OT: Vista's "ultimate" security :)

[Bill Campbell]

On Tue, Feb 06, 2007, Fairlight wrote:
>Only Bill Campbell would say something like:
>> This isn't anything new.  It goes back to the issue of dumb terminal
>> function keys, programmable from the computer.  Imagine programming the F1
>> key to do something like ``rm -rf /'' or perhaps ``sudo rpm -rf /''.
>
>We actually did something a bit less destructive (just rude messages) at
>university with the z49's.  I loved the z49's, actually.  I set mine up for
>common commands and I was pretty much the only one in the lab that I
>configured this one that ever used that terminal and knew what the keys
>did.  Ah, those were the days..  

It's amazing what one can learning when one RTFMs.

>> Actually one of the more fun projects was to write a shim that ran between
>> the user's terminal/keyboard and the FilePro appliation.  It's the only
>> time I've had to write a program that did a fork exec, with two processes
>> handling the i/o mapping the function keys to his codes, and changing the
>> mapping in response to the DT-100 codes received from the computer.  This
>> is the only time I've ever had a program that really required using shared
>> memory as that's where I handled the function key mappings.
>
>This you consider "fun", eh?  :)  Is that the real "fun" or the sarcastic
>as hell "fun", like, "Boy, I just -love- this DOM that's fighting me tooth
>an nail.  Fun fun fun!"?
>
>That project sounds like it was a royal PITA.

Yes and no.  I like a challenge, and I had several things to
learn while doing that (and it was all billable hours :-).

Ugly ``fun'' was when I wrote scr2wp, my Scriptsit to WordPerfect
translater.  The folks from WP were very helpful, but I had to
figure out Scripsit's binary formats by creating documents with
different formatting features, the digging into the binary files
to see what changed.  I did find that Scripsit had some rather
neat programming techniques (e.g. there was only one copy of any
page format line, with repetitiions linked to that copy).

That too was a billable project with a law firm paying the
development costs, and allowed me to resell it which is where the
real profit came in.

Then there was the project I did for Microrim, writing a
translator for old rBase programs to rBase 3.0 (one of their beta
testers offered to hire me to run their compiler department :-).

Bill
--
INTERNET:   bill at Celestial.COM  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
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``Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.''
    Will Rogers