Richy's Random Ramblings – Page 167 – Random ramblings and ravings of Richy B

Poll: Which OS are you most like?

January 28, 2003

[Amiga OS] Neil has just made an entry about a new Poll he’s discovered. Her name is Ingrid, she’s 5’11” tall, long blond hair, perky breasts and is willing to do nearly anything for money as long as it doesn’t cause lasting harm.

Oh – wait, the other poll. 🙂 The one where you find out Which Operating System Matches Your Personality. It decided I was the Amiga OS – “Ahead of your time” (check), “You keep a lot of balls in the air” (check – I also keep a couple elsewhere 😉 ), “If only your parents had given you more opportunities to succeed”. Hmm, maybe…

To me, that description more suits RISC OS than Amiga, but I’m probably biased.

I could have also been: Debian Linux (“People have difficulty getting to know you. Once you finally open your shell they’re apt to love you” – by the way, ‘apt’ is actually a command in Debian), FreeBSD (“You are a speed demon…well-respected, but virtually unknown”), HP-UX (“You’re still strong despite the passage of time. Though few understand you, those who do love you deeply and appreciate you”), Palm OS (“Punctual, straightforward and very useful. … you’re happy with who you are”), Slackware Linux (“…often mistake as insane. Your elegant solutions to problems often take a little longer, but require much less effort to complete”), TRSDOS (“…You feel the world has passed you by. Time has not treated you well”), Windows 2000 SP3 (“You’re a steady and reliable friend. People think you’re all business but with your recent therapy you’ve become a little more playful”) or even Windows XP (“Under your bright and cheerful exterior is a strong and stable personality. You have a tendency to do more than what is asked or even desired”).

Let’s face it – I’m more like the MCP.. (obscure reference there – who will be the first to recognise it 🙂 ).

Search: Do The Google Dance

January 28, 2003

6 Comments

Kuro5hin has an interesting article about what the “Google Dance” is and how it affects your ranking on the worlds most popular search engine.

Long story short: Dance equals Data. Servers. Moving. New Results.

A more complete answer is that the “Google Dance” is the nickname that has been given to the time of the month (usually around the 28th) that the data that “GoogleBot” (Google‘s little spider/robot that goes round ‘reading’ the web) is introduced into the system. However, since Google has over 10,000 servers it does take some time for the data to propagate around (“propagate” has now become my favourite and most used word for some reason). It has been long known that the start of the “Dance” can be found be watching when the data on the www2 and www3 starts ‘reading differently’ than that on the main Google server (an illustration in the Kuro5hin article is to do a query for links to Yahoo!).

Guess That Movie: XVII: Event Horizon

January 28, 2003

14 Comments

[Guess That Movie 17] Congratulations new player KHD for recognising the previous image was Robin William’s “What Dreams May Come” . Hello, welcome and well done 🙂

The image was taken from around the 44th minute of the movie and just shows Dr. Chris Nielson (Robin Williams) and Leona (Rosalind Chao) in a boat together in heaven. It’s one of those films which you’ll either really like or just don’t “get”. I fall in to the latter category – I did try watching it but it just didn’t hold me interest for long enough.

Anyway, on to the new image which marks round 17 of Guess That Movie!. It’s blue and, marking a change from the previous two images, it shows a bloke on his own. But who? And more important in which film? The last one was from a “dream” but this one appears to be more from a nightmare!

Go on have a guess, that’s points to be grabbed and prizes to be won, it’s a real crazy game where anything goes.. Funhouse, it’s a ….. Sorry – just drifted off into early 1990’s UK children’s television gameshows there…(and, no, that wasn’t a clue).

A: Event Horizon . Correctly guessed by Dr. G

Guess That Movie: XVI: What Dreams May Come

January 27, 2003

5 Comments

[Round Sixteen of Guess That Movie] Well, Ph33r_m3 managed to do it again and picked up another 100 points for quickly identifying that the previous Guess That Movie image was, in fact, Halle Berry‘s right breast (ok, the image was rotated) in her orange bikini at the start of James Bond: Die Another Day .

That puts Ph33r_m3 at the top of the leader board with 430 points so far (although LD is close behind with 380 points). It’s going to be close – Ph33r_m3 just needs an extra 70 points to be able to claim the first ever Guess That Movie prize – but all it’ll take is 6 incorrect guesses by other people and he won’t be able to win enough points this round (hint hint 😉 ). Of course, it’ll only take one correct guess from someone else and this round’s points will go to them. And yep, this is my pathetic attempt at trying to fix the scores and start up a little more competition!

Come on people guess that movie before Ph33r_m3!

A: What Dreams May Come. Correctly guessed by KHD

Techy: MS-SQL Slammer

January 27, 2003

2 Comments

As you may have already heard, over the weekend the Internet was hit by one of the fastest spreading worms since the original Morris worm. The name of this nasty piece of code? “MS-SQL Slammer”- so called because it uses a 6-month old exploit in unpatched Microsoft SQL servers as its method of spreading- but spreads so quickly that it caused major problems across the ‘net.

Actually, to call it a nasty piece of work is doing a disservice to the author (who is, at this moment of time, still unknown). It’s a lovely piece of optimised assembly code which does “it’s job” in just 376 bytes in length (to put that in perspective – that is exactly the length, in letters, spaces and punctuation, of the first paragraph of this entry).

When the code infects an unpatched Microsoft SQL Server 2000 or Microsoft Desktop Engine (MSDE – which is included in Visual Studio.net, Asp.net Web Matrix Tool, Office XP Developer Edition, MSDN Universal and Enterprise, Microsoft Access and Microsoft Applicaiton 2000), it first loads the “modules” Kernel32.dll and WS2_32.dll. It then calls the routine “GetTickCount” to generate random IP (internet protocol) address which it then targets for propagation and exploitation over the UDP (User Datagram Protocol) protocol port 1434. It repeats the exploit code (using a method called a stack buffer overflow) until either the SQL server is shut down or the machine is rebooted.