I’ll have to admit that when I first saw this I thought it was incredible. It’s like the huge touch screens of Star Trek TNG. I’m an old school Dungeons and Dragons player from days of old (late 70’s, early 80’s). There are still factions that meet at community gaming centers and stores that still play the old fashioned way with miniatures, maps, paper and pencil. But will this concept change that?

Surfacescapes Demo Walkthrough from Surfacescapes on Vimeo.

The big advantage of the large surface game is that specifics, ranges, inventories, etc. can all be accessed with the touch of a finger. Pretty cool, right? Well, I would have to argue that while it may appeal to the ‘shiny object’ crowd, the old school methods will still be the dominant ones. Why? For the simple reason that having to reference the mountains of books to determine, in the most precise of detail, the effects or abilities of a class, spell, or Boss is half the fun. The research and interpretation is where the fulfillment of D&D lies… That and the imagination!

Now I’ve been tabletop RPG’ing since High School and I can tell you that some of the cerebral fulfillment of the games comes from outsmarting an opponent who doesn’t know the rules as they pertain to their situation or has misinterpreted them, which usually leads to a half hour of looking up the ruling in question and arguing with the DM to get your way. Sometimes, a slap-fight ensues. With the surface method, everything is at your fingertips. You can immediately assess the situation and have the game determine the best option.

Take for example the simple method of range determination as demonstrated in the video. Have you ever played a tabletop RPG and pre-measured a range attack? OMG – You will be banned from the store quicker than your Manna burn rate can be calculated. Not physically banned, but the shame you feel for being labeled and ignored by your fellow type A mouth breathers might as well mean exile. There are rules, protocols, and sometimes rituals that accompany these games, and there’s good reason for it. It’s the interaction with fellow carbon based life forms that makes playing D&D and every other RPG (Games Workshop, etc.) worth while.

I can see this method being useful when your playing a single player game like Diablo or the many other solo RPG’s out there. I think the surface method would be a fantastic vehicle for those types of games where the pomp and circumstance of the group environment are not required. Plus, lugging around those 18 books is the only exercise I get!

In late January, Apple announced the iPad. Essentially it’s a jumbo sized iTouch (approximately 9.5” X 7.5”). Some of the features touted by Apple regarding the iPad are a 10 hour battery life, a solid state drive (16GB up to 32GB), all the multimedia you should need, and the ability to read eBooks. One of the neatest things to me was the ability to dock with a regular keyboard and the ability to run iPhone applications! Sounds like a winner so far, and since it’s an Apple product, I’m sure they will sell millions.

The iPad is beautiful, like all Apple products. It looks like an HD LCD TV with the black border and shiny high gloss screen. Which brings me to the first possible problem…

The iPad is slightly smaller than a standard sheet of notebook paper. Laptops, while smaller now, have similar type screens but are sometimes chided for their clamshell design keyboard / screen mechanics. iTouch devices are nice and small and fit in your shirt pocket. This helps eliminate possible scratches to the screen. The other hidden purpose of a laptop’s clamshell design is to help protect the screen since it cannot be easily placed in a protective pocket. I think the iPad will suffer a bit in that the screen is exposed. One scratch and you’ve not only ruined the aesthetics, you’ve just incurred a few hundred dollars in screen replacement cost.

In 2002/2003, Windows toyed with the idea of a tablet PC. It was marketed as being more convenient than a laptop for quick startup and retrieval of information on the go. One thing the iPad has going for it is a touch screen. The tablet PC’s of old required a stylus (but cut them some slack… it was 8 years ago). I’ve read a couple of posts from Apple groupies comparing it to the Windows Tablet PC’s, but they fail to acknowledge that they are in reality comparing Apples to Oranges… or Windows. 8 years of technological growth have no doubt made the iPad a vast improvement over the tablet PC’s.

One problem I’ve had with Apple over the years is their distrustful licensing model. They assume everyone is out to rip them off so they clamp their product access down with a jackhammer. All applications on the iPad come from the App Store, which means that before you use them, a series of complex and secure communications must happen between your device and your App store account. In my opinion, this is where the iPad falls way short of a traditional laptop.

Window will  have another go at the tablet market in 2013 when it releases it’s new device. Google will also be releasing it’s Chrome OS and a tablet like device. One of the big hurdles that Google has overcome in marketing it’s iPhone comparable phone is price. Google’s product, by comparison, is cheaper, and that’s driving sales.

I wonder if Apple will pull the same old price switch-aroo it did with the first iPhones? They were cut by $100 within a few weeks of release, which angered some initial iPhone enthusiasts who stood in long lines and forked over their hard earned money for Apple’s latest must have device. But, I’m sure the throngs of loyal Apple groupies will make this launch a huge success. Good luck fitting it in your shirt pocket!

There are times when I tell someone much younger than me about some of the trials and tribulations of early Internet life.  You know… before DSL and cable modems, before Wi-Fi, before DVD’s. Sometimes they look at me like I was making all of it up just to amuse myself.

Let me start with a little background. I have been a Software Engineer for almost 25 years. I have had many titles and worked for all sized companies, from fortune 100 to mom-and-pop. I was around when the Internet ‘happened’. When this weird, wonderful technological gift was bestowed upon humanity. I’m also old enough to know, for a FACT, that Al Gore did NOT invent the Internet. Ah, those glorious days of my youth, watching as computers progressed from 286 to 386 to Pentium… Watching as hard drives fell in price from a $695 10MB drive to a $60 1TB drive. But I digress.

Such was my early involvement with the Internet that I hold the dubious distinction of building and installing the first Internet accessible dial-in server at the University of Phoenix for student communication. Prior to that they had to use a dial in Bulletin Board system called ALEx (Apollo Learning Exchange). I left there in ‘95 to dedicate my efforts to Internet related activities and joined up with a man who wanted to start his own dial-up ISP. It reached it’s limit at about 1000 subscribers and was giving Primenet (our biggest local competitor) a run for their money. So, with that said, I believe I am pretty well qualified to speak on the historical events and their significance / relevance, peppered with a little humor, sarcasm, and embellishment.

Thus was born the thread Hacking it: Old Skool. Here I will chronicle some of the pitfalls, surprises, achievements, and flat out failures of various Internet activities. So gather around the campfire and I, the eSource tribal elder, will mesmerize you with tales passed down from Sysadmin to Sysadmin. These are the tales of the life force we call Internet spoken by those who were there to experience it many moons ago… (cue howling wolf).

This first article deals with early attempts at email blast marketing and how the perpetrators would hide their tracks. Remember that in the early days of the Internet, our email programs were barely GUI. They had none of the features you kids enjoy today like spam filters (at least ones that worked) or embedded HTML. They were TEXT with simple links and limited styling. Pornography was a budding business back then and people were looking for ways to get people to click to their site thinking they were clicking on something else. Hopefully the person who clicked was A) A guy, B) Looking for porn anyway, and C) Too unfamiliar with the early browsers to release themselves from the shackles of the endless redirect!

Knowing their dial-up ISP would delete their account if they got complaints against them sending such material, they looked for ingenious ways to send emails, make them look like they are from someone else, and completely wash their hands of them. One such technique was called “The Gullible Server.”

In those early days, ISP’s were generally small shops that, as a group, looked out for each other and tried to help out as needed. There were many servers that had security holes, either by choice or incompetence, that left the door wide open to those looking to take advantage of their kindness.

The Gullible Server involved finding an ISP whose SMTP server had lax security / checking. The email marketer would then create their email with fraudulent or unreliable links and create an email list of recipients. Then the following would occur:

1) The FROM address would be the actual address of the intended recipient

2) The TO address would be a bogus address at the domain server they were spamming through (say Fake_Address@nowhere.com)

3) When the email reached the Gullible Server, it tried to deliver it to the bogus address on their server. It would not be found

4) Trying to be nice, the Gullible Server would send the email back to the FROM address to let them know it was undeliverable

5) The user listed in the FROM address receives the email and the nefarious email scammer’s plan is put in action

6) Some angry users call nowhere.com and complain about receiving offensive unsolicited emails

7) Clueless admin scratches his head trying to find the user Fake_Address@nowhere.com… No luck

If the admin waited more than a couple of days to check the logs and see what user actually sent the email, they were most likely gone or simply did not exist (the logs, not the user). Remember that drive space was at a premium, so keeping long term records on small capacity HD’s was not a priority or a necessity for small, independent ISP’s.

The scam had several variations as different filters and methods were developed for the email servers to combat this sort of thing. For those early hacking pioneers it netted them some benefit and riches. As the popularity of the Internet grew and ISP’s began having to fight and claw to hold on to their customers, the locks got even tighter and eventually this type of email spamming became a thing of the past.

Now, off to bed you little scamps! I’ll regale you with further tales of Internet past some other time! 

I have been using Windows 7 (both BETA and RC version) for several months now on a test machine. I purchased a full copy of Windows 7 over the Christmas break so that I could upgrade my development desktop from Vista and keep it current. Let’s just say the upgrade was less than spectacular.

I had a 32 bit version of Vista but noticed I had 2 DVD’s in my Windows 7 packet… One was 32 bit the other was 64 bit. I thought since I recently upgraded to a dual core Intel I would take advantage of the 64 bit now available to me. Without warning or hesitation, the installation started in a flash but then soon bogged down into a quagmire. After waiting over 6 hours for files to copy, the screen showed it was only 12% done. Something was clearly wrong.

I aborted the upgrade and attempted to boot into the remaining scraps of Vista that may still be lurking. No luck. The install had wiped it too clean on the Vista side and only installed 20% on the Windows 7 side.

After much investigation I found that you cannot upgrade from 32 bit Vista to 64 bit Windows 7. Thanks for telling me! Some kind of warning or denial screen would have been nice. Luckily I backed up everything and had to proceed with a complete re-installation of Windows 7… Which isn’t a bad thing. It’s always best to start with a clean slate, but I have SO much software, dev tools, add-ons, and utilities that it took a day and a half to install them all.

So be warned that even though your fresh new packet of Windows 7 comes with both versions, you can only upgrade to a version you currently have installed. I wonder how Windows 8 with 128 bit support will handle updates?

No, it does not bring up a picture of Bill Gates. What is does, though, is brings up a fantastic little shortcut to all the features that you now have to hunt around for in order to find them. BTW, what happened to ‘network repair’ in Windows7… I can’t find it anywhere.

Credit CNET with this one:

Although its name suggests perhaps even grander capabilities, Windows enthusiasts are excited over the discovery of a hidden "GodMode" feature that lets users access all of the operating system's control panels from within a single folder.

 

By creating a new folder in Windows 7 and renaming it with a certain text string at the end, users are able to have a single place to do everything from changing the look of the mouse pointer to making a new hard-drive partition.

 

The trick is also said to work in Windows Vista, although some are warning that although it works fine in 32-bit versions of Vista, it can cause 64-bit versions of that operating system to crash.

 

To enter "GodMode," one need only create a new folder and then rename the folder to the following:

 

GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

 

Once that is done, the folder's icon will change to resemble a control panel and will contain dozens of control options. I'm not sure it's my idea of playing God, but it is a handy way to get to all kinds of controls.

I've asked Microsoft for more details on the feature and how it came to be. But so far, Redmond is silent on the topic.