Beginning WMI

Ok, I have just recently discovered the inherent coolness that is the WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation). I whipped up this example to show some of the random stuff you can retrieve with it (be sure to “allow” the activeX to run, you trust me don’t you?).

Here be the sample

Isn’t that cool? Imagine what a hacker could get up to if they could just execute whatever old ActiveX they wanted on your local machine, hmmm?

Anyway, I hope to write a few more interesting examples in the near future. Hmmm, Imagine being able to turn on / off services or kill processes using nothing but scripts in a web page?

Update:

Ok, I couldn’t help myself, I whipped up this web based service manager (requires admin access of course): Service Manager.

Susan’s wedding

At long last I have managed to get my hands on some copies of my sister’s wedding photos. I am resisting the urge to post a picture of the cake first.

So first, here is a picture of the happy couple: David & Susan Simpkin. I find it difficult to disagree with my father on this one: this is definitely the most beautiful bride I have ever seen or will ever see.

And at last, the picture you’ve all been waiting for, here is a picture of the cake on the left. I made it myself. It’s three layers of chocolate mudcake, covered in white fondant. The little blue shells and seahorses are white chocolate which I have coloured.

Oh and the top layer is gluten free (Buckwheat flour) it worked out reasonably well 🙂

69er

You know how it is. As software developers we all know how dodgy software can be. There’s always the registry setting containing the admin password (yes, I’ve see this, but not at Beca), the hard-coded string required to get a particular component to work (seen that too), the thing that Allen does every morning to keep the web servers going (he used to run a batch file, bless his heart). I discovered another one of these today when diagnosing a problem in one of our vital systems.
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