18 December 2013

Why DOS attacks stop - behind the scenes...


I first saw this here:



Hilarious.


01 December 2013

Arcade Volleyball on the first date? Let's use Hamming Codes for protection...

This shows you what some of my earliest interactions with computers were like:

Even the world's worst Perl code has nothing on this.







I used to be a computer-store-rat who would beg/borrow and occasionally purchase copies of Compute!'s Gazette (which, IIRC, was oriented towards the Commodore line of computers).   In each month's exciting issue, there would be "source code" listings that you could type in so that you could end up with some computer utility or game.  Typing in the source code involved typing in long streams of hexadecimal numbers from listings like this one.

I had no money to send away for a tape or a floppy disk with the corresponding binary code, so, if I wanted one of these utilities, I had to type in all of this stuff.  There was a utility that would read in all of these numbers, line-by-line, and perform a simple check to make sure that the typist didn't make any typing errors.

This process was slightly less painful than slamming one's hand in a car-door a few times.  I only managed to type all of these numbers in for a few programs that interested me.  Luckily, I managed to satisfy my curiosity for programming computers in lots of other ways....

....

A former co-worker of mine (who is one of the best software engineers I have ever worked with)  spent his early years with computers in a similar way to me.    This gentleman has a really good sense of humor.  I also have the impression that his personal life is more "Norman Rockwell" and not "Hunter S. Thompson".  He's a fairly traditional guy.

This is all background to the following story, which amused me greatly:   it seems that my former co-worker, during his teen-aged years, was both interested in computers and this certain young woman (who turned out to be his future wife).  One of his very early dates with this young woman consisted of her reading strange letters/digits to him as he typed into his first computer.  My former co-worker related all of these facts to us one day while we were in the lunch room at work.   And then....somebody in the room considered all of this and asked my co-worker "so....let me see if I understand this correctly....are you telling us that you had hex with your future wife on the first date?".

The room exploded in (good-natured) laughter....