Mark is back from Burton! (page 5)

It has been quiet on the Access Point, after we had some fun with all the collected passwords. Just as I was starting to think that I had to rename it, to "default" or whatever, to make all the student girls around here think it was a new and different AP, to get some new custom, Mark is Back! Having been away for weeks, and told everyone he was having to hand back his fancy laptop, I was despairing of ever seeing him again. But his new job has started and he still has the laptop. He is my only "customer" with Vista. And yes, Vista phones home a lot more often than XP...

Because it was so quiet on the Access Point, I messed with it a bit. I came across a perl script that turns the internet upside-down:

http://www.ex-parrot.com/~pete/upside-down-ternet.html (Or go to Pete's homepage: He's my kind of guy, what with the black, white and blue...)

It looked so easy... Of course it did not work, but the concept tickled me to a point where I had to learn perl and squid and whatnot so as to be able to modify it to a point where it would work. This took sixteen hours. But it works now. Between brackets, I don't know why the original script's "system("/usr/bin/mogrify", "-flip","/folder/folder/images/$pid-$count.jpg");" had to be modified so all the arguments were passed in the same line, since the other system commands were happy to take them one at a time, but I digress.

The Internet is now served upside-down. Well, the pictures, anyway. I changed the script so that almost every picture format is included. It was going to be blurred instead, because it seems to me that people are more likely to blame that on the monitor or whatever, but that proved too much of a drain on the minimal resources of the Virtual Router. And I can't be bothered to change it to more memory and two processors, because that would involve a virtual reboot and I think there's quite a few services running that will have to be restarted manually. Too many to remember sort of thing.

Anyway. Marky had his entire myspace upside down. And he lasted a whole hour without asking a soul why this might be the case...

Update (January 2008)

After being off air for a while, I'm back now, with an innocuous new name (Belkin54g) but the same visitors on the whole. The mogrify is now serving pictures from a very limited set instead of nice new ones, I don't know why they bother looking at the myspace and facebook pics, they are bound to have seen these photos already.

Amy is my most consistent visitor. She still has no idea why her LimeWire is not working. The other day she had to be knocked back a little because her incessant facebook surfing got in the way of the virii, so I only allowed msn for her. She complained.

2008-01-08-20-21-22 Amy Say:

i can't get on the web all of a sudden, it was fine earlier ,,, now it says i'm band

2008-01-08-20-21-45 Amy Say:

story of my night!

2008-01-08-20-22-00 Rich 1985859620 Say:

ur on the web to talk to me lol

2008-01-08-20-22-20 Amy Say:

this is the only thing it will let me on!

2008-01-08-20-22-43 Amy Say:

and i've been kicked out of the TV room by Raz