Re: Hacker FAQ (please comment and help fix)

Article: 7752 of alt.hackers
From: dilatush@raptor.sccs.swarthmore.edu (Jeremy Todd Dilatush)
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
Subject: Re: Hacker FAQ (please comment and help fix)
Date: 2 May 1995 18:20:03 GMT
Organization: Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA, USA
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Squidge (T.R.Matthews@bradford.ac.uk) wrote:
: However, the source for the few versions I could find weren't as good as the
: one here, so I thought of another plan. I'm going to get the binary, and
: hex edit a 0x007 or two into the printed string. Should make the screen
: flash quite well, hopefully :)

: Except being new to the Unix system means that I'm probably not noticing
: that the data part of the binary has a checksum or something ;)

I don't know about other systems, but IRIX 5.3 (SVR4 and SVR3 mainly) will
accept that change... even in the kernel!  One day (when I had more important
things to do) I opened the kernel in emacs and edited some of the boot
messages.  It worked fine!  The hardest part of the task was getting emacs to
stop making a backup file (I'd already made one manually) 'cuz there wasn't
enough room on my / partition for it.

ObHack:
	I confess, I own a Macintrash.	A low-end one at that.	Well, I
now do most things on Sparcs and an SGI, but, well, sometimes I'm in my
dorm room and I need to print something out.

	One day I had a CS assignment which was detailed in a somewhat
complex email.	I usually do my CS assignment away from the computer (it being
theoretical CS) so I wanted to print the message.
	Well, I ftp'ed the message down from my Unix account.  Then I
encountered trouble.  It's nontrivial to print text files on a mac ... you
can use TeachText (the Mac text editor, since replaced with SimpleText) but
it always prints using a proportional-spaced font.  (As a rule, things
only look good in TeachText if they were written in it; and if they were
written in TeachText they only look good in it).
	I could also have opened it up in MS Word and changed the font, but I
get sick of doing that as it takes forever to start.
	So, I decided to write a little program to print out the message.
	I used to do some Mac programming, and I've got a compiler (Symantec
THINK C).  The compiler has a 'console I/O' library for use in porting
text-interface programs from other machines to a mac.  It has options
for 'redirecting' the console input from a file and the output to the
printer.  (and of course, since it's for porting stuff to/from text based
machines it uses a fixed width font)
	So...I wrote a little program that just copies standard output
to standard input, and redirected the output, and my message was printed.

Of course, it took a lot longer than it would have in Word, but that's
procrastination for you :-)

Embarassingly, after I did that I realized that the editor that comes
with the compiler has a 'print' option that also prints with a fixed
width font, so I could have just done that.  Oh well, made a nice hack.

I'll have cooler hacks soon when finals are over and I start again on my job...

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