simple to hack up a little block device that would act like a 15Tb FS and look like a normal file. /dev/zero looks like about 800 quadrillion bytes if you read it for long enough. Just as long as the device returned filesystem information where it needed to, it could fill the "files" themselves with repeating patterns. As long as it simulates a 15Tb filesystem realistically it'd be good enough for testing.
Of course, they probably actually did it with a real file, but there's no reason it couldn't work this way.
This guy states that Mplayer needs to be compiled with the GUI to view anything other than DVD's. Did he even look at the command-line arguments? You just specify a codec on the command line (like "-o odivx"... the actual argument could be different, I'm gapping o_O) along with the filename. In fact Mplayer's GUI is distressingly impotent, disallowing access to most of the features that are most important to anyone running it on a system that's just barely powerful enough to run it well (like my 667MHz P3), such as post-processing settings and video/audio output devices.
:P
Mplayer is far better and more capable from the command line. His assertion is silly.
The last time I said "I thought it was funny", it got modded -1. But, come on, a laugh is a laugh. One day a year is hardly gratuitous. I think most of the stories posted today are hilarious. It's making my work day all the more bearable.
:D
So don't bitch!
Yeah, I once did random network administration junk for a small company that sold Nortel stuff. Our VP was a fat moron with a respiratory problem who used to print off every spam e-mail he got and make me "look into it and see if it offers any benefits to us". I used to just throw these things in the trash but a few weeks before they actually hired me someone talked him into buying a wretched Netwinder. Not only that, but he decided to try to distribute them. Damned if he had any idea what they were or what they did but that little brochure just had so many darn Internetty words on it!
The web-based interface was nice, frankly, but the modified Redhat distro it comes loaded with is ridiculously sparse, and the omission of certain little things like, say, GCC makes adding any functionality a real pain in the ass. Unless, of course, you can find all the binaries you need for its StrongARM architecture. Not that they encourage you to expand it anyway, but as far as I'm concerned that slashes its hack value in half.
At any rate, most of the functionality it promises is obscurely implemented (if at all) and I never did get most of it working (like the much-touted "VPN capability" which the thing has literally zero pre-loaded facilities for).
Maybe I'm just biased by miserable experiences like the time the fat idiot decided his accountant's office, a tiny LAN done with coax on which three of the desktops had a modem sharing a single line so that one person could use the internet at a time, could use a Netwinder and offered a "free trial". He had me make a list of the benefits it would offer the guy, and all I could really come up with was that I could get it to gateway all of them onto the Internet at the same time. That became the "selling point" and the privilege fell to me of going to the site, completely reconfiguring the entire office to access the Internet via a gateway (which involved actually installing TCP/IP on several of the Windows 95 machines, a task which resulted in one of the machines being completely stripped of functionality when someone failed to mention that it was running a slightly different version of Windows 95 than the one on the CD I had been given to do the protocol installations) and then setting up the Netwinder's ridiculous dial-on-demand "feature". Since they used the same phone line for Internet and fax, and since the Netwinder would dial out every time any program on any computer tried to do anything with an outside address, ever, it was a nightmare. Oh, and they thought they had to turn it off every night. It doesn't have an "off" switch, so they just unplugged it.
Also, rebel.com's tech support was godawful and frequently encouraged decisions which would cripple either our internet access or the netwinder itself.
I haven't worked there for six months and I'm still getting an e-mail every time the IP changes (a script I put on to help me track the dynamic IP from home) and they STILL haven't changed any of the passwords, including root. They probably don't even remember the beastly little thing is still humming away in their MDF.
The Netwinder is an underfeatured, overreviewed device which encourages incompetent administration and ruins people's lives. Trust me.
Heh, cool. A similarly predictable guess reveals that Member ID: memberid, password: password works too. That's even more intuitive than password/password. :D
Well, aside from the hard drive reference (which I thought was hilarious, by the way), these are starting to sound more and more like floppy disks. -_-
"No copyright infringement intended." -- quote from http://www.savedanieljackson.com/ .
I really like that. We should probably all be putting that on anything we do, so the next person to be sued over the DMCA can at least say "but, look at my site, y'r'honour -- it was clearly unintentional, and I'm real sorry about the whole deal."
Hehe.
Actually, some companies do it the way you describe (with a database of known keys) but Blizzard does something slightly different, which Microsoft may do as well.
:D
In Blizzard's games, the routines used by the installer to verify authenticity of a CD key actually checks for compliance to a much more broad algorithm than the keys are actually manufactured by. This means that methods of generating keys reverse-engineered from the game itself will produce keys that work for installing the game but are very likely outside of the real algorithm, which usually constitutes a tiny subset of the one used for installation. This REAL algorithm is used to manufacture the CD keys and is what is checked for on, for instance, the multiplayer servers. Since that checking is serverside it theoretically can't be reverse-engineered to a keygen. Lots of companies are doing this now -- most game keygens are fine for installing but won't play online, and while it's possible for the keygen to randomly hit on a key that falls within the real algorithm and thus allow online play, it's astronomically unlikely.
Quite smart, really.
I thought it was funny.
I remain a Slackware addict as of 8.0 and the only hardware autodetection it handles is for network cards (which is undeniably handy for getting a new box online quickly), which is implemented basically through a crude "modprobe *" which ends when a module loads happily.
Everything else -- configuring X, compiling 3rd-party drivers, hunting down the module and parameter combinations for sound cards, even manually editing isapnp.conf for legacy devices -- somehow feels like a natural part of the process for me.
Of course, I'd probably feel different about it if I spent most of my time setting up desktops rather than servers. Either way, Slackware works fine for me, and it does it without being either presumptious or patronizing. That's all I can ask.
And ES. Which shouldn't be used for calculations.
:D
But usually is anyway.
C-Hash.
I can't help thinking this is really cool in a sick sort of way, but you'd hope they could have used a text-to-speech that sounded a bit nicer...
"Modern medicine" in this case just represents an absence of environmental pressure, which is the only real selective agent involved in "natural selection". In that sense, sure, human evolution is all but over except in the most extreme cases (genes for, say, dropping dead on your first birthday are unlikely to get passed on). This idea is basically a truism...
:P ) are. While our physical form hasn't changed much in the last few thousand years, the human pool of knowledge has -- indirectly making us better survivors by means of technology and other non-genetic interventions. We're still evolving, it's just on a higher level of abstraction -- memes -- now.
:/
The fact is that humans have been affected memetically rather than genetically increasingly more so in recent centuries -- we've come to a point where we can make conscious decisions that basically override genetic predispositions towards survival and propagation (simply being capable of choosing abstinence or suicide go to show how powerful the memetic capacities we've evolved have become over our simpler genetic influences). Humanity's "evolution" from this point on has basically just switched fields -- it'll be memetic from this point. The fact is that while bad genes may not be getting weeded out so efficiently, bad ideas (ideally
So to speak.
I feel your pain. :P Just about all the nightmares I've had with Solaris 8 were in installation. In some ways it can be as much of a partition nazi as any Microsoft OS (which made setting up the Win2k/Solaris multi-boot machines for a college lab a real joy...) and even with the filesystem aside it seems to try to foil you in every way possible.
;) I guess it's a misnomer for your AMD, but there's a pretty decent Solaris on Intel FAQ out there. I don't know if it'll directly solve your problem but it's helped me out a bit in the past so it's probably worth a look.
The Intel Solaris installation process is one of those things that can just go wrong in so many different ways that I'd be remiss to even wager a guess of what could be causing the crash.
Are you kidding? At those odds? Put me in for $10. ^-^
For the record, logical partitions are a fictional creation of Microsoft and are extremely scary, unnecessary things which you should probably avoid when using a sane operating system. You can have up to four primary partitions -- extended partitions and "logical drives" exist to expand that. The (sane) idea was that, if you used your first three partitions and expansion to more was imminent or necessary, you'd throw an extended partition in the fourth and put as many logical drives in it as you needed. You know, hda1-4 ... then your logical drives are hda5 and up.
It's a nice idea but since MS-DOS you've only been allowed to make one primary partition, and after that you're forced to put in an extended partition and logical drives. Most operating systems need to be installed on a primary, so your best bet would be using the operating system in question to set up the partition table. Last I checked even XP won't let you add more than one primary partition, but I could be wrong.
I've had the same problem with Intel Solaris. Bleh.
I know that certain demoscene types have knocked off a demo or two for Linux over the last few years. Good ones, too. Since console demos have been so popular for so long (there's tons for the Dreamcast and Playstation -- people were even hacking up intros for the SNES), this could lead to a very cool cross-over.
Even aside from the NIC and hard drive, you can plug whatever you want into those USB's. Pull out a USB DVD-ROM and you're set.
Hrm, deja vu...
Is that hard drive going to be used only for linux? can we save games to it?
I have no idea what kind of native support the PS2 has for saving games to a hard drive, but it's a pretty sure thing that once you install Linux on it it'll be right out -- none of the games you own have any idea how to write to an EXT2 filesystem. Any hard drive-save support would be highly proprietary. Now, as to whether it could be achieved with some partition magic... that's food for thought.
So plug a USB CD-R in with the handy-dandy USB support Sony has kindly hacked into the 2.2.1 kernel, throw in your favourite burn (the one the PS2's "native" DVD-ROM refuses to read), fire up Theoretical Bootloader and you're in pirate-land. ^-^