Adventure Rocket Ship

I've just performed the Internet equivalent of lobbing the paper across the room and muttering 'Bloody charlatans should be bloody horsewhipped. And the Inspiral Carpets.' Only because the laptop's not mine-mine and the Linux box is too heavy to throw comfortably, I just closed the tab and resolved to write a stroppy post somewhere no-one will read it.

Perl, right? Appaz. 'The kids' are getting (back) into it because, I don't know, ZX Spectrums, Vengaboys and brightly coloured foreign shoes. The reason the relevant article was pleased to call a thesis was because when they did dotcom 1.0, Perl had near total market penetration the like of which the PHPythonRubyNodeClojure fanpersons can only envy.

Which is partly true.

When we did dotcom 1.0, Perl5.0.cock was the only game in town and everything else was even worse. Shellscript? I watched some daft bugger try to code up a system in not-even-bash on a xenix box. I wrote some mostly-functional client/server stuff in C.

In the early 90s I did rather a lot of C hacking. I was quite good at it and quite familiar with the inside of the Greymatter catalogue. (Greenleaf comms and FTP TCP/IP libraries most specifically) And, modulo the joy of hunting down obscure pointer bugs, I could probably call it 'fun'.

Fast-forward a bit and we're ankle-deep in O'Reilly,Sun and Cisco books as we try to bootstrap an ISP. Imagine there not being a Google or a superexchange to cut & paste from. (You can't. I mean, I can barely remember how we did it.) But, y'know, we weren't idiots. We knew Livingstone Portmonsters and DHCP was the way forward, rather than whatever-the-hell-it-was that Demon did. And, after a brief and mistaken adventure with a Perl4 package from Sunsite, I got really quite bored with handrolling perl5.

I didn't find Perl coding pleasant. I could do it, because one procedural language is pretty much like any other, and it seemed much more capable than this 'personal home page' macro malarkey that some German kid was playing with, but it was just... Ugh. Everything about it was... Ugh.

However, because time had moved on and we were up to Perl5.2 or 3 or something on Deadrat5 or 6 and everyone around me was all like 'oh eh right perl it's banging and sorted geezer' I assumed that I'd just got old and stupid and I should stick to hating SysV like any other sensible person.

It turns out that actually I'm significantly more productive in Ruby, which was a jolly pleasing discovery to make.

I'm sure Perl's got a place, just as long as it's nowhere near me.

Beetled off to Brighton for the weekend, which was something of a curate's egg.

'The quantum thief' is really jolly good, isn't it? I hoovered it up in half a day spent in some hotel rooms and a slow train back to Bristol.

Right now I am hacking on interrupt code for t'Arduino, because obviously there has to be a dead stop followed by swearing when yon robot hits something.

Although. I wonder if the logic might be better the other way up? This stuff's hard, but fun. Moderately simple problems in very constrained environments. Or at least, the responses-to-the-outside are constrained. The outside world isn't, which is also part of the fun.

I am also very glad that I pulled the 'wiring loom' from some horrible old PCs. Plenty of muti-pin headers on long bits of wire.

I recall reading the edition of Byte where they investigated the Lisa (Byte used to do computers properly, I guess because each one was new and strange. They'd have the lid off to look at the circuitry, talk to the designers of hardware and OS and maybe even show you some example code).

I couldn't make head or tail of the thing. You moved a 'mouse' around which shifted a 'pointer' on the screen? And then what? How did you actually do anything? Where was the terminal so you could type stuff and get on with some work?

AppleII kit made much more sense; 6502, seriously hackish disk-OS code that did one thing if you jumped into a routine at point A and something completely other if you jumped in a few instructions later. Twisted genius. And the sodding reset button right by the return key.

Of course I 'got' it later. I bought an Amiga because they were just better than the x86 kit and I didn't want to do DTP which is what Macs were for. I'd done real typesetting and one fo(u)nt per page was quite enough thank you very much.

And then. And then there was this expensive black box made from unobtanium that ran an OS that did stuff. It came with a dictionary and a thing that could send 'electronic mail' with pictures and noises. Although you could only send those messages to other NeXT users and Bob help you if you were on a dial-up because even at 14k4 it took a while, cost a lot and tended to piss off the recipient for similar reasons.

I still have a NeXT; it's probably twenty years old, but that was the point that Jobs and his team made Unix work. Inasmuch as Unix has always mostly worked, but the work was to do with Unix, rather than it being a platform on which to do other things.

OSX is likely the most productive Unix workstation I've ever used. There's a bunch of things it does really quite badly, but they tend to be the things that involve Other People's Protocols. (Not really a valid excuse, but there we are.)

However, first a word about brains.

I've been guzzling Omega 3+6+9 pills as an experiment for a number of months. I don't much care if it's just a placebo effect, but they've made a deal of difference to my powers of concentration and focus. However, the last couple of months have been a bit, well, 'meh', as the young people will have it. This appears to coincide with necking fish-based Omega pills, rather than the Linseed ones I was using before, and again since yesterday. I'm not sure what, if anything, it means. I'm probably just more awake because the weather's nice, but if I'm firing on all cylinders I'm not going to knock it.

Anyway. Generating good-quality passwords. Last night's brief bit of hackery demonstrated that there's no point trying to remember the administrator password on this Windows box, since it's quicker and easier to crack it directly from the hash-table. Assuming a dictionary-ish word with leetspeak number/character substitutions:

0:00:00:49 + Cracked Administrator
0:00:00:00 + Cracked test5:2
0:00:00:00 + Cracked test1:2
0:00:00:27 + Cracked test6:2
0:00:00:33 + Cracked Guest
0:00:00:44 + Cracked test2:2
0:00:03:04 + Cracked test4:2
0:00:13:53 + Cracked test5:1
0:00:26:09 + Cracked test1:1
0:00:26:35 + Cracked test3
0:00:41:23 + Cracked test6:1

Times are deltas, and the :1 :2 bits are an artifact of the rubbish way that Winders stores passwords. The point being that the Guest account had a p/w of 'fnord' which is both short and reasonably obvious, the Admin account has a p/w that's in the 'obvious password list'... And the others that took circa thirty minutes rather than thirty seconds were all non-dictionary but pronounceable.

I've been a fan of pronounceable passwords ever since I had to solve this problem the first time, when we were running the ISP nearly ten years ago. Somehow I found this Java password generator, and I've used it on and off ever since. The benefits are obvious. It's a lot easier to remember something which sounds like a real word.

A quick scan of the Winders password-generator 'market' seems to indicate that they're all over-featured and horrible, apart from the one based on the code mentioned above. Unfortunately, the UI is in some non-standard colour set which makes my eyes itch. Can you still hack that sort of thing with a resource editor? It also comes sans source, which makes me slightly uncomfortable. Were I an enterprising cracker, I'd build a password generator that 'phoned home' every so often. I'd probably also get it to disguise its phoning as DNS traffic, on the off-chance that our target was clued enough to be watching the firewall logs.

So that's the generation of suitably obscure passwords sorted. How about remembering which one goes where and making sure you don't use the Paypal one somewhere else by accident? Password safe appears to be the tool to use.

Lord knows what Mac users do. Nothing important enough to require remembering lots of passwords, it would seem.
Edit: They read the first two comments and look smug. Very fine indeed.

KDE's kwallet also appears to do the right thing. I have to admit that I've not yet had to use it properly.

Brown pinstripe suit w/lionels and Dunlops == Cobol programmer.

Ugh. Bad mojo.

(Though for the full effect, you'd want a knitted tie, real-ale beard and a copies of Practicals Caravan, Computing and Electronics in a 70s Sainsbury's carrier.)