Wannacrypt,a story

The NSA’s hack on old Microsoft operating systems is weaponised and released to the internet, most publicly massively impacting the UK’s NHS, which had taken the decision not to move forward from Windows XP, a product for which support by its authors ceased in 2012. This was meant to be quick and a source list for a blog article, but as ever it took too long.

This is a storify I made at the time and have transferred it to this blog and published as at the date created. …

Wish, Boomy icons and imagemagick

I need to write a program for managing my windows host, well actually, someone else’s windows laptop. I fired up TCL/TK and discovered that I haven’t copied my tcl/tk icon library from my home systems and I decided to improve my library, which is a big mistake.

I went looking on the ‘net and found the lovely Boomy icons. Annoyingly the transparency representation doesn’t work on my platform and the lovely transparency on the GIFs comes out a delightful shade of pink. There is no .bmp set; the .png set work and look fine. GIMP allegedly supports batch operations, as does Imagemagik. I have been impressed with Jonathan Soma’s trip map http://www.triptropnyc.com/ site about the New York transport system, which uses Imagemagik ever since I saw it, so an excuse to play with it would be good.

The alternative might be to find and install the TCL/TK IMG package which seems to be at SourceForge, http://sourceforge.net/projects/tkimg/.

I have opened a wiki page here, to record my notes, successes and failures, which now includes how to use ImageMagick to perform a simple format conversion. …

Running Python on Windows XP

I wrote an article on installing Python; a bit of chat about why and a bit about how. I got myself a copy of the O’Reilley “Learning Python” book and started working my way through it. For various reasons, I decided to try it on Windows; I thought the binary install would be easier and I had some reasons for not trying it on Solaris. The windows install from python.org is quite cute, as you would expect but it requires some further configuration before the python imports and module search works properly.  …

Laptop Diaries II

How to  build a triple boot laptop. First, I salvaged as much as possible. Fortunately this consisted of the whole of the windows partition, and some parts of the Linux partition, including some parts of $HOME & /opt. Most importantly it included /opt/install which acts a bit like “My Downloads”. This meant that I have a list of most of the products originally installed on top of RH Linux. (These include Star Office, Acroread & Mozilla (I also downloaded GNOCL, but only played with it). I used “Ghost” to save the windows partition. …