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Diary of a B+ Grade Polymath ([personal profile] tcpip) wrote2006-06-26 01:19 pm

Prosper President, Computer Meme, Cybernoia

Went to my first Prosper Australia executive meeting last Wednesday; the President of some ten years Maurie Fabrikant stood down and, with some surprise, I found myself President of the 102 year old organisation. On that topic (yes, I know I've mentioned it before), this Wednesday I'm speaking about said issues at 6.30pm at the Hume Global Learning Centre, 1093 Pascoe Vale Rd at a forum entitled "Please Explain Mr. Brumby"; please come along. One of the speakers at the gathering is Matthew Guy, a local Liberal Party candidate for the Upper House.

Spotted the "What's on Your Desktop" meme from a couple of el-jayers. These are the machines that are in regular use in my soho;

Gigabit desktop, Celeron 2.8 GHz, 256 meg RAM, 80 gig HDD, 120 gig HDD. Windows XP Home and Fedora Core 3.
HP Compaq NX 5000 laptop, Centrino 1.6 GHz, 512 meg RAM, 60 gig HDD. Windows XP Professional and Ubuntu 5.10
HP Compaq Evo N1000V laptop, Pentium 4, 1.4GHz, 40 Gig HDD, 512 meg RAM, Windows XP Professional, Ubuntu 6.06

Plus I have a Pentium II-MMX, 256 meg RAM, 20 Gig HDD with Windows 2000. There's also three other Windows 98 machines which see little use and three laptops in storage.

Networking-wise I have a

Cisco 2900XL 24 port Catalyst Switch a Cisco 4000 series router (thanks to [livejournal.com profile] laptop006) and a Billion 4 port switch/router/aDSL modem. Damn I like that Cisco router. Just perfect for my studies.

Oh, on topic for those of you using MS-Windows try this:

1.) Open an empty notepad file
2.) Type "Bush hid the facts" (without the quotes)
3.) Save it as whatever you want.
4.) Close it, and re-open it.

Gaming this week consisted of a brief game of my one-to-one Call of Cthulhu/Nephilim crossover and the first session of the Paranoia/Cyberpunk crossover ("Cybernoia"). The latter seems to be working quite well with a greater sense of narrative development and seriousness than the standard Paranoia game, and with greater "setting realism" than the standard Cyberpunk game. The two systems merge well too. I've started writing the "combined rules" out which I will distribute as a PDF - it just works too well for the gaming public not to have a copy.

bush?

[identity profile] tatjna.livejournal.com 2006-06-26 03:26 am (UTC)(link)
Well gosh.

[identity profile] v3nu5.livejournal.com 2006-06-26 03:41 am (UTC)(link)
Just did that crazy notepad thing! :o!

[identity profile] greylock.livejournal.com 2006-06-26 03:48 am (UTC)(link)
What's up with the notepad thing?

[identity profile] greylock.livejournal.com 2006-06-26 03:50 am (UTC)(link)
Aha! What a strange bug.
http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2006/06/14/631016.aspx

[identity profile] pache.livejournal.com 2006-06-26 03:59 am (UTC)(link)
my emulator's currently blown up so i did a quick net search to check what'd happen - according to what I found that little quirk of notepad will actually work with any combination of 4 letters, 3 letters, 3 letters, 5 letters... hence the site reckons it wasn't aimed specifically at bush, although i'd suggest it might just be the coders covering their backsides for when it got found out =)

and congratulations Mr. President =)

[identity profile] tcpip.livejournal.com 2006-06-26 04:00 am (UTC)(link)

Yep it's a good one; apparently works with any word combination of that number of characters

[identity profile] tcpip.livejournal.com 2006-06-26 04:02 am (UTC)(link)

It's scary that they can't even get notepad to work right... What hope is there the rest of the OS?

Re: bush?

[identity profile] tcpip.livejournal.com 2006-06-26 04:05 am (UTC)(link)

You don't seem so surprised ;-)

[identity profile] tcpip.livejournal.com 2006-06-26 04:09 am (UTC)(link)

That's right, it's a character encoding issue; "This app will break" is another favourite version.

I just find it scary that it's notepad. I mean, you really can't get too much simpler.

[identity profile] uke.livejournal.com 2006-06-26 04:27 am (UTC)(link)
Congratulations on your new position!

[identity profile] tcpip.livejournal.com 2006-06-26 04:56 am (UTC)(link)

Thank you! It was quite a surprise.

Now the challenge is living up to the expectations the committee obviously has in me.

[identity profile] mystic-one.livejournal.com 2006-06-26 05:30 am (UTC)(link)
Congrats on the new position :) *applauds*

Tried that notepad thing.... had me laughing to see the result. Very neat little 'bug' but yea.... doesn't leave you much hope does it.

[identity profile] tcpip.livejournal.com 2006-06-26 05:38 am (UTC)(link)

and congratulations Mr. President =)

Somehow I didn't parse this, heh..

Yeah, very happy with being handed the reigns on this ol' warhorse. Now the question is which targets to charge (no windmills!).

I mean how do you convince people that there is such a thing as a good tax?

[identity profile] tcpip.livejournal.com 2006-06-26 05:39 am (UTC)(link)

Thank you kindly... Applause is good ;-)

I wonder if there's a quirky similar bug in some of the basic *nix editors like gedit, vi, emacs or kate.. Hmm...

[identity profile] darkstardeity.livejournal.com 2006-06-26 05:45 am (UTC)(link)
Conga-rats

Rats of the Congo

[identity profile] tcpip.livejournal.com 2006-06-26 06:02 am (UTC)(link)



(Congolese giant pouched rat)

Re: Rats of the Congo

[identity profile] darkstardeity.livejournal.com 2006-06-26 06:58 am (UTC)(link)
I was thinking more of this sort:

Re: Rats of the Congo

[identity profile] rhapsodical78.livejournal.com 2006-06-26 07:01 am (UTC)(link)
I was researching those giant pouched rats. I want one.

Apparently they used to sell them as exotic pets in America until they began transmitting a particular disease after which the sale of them was banned.

I shall now try this notepad thing.

WTF???

[identity profile] lardarsegreg.livejournal.com 2006-06-26 07:07 am (UTC)(link)
I'm not even gonna look at that link, and just guess that notepad thinks it's unicode or something stupid like that...

Re: WTF???

[identity profile] tcpip.livejournal.com 2006-06-26 07:11 am (UTC)(link)

Very good!

Re: WTF???

[identity profile] lardarsegreg.livejournal.com 2006-06-26 07:40 am (UTC)(link)
I don't know what to be more shocked about... The bug existing, or me being able to work out what it was with just 1 guess. Didn't even bother to use a hex editor...

Re: Rats of the Congo

[identity profile] tcpip.livejournal.com 2006-06-26 07:44 am (UTC)(link)

I presume the "particular disease" wasn't ebola virus, right?

Re: Rats of the Congo

[identity profile] tcpip.livejournal.com 2006-06-26 07:47 am (UTC)(link)


Haha! You win at teh Internets!

Re: WTF???

[identity profile] tcpip.livejournal.com 2006-06-26 07:49 am (UTC)(link)

Well the guess shows that you're pretty cluey on character encoding, which is good but not brilliant ;-)

The fact that bug exists however is downright outrageous.

Re: WTF???

[identity profile] lardarsegreg.livejournal.com 2006-06-26 07:58 am (UTC)(link)
Just another thing to add to teh list of the things that's bad about Notepad (white background, no MRU, no line numbers, tab stops at 8, no decent "find in files" function to back it up, no multiple document editing, etc...)

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