“It’s a valid critical form, and it seemed to go down well.”

“Pah. It got needlessly self-indulgent towards the end. The punctuation stuff? Far too self-referential. Avoid it in future.”

“I should avoid talking about the form within the form?”

“Indeed you should.”

“Bit late, then.”

“Somewhat. Today, incidentally, I am not your guilt complex.”

“Oh, good. He was annoying. Who are you?”

“Nonspecific, though I am the part of you which is constantly typing @-signs instead of quote marks, because you’ve been using Mac keyboards too long”

“Can’t I just fix the keyboard layout?”

“And avoid wearing out your backspace key? Silly, twisted boy.”

“That’s two Goon Show references in as many entries. Someone will complain.”

“I’m sure they’ll never notice.”

“So, what are we here to discuss?”

“Windows.”

“Why?”

Today I installed Windows. I do this quite often, because I run a Teflon windows install. All important stuff is on the server, MyDocs in Windows is aliased over there, so effectively I can wipe clean XP when it reaches the end of its half-life, which is between one and six months. This one was brought about because the central hard-drive in my desktop was beginning to error out (To the point where Ubuntu wouldn’t even read from it, though windows still booted) and I decided to upgrade to SATA. As I type hundreds of gigabytes of games installs are copying across, but that’s not the annoying bit.

For the first time in quite a while, I’m running an entirely honest and legitamite copy of Windows XP. My first ever copy came from an MSDN disc, but I lost the code to a while ago, and since then have been using a key I can no longer remember the origin of. Having now lost that key too (It was on a floppy disc) and since I actually have a job and do use Windows (My desktop is mostly for Internet, games, coding and Paint Shop Pro. Games and PSP require Windows (WineX has some problems with some of the games I play) and the other two I use open source software, albeit on Windows. I don’t currently have a Linux install on the desktop (though Debian’s on my server), because – as I said – it won’t read my disk). So I bought a copy of Windows XP Pro.

Breezed though the install. Entered my Product Key to prove I am not a pirate, for I am no longer a pirate. Waited a bit. Was told I had to Activate Windows within 30 days, and that my clock’s date was wrong. Tried to activate Windows, Couldn’t contact server. Fixed clock. Installed stuff. Reboot. Now it was 30 days later (fixed date, remember), I couldn’t log in unless I activated Windows. This time it connected, and Windows was Activated (until I change my hardware) to prove I am not a pirate, for I am not a pirate (Pirates don’t have to activate Windows). Right, next, patches. Automatic update, update automatic update, reboot. Automatic update, install updates. Windows Genuine Advantage. Woo. I install Windows Genuine Advantage, which examines my system and concludes that I am not a pirate, for I am not a pirate. Takes me though a wizard of how wonderful it is not to be a pirate. Apparently, as a proven not-pirate, I am entitled to download the Karaoke Plugin for Windows Media Player! I am such a lucky boy.

Friends do not let friends do Karaoke.

This was all so much easier when I was a pirate.

The same goes for movies, games, music. While it is technologically easier to download a DVD from Bittorrent via The Pirate Bay, that’s what people will do. That’s why the iTunes music store is so sucessful, because it _is_ easier than buying a CD, you’re already in your music player, you don’t even have to shift contexts. And I have more to say on this subject, but Windows won’t shut the hell up about having to reboot my computer now.

And if you can tell me the name of the track that accompanies most of this, I’ll be your friend forever.

[11:43] {ccooke} so reinstall to the 10g?
[11:43] {Aq-Work} I have to make it usable first so we can drag the accounts data off to the server
[11:44] {Aq-Work} Plus, I only have an XP pro disc, and the chances of this box being able to handle XP are slim to the non-existant.
[11:44] {ccooke} :-)

“Martin Underwood” wrote:

“Johnny” wrote:

“Conor” wrote:

It means your PC won’t become a trojan infested pile of stinking crap

That sounds like Windows to me, ever increasing in size too.

I’ve always wondered: do Linux and MacOS have any security loopholes? Is part of the problem simply that most virus writers direct their attentions to Windows because it is the most popular OS? I believe that XP is inherently more secure than Win 95/98, but is more prone to viruses because virus writers are concentrating on XP rather than Win9x. The same may be true of Linux and MacOS compared with XP.

For MacOS this is partially true, being less of a mainstream OS it doesn’t get so many viruses. Linux is slightly more preemptive and reactive, the theory is that since so much of it has source code open to public viewing, somebody somewhere will see any potential security vulnerability. In fact, Linux/Unix based systems do suffer from such exploits for similar reasons as Windows – and about as frequently – but the community as a whole tends to react far quicker and with much more honesty about the problem. (For example, see this, an archive of this year’s security announcements for Debian GNU/Linux).

On top of this, Linux has a couple of other advantages. Firstly, that usually the only “given” on any Linux system is the kernel itself, other functionality is supplied by a myriad of other packages. The mail server could be Exim, Sendmail, QMail or any one of a hundred others, for example, but for a Windows system you’re pretty much guaranteed to be running Exchange. Windows’ ‘cohesiveness’ – the property that makes it a much easier to use desktop system than any current *nix based one – is the very property that makes it an easier target, since you can pretty much predict what’s running on any given Windows box and target that.

Finally there are the Users. Most of the Linux user base are still relatively geeky people who are aware of the importance of keeping up to date with the security holes, whereas a frightening number of Windows users have the same sort of problem as Oscar above, that they don’t understand what they actually need to do or – in a more office based scenario – why they should care.

Of course, the fact that Windows users outnumber Linux users 100 to 1 (at least) doesn’t help either, plus a number of crackers will deliberately aim at the “Evil Empire” on purely ‘moralistic’ grounds.

Fear the fuckwits who think themselves on the side of “Good”.

Faithfully Yours,

From his Windows PC, though his Linux news server :-)

So this is what happened, This is why I hate technology and am going to forthwidth go live in a bunker. No. A monestary. Get me to a monestary, because if this is what it means to be free, I don’t need it.

(Today’s obscure reference brought to you by Winamp)

(Tails of technological woe start in three paragraphs time, feel free to skip to them)

I had a computer called reef. It was a good computer, the heart of it was the Celeron 333 my parents bought me for my 18th birthday. It’s a grandfather’s axe thing, I’ve replaced the Mobo, memory, hard-drive, graphics card, case, keyboard, mouse, floppy-drive and network port, but it’s still the Celeron my parents bought me.

The Mobo is a little dead, in fact, as at some point 2002 the PS/2 ports on it died, and since it lacks decent USB support (Or anything else) it means I can only access it remotely, which isn’t any problem as it’s a server. It’s main functions were replaced mid last year by Atoll, a 2ghz Athlon doing exactly the same things at 5x the speed, so here I have a spare box doing nothing that I can’t use as a desktop.

I also have a new broadband connection arriving on Tuesday, and the router I used to use with it is an ADSL router, and this is cable. New solution time. I decided to turn reef into an IPCop box (I’ve used IPCop before, I’m used to how it works, and I understand it in a way that I don’t for – for example – Cisco routers) which would stand between our network and the rest of the world. So far, so hoopy. Pol has also lent me a Wireless Router, and I can therefore switch to Wireless and get rid of the unsightly cables that have littered every other house I’ve lived in.

Because I can’t plug a keyboard into reef (prospective firewall, welcome back, woe fans) I decide to put the componants into Maelstrom (my desktop box) install IPCop onto the HDD like that, and then transfer it all to reef and then go. I get as far as turning reef into a reef/maelstrom hybrid and halfway though formatting the old HDD before I realise that maelstrom has a 6 gig + 20 gig HDD, and reef has a 20 gig HDD which it doesn’t need. I therefore put Maelstrom back together, rescue important things from the six gig HDD (onto the secondary HDD) and install IPCop onto that. It’s about this time that I realise I’m going to need another NIC, so I put Maelstrom back together to get online and buy that.

‘cept I’ve just reformatted my Windows drive, so I’m going to have to reinstall Windows (No broadband + No install CDs + Winmodem == No Linux). It’s about this time that I plug the power for the floppy drive one pin to the right of where it should be. I wonder where the smell of TCP is coming from. I start the install process, with my Unattended Install Floppy in the drive (This floppy, as you may remember, makes Windows install itself without any input from me). Setup doesn’t read it. The smell is getting stronger. I note that the BIOS doesn’t see the Floppy drive on reboot. It’s really starting to smell quite bad now. I turn off the computer and check the connections, realising that the floppy-drive power cable is really quite hot now. A short tug and I have a twisted mass of plastic, two pins of the power connector, and a really fucked floppy drive.

Did I mention the floppy drive has my WinXP Serial number on it? It does.

Did I mention that this number’s only other place of existance is in the home directory of the server that I now cannot access because my computer is buggered?

It is.

So, girlfriend’s laptop, serial number, reinstall Windows.

“Drive F: (Secondary hard-drive) isn’t formatted. Would you like to format the drive you put all the important files on three paragraphs ago?”

No.

“It looks like you’re having a bad day. Would you like some help?”

Fuck off.

I ordered some new parts from Dabs. They arrived next day. Yay Dabs.

I fiddled with the cables. I could see my old Hard-Drive. Yay cables.

I installed IPCop with the new NIC. It worked. yay IPCop.

It didn’t boot. Boo IPCop.

I tried to reinstall IPCop, but it wouldn’t boot. Boo IPCop.

I tried to reboot windows, but it wouldn’t boot. Boo Windows.

I tried to boot with a handy Gentoo Live CD, but it wouldn’t boot. Oh bother.

Apparently the secondary hard-drive was still not working. I discovered this by a process of elimination about an hour later.

I installed IPCop. It worked. It booted. I put reef back together. It booted. I put maelstrom back together with the new floppy drive I bought from Dabs. It booted, but performance was crap. I reinstalled Windows. It booted. It worked. I watched Bubblegum Crisis 2040 for several hours. Yay Anime.

Right, part two. Wireless networking.

On one side of my bedroom, I set up the wireless router and plugged it into my hub.

On the other side of my bedroom, I set up maelstrom with the new PCI Wireless NIC I’d bought from Dabs. After a little mucking around and leaning on the reset switch of the router until it forgot it’s old password, I configured the router to work.

(Not work the way I want it to. All I want it to do is act as a hub and forward packets to the router. I don’t want it to filter them – that’s why I want IPCop – or be a DHCP server – that’s why I have another server. All I want it to do is allow access to anyone with the password, which is – in case you’re in Letchworth – Swordf1sh)

It was now accepting packets (Though not doing anything with them. No point until the ipcop box is online) but could the Wireless Card see it?

Could it hell.

Was it that the Router wasn’t configured right?

Was it that the card wasn’t working/configured properly?

How the hell could I tell the difference?

Upon all these questions I gave up and went to bed. It was late, and I was tired.

Next morning they were both able to see each other.

No idea why.

Two hours later I couldn’t see WLAN (The router’s Wireless Network) at all, but was apparently connected to ‘default’. Yay open wireless networks. In this case, someone running XP with default config (I was even able to access the net with it for about 10 minutes. Then it broke. No idea why).

Then Maelstrom stopped being able to see the secondary hard-drive again.

Now it can’t see the wireless card.

I hate computers.

So I went to watch anime instead.

Then I ran out of episodes.

I hate everything. I’m going to bed.

A list of all XP Security Patches since Service Pack 1

This avoids the Catch-22 of having to put an unpatched Windows box onto the internet in order to get all the security patches to make it safe to put on the Internet. Be aware, however, that XP Service Pack 2 is on it’s way and that’ll include most of these with it.

A note on research, here. I spent about an hour trolling the Windows XP microsite looking for a list, wandering though the Expert Zone (“Focus on New Users” was the lead headline. Define Expert) and generally seeing if it was actually where it should be on the site, and then gave up and typed “hotfixes since XP Service-Pack 1” into google, which got me a PC World article sending me to a download page, which sent me to a Microsoft Redirection page sending me to the aforementioned MSKB article.

This is, in fact, bollocks. Columbus had better navigation than that when he sailed to India. Microsoft may not want to admit it, but there are major holes in XP as released, and even in SP1, and it’s really important to be able to get your machine secured as quickly as possible, and not even mentioning the above article within the security section of the offical XP microsite is just stupid. The Trustworthy Computing thing is a good idea, and deserves kudos, but won’t work unless we – as Sysadmins, users and developers – can trust Microsoft to admit when something is wrong, and hiding a list of security updates (It is, however, an extremely impressive list of updates) doesn’t inspire that kind of faith.

I got this e-mail:

Dear user of Tmbg.org,


	
Our main mailing server will  be  temporary unavaible  for next two days, 
to  continue receiving mail in  these days you have to configure our  free
auto-forwarding  service.

	
For details see the attached  file.

	
In order  to read the attach you have to use the following  password: 04185.

	
Have a good  day,
    The  Tmbg.org team                             http://www.tmbg.org

to my drw0rm@tmbg.org address (The address I occasionally use on usenet). Now, apparently it’s purely coincidence that it happened to pick the right body (tmbg.org _is_ a free forwarding service, and has had a couple of problems recently) and looks roughly right, but it fooled me (In my defence, it’s first thing in the morning, I haven’t had my tea yet, and I’m dosed up to the eyeballs with cold remedies) and if it can get me – who knows about these things – it scares me how many others it would have got.

The only reason I have Norton installed at all is that yesterday we had a virus scare in the office when a co-worker opened an attachment ‘from’ the CEO and he got an e-mail to himself from a mangled form of his address. After scanning the headers, we unplugged her PC from the network, grabbed Norton and the latest signatures (More difficult than it should be, since Norton’s site focuses on you using the Auto Update service, but since we couldn’t put the computer online until it was disinfected these were recommendations we couldn’t follow) (Incidentally, Norton at 25mb & another couple for the signature file made me once again glad of the pen drive for transferring them).

It took just under two hours to do a full sweep of her machine – during which she couldn’t do very much – and about the same length of my time over the course of the day to sort out the thing, which is about four hours of company time yesterday wasted on a virus (Or, to put it another way, given how big a company we are, one third of the company out of action for quarter of the working day).

Incidentally, recommendations to switch to another OS will be laughed at, since of the office me and this co-worker are the only people not using OS X, and it’s kind of useful to have at least two people using the platform we’re currently developing for.

Not that I would refuse an iBook if offered, of course.

This arrived this morning:

Dear  user  of  e-mail server "Aquarionics.com",


	
Some  of our clients complained about  the spam  (negative e-mail content)
outgoing  from  your e-mail account. Probably, you have been infected by
a  proxy-relay  trojan server. In order to keep your computer safe,
follow  the instructions.

	
Advanced  details can be found  in attached file.

	
For  security reasons attached file is password protected. The password  is "80362".

	
Have a good day,
    The Aquarionics.com  team                               http://www.aquarionics.com

Pity I didn’t recieve this one first, really.

Yes, it was Valentines, not traditionally a day my mood is good (Especially with the whole “togetherness” aspect of local programming that’s particulally annoying at the moment).

Yesterday, though, the hard-drive of my desktop decided that since nobody had sent it a Valentines card, today was a good day to die. Click. Boom.

XP decided it couldn’t find it’s system files. Couldn’t recover it’s system files. Couldn’t reinstall it’s system files. Couldn’t go on living. Goodbye, cruel world, may you find a better operating system than me. Blam.

This was annoying, because I was looking forward to playing computer games all weekend. Nothing more than that, really, because I run something of a Teflon Windows install. Nothing sticks. Everything I want is kept on the server (My ‘My Documents’ folder is a subdirectory of my home dir on the server, shared over Samba), All I have to do is format the hard-drive, shove my Windows XP CD in one drive and my Unattended Install Disk into the floppy drive and come back in a half hour to a clean, new windows install.

Nuh-uh.

You see, somewhere between now and last November – when I wrote that article – I’d decided that the most vital thing I needed was not my emergancy must-have-so-system-downtime-is-minimal floppy diskette, but a dos-boot diskette so I can play my older games still. So I had copied an image of the diskette onto c:, and turned my emergancy-vital-important diskette into what was, now, three and a half square inches of worthless plastic.

At this point I called myself a number of impolite things. I told myself I was being a bit harsh on me, but I disagreed and continued raging on the general theme of me being a moron who didn’t deserve a computer.

I reread the article I wrote last time, wished my writing style was slightly less florid and slightly quicker to get to the point, downloaded the example file and recreated the disk. Mere hours after the inital crash, a spinny-rotaty question-mark informed me that I was now in the New XP Experience! Yay. Rapture. Spiraling shapes of pure entertainment, now go away and let me get to my desktop.

It went away and I was left in teletubby-land. With a speed caused by months of experience, I got rid of teletubby land (Replaced with a rather nice picture of a Cambridge sunset) and turned the green/blue to darker-green/silver. Then I realised the important thing.

I had no drivers.

You see, I don’t keep installation CDs. I have this connection to the Internet, no bandwidth limits, and the exact knowledge of what is in my computer. I can get drivers from the source, damnit.

Or rather, I could. Right now my connection to the Greater World is via my dad’s PC. The contents of our home-network are my desktop and my server, because my parents object to having wires trailing around the house (Don’t have time/money/equipment for wireless). Hmm.

I do, however, have an MP3 player.

I have, over the last few years, spent quite a lot of money on MP3 players. I had one of the orignal Rio’s, a replacement cheap one when that died, a Rio600 when the buttons fell out of the cheap one, and my current one. The best example of why Digital Rights Management is a Bad Idea (And yes, Virginia, there are good reasons for both DRM and copyright, but that’s another article) is that my current MP3 player is the first one that Just Works.

It’s a USB Mass Storage device. PC, Linux, even OS X recognises it as a USB Mass Storage Device. It’s a 128mb USB hard-drive that has a headphone socket and will play any MP3s it finds though it. It has a built in USB plug, too. It Just Works.

Therefore I was able to spend an entertaining day ferrying my MP3 player between dad’s computer upstairs and mine downstairs containing drivers for the sound, 3d, modem and network cards; Direct X; Game, System and Application patches; without having to burn CDs of them.

I did, however, lose my game saves for every game that doesn’t follow the (sensible) Microsoft recommendations and put them in the My Documents folder where they won’t get lost. This is, obviously, most of them, so I’ve spent most of today burning backups of my server home directory (Dying hard-drives concentrate the mind with regard to backups) and wandering back through “Prince of Persia: Sands of Time”.

Oh, and watching Office Space (IMDB). Which is good.

http://www.aquarionics.com/gallery/Gid_[and]_Suzi’s_New_Year_2003

IE does the following:

http://www.aquarionics.com/gallery/Gid_%5Band%5D_Suzi/’s_New_Year_2003

Now, I realise the escaping error in the generated URL was my own stupid fault, but the fact that IE automatically reverses any backslashes in a URL - to retain compatibility with Windows’ broken directory seperator – is interesting. It means, for example, we can do this:

@import url(”/assets/cssspecial-ie-stylesheet.css”);

and IE will load it (It will try to “fix” the broken backslash) where Gecko/KHTML will attempt to load a file called “cssspecial-ie-stylesheet.css” in the assets directory is interesting. New browser-hack?

This isn’t news, really. When the first version of the new, all accessible RNIB site went live (And I ranted about it) some of the links contained backslashes, and thus broke for Mozilla, and it’s still annoying, but it might be useful.

What would be really interesting would be combining this with an IIS server. Does the server resolve it as the right path on the system (The Windows one) or as the RFC 2068 compliant one?

My solution, by the way, was to rename the album to “New Years 2003” and leave the escaping problem until I’ve got time to fix it properly.

• Box A runs Windows XP, it’s an Athlon 2000XP.
• Box B runs Debian Sarge, It’s an Athlon 1200XP.
• Box C runs Debian Stable, It’s a Celeron 300mhz.

Downloading a file from a HTTP server with Box A takes $time

Downloading the same file with Box B or C (Or similerly sized files from the same server, so no caching) takes $time/3

Downloading said amount of data from the same server with Box A running though a squid cache server on either B or C also takes $time/3

All are plugged into the same hub, behind the same router, on the same ASDL.

Why? And how can I fix this? (Apart from installing Linux on A, which is mostly a games box ATM, and dual boots to Gentoo anyway)

I learnt that once you’ve installed Windows XP, you can do it again without any hassle at all. In fact, you can insert the CD and a floppy, and come back in an hour to a working system.

This is the wonders of the unattended boot system, and something that a number of Linux distros could learn from. Basically it works not unlike the linux kernel stuff (And, in fact, Caldera Linux’s install system, which most of the current linux distros can learn from) in that you write a file – on your own or with tools – that defines the answers to all the questions, and and save it to a floppy. When WinXP Setup starts up it reads the defaults from the floppy drive and gets on with it.

Magic.

Two problems.

First, the file itself. The automated file creation stuff is nice, but doesn’t contain all the settings. In fact, it doesn’t contain the ability to solve problem two.

Second, XP now relies upon expert users doing this. There is no way in the default setup program to say “Install XYZ but not ABC or QRS”, you have to do it in the config file. More importantly, the Windows Unattended Setup Wizard GUI Thingy doesn’t have that option either. You have to look though the help files to get all the settings. Worse, if you then load that edited file into the Wizard, imports the data it understands, applys the changes you make, and then exports the file again, minus your edits.

Nevertheless, it’s quicker than answering all the questions, and a damn site easier than deleting everything afterwards

I used the Hytek Computer tutorial, which was spot on up until the wizard ended, followed by the included help files. Also helpful – had I found it at the time – would be the MS Support KB

Things to beware of:

1. Duelbooting. Install XP first. Preferably with the other HDD disabled or – preferably – removed. If you are duel booting turn off the automated partitioning as XP Setup will claim any unrecognised partitions for itself and leave any NTFS with data on it untouched.
2. One of the most valuable settings is ProfilesDir = "D:Profiles" or whatever you set it to. This enables you to move ‘Documents and Settings’ to a seperate drive or anything, something you can’t do after install without fucking around in the registry and hoping nothing cached it.
3. Don’t use your GRUB boot disk for the formatted setup floppy. You’ll regret it.

Just in case it’s useful to anyone, my winnt.sif WXPAI config file (With all passwords & serials removed, natch)

Apparently it was, and this is how I had to do it without resorting to external software. Ready?

I have a server that generates an xplanet image every 20 minutes. It used to be my background image when I was in Linux, because linux makes that kind of thing easy. In windows up until XP, though, you have to have “Active Desktop” turned on to use anything other than a bmp as your background, and 1600*1200 backgrounds are non-trivial to shunt around. Plus it loads it on startup and caches it there until shutdown, not optimal for an updating image. The solution to this was a web-page on my server that I set as a background under windows, which said:

resulting in a page that refreshed every 10 minutes. Problem was that it didn’t refresh the image, even with no-cache set on the image itself. Eventually in order to get the image reloaded, I set the script that was generating the image to generate it to a file with a random name between “1.png” and “20.png” and then:

This appears to work. But it’s stupid that I have to do it.

It being Saturday, this is a rare thing. Well, it's a rare thing anyway, my email has been 90% spam since january, but this was interesting in a sort of XML-type way, so you get to hear it to.

Last week, Microsoft put a new newsgroup on it's public NNTP server (news:msnews.microsoft.com) called microsoft.public.office.xml, which immediately caught my interest. A little while ago, there was some question over whether MS was going to back down on the "Office Will Do XML" stuff, so I asked. I was answered. This is what they said:

From: "Cybarber"

Hi,
There has been a lot of talk about Microsoft scaling down on XML in the versions of Office 2003.

Hopefully this rumour is unfounded and XML functionality will be in the Standard edition aswell.

Is there any clarity about this subject already?

From: "Joe_MSFT"

In short, yes, the Professional version will have additional XML capabilites from the other editions, primarily those based on how customer-defined XML schema can be used. This was done because the product editions have been designed to meet the needs of different audiences. A brief overview is here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/newsroom/office/factsheets/OfficeSKUFS.asp We will be publishing more details in the coming months.

Can you use XML with all 2003 versions - yes. They will all continue to have XML Web services support through the Web services toolkit and Word and Excel will be able to be saved in their respective native XML file formats that allow for content reuse, transformation, construction and such.

--
Joe Andreshak, Microsoft Product Manager
This post is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights
Sample code subject to http://www.microsoft.com/info/cpyright.htm

From: Aquarion

Does this mean that any given Office 2003 file in it's native XML format - from any version of Office - can be transformed by, say, an XSLT stylesheet?

It's possible to remain within XML specs, yet having the main content in a binary format, and I've heard rumours that this is the case.

From: "Joe_MSFT"
I'm not sure I understand what you're asking, but let me explain.

The binary file format is separate from the XML file format. With Office 2003, users can choose to save Word and Excel files in EITHER the binary or XML file format. The binary file formats are similar to what has existed for the previous versions.

The Word XML format is new for Office 2003. Previous versions of Office will not know how to interpret the XML and simply open it as a plain text file. There is no straightforward way to convert old binary files to XML files, however you could open an old binary file in Word 2003, for instance, and now save it as XML. This XML file is now usable by any program that can interpret XML tags.

Hope this helps,
Joe

So it looks like all versions will save as XML, but only the high-price versions will have all the XML modification/DTD stuff in it.

Exercise in what, I was never quite sure. Futility, probably. Anyway, I stopped developing it when I stopped a) using it and b) using VB for anything It's a mesh of code I wrote when I was sixteen, so don't expect miracles. When it ceased to be, I released the code under the GPL, then forgot about it. Now I appear to be getting searches looking for it, so this page exists.

Then, of course, we have the quote files that came with it, including the one that has 250,000 tag lines and scares all right thinking people. So, the downloads:

The Program:

Quoth 1.1.1

The final release. Changelog is at the very end of this document

Quoth 1.1.1 Source Code

Requires VB6. Released under the GPL. Beware of the tiger.

Readme

The readme and changelog

The Quotes

ChangeLog

* Change/fix    + add   - remove

31/03/00 1.01, Aquarion's Random Sig Engine, Never released. Name too bad
01/04/00 1.02, Quoth
                * Name
                * About Box, now a form of it's own
                + Splash Screen
                + Minutes and seconds now saved to the Ini file
                * Fixed a crash if the Ini file was trunicated
                + Readme.txt
                + Confirm Quote box
                * Fixed Save Settings when x box is pressed
                * fixed Mini-Quoth
                * fixed bug in Scrollbars, Now disabled when countdown is running.
10/04/00 1.03   + Multiple Line Quotes
                * Interface, now tabbed
                + "Last Generated Quote" Box
                + Quote Centering
                * Save Settings, now all options saved
                * Quit Dialog now asks if you want to cancel
                + Timeout on Splash Screen
22/04/00 1.04   + Clipboard export
24/04/00 1.05   * Realised that the random function was producing the same output each run
                  (Always line 56, then 24. for example) and it only changed per build
                  Fixed that :-)
26/06/00 1.06   - Manual tab removed, since it was just a button on it's own.
                * allowed users not to specify a Sig Out if they wern't saving sigs
                + Show Details box, gives details of what the program is doing.
04/07/00 1.07   * fixed the Save Settings button. 
                + Added the Icon
                + added a "Version" line to the ini file. Program no longer crashes on old ini files.
                          It refuses to use them :-)
                * Locked the "Minutes & Seconds" text boxes, to stop people crashing Q by putting text in them.
                * fixed the Status box to realign itself every time it is displayed.
06/08/00 1.1    + added support for Countdown
                * Version number bumped up to 1.1. Scary.
                * Misc bug fixes
                * updated Mini-Quoter to use the new ini file format
09/05/02 1.1.1  + Released under the GPL. The End.

Having planned to go yesterday for three weeks, I started packing this morning, at about 2am. It's now quarter past twelve, I've missed the train I intended to catch, and I'm aimlessly wandering, hoping I haven't forgotten anything vitally important.

Like clothes, for example.

Three weeks back at Uni. Fun. Three weeks of exams and panic. Fun Squared. Although my Dad has lent me his Laptop for the duration, which makes life a lot more interesting. So i managed to use that excuse to play with the Laptop, installing C++ Compilers and other things I possibly won't ever use. But D-Time is approching, and I must find some shoes before the train ride. Who knows? I may even pass.]]> 2000-05-06T05:00:00+00:00 Personal windows 0 journal http://www.aquarionics.com/trackback/journal/47