Stuff

You know, when the latest "Enterprise" show came out, I thought that the introductory song with really corney, especially since it didn't follow all the other shows starts. Well, last Wednesday I really listened to it and watched the mosaic of movie clips, and really LIKE it now. I am not sure why I have the change of heart. For some reason, it "touched me". It was weird. Kinda overwhelming to think we have come so far from Sputnik to the ISS. I definitely like the newest series the best, although it may be because its new. I used to think the same thing about TNG, and then Voyager. Also.. could be Tapaul in the decontamination room. :)

Work has been interesting. I have been writing an IPSec Configuration Client for Windows XP/2K in C++/MFC. I have to admit, I still think Microsoft's BEST application is Developer Studio. It is extremely well designed if you know how to use it. Been years since I did any heavy work in it... but the short cuts came back to me in a matter of a few hours and I was in the bowels of the debugger without any problems. CVS is kinda ugly for MFC projects though. May make more sense to use SourceSafe, but I will continue to work with CVS to stay consistant. Not a huge problem, but migration from the IDE on my laptop and the desktop is nicer without the CVS crap attached. SourceSafe is ok for that.. but we don't have any Microsoft server platforms. Refuse to use them. Linux/Unix all the way baby, with sprinkles of samba for the Window clients.

Here is a neat little tip if you like to hack at your favorite MS OS. Go over to Sys Internals and grab their RegMon application. This baby will track every push and pop on the registry stack and record creation, modification, reads and deletions within the registry. If you wanna crack an application and wonder what its using in the registry, this baby will record it all. In my case, I was reverse engineering Microsoft's IPSec driver implementation, and within 15 minutes I had it totally mapped out, and didn't reverse engineer the code at all. I know what they are calling, and now doing it myself. Great tool to add to your arsenal. And, if you are like me and like to geek out on how they did it, they include source!

I LOVE what what Chicks Dig Unix did with their blog. I used to use CDE a lot (especially on Solaris) and it was really kewl to see that. I know engel isn't much of a fan, but that was still pretty creative. Wish I would have thought of that. Maybe Solas will do a windows dressing version ;-). Ok... maybe not. But this guy already did it.