Thursday, January 29, 2009

How Not to Create a Dialog Box

From Aquamacs on Mac OS X:



Or perhaps this was plain OS X Emacs, Aquamacs certainly has the same dialog. "Save this but no more," eh?

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

My computer is taunting me. Loudly.

I'm leaving Xoma, and arrived at work yesterday morning to a surprise: my computer is taunting me! And loudly, too.

There followed much perusal of ps lists and greping through the entire filesystem, but I couldn't find the source. Nithin finally suggested I find any file altered in the past few days, which led me to ... Nithin's .bash_history. Which led me to this, from "site-packages/date.py":

#!/usr/bin/env python
import os
import sys
import random as ran

taunts = [
'Wha' + 't ar' + 'e y' + 'ou do' + 'ing?',
'go' + 'od ridd' + 'ance',
'say' + 'anara! suc' + 'ker', 'y' + 'ou a' + 're a dir' + 'ty trai' + 'tor',
'I tho' + 'ught w' + 'e w' + 'ere frie' + 'nds',
'a ro' + 'ck wa' + 's mi' + 'spla' + 'ced, ' + 'Kie' + 'ran ha' + 's vani' + 'shed',
'won' + 'der b' + 'oi h' + 'as go' + 'ne t' + 'o t' + 'he da' + 'rk si' + 'de']

if __name__ == '__main__':
t_index = ran.randint(0, len(taunts)-1)
os.system('os' + 'ascr' + 'ipt -e "set Vol' + 'ume 6"')
os.system(('sa' + 'y "%s"') % taunts[t_index])

sys.exit()


This process was run every 15 min by a launchd plist called "com.apple.spaces.plist," which sounds pretty innocuous. Brilliant!

Xoma's lucky that Nithin Reddy and Jake Rothenbuhler possess more loyalty and general fortitude than I do.