CorkScrew/AboutMe

Random Christs assassin mathmo first year computerey person. [Has a homepage]

Welcome to the madness. Your choice of WikiName? amuses me. --ChessyPig

Ah, hello. After peering briefly at your homepage: I think the CS do occasional friendly probing (though this probably wouldn't have caught your mistake), and take a dim view of anyone else doing so. Also, some college computer officers are more bastardly than others, and your friendly attacker might end up having to explain themselves to the Dean. --NickTaylor

(PeterTaylor) Occasional is an under-estimate. Although there's a lot less friendly probing done than unfriendly.

: No kidding :P -CorkScrew

A question for those in the know: I can't make Japanese appear on my computer. For example, ドリームキャスト is apparently supposed to appear as the Katakana for "Dreamcast", but to me it just looks like a row of unused character codes - Debian displays them as a little box with 4 hex values inside.
What is my computer lacking that will allow it to handle Japanese characters? Please help!

Check the following, in this order:

What encoding does Mozilla think the page you are looking at is in? (in "View" menu)
What fonts is Mozilla using for Japanese encodings? (buried somewhere in "Preferences")
Do you actually have any Japanese fonts installed? (Use xfontsel or xlsfonts | less or something to check; if you don't, use apt-cache search to find some and apt-get to install them).
Google

yay! got it working

What was it, in the end? - MoonShadow

: I can't for the life of me remember now. I think there was some sort of built-in system for downloading stuff like that. - CorkScrew

I'm not sure if you do mean VNC - VNC is the desktop server thingy, (desktop in a window). It's not really a security mechanism as such. You might mean VPN which is Virtual Private Networking - private network tunnelling over an internet --Mjb67

: No, I did mean VNC (WinVNC?). Our head of IT used/uses it to watch what people were doing in Windows. Of course, fixing this particular "known issue" took about 10 secs worth of regediting. Frankly I wish he'd spent more time worrying about the Unicode Directory Traversal bug on the admin server. Let's just say that it's not too hard to get MS Access to open SIMS format files (ie confidential school databases). Let's also say that, thank god, all my friends are more benign than that teacher.
: Sorry to go on - this is on my top-ten list of favourite /Rants.

I have an unhealthily CompSci-like interest in computers and am intersted in learning AssemblyLanguage. Can anyone offer advice on how to start?

Well, at least you recognise it as unhealthy. Um. I'm torn. Your two options are to either start with something small and preferably emulable. Z80 or 6502 spring to mind (specturm or commodore) or to start with something clean (MIPS or ARM) The first has the advantage of having lots of free literature easily available. The latter has the advantage of making sense. Of course, you could just attend the comparative architectures lecture series. --Vitenka

(PeterTaylor) If you want something small for which emulators exist, how about Z-code? (Maybe one-quarter serious...)

When are the comparative architecture sessions? Is the lecture schedule online? I've never got the hang of that Reporter thingummy. Note: this is in no way a thinly-disguised attempt to extract CompSci lecture schedules for the purposes of the AssassinsGuild

: The 'Reporter thingummy' really isn't that difficult. Google on 'cambridge reporter' will get you to the homepage, 'special numbers' will get you to a page containing a link to the lecture lists, and 'computer science' will get you to a pdf which lists, halfway down, the 1B courses you're after. --ChessyPig