tewha.net

Had to share this little gem I discovered.

Remote Desktop is a tool provided with Microsoft Windows to log in remotely to a Microsoft Windows computer. I think it is only available with Windows XP Pro.

To crash a Windows PC:

1. Use SSH tunneling to connect your computer to itself. Forward the RDC port (3389) to another port.
2. Use RDC to connect to the forwarded port.

That’s it. Boom, you’re looking at a black screen with a blinking text cursor. I did this on purpose a few weeks ago just to see what would happen. I don’t think you even need sshd to do this, but otherwise you’ll need two computers…

Which is what I did just a few minutes ago by mistake. RDC is so good that I often forget which computer I’m on. Today, I not only forgot, but decided I needed something on my other computer and RDC was the way to get it. I crashed both my work and home PC by creating an RDC loop. At least, this is what I think happened. Since I had to call my wife to get her to poke the Reset button on the case, I am reluctant to try to recreate it…

I don’t know what I expected. Maybe windows in windows until RDC crashed. But I didn’t think it would require a hard reset of the computer.

What can I say about Microsoft that hasn’t been said before?

If you know a lot about Palm OS, Wikipedia’s Palm articles need some attention: Palm OS, Palm, Inc., PalmSource, Inc. and Palm (PDA).

I think we finally have our phone lines and fax machine (better known as the money printer, since we get purchase orders through it) set up again.

I find it almost impossible to believe that our phone lines lagged behind our physical office move by two weeks. Our Internet is still not right here, and will probably take many more months. All of this after we gave Telus over two months notice of our move.

Luckily, VoIP works really well over Shaw, despite Telus insisting it was impossible to run VoIP over cable. In fact, it works so well that I plan to skip getting a home phone line next month when I move. I’ll either rely on cell phone (unlimited local calls via Fido) or get a VoIP line if I anticipate a lot of North American-long distance. A land line just does nothing that I need anymore.

I guess it goes without saying that all phone companies are inherently evil. What doesn’t go without saying is that ours in particular is also stupid enough to think they still have a monopoly on voice communications. Telus is going to be blind-sided, and it couldn’t happen to a better group of people.

I thought I’d bring this out of comments and post a full entry for it.

Ben Combee wrote:

CW for Palm OS V9 is being restocked by Metrowerks, but there are no plans to update the toolset. IMO, the V9 release works well for producing Palm OS Garnet applications. There are a few updates I’d make if I was still there, but nothing major. On the topic of non-Garnet OSes, PalmSource has done a good job preparing an Eclipse-based environment for Palm OS Cobalt and I assume they will do something similar for Palm OS for Linux. The limitations of prc-tools for 68K programming don’t apply to the ARM tools for Cobalt.

I’m not really disagreeing with this. CodeWarrior for Palm 9 is an excellent tool for Palm OS Garnet, and if you are writing C/C++ applications for Garnet using PRC you need your head examined. Likewise, the free tools for Cobalt seem to be very high quality, and there’s no reason to assume that Palm OS Linux tools will be any worse. PalmSource is producing great software; my problem with PalmSource is that for various reasons nobody is running their software.

My problem with the current situation is based on these points:

1. Palm’s public position is that they are not producing Cobalt devices any time soon.
   Palm has a stake in developers continuing to be able to produce Garnet applications. Now, granted, Palm may be working on Cobalt devices. I’m just not counting on it as a developer. CodeWarrior doesn’t need to last a month or two, but potentially years.
2. Metrowerks lacks the resources to do even minor fixes to CodeWarrior for Palm, and lacks motivation to acquire them.
   Metrowerks has already made roughly as many sales on CodeWarrior for Palm as they ever will. Short of a major release and upgrade fees, there’s no more money to be had out of it.
3. There are no other tools available that come anywhere near providing what CodeWarrior currently provides.
   In short, if CodeWarrior broke tomorrow, I would not be able to build my applications.

Aside from the broken command line compilers (which is pretty important going forward, since it would have allowed uers to escape the IDE when it ultimately breaks), CodeWarrior for Palm is in pretty good shape. But what if SP3 for Windows XP (assuming such a thing ever exists) broke CodeWarrior for Palm? Who would fix it? And what effect would it have on Palm?

Currently, Palm and third party developers both have their eggs in one basket. A basket that they have little to no influence over.

As an aside, was the C++ article useful to anyone? I’m considering writing more articles on specific issues, such as unicode on the Palm.