Found a couple of interesting reads on Slashdot. The first was about Keyless car locking systems (read Autocop ishtyle ones) malfunctioning in Las Vegas. They just refused to open up or respond in anyway. People think it was maybe due to Area 51 or the Military screwing up when they were testing jamming devices. Either way, these systems are SO widely used.... & I don't want to be trapped without being able to get into my car. Of course, the hard way out is to old way out... Put in the keys, open the door & wait for the alarm to stop :) The article can be found here. Also for those of you who have cars with Autocop systems installed, try this : Leave your Cell Phone in the car (I tried this out with a Reliance one) & call your number up. The Autocop system starts beeping & flashing intermittently. If you were able to zero down on the exactly frequency & use your cell phone to generate that signal, you'd be able to open you car with the phone. Or for that matter tons of cars in India. Wonder if the makers of Autocop ever thought of all this.
The second was about our pal on Mars, Spirit. Wind River, the maker of Vx Works (RTOS) made a nice little error when they lets say overlooked a part where they should have handled an exception gracefully. So Spirit was rebooting itself over & over trying to allocate memory each time & failing (coz its memory had other data) & the exception generated by this wasn't handled gracefully. The article is here & is a nice read. Wind River also has this kickass slogan that goes Mars 360o. Not another OS in sight. I guess that is something to be proud of ;)
Lazed around today, updated Gentoo, played Curse of Monkey Island. Oh & in Half-Life am stuck at a level where I need to kill tons of stupid floating monsters & can't coz I run out of Gauss Gun ammo everytime & any other weapon is not as effective as the gauss gun. So I've all but given up on that.
And no thanks to rats, my building's electrical system is going to go in for a complete upgrade. That means for the whole of this week, from 1000 to 1630, I won't have power in the house. Dang blast those rats...
full