June 13th, 2009 § 1
My uncle has kind enough to give me his old GPS unit to me, so Chris and I decided to try out geocaching. We had 5 unsuccessful attempts, followed by a success. It was really fun looking at all of the items and logbook entries. We signed the book and put the cache back and had two more unsuccessful attempts.
ps. This blog post is smallish due to me still learning the DVORAK keyboard layout.
June 1st, 2009 § 0
HPT (Hazard Perception Test) is a test to test your reaction time for hazards when driving. It is required for Queensland drivers to take the test to move from a P1 to P2 licence. The test is taken online where you are shown several one minutes videos, and you must click on the hazard as soon as you spot it. I always like to play around with online systems testing security so I gave this setup a shot. I used the practice tests to see how the system worked, and it was pretty easy to work out a way to cheat the system (like most online exams).
Since it was encrypted using HTTPS Wireshark was out of the question, however this doesn’t mean you can’t still see what’s happening. I found a nice tool called “Live HTTP headers” which shows you all the requests. The first thing I noticed is that the videos are preloaded. You can see all the requested URLs in Live HTTP headers.
To watch one of the videos before taking the test, all you have to do is grab the URL for it (see the screenshot above) and paste that into a new tab. The videos seem to be able to be downloaded at least twice. You can then watch the videos, and then take the exam, and know exactly what’s in the exam / video.
It’s not overly hard to do, and actually quite fun.
June 1st, 2009 § 1
I’ve been playing around with the new build for a little bit now, and I can say that it runs much more smoother than build 7000. Infact, I find Windows 7 nice and easy to use, and seems a little bit more shiny than OS X. Moving around the file system is still a pain in the ass, and a few panels are still colored the nice old grey from XP. The search features are great. Nearly as fast as spotlight, however when you search for a program it doesn’t automatically highlight the program, which would save some keystrokes or mouse clicks. I wish that programs would act more like OS X, in the sense that you can close all the Windows, but the program will still stay running and remain in the dock (read: taskbar). They are still using that dreaded Program Files folder, and between the registry and the local settings folder, the backend is still a mess. The UAC doesn’t bug you as much as Vista, yet I still don’t think Microsoft has fully understood the purpose of it, unlike the OS X version.
It’s a shame that Windows has tried to make all programs backward compatible for so long. The amount of hacks required to achieve this, yet remain secure is huge.
