Azure Jane Lunatic (Azz) 🌺 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
azurelunatic) wrote2014-04-22 02:17 am
azurelunatic) wrote2014-04-22 02:17 am
A Return to Yourself: a Return to WWII Encryption
What can I say about today?
It was a Monday. I went to work. It felt like no sooner did I sit down to try and figure out what was in my inbox that I got a pop-up over the side of my cube: Purple (not wearing purple, but also not combining the tan overshirt with the screaming neon green t-shirt like he did on Friday) asking if it was time for lunch.
It was, in fact, time for lunch.
There were commiserations about various TiVo problems and their solutions. Apparently if your hard drive decides that 8 seconds is too long to chill out, and the TiVo startup goes that long without poking the hard drive, you've got some problems.
Deskwork ensued, and a certain amount of clobbering the cabinets. There are things in there that don't need to go with us. There are also things in there that do. I'm one of the ones helping sort this out.
Then it was time to depart to see the guest speaker. We were told to come early, because there would probably be a crowd. So we all made plans. 4/5 of #cupcake went; the other 1/5, lb, had come in at ass o'clock and was 100% done with work an hour previous. Come that time, Purple was still showing idle. Fortunately I had seen which way he had gone, and walked by the window and tapped on my wrist meaningfully. (Will that still mean "time" in a post-wristwatch age?)
When we arrived, Mr. Zune and Mr. AU were already there, lined up with Mr. Zune's boss-shaped-person at the end of the line. So Purple and I filed in, to have 4/5 of #cupcake all in a row. It was pleasant.
The guest speaker was Ken Thompson. Everyone was very excited. It was an interview with one of the senior dudes, who had a compilation of prepared questions. It was great fun to listen to.
At one point, it transpired that Ken had brought something for show-and-tell, in case things got slow. It was an Enigma machine. We were duly impressed. He told the story of how he had come by it (lost the coin flip, but later inherited it) and the other fellow held it up so we all could see. Ooo.
Eventually they opened up the floor for questions. Ever since he'd mentioned Berkeley specifically by name, my brain had been going down the breaking-things path. (The story of my father vs. the variable speed card reader goes here.) As I listened and grabbed the occasional picture, I thought about what the best question might be. What about the most expensive thing he had broken?
Some questions later, it solidified in my mind, and I caught the attention of the guy with the microphone. I held it carefully as Ken answered the previous question (and handed it back to the guy who'd asked the previous question when he needed to clarify, because some things just need amplification). And soon enough it was my turn.
The question I asked was shaped a little like this: Breaking things can often be a significant part of a computer person's life. Could he talk a little bit about some of the more interesting times he tried to break something, broke something, or almost broke something?
I noticed absently that my voice, amplified and re-broadcast over the speakers, was clear, full of humor, and without raspiness or hesitation. It was a reasonably nice voice. Apparently I've been coming to terms with it.
The question was wildly popular; as I sat back, my #cupcake compatriots congratulated me on an excellent question. He settled in to give us context and then a hell of a story. I will do my best to relate it; I've been poking around to see if there's a better version up online elsewhere somewhere. However! There were no few times that he'd in fact had written permission to fuck all sorts of shit up, and in one particular workplace, they'd been in the habit of leaving little easter eggs for him inside the hospital mainframe, with taunting messages to the effect that he could never get this one. And in his pursuit of this particular one, he had managed to de-couple the login function from the password file that it was supposed to check, with the result that there would be no more logins. And he couldn't get them back together. (Appropriate noises from the audience.) However! He had two terminals open. And he was still logged in over there. And he managed to discern that he could make the login program check for a password against the terminal. And he did. And he was back in. And hooooooo boy the stuff he could get into. And after that, this trick was in his arsenal.
There were more questions, and more answers. Some of the questions were loaded. Some of the answers were hedged. One of the questions was about which language he thought was best for educational purposes, Java or C++. "Machine code," Purple muttered in my ear. I whapped him gently. Ken answered according to his thoughts about the market: learn the language in which you can get stuff done. Then someone said, no, which one to teach the student the most about the workings of the computer? And in fact the answer was as Purple had predicted. We bumped fists.
At the end there was a rush for the stage to see the Enigma box. Having not been fast enough, Purple and I had a terrible view. I wound up spending much of the time watching off the screen of someone whose phone had a better view. Heh. We did get to peer at it between shoulders, though, and this was delightful.
After that we wandered back. I saw Madam Standards, and we talked a bit about our weekends, which necessitated coming out of the broom closet. Dang, I'm in a lot of closets. Then I attacked the team's storage closets again. Whee! (There was also an interlude where I poked my face in to see my manager about the outdated swag, and wound up going off for a few minutes about all the things which are currently broken about the fucking database. Then I cut myself off and said that I saw that I had quite the list, and I should go do something about it.) It may also be worth noting that at this point I had been standing for a while. My legs are strong enough again that this much standing did not entirely incapacitate me the way it might have some months previous, but that I was definitely starting to feel an endorphin high, and I was thus a lot more silly (and a lot more affectionate, but there are times and places, and "I LOVE EVERYONE IN THIS BAR" is a lot less appropriate at work) than was perhaps helpful. So some good old-fashioned shuffling through hella old software was entirely sensible.
Consequently, there is now a huge Office Depot bag on my manager's side table, with a sticky-note bearing the label "OLD AS BALLS SOFTWARE" for her examination and disposal.
The concept of installing Linux on a dead badger has changed somewhat since the original publication of that bit of hilarious science fiction. In the day of the Raspberry Pi, it is a lot more practical of a consideration. Sometimes conversations like this result in Purple (or me) saying some damn strange things. Sometimes this results in sharing. This time, it was Purple who shared to #cupcake, rather than me to Twitter.
The thing about my brain is that sometimes it has not much in the way of filters. The thing about me being friends with Purple is that if I think of something that I want to say to him when I'm somewhere else, like at ass o'clock when I'm near twitter or something, I will make a note of it and then bring it up. Yay external brains. He does not offend my aesthetic sensibilities. Combining the tan shirt with the green one, however...
He emitted that utter shit-eating grin again, and allowed as how it had been a deliberate choice. It had been at that point in the laundry cycle, and that had been the t-shirt he'd turned up, and while there had been no good choices, he'd decided to visually troll the lot of us, and made a very deliberately bad choice. Much as the Collective played fast and loose with Prime's reputation for innocence and Shanna's dirty mind, he plays with the stereotype of the engineer as clueless about color, fashion, and aesthetics. And he hoped that he hadn't caused any actual hurt with the color combination. :D
And tomorrow will be another day.
It was a Monday. I went to work. It felt like no sooner did I sit down to try and figure out what was in my inbox that I got a pop-up over the side of my cube: Purple (not wearing purple, but also not combining the tan overshirt with the screaming neon green t-shirt like he did on Friday) asking if it was time for lunch.
It was, in fact, time for lunch.
There were commiserations about various TiVo problems and their solutions. Apparently if your hard drive decides that 8 seconds is too long to chill out, and the TiVo startup goes that long without poking the hard drive, you've got some problems.
Deskwork ensued, and a certain amount of clobbering the cabinets. There are things in there that don't need to go with us. There are also things in there that do. I'm one of the ones helping sort this out.
Then it was time to depart to see the guest speaker. We were told to come early, because there would probably be a crowd. So we all made plans. 4/5 of #cupcake went; the other 1/5, lb, had come in at ass o'clock and was 100% done with work an hour previous. Come that time, Purple was still showing idle. Fortunately I had seen which way he had gone, and walked by the window and tapped on my wrist meaningfully. (Will that still mean "time" in a post-wristwatch age?)
When we arrived, Mr. Zune and Mr. AU were already there, lined up with Mr. Zune's boss-shaped-person at the end of the line. So Purple and I filed in, to have 4/5 of #cupcake all in a row. It was pleasant.
The guest speaker was Ken Thompson. Everyone was very excited. It was an interview with one of the senior dudes, who had a compilation of prepared questions. It was great fun to listen to.
At one point, it transpired that Ken had brought something for show-and-tell, in case things got slow. It was an Enigma machine. We were duly impressed. He told the story of how he had come by it (lost the coin flip, but later inherited it) and the other fellow held it up so we all could see. Ooo.
Eventually they opened up the floor for questions. Ever since he'd mentioned Berkeley specifically by name, my brain had been going down the breaking-things path. (The story of my father vs. the variable speed card reader goes here.) As I listened and grabbed the occasional picture, I thought about what the best question might be. What about the most expensive thing he had broken?
Some questions later, it solidified in my mind, and I caught the attention of the guy with the microphone. I held it carefully as Ken answered the previous question (and handed it back to the guy who'd asked the previous question when he needed to clarify, because some things just need amplification). And soon enough it was my turn.
The question I asked was shaped a little like this: Breaking things can often be a significant part of a computer person's life. Could he talk a little bit about some of the more interesting times he tried to break something, broke something, or almost broke something?
I noticed absently that my voice, amplified and re-broadcast over the speakers, was clear, full of humor, and without raspiness or hesitation. It was a reasonably nice voice. Apparently I've been coming to terms with it.
The question was wildly popular; as I sat back, my #cupcake compatriots congratulated me on an excellent question. He settled in to give us context and then a hell of a story. I will do my best to relate it; I've been poking around to see if there's a better version up online elsewhere somewhere. However! There were no few times that he'd in fact had written permission to fuck all sorts of shit up, and in one particular workplace, they'd been in the habit of leaving little easter eggs for him inside the hospital mainframe, with taunting messages to the effect that he could never get this one. And in his pursuit of this particular one, he had managed to de-couple the login function from the password file that it was supposed to check, with the result that there would be no more logins. And he couldn't get them back together. (Appropriate noises from the audience.) However! He had two terminals open. And he was still logged in over there. And he managed to discern that he could make the login program check for a password against the terminal. And he did. And he was back in. And hooooooo boy the stuff he could get into. And after that, this trick was in his arsenal.
There were more questions, and more answers. Some of the questions were loaded. Some of the answers were hedged. One of the questions was about which language he thought was best for educational purposes, Java or C++. "Machine code," Purple muttered in my ear. I whapped him gently. Ken answered according to his thoughts about the market: learn the language in which you can get stuff done. Then someone said, no, which one to teach the student the most about the workings of the computer? And in fact the answer was as Purple had predicted. We bumped fists.
At the end there was a rush for the stage to see the Enigma box. Having not been fast enough, Purple and I had a terrible view. I wound up spending much of the time watching off the screen of someone whose phone had a better view. Heh. We did get to peer at it between shoulders, though, and this was delightful.
After that we wandered back. I saw Madam Standards, and we talked a bit about our weekends, which necessitated coming out of the broom closet. Dang, I'm in a lot of closets. Then I attacked the team's storage closets again. Whee! (There was also an interlude where I poked my face in to see my manager about the outdated swag, and wound up going off for a few minutes about all the things which are currently broken about the fucking database. Then I cut myself off and said that I saw that I had quite the list, and I should go do something about it.) It may also be worth noting that at this point I had been standing for a while. My legs are strong enough again that this much standing did not entirely incapacitate me the way it might have some months previous, but that I was definitely starting to feel an endorphin high, and I was thus a lot more silly (and a lot more affectionate, but there are times and places, and "I LOVE EVERYONE IN THIS BAR" is a lot less appropriate at work) than was perhaps helpful. So some good old-fashioned shuffling through hella old software was entirely sensible.
Consequently, there is now a huge Office Depot bag on my manager's side table, with a sticky-note bearing the label "OLD AS BALLS SOFTWARE" for her examination and disposal.
The concept of installing Linux on a dead badger has changed somewhat since the original publication of that bit of hilarious science fiction. In the day of the Raspberry Pi, it is a lot more practical of a consideration. Sometimes conversations like this result in Purple (or me) saying some damn strange things. Sometimes this results in sharing. This time, it was Purple who shared to #cupcake, rather than me to Twitter.
The thing about my brain is that sometimes it has not much in the way of filters. The thing about me being friends with Purple is that if I think of something that I want to say to him when I'm somewhere else, like at ass o'clock when I'm near twitter or something, I will make a note of it and then bring it up. Yay external brains. He does not offend my aesthetic sensibilities. Combining the tan shirt with the green one, however...
He emitted that utter shit-eating grin again, and allowed as how it had been a deliberate choice. It had been at that point in the laundry cycle, and that had been the t-shirt he'd turned up, and while there had been no good choices, he'd decided to visually troll the lot of us, and made a very deliberately bad choice. Much as the Collective played fast and loose with Prime's reputation for innocence and Shanna's dirty mind, he plays with the stereotype of the engineer as clueless about color, fashion, and aesthetics. And he hoped that he hadn't caused any actual hurt with the color combination. :D
And tomorrow will be another day.
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