Virus Attack Shock Horror. Don't Say I Didn't Tell Y'all...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

About 16 years ago, prescient me sat down to write a book to take my mind off my recently ceased 60 a day habit.

This amused me a great deal for a number of months and involved bringing together a self-manifesting roasted chicken and various other objects, the angriest policeman in the UK, a leather catsuited CIA operative who gained considerable sexual satisfaction from killing, a hapless doctor from Richmond, a shadowy cabal of evil octogenarians a sex worker called Kylie and divers other players.

These were gathered together to form the 100,000 word lump of idiocy that was to become my first, very silly, novel Space. Widely rejected by people who knew what they were doing, it reposes on Amazon at £0.99 simply because a few years ago I opened the thing and took a look and it amused me greatly. Its first Amazon review reads 'this book is not funny'...

Anyway, don't tell me I didn't warn you this was going to happen:

Trickling through the Internet like sand through pebbles, the Hellfire virus replicated itself, building heuristic databases on its host servers, configuring itself to match each host operating environment, squeezing itself into every device it could find, hijacking middleware, pushing Java subroutines into client devices. It built lists of target machines from lookup tables on its host servers, patiently gathering information, segmenting targets and flinging out code through ports to match vulnerabilities in hardware and software alike. 

Its primary target lists, defined on the servers at The Space Agency, replicated in China, Dubai and Portugal, started it on the scavenge for secondary targets. The core lists were updated as scavenger routines passed back server information. As each primary list was completed, the servers triggered client targeting routines, passing code across to client devices. 

The virus reached the last of the first batch of core target lists and started to disperse code across to the last class of servers. The folder named Utilities opened automatically and a fresh batch of code started to stream across the world’s networks as the virus targeted the next class of URLs in its fast-growing lookup databases. The virus completed its host lookup tables, closed the core folder then deleted it. The core code streamed out of the server farm at The Space Agency, triggering a delete routine it had left behind and flowed out through a single private network connection that had been preserved for this moment. 

It replicated its core, then: snaked out to a number of defined primary servers around the world. From these, it started again, using the information gathered by its hunter applets to send out new child routines to the new servers it had identified over the past 24 hours. Each child carried the core virus routines but also had added what it had learned over the past day, new backdoors and open port locations, new platform configurations added to its databases. The replicated core routines each started life anew, stronger, smarter and bulked by the data they carried. Its performance started to slow as links became clogged with virus traffic, new routes harder to find each time a search routine triggered. Slowly, Internet traffic died down so that only the virus was sending and receiving information across huge swathes of network. 

As terminals came live, the virus scavenged and infected them, triggering the Hellfire display and sound routines. They waited, counting processor cycles. Every machine the Hellfire virus had infected became inoperable as it closed down any inputs except the ones that waited for the next command from the virus. Global bandwidth utilisation soon dropped to an absolute minimum. There was no traffic. 

The Internet was dying.

Here's a link to it on Amazon. Please don't consider this as an example of the kind of thing you should expect from my later novels. And remember: no refunds.

Random Observations: On Bit Rates

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I was watching my beloved - and soon to be replaced - Samsung copying a file over to my memory key and idly watching the nifty little data rate graph gadget that Microsoft has added to Windows 8 letting me know it was copying at a little over 10 Mbps or 10 megabits per second.

It reminded me of an argument I had back when Unisys (showing my age, I can actually remember Sperry, Burroughs and Rand) released a 'mainframe on a desktop' and I was editing a computer magazine. Pal Paul Lynch was GM of Saudi mainframe software company Al Falak and poo pooed my enthusiasm for this latest innovation with, 'Listen, when your desktop machine can manage the IBM 3090's 3 Megabits per second throughput, you can start talking to me about mainframes on a desktop.'

The IBM 3090 600E was the daddy of all mainframes in the late '80s. This was it, as good as it got; a ten million dollar room full of quietly humming cabinets that supported a stunning 256 Megabytes of storage. It streamed data to tape at an amazing 1.25 Mbps and its processor core clocked at a stellar 69 MHz. And its processor crashed through a blinding 10 MIPS (million instructions per second).

To put this in context, when we're looking at this gargantuan processing power in today's context that's something in the order of a singing birthday card.

The Samsung's replacement (Samsung, having made for me pretty much the perfect notebook in the shape of the Series 5 Ultra, if you discount the issue of Chuck The Trackpad, has now stopped making notebooks and only makes tablets and phones.) has up to 8 Gbytes of RAM, 256 Gbytes of onboard solid state storage and its 4Ghz processor runs, as far as I can tell from the confusing rash of conflicting numbers I can find online, at something like 52,000 MIPS. In short, it could execute every single instruction ever processed by every 3090 ever, take time off to eat a doughnut and take a leisurely coffee before having the job finished before its scheduled lunchtime nap.

I am glad to say it weighs a little less than an IBM 3090, too. And doesn't require water cooling, which is also nice...

Computer Says No

The sheer horror was slow to dawn on me. I was looking at a laptop with a blank screen that should have been displaying gentle shades of blue and playing warming, cute peepy sounds to let me know I'd made the right choice in Microsoft.

But instead of lovely Windows 7.0, I've got a fritzed machine, an error somewhere in chipset land made all the more difficult to diagnose because it failed inconsistently before eventually going down with the finality of a fat drunk losing his legs.

This is why the shower head got replaced, the toilet seat repaired and the picture hung. I hadn't actually realised how much of my time the wee sucker was actually eating. Depositing the little slab of now-useless black plastic at the service and support centre this morning left me walking away feeling distinctly naked, I can tell you.

Yet, despite my black thoughts in the car on the way over to the office, my day hasn't been a disastrous void spent looking at a notebookless desk. I'm accessing my email using our remote access client, doing stuff in Google Groups and pulling the documents I need from the server. I got Twitter up and running on the spare machine I'm using and all my RSS stuff is on Netvibes. The same crash a few short years ago would have been a true horrow - everything I had was held on my local hard disk. Now a great deal of the stuff I work on is out there in 'the cloud' - accessible to me wherever I am, whatever machine I'm using. Device independent, platform independent and client indepenent.

I do realise the fact that I even paused to think about this, let alone wrote a post about it, makes me a deeply sad individual. But then I am temporarily bereft of my beloved Lenovo T61 and grief makes one inclined to behave oddly.

Vista

I’ve tried not to post this post, God knows but I’ve tried. However, some things I guess are inevitable and this event certainly seems to be.

I’ve upgraded to a new notebook, the Lenovo T61. It seems perfectly competent, but I was inordinately fond of my old T43 and really wanted the same but faster. The T61 is undoubtedly more powerful, but is actually bigger. I didn’t really want bigger. I should have waited for the incredibly sexy X300, I know.

But it’s not the Lenovo ruining my life. It’s Microsoft Bloody Windows Bloody Vista.

It’s hard to imagine anyone purposefully creating a more pointless, dumb and fundamentally irritating piece of software. Windows Vista is like having a constant visual conversation with Barney. Every time you try to achieve or accomplish anything, there’s a cuddly-purple-dinosaur-like dialogue box asking you if you really want to do that or telling you, for some irritating and unfathomable reason, that you can’t do it. Sometimes it offers you help and when you finally wade through a dense jungle of awful dialogue boxes to link to the Microsoft Loves You™ website, it smugly tells you that it can’t help you at all, really. It was just, one presumes, kidding. I’m already sick of waiting anything up to a minute for Windows Explorer to open. And I’m heartily sick of watching a damn blue circle coruscate calmingly as I wait for something, anything, to happen in response to my inputs. I haven’t spent so much time waiting for stuff to happen on a computer for a long time. But then it was complex stuff like drawing a fractal. Now I’m waiting for a basic dialogue box to appear.

I have upgraded to a significantly more powerful computer in order to wait longer for basic system events to take place. Explain that to me. It’s like wading in digital molasses. I’m slowly drowning in a sea of slo-mo, pricked to incandescence by stupid dialogue boxes telling me that the keyboard is the tappy thing in front of me, that I am a bipedal carbon-based lifeform and any number of blindingly obvious infodings that I simply do not want. I feel like a bull being goaded into blind fury before the toreador finally brings me to my knees with a cry of ‘Vistaaaa’.

I’m getting used to some new joys, too. For instance, the joy of finding my DNS settings or my browser homepage arbitrarily reset. The joy of hardware that refuses to work (Vista has convinced itself that the rather excellent Lenovo biometrics system is not connected to the computer).

Every time you try to achieve or accomplish anything, it’s like having a mad mid-Western voice suddenly explode in your head: “Hey! You’re trying to change those settings! That’s under the bonnet stuff, li’l buddy! Are you real sure you wanna go lookin’ under the bonnet?”

“Heyyyy! You’re sending an email! That could be real insecure! Press OK to send the email or just go on ahead an’ press Help to shoot yourself!”

I might sound angry beyond the point of reason. I am. I want XP back. Actually, I want Windows 98 back. Actually, scratch that. I want DOS back. I’ve been forced to the realisation that I’m using 2GB of RAM, 160GB of hard disk and a dual pipelined multiprocessing 64 bit microprocessor clocked at over 2 GHz to type and send letters 90% of the time. I used to use a 64 Kbyte, 1 MHz machine to do that and it was just fine. The only difference is that I used to print and send those letters and now I email them. How can it be possible to do so little with so much computing power and resource? Because there’s a fat, stupid bloated wodge of software between me and productivity and it’s called Windows Bloody Vista.

And yes, thank you. I do feel better now.

Ancient

Gianni was musing the other week about the history of the Macintosh and generally having a ‘my first computer I ever had at work’ moment, which rather got me thinking along the same lines. And good golly, but he’s a relative newbie!!

So here’s the list of computers I've used in order of (remembered) ownership/use for work. Home is another thing entirely!

• CBM 96
• Tandy Model III
• Tandy Model IV
• Tandy IVP (The 22lb ‘luggable’)
• Apple II
• Apple IIE
• Apple IIC
• Tandy M100
• Tandy M1000 w/10mb external HDD (The 'look at me even a little bit wrong and I head crash' model)
• Tandy M2000
• Apricot F1
• Olivetti M10
• DEC PDP11
• THEN an Olivetti M24, Gianni Catalfanewbie!
• Toshiba T1600
• Compaq 386
• Compaq Presario
• Digital Pentium
• Fujitsu Laptop
• IBM T43 (lovely)
• Lenovo T61 (jury’s still out)

I remember laughing at the Lisa and furious arguments at the BASUG Apple user group about the evil 'closed top' Mac, 8” disk drives and the GEM GUI, proofing Ventura pages on a dot matrix and thinking that the Amstrad was a really cool computer. The Sinclair QL and the ICL One Per Desk (doomed from the moment someone said, 'Hey, why don’t we put a phone on a computer?'). The first computer I ever saw, in fact, was a Hewlett Packard mainframe that my school bought at huge cost (suppose it would have been a 3000 series) which was programmed using punched cards.

I think I’d better stop there, actually before the Geek Police come for me…

The Finger

So we upgraded our server at work, which involved many technical things that are of no interest to anyone at all in the world whatsoever. One of the things that the upgrading man did was migrate my user profile to a new user profile (without, of course, telling me what he was about to do). This was lovely of him, but of course resulted in all sorts of personal data being misplaced and/or lost and some of my favourite apps requiring re-configuring and even partially reinstalling. I’ve lost all my Google Earth landmarks as well as a whole load of other stuff including Netvibes, Digg and other toolbar buttons on my browser. Oh, did I ever mention that I use the vastly superior and generally rather smashing Mozilla Firefox browser? I do commend it to you most highly.

Anyway...

Perhaps interestingly, the move also resulted in something of a logical conundrum. I use a ThinkPad (Lenovo is a client but, trust me, I don’t endorse client products lightly), which is a truly brilliant machine in so many ways. It has a biometric password system, so I am the only person who can use the machine and just swipe a finger rather than keying in a password. Which is cool.

When our number one software engineering and server migrating expert migrated my user profile, I became another person to the computer, which is now refusing to accept my index finger as a valid fingerprint because it was registered under the old user profile and therefore, as far as the computer is concerned, is the finger of another person.

So I can’t use my index finger to log on any more. I have to use my middle finger. I took great delight in showing the upgrading man which finger I am now using to log on as a result of his actions.

He didn’t seem impressed for some reason…

Acer in Pointless Promo Shock Horror

I was mildly amused at the kind gift of a small, flat stone from Acer Computer attached to my Gulf News this morning. I was mildly irritated that the package was glued to the front page headline and tore the page when I tried to remove it as carefully as I could, but we'll put that down to early morning biorhythms.

There were many newsworthy things in today's papers, including the fantastic and most welcome news that Wadi Warraya (or Wurraya or Waraya or any other way you want to spell it) is to be, belatedly, declared a protected zone. This great news was not in Emirates Today which, you may remember, did launch a concerted one day campaign 'Save the Wadi Fish' that was based around an interview with a conservationist working in Waraya. A big bag of bite size Snickers Crunchers says that ET does a piece taking the credit tomorrow. For now, GN can sit back and enjoy that warm, fuzzy feeling that rewards those who get a decent scoop.

But it was Acer's stone that stayed with me. Disregarding the sage advice of French poet Alain Bosquet, I did not regard my stone so long, so long that it accepted to speak in my place. No, I looked for the invariable ad that explained the invitation attached to the stone: "Nature Shapes, Technology Creates. Individuality is yours alone to enjoy... find out more inside."

Any ad that accompanies such a slice of unremittingly daft and pointless pseudo-empowerment blather is, I thought, going to provide some mild entertainment value at least.

I finally found the ad, buried deeply in swathes of four-page spreads from real estate companies. If you take a minute to go through GN reading the headlines of the ads, you start to understand what Ken Kesey meant by recreating the acid experience without taking the drug:

Experience fine living...because attention to detail is not just a commitment, it's a way of life...; Once a year, the Cereus blooms in darkness; tycoon by day, connoisseur by night; Sea Side Living Starts Today; Your gateway to island living; Live and work in absolute grandeur; Your aspiration for a better tomorrow; Homes created around your lifestyle; Earth, sun, wind and water - the constituents of life, and the quintessence of being; not just another address in the making but a marvel with features extraordinaire...

It's a bewildering array of jumbled up words, sloganeering with no applied intelligence: declamatory, mindless blipverts of aspirational words slung at your psyche in a barrage of positivity and over-promising.

How, you may be starting to think, are our stone-wielding friends ever going to cut through? Answer: they're not. It took me three runs through the paper to find it. And I was looking for the daft thing. The ad was buried on the left hand page 20 and was made of the same old language as all the rest of it. 'Emotion, individuality and temptation at a glance' it starts. Hang on, this is a PC, isn't it? Just checking, thought it might be an apartment in Full Moon Bay. And then, for some strange reason, the next headline is 'Dolby surround sound speakers'! It's like being jerked from a page of Paulo Coelho to a supermarket flyer.

The other words in the ad are irrelevant, you can put them together in any order you like and they'll mean just as much. Print them, cut them out and try it.

Unrivalled | Empowered | Wonder | Style | Concept | Technological | Natural | Performance | Prestige

However, I now have a stone that I didn't have before and for this, like so many other small mercies, I am truly grateful.