Into the Void

Microsoft DreamSpark

Dreamspark is Microsoft’s program for getting free development tools into the hands of students, in hopes that when they get out in the business world they’ll ask for the tools they’re familiar with. Or in Microsoft’s own words:

It is our hope that the DreamSpark program will spark your creativity and help you harness software’s transformative magic to turn your good ideas into reality, by equipping you with the tools you need to succeed and excel during your academic experience and skills you will need after graduation.

Are you a student? Here’s what you can get:

• Visual Studio 2008 Professional
• Microsoft Virtual PC
• XNA Game Studio

… and more.

That’s right, these are the same goodies that old women like me have to pay hundreds of dollars for.

I am having serious trouble keeping my debit card in my pocket on this one. I suspect that sometime between now and tomorrow morning I will yield to temptation.

The Chip PC Jack is a computer that fits in a standard electrical outlet. WANT!

A “Thin-Client” computer is one that runs a pared down operating system, in this case Windows CE. That’s the same OS that runs on many PDAs. However, the Chip PC Jack supports a standard keyboard, mouse and monitor. Two monitors, if you want, either VGA or DVI with separate adapter. Many of Microsoft’s productivity apps, i.e. Office, are available for Windows CE.

If you want much Geek Mojo, this is it.

Microsoft DreamSpark

Dreamspark is Microsoft’s program for getting free development tools into the hands of students, in hopes that when they get out in the business world they’ll ask for the tools they’re familiar with. Or in Microsoft’s own words:

It is our hope that the DreamSpark program will spark your creativity and help you harness software’s transformative magic to turn your good ideas into reality, by equipping you with the tools you need to succeed and excel during your academic experience and skills you will need after graduation.

Are you a student? Here’s what you can get:

• Visual Studio 2008 Professional
• Microsoft Virtual PC
• XNA Game Studio

… and more.

That’s right, these are the same goodies that old women like me have to pay hundreds of dollars for.

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Ok, so they’re not flowers, they’re lemniscates.

If you are using IE 5.01 Service Pack 2 (SP2) or later and the Microsoft Office 2003 Web Components, you can play with this interactively by clicking on the flower. IE may give you a security warning. Apparently IE doesn’t trust Excel.

The equation is
ampl + PM * SIN(petals * theta) ^ exp

Where
Petals is the number of petals in the lemniscate,
PM is +1 or -1,
ampl is a unit to add to the SIN function
and exp is an exponent
theta is the angle – you can’t change this.

Try the following data:

Have fun!

Hacker publicly cracks Windows Vista – vnunet.com

For those of you who aren’t aware that the long-awaited Microsoft “Longhorn” OS has been released for Beta testing under the new name “Vista”… well, they have. Add more memory, clear 40G in your harddrive to run a virtual machine, and buy a new video card if you want to check it out.

The shoemaker’s children go unshod, of course: I downloaded Vista and Office 2007 weeks ago, bought a new harddrive in order to create a dual-boot system, then moved on to other things.

“The fact that this mechanism was bypassed doesn’t mean Vista is insecure. It just means it’s just not as secure as advertised.”
– Joanna Rutkowska

Rutkowska is a security researcher with coseinc. She demonstrated a way to load unsigned drivers into Windows Vista at the Black Hat security conference.

The Internet is big. No, really BIG. It is possible to look online for a recipe, follow a link to the history of the recipe and the culture of the people who created the recipe. Before you know it, dinnertime is a distant memory, bedtime is long past, and tomorrow morning is shining right into your tired, bloodshot eyes.

The problem is one of information overload. Information, you see, doesn’t create wisdom. Wisdom comes from choosing which information is useful for the task at hand, whether that task is cooking dinner or writing an essay on the funerary practices of the Fore tribe in New Guinea. Or both.

When I first had net access – and Al Gore hadn’t invented the Internet yet – information was limited and it was sometimes difficult to locate it. There were several types of indexing, with special command-line programs to access them. Gopher was the very apt name of a commonly-used program used to dig into the information indexes. When you eventually found what you wanted, you’d then have to launch a separate application to handle the File Transfer Protocol (FTP).

When I finally gained access again, a fledgling HyperText Transport Protocol (HTTP), in conjunction with the Graphical User Interface (GUI) of the MAC and of Microsoft Windows, provided easy access to related information, and yes, I got lost surfing more times than I can count.

Here it is several years later, and I hardly ever surf aimlessly. I also have given up on wordy but rather content-sparse general news outlets, including TV, newspapers, radio and even the big online news portals. Frankly, most news articles can be absorbed from the title and first paragraph. So how do I surf for titles and first paragraphs?

Well, in the last couple of years it is becoming more common for on-line resources to provide Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds. An RSS feed is a text file that contains, at minimum, titles and summaries of recent articles on the main site. RSS feeds play an important part driving traffic to the information provider.

In future articles I will be exploring new tools for presenting information on the web, and their attendant issues. It is my hope that in clarifying the issues for myself, I will help clarify them for others.

Update 11/6:

My buddy Jim gave me some good hints on getting the Wifi card running on the laptop under Linux. He has his own Wifi tale of terror. Plus he pointed out that I can compile the driver, drop it into the file system, then use modprobe to tell Linux to look for it. Great!
XP is up and running. I am in the process of re-installing software. It refused to upgrade Windows 2000 Professional to Windows XP Professional so I had to install XP in a different directory, which happened to be the default directory for XP. It didn’t bring in any of the settings. I was afraid it would clobber user Application Data so I created a new user and am copying settings from the 2000 user to the XP user, like Eudora mailboxes. What a pain in the @55.
Now the computer is dual-boot, which isn’t at all what I wanted. During the install, XP warned me I couldn’t do a dual-boot system in the same partition. WTF? Of course, if I *wanted* a dual-boot system, XP probably would have shredded the existing file system. Sometime in the next week I’ll figure out what to change to uninstall 2000.
On the plus side, I backed up a lot of data to CD/DVD before starting, and then I cloned the hard drive. Just in case. I’ll install it in the other computer, which is currently doing a fine impression of a doorstop, if XP doesn’t implode in the next week. Then I can use *that* to recover the data from the original hard drive from that computer, which is currently doing an impression of a paperweight.
I’d have to change mobo drivers, among other things, to use it in the other computer. Might require a repair installation of Windows 2000. Did I mention that this whole process is a pain in the @55?

Plus I started using a Microsoft wireless keyboard and mouse Wireless Optical Desktop Pro last week. The mouse is huge and is shaped to provide an easy, solid handhold. Unfortunately, that means that it’s hard to shift it around in my hand as I use it. Reorienting the mouse as you work is a way to prevent Repetitive Stress Injuries (RSIs), and this mouse forces me to use it in a way that is guaranteed to make my hand ache. Which it did. Well, I’m aware of it now. Maybe I can rig something up with an old mouse shell and this ones guts.
Update 11/10:
Mr. X, who has hands the size of catcher’s mitts, has no problem using the wireless mouse.

I’ve been dragging my feet as far as the soon-to-be Linux Laptop goes. There are a couple of issues that I haven’t quite resolved.

First, Knoppix came up in the GUI. It didn’t seem to support the wireless card. But it communicated with it, which is better than Windows 98 did.

I found what might be the ADM8211 chipset driver on SourceForge, then promptly lost the info again. I’m unclear on how to integrate a new driver. Do I have to recompile the kernal – which I’ve never done – or can I simply compile it as a stand-alone driver that I drop into place somewhere in the file system? Maybe a reference goes in what in uCLinux is called (I think) /etc/.rc? That file has startup info for things like ipconfig. I can prevent it from coming up in the GUI by entering a run-level command in /etc/inittab.

RH 5.2 used to come up with the command line and if I wanted to play with the GUI I’d type startx. I did it for my Senior Project, upgraded a trash computer and used it for software development from the command line. I have the notes here somewhere… The *first* gotcha was that I was trying to use an unsupported CD. You get the idea. But eventually it all cooperated.

Anyway, I’m told that Fedora changes too fast, still requires too much babysitting. Apparently Centos 4.2 uses the source code from Red Hat Enterprise Linux. That might work.

The laptop has no way to cut a new CD. Oh, wait, that’s vinyl talk. *Burn* a new CD. So if an install CD is needed, I would have to transfer the image – a .iso maybe? – to a Windows computer to burn it. I would have to get to the other computer by dial-up modem through one of the free services. Egads!

I am aware that some OSs allow you to update the kernel on the fly. The name of the capability escapes me. Preemptible kernel, is it?

I’m going to attempt to upgrade the Windows 2000 computer to Windows XP this weekend. Believe me, Windows 2000 is solid as a rock, Which is probably why Microsoft is no longer selling it. In XP Home which I use at work (go figure), I had to disable a lot of unnecessary things to stop it from hanging when I opened a couple of windows. Who needs shadows under the cursor, 3D everything, and font smoothing? It made a big difference. The only reason I’m upgrading to XP Professional (not Home) – actually it’s a lateral move – is because I bought a USB printer with a card reader and it turns out I had already boffed up those drivers trying to install an internal 9-in-1 card reader. I removed some of the boffed-up stuff from the registry, but haven’t tried to reinstall the printer. Obviously I’m not particularly confident it will work. To that end, I have already backed up all the really necessary stuff, except email which I will backup last thing before I do the install.

I know what I have to do, the questions are mostly things I can work out through trial-and-error. I’m confident that I will eventually get the laptop running Linux AND this computer running Windows XP. I must make a couple of decisions and then “Just Do It”.