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RIAA pwn3d!!!

My next hobby. Warning: language.

And a copy of my latest entry for my other blog. It's long, so be prepared to digest it.

So the coding contest is over. It was a lot more fun than I expected it to be. Although I have not yet finished the puzzle I was working on, I can say that I was amazed at the complexity of it.

So I'm hoping that those of you that read this blog are technical people because the following is going to get very technical, and may even sound like rambling at some point. For this I apologize in advance.

So we started on Friday around 5pm. We get the spec off the website and start implimenting the virtual machine. So Luke works on his implementation and tests it. However, by some stroke of magic his program works the first time we run it. Needless to say this was amazing. At first we weren't sure that it was working though because we were getting this random garbage being printed out to the screen. But then we got smart. We decided to capture the output to a file. So we do that. And we open it in Visual Studio, and there's this message that says "Delete everything up to colon:" We do that and are left with this 15 meg binary file. Then we got curious and opened up that new file in the virtual machine. Lo and behold, we are prompted with a UMIX prompt. (Universal Machine IX.)

We log into the guest account and we're greeted with a message that says that some guest has been attempting to hack the system using this qbasic script. Yes, I did say qbasic. There was a nearly fully implemented version of Qbasic running in this UMIX OS. So we take the hint (afterall, it is a puzzle contest) and begin hacking away. However, there was an error? Oh no!. So we take a look at the hack.bas file and it turns out that the file was corrupted. We copy the file out into notepad and look at it to figure out what it does. It was a brute force hacking script. However, all the numbers were Roman Numerals! So we've already hit a crazy level of rediculousness and we're only like an hour into this thing. So after we obtain some passwords we start logging into those accounts while we continue to brute force the system and get as many passwords as we can.

I decided to login to the account named howie. I log in, and there is this adventure game. From what I was able to gather, adventure is a text based game that lets you examine, combine, destroy, and otherwise manipulate items while you walk around a map and complete some sort of task. I'm still working on the game now because as I discovered, the items are interdependent. So you need to figure out what item needs what thing and then combine them in the right order to make something. From what I can tell now, I am just over halfway finished with it. Some of the items have rediculous interdependices. Dan developed a tool to help analyze those dependencies. I also developed a tool that would find the items in a room and develop the query to examine all the items in the room. So once I had finished that tool, I began my attempt at solving the puzzle. Right now, I've got a script that runs through about half of the board and assembles everything for me. I just need to figure out the rest of the board.

There were also other puzzles. Michael and Karen were working on a bruteforcer that played this game for them and created the answers that they needed. Unfortunately, Michael only got it working right as the contest ended.

Luke and Anson worked on a ray-tracer in this crazy ASCII programming language called 2d. In this language there were ASCII boxes that represented functions and you had to tie them together to perform tasks. I really can't explain it much better than that, but it was crazy looking when they had it finished.

Cyrus and Tom worked on implementing a second virtual machine that was based off of this four operations that had intended operations, and unintended operations. It was called balance. The idea was to figure out what operations needed to be done in what order to perfom certain tasks and leave everything in a good state. It was crazy to listen in on some of the stuff they were talking about. It was a lot of stuff that I am only vaguely familiar with. (bitwise operations on registers in virtual machines.)

There was also the company picnic on Saturday where Michael, Karen, and I went and played volleyball in a tournament with some of her friends and a random girl that we picked up when we were there. we didn't advance anywhere in the tournament, but I played much better than I knew I could. I was actually surprised, because my serve was consisent. It was good to play well, and I got a nice tan. It is amazing to see how much darker I can get when I am only in the sunlight for a few hours. It was a good weekend.

So yeah, now I'm testing the latest add-in and making sure that it is stable. Our goal is to have everything done and ready to ship before Friday, so this is our final push to awesomness.

Hope you enjoyed the read. By the way, if you don't know the song, Tuesday Afternoon by Moody Blues. I like it, and so should you.

coders got rocked by some serious puzzles.

Back to my ADD.