Taking Down the Pinball Machine and Bigging Up the Car

Still playing pinball. Still enjoying it. Still not very good. I've made it my ambition to get into the "Twilight Zone" (some say I've been there for years) and up until today I was getting quite hopeful of achieving it. However, not terribly successful today. Somewhat blighted by the fact that half way through my best game a wire came off under the playfield and half of the components stopped working. Still, if the machine is having to fight that dirty maybe I'm in with a chance.

I'm getting ready for tomorrow's trip to Microsoft Reading to take part in the kickoff of the Imagine Cup 2004. I hired what I thought was a people carrier and ended up with a crowd carrier. The device is basically a mobile shed, with similar aerodynamic and road holding properties.

 

Put your lunch on your shoes

I've invented a new technique to stop a person (let's call him person R) from leaving that person's lunch in that person's house instead of taking it to that person's workplace. The trick is to leave the bag containing lunch on that person's shoes, so that it does get taken to work rather than left in the hall.

This is all because last Friday I left my lunch at work and had to go back and fetch it. the good news is that number one son was home from school (sorry, college) and so it did give me a chance to have one of those memorable Father/Son conversations which will feature so greatly in my memoirs:

"How are things going son?"
"Fine"

Oh, and a note from the author. I'm painfully aware of all the horrible things that go on in the outside world. I see them on the telly and internet and all over the front of my newspaper. However, I'm trying to keep the blog firmly pointed at sillyness, gadgets and university life, and so please don't think ill of me for this.

 

Dude, where's my car?

Perhaps our absolute, final, final Thursday Admissions Open Day Experience (tm) today (got one a fortnight on Saturday though). Gave what I thought was quite a good talk at the start and was suitably witty and urbane throughout. Then, on the way out of the university, I had the misfortune to forget where I had left my car in the car park. Just as I was wandering around looking puzzled I bumped into a couple who had been at the Open Day. "Thanks for a nice afternoon" they said brightly. "I've lost my car" I moaned in reply and staggered off into the distance, leaving them wondering if they really should consider attending a course taught by someone who could mislay a ton and a half of metal painted bright red. Ho hum. In my defence, I can still just about remember how to program....

 

Out into the Wild

I've released a couple of my little Smartphone programs out into the wild. You can download them from here. They are the hand banner program and the first level of the cheese breakout game. If you have a Smartphone E200 you could download them and have a go.

This evening I've started working on some silly screensavers to go with them. I'm not sure why you'd want a screensaver for your mobile phone, but you never know....

 

A world first, and Preston Foster Needs You

Paul has managed to get the .NET Virtual Machines coursework going. I think, although I may be wrong, that he is the first person to run a .NET program on a 6502 processor! This may not sound much, but it impresses people like me.

And so off to the pub. A wide and varied discussion ensued, amongst other things we are still deciding on the tag line for the Preston Foster sweatshirts. (choice of colour and size, ten pounds each, place your orders now). We are thinking about:

Preston Foster: Gone but forgotten

Preston Foster: Coastguard Legend

Preston Foster: A man before my time

Preston Foster: Nobody you'd know

I think I like "A man before my time" best.

 

Oh, go on then, I'll make you all rich

Since I've no desire to upset my readers (both of them) I thought I'd let you in on my get rich quick scheme anyway. If you have an XBOX, and a one hundred and twenty quid or so to invest, get yourself a copy of Steel Battalion. You may have to ask around at shops, or put in a special order, since the production is beginning to sell out now. The game itself is pretty amazing. It ships with a dirty great controller which has over 40 switches and lights, along with a foot pedal. You use all this hardware to control an enormous metal fighting robot and apparently the gaming sensation is amazing. The original version of the game sold out some time back and a new version, with XBOX LIVE ability, is due for release in the UK at the end of this month. I've ordered mine (I just hope it arrives) but of course I'll probably hang on to it and not turn a profit. From the looks of Ebay you can make some quite reasonable money on this item. If only I could lay my hands on a couple more.....

Now that's what I call a controller....

 

Registries, Wine and Security Breaches

Drinking wine and mending computers is probably not generally good policy. But number one son was doing most of the work and I was just supervising from the back, suggesting unworkable ideas which turned out not to work. Not that I minded too much. It was nice wine. Brian's sister has a laptop which had turned slightly agin her, and since she had some business files on it she wanted rather urgently we thought we'd take a look.

The problem was simple enough, the machine went from needing no login to not letting you log in at all. This made the nice notebook into a shiny paperweight/heater. Attempts to get past the security failed, and so it was out with Knoppix CD and away.

If I was in computer security I would make it my business to learn a lot about Knoppix, CD-ROM drives and BIOS chips. Knoppix is a version of Linux which boots and runs totally from a CD. You put the CD into most any computer and, if the BIOS will allow your machine to boot from CD-ROMS (and many have this turned on by default) within a couple of moments you have a fully running operating system under your control.

And this is the point at which it gets scary. Knoppix can understand the hard disk on the machine. The present version is not very good at writing to disk, but it can read anything, including files which the owner may have thought were safely protected by their username and password. We used it for a very benign purpose; we (or at least number one son) managed to read all the important files off the machine prior to the rebuild to fix the registry fault which had caused the problem in the first place.

But bear in mind that any system is vulnerable to attack by a Knoppix armed miscreant. A naughty person with a CD-ROM and a usb memory device could come into your office and copy all the important files off your system without knowing your password or anything. Which is scary. You can protect against this by turning on file encryption if you have Windows XP Pro. If not, and the data is important, at least set a password on the file (you can do this in Word and Excel and it slows people down a bit), or invest in something to keep things secure. And keep your office door locked.