Liquid Tension Experiment

I'm listening to Liquid Tension Experiment Vol. 2, 74 minutes of saturated prog metal instrumentals by the side project band of Dream Theater's lead guitarist, drummer and keyboardist. It's awesome stuff. The kind I'd love to have a go at creating, if I had (a few!) years' more keyboard experience, and knew guitarists and a drummer who were similarly enthusiastic for writing desperately obscure self-indulgence that most people wouldn't listen to if you paid them :-)

Josh, I don't know if you're still reading this on a regular basis, but there are a couple of tracks off LTE2 that I really need to send you.

Speaking of fine music, a report on last night's Radiohead experience will follow tonight, or later.

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Syndication Wars

For the sake of compliance with yet another random standard (and to get another pretty "valid" banner for my site), clunkyblog now sports RSS syndication support. And I said it wasn't going to suffer feature bloat. Oh well. For anyone who knows what I'm talking about, the URL for the feed is:

http://www.m3fe.com/clunkyblog_rss.php

If you have a LiveJournal, you can add this feed to your Friends page by going here and entering either the above URL, or the account name paul_roberts. My blog entries will then appear on your Friends page as if I was using LiveJournal too. Clever, that.

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Unclean 2

Swopped the Colosseum for a surreal night at Varsity. Met lots of randoms.

Further to my recent post about virus-writing, it seems one Canadian university is braver than I am. It sounds like something of a publicity stunt to me, though. "Whoah, man! We gotta go to Calgary and write viruses!" Frankly, I can't see how letting some students play with some old email worms is going to "delve into the cybercrime mind" at all.

"The course is open to 16 fourth-year students who must work under strict conditions in a secure lab cut off from Internet and cell- phones. Other security measures to thwart students who may have malicious intent are in the works."

Like any student who had the knowhow and inclination to develop a worm would want or need to sign up to their silly course anyway. This Slashdot post says what I'm thinking.

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Unclean

Y'know, it's strangely tempting to write a devastatingly pervasive all-rounder virus/worm hybrid with some kind of vaguely internet-crippling payload.

Why? The intellectual challenge, I suppose. It's a try-to-do-better-than thing. The majority of new nasties seem to be fairly lame - with the occasional exception, they're buggy, or they're strong in certain areas but very weak in others. And decent polymorphism appears to have all but died out - the moment Symantec et al get hold of a specimen, the virus is ultimately doomed. A worm that combined the "best" features of many of its predecessors, and then some, tested to the hilt, would be highly likely to survive in the wild.

I wonder if the act of actually writing a virus is illegal yet, or if, as the Dr Solomon told us in his lecture a few weeks ago, you can only be prosecuted if you actually release one.

Either way, I fancy doing some research into "fully" polymorphic executables. Maybe as my third year project. I can't think of any non-malicious applications for such a technology yet, but I'm sure there are some :-)

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No, I won't fix your computer (well, unless you buy me sweets)

I eradicated the Palyh email worm from Charles's computer last night. Mildly interesting because it's a brand new one and Norton didn't recognise it, and nor did Google. It sucked though - only took five minutes to analyse and defeat.

And Gabriella bought me fruit gums for utterly failing to retrieve her [corrupted / deleted / lost in the digital ether] essay :-)

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Education (We Don't Need No)

So, I've chosen my few optional modules for next year, supplementing the god-awful selection of dry, prehistoric core courses that I'll be forced to endure. I've chosen Numerical Algorithms (ick), Introduction to Business Studies (haha), and saving the best for last, Russian For Scientists I :-)

I haven't written my presentation for Thursday's 9am seminar yet. Still, I taught myself some maths today. And fought with PCI cards and IRQs for half an hour. I now enjoy superior audio performance. And we went to Rootes Reception to tell them that water was a-drippin' through Kate's ceiling. Some girl upstairs had a shower with the curtain on the wrong side of the bath. The ph00l.

The corridor is all dark because every second light is off. This curious phenomenon, unrelated to the flood, is repeated in corridors all over the building. Is it some psychologically motivated mood lighting trick, or are Warwick Hospitality just trying new ways to save money?

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Xanana

Kate and I are in the union's Cafe Xanana, wasting time. One of the staff just tried to give us more food. I long for sausage and onion. I see Russ and his girlfriend, a gay couple, another couple, another couple, and a random. It's so damned coupley in here, in fact, that I may have to go and write my presentation on Private Email in the Workplace instead.

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wap wap wap II

I'm typing this on my Nokia - rather pointlessly, perhaps, as I'm sat in front of the PC, but it demonstrates my snazzy new home-made WAP interface to clunkyblog. This means that my site is now technically a "moblog". Horrible word, that. Anyway, expect some action-packed updates on the move, if I can be arsed.

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wap wap wap

Note to self: Write a WAP interface for blog updates. Would probably get used, like, once ever, but would take 10 mins max to construct, and would have a degree of cool.

Note to everyone: Google are said to be looking at excluding blogs from their search results, which is both interesting and vaguely worrying.

I seem to have been randomly included on this list of Warwick students' blogs. Which is nice.

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Self help

Online diagnosis thingies are amusing. Particularly the ones on mentalhelp.net (thanks, Rob). If its learned tones are to be believed, then I'm a moderately manic, moderately depressed alcoholic ("Hazardous Usage: Help Strongly Urged") with borderline Adult Attention Deficit.

Or, in English - a Student.

Needless to say, we didn't win last night (if we had, I'd have mentioned it by now). We were happy enough with how we played, though, so we shrug and move on. The winners were some curious kind of 80's soul effort with a drum machine and a Prince/George Michael wannabe singer. Hmm. Great stage presence, though.

The low point of the night was Fine Line allegedly trying to make off with Neil's bag in their van - said bag containing as it did a grand's worth of cymbals and such things, as well as his phone and car keys. Kudos to Mike for spotting something was afoot, confronting them, and retrieving it. You really don't expect that kind of shit from another band.

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