Frank-ly

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Just mulling over the number of malicious code injection instances that are frequently wreaking havoc on all manner of victims lately, from the deserving of malice to the frankly innocent, who should not be targeted [why on earth was Citizen's Advice blitzed? Makes absolutely no sense: they're the good guys, people]. Thinking about such stuff brought to mind a post of mine from five years ago, where I described hiding a tribute to a recently deceased friend in our then software product, FotoPage, via the C command 'malloc', which as any programmer knows is not great practice and potentially dangerous, but I made sure that I wasn't feeding my message into a chunk of memory remotely sensitive, so I felt reasonably safe in doing so [no-one lost all their data, so far as I am aware].

In that post I mentioned that I had buried similar tributes to dead people in other softwares I'd had a part in creating, not least of which was a tribute to the lately departed Frank Zappa, which I snuck into the show control code for the Electric Mountain presentation for National Grid at the lakeside museum in Llanberis [now a car park], in 1993. See my post on our involvement in the original project and our subsequent re-engineering of it and its content update. For the duration of our re-engineered show's life - some three or four years - every time the program kicked in at the start of the show, a tribute to Zappa was loaded into the system: as I've said before, conservation of energy would suggest that these multiple daily tributes are still emanating through the ether as we speak, and will for as long as the Universe exists, despite the demise of the vehicles carrying the messages. Nice thought...

Comments

  1. Anonymous30 July 2025 at 14:48

    Only if you ignore Entropy mate!
    ATB
    Joe

    ReplyDelete

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