Distributed password cracking?

I saw on Digg that the new version of John the Ripper, the well-known password cracker is out. In an interview with the author, he mentions that he has done a lot of micro-optimizations to make it as fast as possible. I was wondering, wouldn’t it be much faster to write a password breaker in a language such as Erlang, making it distributed and adding a lot of nodes to work on the password file than to learn about all the little things you can do to get the most out of one processor? Just a thought.

PSP load time

Wow…, this is just too long a load time for any game on any platform. I can understand games having to fetch data from the medium, and I can understand that a CD is slower to read from than from something like a flash card (à la DS), but this is just ridiculous. People who bought this game should request that THQ reworks the code to cache more information to lower these waiting times and that they can freely exchange their long-loading copy for the newer one, provided they show a proof of purchase.

Scripting on Win32: Alternatives?

Just a quick question to the people who do scripting on Windows: besides the Microsoft-provided solutions (VBScript & JScript, .Net, batch files), are there scripting alternatives? How well do things like Python or Ruby work with things like Windows Scripting Host and WMI? Thanks.

A new type of job?

Go to the download page of PeerSync, and check the second option in “Type of user”. System administartor? A new job? Does it pay well? Do you get to eat pie?

Apple to switch to Windows?

According to Dvorak, that could be an announcement that Steve Jobs could make. To that, I say “bullshit” for many reasons.

First, he describes Apple as a hardware company. That’s wrong, Apple is in both software and hardware, they are a computing solution company. They provide you with software that works perfectly well with the hardware that they produce, thus making it very easy for new users to get things up and running. This ease of use made possible by this close association between hardware and software was actually the subject of the “Switch” campain where people marvelled how easier it was to use a digital camera with OS X. Apple surely doesn’t want to lose those customers by sending back to the driver hunting hell.

Second, people get passionate and attached to software, not so much with hardware. I had no sadness leaving behind my Compaq Presario for a clone. And I had no problem switching from a Gigabyte motherboard to an ASUS board. However, I feel much more when I decided to make Emacs my main text editor. I could think back of all the time I put into learning Vim and how I was gonna miss X and Y feature, but Emacs had elisp in it. I had a real hard time deciding whether I was an OSX guy or a Linux guy after I got really familiar with my iBook. I couldn’t care less if OSX ran in a beige box. I want the user experience, not the white box.

Apple may announce that they will make it easy to put Windows on Apple hardware, but they won’t announce that they are getting out of the OS field, no way. Mac hardware is married to Mac OS X the same way the iPod is married to iTunes.

You’re wrong on this one, Dvorak.

Questions for the speed readers

I have a few questions to ask to the people who read my blog who are speed readers (or to the people who know speed readers and can contribute their answers.)

1. How do you read something on your computer? Do you use your finger, or do you just read more slowly?

2. It seems that when I try to speed read, I have an ever bigger need to back-read. Is it normal, does it eventually pass?

3. Although I try hard not to subvocalize, I can sometimes “hear” the sound of a word in my head. Is it possible to eliminate this entirely, or do I just need to learn to ignore the “mental sounds” of the words?

Phoenix Wright Promotion!

I found this very funny PW:AA video on dsfanboy.com. It’s in Japanese, subtitled in english. It’s extremely funny! When are they making a sequel!?

Gameboy Advance programming book

Here’s a free Gameboy Advance programming book. If game console development interests you, this might just be something for you. The book uses an open source library and IDE called Ham and VisualHAM respectively. Ham is available for both Windows and Linux, but VisualHAM is Windows only. Nevertheless, a little knowledge of Makefiles should be enough to get you going on Linux without the helpful “Build” commands in the IDE.

The book assumes a working knowledge of C.

What VBScript taught me

For the past three weeks, I’ve been working pretty heavily with VBScript at work. My superior asked me to write a couple of scripts to query the on-site computers and do operations on them. Now, as much as I love languages like Ruby or Smalltalk, it was clear that using them, or pretty much anything else than VBScript, would be an error on my part.

The VBScript language sucks: error handling is deficient, working with arrays is a chore, it has no interactive interpreter, I don’t particularily care for the syntax and the language just isn’t terribly expressive. These all seem like valid reasons not to use VBScript, however the language does have a few things going on for it.

VBScript is widely used as a scripting language in Microsoft environments, so it’s easy to find documentation on how to perform different tasks. The MSDN documentation is very good and the examples from Technet’s Scripting Center help you move along nicely. People I work with are also familiar with VBScript, so it is possible to exchange information and snippets from previous scripts and help one another when trouble strikes. VBScript is also installed on every machine by default, so we don’t have to deploy anything (e.g: an interpreter, a runtime environment)

The bottom line is that for the tasks I was assigned to do, VBScript proved to be the best tool for the job, in spite of all its deficiencies. VBScript taught me that using the right language for the job is more important than using one’s pet language.

Super Mario DS

Looks awesome! Can’t wait for it!