Valhalla Legends Archive

http://www.macrumors.com/2010/05/26/microsofts-steve-ballmer-to-present-during-wwdc-2010-keynote/

I thought this sounded very interesting. Anyone else hear anything about this?



P.S. Before someone jumps in because they think they're a genius, I'm aware this information is unconfirmed.

This might qualify as the most unusual music video I've ever seen where the intention probably wasn't for it to come across as funny or unusual.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTGjjeMQ_cM

From time to time I click on Who's Online to see what the numerous guests on here are doing. Often, they are allegedly printing topics. Sometimes they are printing something that makes me think to myself, "Who the hell would want/need to print that?". Are they really printing the topic? Or is that a flaw in the coding of the forum and they are really doing something else?

I was working on something with unsigned long long types and came across a weird observation. It turns out that when storing a numeric literal into a long long (and probably a long as well) in Objective-C (compiled with gcc through objc mode) that the compiler doesn't issue any errors, or even warnings when you don't append LL to the end of the literal, and the code still works just fine. With g++, it produces an error if the LL is not there and the compiler also labels the literal as a long, even though it should be long long.

Is there some special reason this happens? Or is there just a setting in the compiler that caused this?

Out of the two bits of code below, is one "better" (if so in anyway, explain) than the other, or does it boil down to preference? Assuming n is equal to 128845834980000000

int x = (unsigned int *) n;

int x = n % 4294967296;

First off, I understand that the cast in the first piece of code isn't required, though it keeps the compiler from warning about a possible overflow.
Both pieces of code will produce the same value. Is one better than the other? Why? Or is it just preference?

This is news from on or around March 25.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=3000

http://blogs.msdn.com/michael_howard/archive/2009/03/24/ken-johnson-skywing-joins-microsoft.aspx

Cmon, Skywing, at least keep us up to date with some things.

What sort of stupid shit do you guys do while at work?

http://i65.photobucket.com/albums/h240/Tyranize/IMG_0334.jpg

http://i65.photobucket.com/albums/h240/Tyranize/IMG_0281.jpg

http://i65.photobucket.com/albums/h240/Tyranize/IMG_0286.jpg   ---- there was an employee who stole cigarettes from anther employee so we set a trap

I'll get some more eventually, or as worthwhile ones take place.

Lately I often come across movie files that require me to type in a password after downloading them via a torrent off some site. It usually seems to be a password from cryptoguardian.com. Right now I have an AVI file that wants me to type a password in. To obtain the password, I need to go to their site and complete a sponsor offer (going to cost some money). I'm sure the movie data really is in this video file (I say this because a lot of forums where this is brought up they say it's a scam) because this file is still about 875mb.

Does anyone know if AVI format supports this kind of password block or similar? Before I tried combing the internet for hours looking for the true answer, I figured I'd see if anyone here knew more about it.

Update: I figured I'd look around anyway. I found this:
http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/formats/fdd/fdd000025.shtml

The AVI movie file I downloaded starts off with "RIFF" when I checked it out with a hex editor. Still looking, I'll update post if I find anything useful.

Usually when a person I don't know messages me online, I casually go along with the conversation until there is a reason not to. Here's an interesting one that has just happened that's never happened to me before on an IM:

Quote
shelbymuhyt:hello
Ryan:hey. whos this?
shelbymuhyt:Hey Ryan
Ryan:hi
shelbymuhyt:This is difficult for me to do because I'm shy..but I have a crush on you, i have been sending you emails but no response
Ryan:heh. thats alright
Ryan:as far as my email goes, i dont use my yahoo email
shelbymuhyt:I've never been able to tell you for reasons which you would quickly identify as obvious if you knew who this was.
shelbymuhyt:With that said, I want you to guess who I am, and approach me yourself.
shelbymuhyt:To help you out with your guessing I made a few pictures and videos with "Ryan" written on my body.
Ryan:ok.
shelbymuhyt:They're kind of risque photos so I had to make a profile at www.golivesafe.com/access/ and post them there
shelbymuhyt:did you get my last IM about the riscque photos? if you didnt get the link visit it in my yahoo profile
shelbymuhyt:My username in the members area is "RyanandME09" (It's a free website but you might need a CC or Debit to verify your age because I had to. Sigh.)
shelbymuhyt:once you are inside search for me. I want you to guess who I am and then approach me yourself. I'm shy and this is the bravest thing I've probably ever done, but you need to do the rest.
shelbymuhyt:i wont ever be able to get on yahoo messenger again this is my only day so come talk with me on the website
shelbymuhyt:Kisses, Secret Admirer

That was it. It appeared to be a bot as it sent the messages with several seconds in between.

This was on Yahoo IM, so that's why I mentioned I didn't use my Yahoo email (they must have gotten my info from a public Yahoo profile or something).

It wanted me to enroll in some membership that was nearly $40/month not counting this other $3.95 charge for something else I don't need.

Just thought this was a bit odd, anyone else ever have this happen?

I'm considering setting up a high quality video camera behind the backseat of my car or if possible, from the ceiling between the two front seats where the ceiling light is (or more likely the dashboard). It's something I want to do just for fun and incase I ever catch anything interesting on the road (I'm on a number of different highways often), I'll have it on camera. There's a lot of video cameras out there, and I know where to look to find them. I'm curious if anyone else has done this or knows of a particular camera that would recommend for the job?

if (x > y)
  x--;
else
  y--;

This isn't the code used in my application, it's just for examples sake. A friend claimed this would be classified as a dangling else problem. As far as I know, and after looking it up for exact details on Wikipedia, it does not qualify as dangling else. What are your opinions?

Not sure if anyone has ever seen this, but this is great stuff.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8RJerMS40c&feature=related

Anyone else ever hear about this?

http://gone-hollywood.com/2008/05/man-admits-to-having-sex-with-1000-cars/

A friend recently introduced me to this language. From the definition, ObjC may come to mind, and it is pretty similar to ObjC in many ways, most notably the fact that it supports OO. Although this isn't the only difference between CTalk and ObjC, I find that CTalk's syntax is far more attractive than that of ObjC. I suggest you check out this language. As far as speed and any available benchmarks (if any) goes, I wouldn't make that a concern right now. I suggest you check out the language, it looks like it could be pretty handy.

P.S. It seems like it would be a good guess to say that the "Talk" in "CTalk" is taken from Smalltalk. 

Apparently, if I want to use bonds to help pay for anything education related (in my case, college tuition), the bonds will not be taxed. I've got nearly $800 in bonds that I would like to apply towards the rest of my college tuition but I am unsure of how to go about proving that I will be using them for education so that I can get the money from them tax-free. Does anyone know in detail how this works?

I'm just messing around with inline assembly in MS VC++ 6. Here is the code I am working on:

__asm {
mov eax, 0
push eax
call GetModuleHandle
mov [hInstance], eax
mov eax, [hInstance]
push eax
mov eax, IDD_MAINFORM
push eax
mov eax, NULL
push eax
mov eax, MainDlgProc
push eax
call DialogBoxParam
}

Now, the error I get is:

Quoteerror C2400: inline assembler syntax error in 'second operand'; found ')'

Now, I'm not VC++ expert or asm expert, so I really have no clue why this would happen. For all I know the answer to this is very simple. I'm also not sure where this ')' is located when the error refers to it. Hopefully someone can help me out with this.

I'm working on a large project (language for the job is C/++) and I had the idea to use an obfuscator on the source code in order that if someone were to make an attempt to reverse engineer the software, their job would be much more difficult than if the software's code hadn't been obfuscated.

I'm not 100% on how this obfuscation quite works. Is the performance of your code affected at all? Do obfuscator's generally compile your code as well, or do they just obfuscate the source? In the end, the assembly produced by whatever compiler is used, how is that affected? Will it be much different than if obfuscation hadn't occured? Or, would the assembly be just as obfuscated as your original source?

And most important of all, is obfuscation even worth it?

I started really studying x86 asm recently and decided I would use FASM. I tried writing a basic console hello world application. I'll start by showing my code:

format PE console
entry start

include 'include\win32ax.inc'

section '.code' code readable executable
  start:
        invoke AllocConsole
        invoke GetStdHandle, STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE
        mov [_outhandle], eax
        invoke GetStdHandle, STD_INPUT_HANDLE
        mov [_inhandle], eax
        invoke WriteConsole, [_outhandle], _msg, 13, _written, 0
        invoke ReadConsole, [_inhandle], _char, 1, _read, 0
  finish:
        invoke ExitProcess, 0

section '.data' data readable writeable
  _outhandle    dd   ?
  _inhandle     dd   ?
  _written      dd   ?
  _read         dd   ?
  _char         db   ?
  _msg          db   'Hello, world.'

section 'idata' import data readable writeable
  library kernel, 'KERNEL32.DLL'

  import kernel,\
         AllocConsole, 'AllocConsole',\
         GetStdHandle, 'GetStdHandle',\
         WriteConsole, 'WriteConsoleA',\
         ReadConsole, 'ReadConsoleA',\
         ExitProcess, 'ExitProcess'

What happens is when I try to assemble this code, I get the following error message:

QuoteError: symbol already defined.

It tells me that the error occured on the following instruction:

WriteConsole dd RVA _label?000067F

First off, I really don't know what the above (the last text in the code tags) means. When the error dialog shows up, the following code is highlighted:

import kernel,\
         AllocConsole, 'AllocConsole',\
         GetStdHandle, 'GetStdHandle',\
         WriteConsole, 'WriteConsoleA',\
         ReadConsole, 'ReadConsoleA',\
         ExitProcess, 'ExitProcess'

The above code is apparently the source of the error, located inside my program's source code (hello_world.asm). However, there are two sources of error. My source code (hello_world.asm) and import32.inc. The line of import32.inc which contains the source of error is line 45 which contains the following code:

label dd RVA _label

I'm not entirely sure if the above is necessary for you to know or not.

Anyways, I'm not really sure what causes this error. If I decide not to define WriteConsole, I get the same type of error message only for ReadConsole instead. If I remove the definition for ReadConsole, it tells me that WriteConsole (and eventually ReadConsole) is not defined.

I would greatly appreciate help with this issue. I'd be glad to provide more information if that is necessary.

Update: I changed a few things. The program now can be compiled into a normal executable, however it will not run so it seems. The few things I changed were:

I changed
include 'include\win32ax.inc'
to
include 'include\win32a.inc'
I don't think this had any real effect.

I noticed a small problem where I wrote
section 'idata' import data readable writeable
I left out the period (.) after the first apostrophe in 'idata'. This was changed into '.idata'.

I changed the import data section's code to:

section '.idata' import data readable writeable
  library kernel, 'KERNEL32.DLL'

  include 'include\api\kernel32.inc'

This seems to be the main cause for removing the error messages I was receiving earlier. I am still at work trying to get the application to output text to the console. I'll keep this post updated, and I'm still looking for any possible help.

I've been searching google long enough, maybe someone else could do a better job searching, but I could not figure out how to, using MS Visual C++ 6 set a dialog box to function as my main window. I found 1 site, maybe it was 2, that addressed the issue but ended up not helping at all. The first site had code that would not compile because they used a certain function that had not been defined anywhere and was never mentioned. So, I'm left trying to figure out how to get my dialog box to work as my main window.

I'd greatly appreciate it if someone could help me solve this. I am positive that the solution is trivial, it's just difficult when you have no idea what you're doing.

There are many languages out there, some choose to be statically typed and some choose to be dynamically typed. I'd like to know your opinions on what is generally better to use. Static types or dynamic types? If you'd like to, provide an explanation as to why you chose what you did. I'm just curious as to what the results will be here.