Neil Hopcroft

Dear lazyweb…(blame jwz)…I’ve gotten the cygwin X server running, anyone got any clues to install a window manager in it? Everything runs in a big pile in the top left corner of the screen….looks like twm is nearly the kind of thing I’m looking for.

Taking self-build a step too far

“Leper Madonna” – an exercise in publicity and offshoring…

I was looking at a scope trace of ‘Musicians are Morons’ by 2nd Gen and wondering if it spelled out the songs title if only I could get the scan rate right….that’d would be somewhat cooler than having the Aphex Twins face turn up on the voiceprint….if you were a noise merchant with more respect for daft abuse of technology than the music industry, and had a message to send, what scan frequency would you use?

“The Attack Vector Test Platform was written over the course of research for the paper and presentation titled “A Comparison Buffer Overflow Prevention Implementations & Weaknesses””

This, and other useful tools, can be found here, pGraph looks particularly interesting….but of course I’ll be running them in a safe environment, until I’m confident they’re behaving.

Theres something of a recurring theme in my social interactions at the moment – they all seem to start badly but pick up just as I’m about to give up and go home.

Saturday I arrived outside a development of flats in Bishop Stortford to find that I didn’t know which door I should be knocking on, and that the two phone numbers I had were both remaining unanswered. So I headed into town, to at least explore the place before heading home. A quick browse of the magazine shelves in Smiths was all it took to summon up Ben and his young lady (whose name I can’t spell…), and we quickly hatched a plan to obtain some ingredients for soup before the arrival of Ben and Tamora.

After watching master-chef Ben prepare and serve superb soup we headed out for a walk – there aren’t many people for whom a bridge over the M11 is a destination. It was well worth the wading across muddy fields, over streams, through brambles. The bridge itself is relatively unremarkable, however its location is perfect for watching the incoming stanstead flights and for overlooking the south-side of the exit junction for the airport. Poor Tamora couldn’t believe we were all enjoying standing on an exposed east anglian roadway on a snowy february evening.

Our navigation back to civilisation took us through Bedlam and rather closer to the Essex border than we had anticipated – there seems to be little respect for the speed limits in this area, people in such a hurry to get back to their boy racer homelands.

For the evening we found an Indian restaurant without any veggy options, so headed on down the hill to the telelephone place, which turned out to be quite a nice Thai restaurant, if a little over populated with hanging plants.

Then last night I arrived at the Calling rather early, and found myself sat in the corner contemplating, amongst other things, why I’d bothered to come out so early. This kind of thought pattern isn’t a good thing and leads you to all sorts of depressing realisations about the state of your life. I won’t be early again in a hurry. As it were. It wasn’t so bad once I’d figured out other people had arrived.

And today I figured out why I couldn’t see anything on my new computer any more – the graphics card seems to have given up the ghost. So I headed out to get another, after trying an old 8Mb RagePro I had hanging around, which was, in its day (8 years ago) not a bad card. I’m now running around 4 frames per second on last years model MX4000 where I was getting 40fps on the shiny new X600. At least its rendering, I suppose, better than the Rage. But blimey, does it make a different to the noise given out by this machine – I knew it was the noisiest bit but I hadn’t noticed quite *how* noisy.

2 days and counting….I’m expiring prematurely. Looking forward the freedom. Anyone about daytimes next week?

One for johnfkent:

“1. Why would you want to get scurvy?

There are as many reasons for getting scurvy as there are people with scurvy. Some have been personally wronged by citrus fruit or the Florida Orange Growers association. Some treat it as a religious experience, believing that God is anti-fruit (see Psalm 78:47, Mark 11:12-14, and Genesis 4:2-5, for examples of God’s strong anti-fruit sentiment, as well as the site God Hates Figs) and using scurvy as a means of getting closer to God. Many of us find scurvy beautiful. Some of us are fans of pirates, or have pirate ancestors, and wish to better connect to our inner corsairs. Some of us got into scurvy via Atkins or the South Beach diet. And some of us just don’t like fruit. It’s stinky, squishy, makes you have to go to the bathroom more often, and really stings if it gets in your eye.”

–

Calling Gamers…anyone up for a gaming session here (Milton, Cambridge) saturday afternoon?

Kick off around 2pm. Ask if you need directions. Bring a chair.

“Windows Ke- errr Command Key – Now built into every configuration of the new P-P-P-PowerBook G4 family: a crossed out windows key that now functions as a command key! Based on the original key, the new command key is just as annoying as the windows key. When you think you’re having fun in a game, a quick accidental press of this key will minmize the game and lag your computer. But wait, not to worry! The P-P-P-PowerBook is a binder! Yeah…”

“The Banana Guard was designed…as a device to prevent banana trauma during transport”

…though the FAQ does suggest some as yet unrealised potential for aftermarket additions…