Software

Fans of Gmail Checker, rejoice. Your favorite Gmail notifier is back with a vengeance. The slew of changes I made in the last hour is a veritable deluge, but I will attempt to describe them in a few short sentences.

If you know me, you’ll know that I like to waste my time on playing in my favorite MUD. If you don’t know what MUDs are, you have been born after 1970. MUDs are online multiplayer games (think WoW) but without all the graphics and fanciness. It’s purely text-based, so it takes a while to get used to, but the writing on good MUDs is great (and I mean novel-level, and not anything like the DaVinci Code or Men Are From Mars, Women Are Not) and their worlds are typically much much larger than graphical MMORPGs’.

So yeah, I particularly like MUDs because you can make bots that do anything, from fighting for you to running a casino (and you know that people are suckers for gambling), so I spend my time writing bots for MUSHclient, an excellent MUD client.

Since I’m no good at prologues, I will get right to the subject. I guess that was a prologue, though. Turns out I am a bit good at them. It wasn’t particularly good, but oh well, it serves its purpose. So, without further ado, I present to you… Hamachi!

Hamachi is “a zero-configuration virtual private networking application with an open security architecture and NAT-to-NAT traversal capabilities.” That’s basically computer talk for “LAN over the internet”. It’s great for making resources on your PCs available over the internet without having them open to everyone (or just playing games that only support LAN with your friends).

Have you ever wondered what the joke answer to every Linux-related question (“rm -rf /”) actually does? You know it deletes everything, but have you ever seen it? Well, for your viewing pleasure, I have trashed my Ubuntu system. It wasn’t really what I expected it to be, nothing blew up. I won’t spoil it for you though, I’ll let you see for yourself. If the video runs a bit fast it’s because I’ve skipped the redundant frames (there was a lot of doing nothing, about 2 minutes of the terminal deleting with no output).

You can download the video (it’s encoded in Xvid) by clicking on its link.