Saturday Club Life

Yesterdays visit at the HelMUG booth at the COMDEX turned into a small hacking project. But I managed to take some pictures (click on the preview for a bigger image). The smallish insert is a 1970s video phone from the booth of the telecommunications museum, absolute highlight of the exhibition. In the big picture there are a couple of its modern cousins: Plenty of Apples iSight cameras at the HelMUG booth. HelMUG webmaster stefbystef even presented the new HelMUG website over a video iChat connection. I came home pretty late from COMDEX, but not late enough to miss the party of the Greek 2CV club.

The HelMUG mini hack: I managed to write a small script to change the password of a lot of imported user accounts at once. Started out with a small expect script (found on the web, but easy to do yourself) to script /usr/bin/passwd. Then changed that a bit to our needs. Finally hooked it up with a small shell script to run on a text file with username and password on each line. The reason I used a shell script for the second task is that I don't use expect very often, and I did not want to mess up a task like this. But I love expect, even though I'm a python programmer, the tcl grammar is very cool and each time I use expect (which is based on tcl) it makes me whish I had more chance to play with it.

Then came the 2CV party: Last year I went on an excursion with the 2CV fans. So I knew some of them. At the party there were also a lot of unknown faces, since everybody had brought their friends. I enjoyed it nonetheless, good music, drinks, good people, and a very nice place. The clubs hangout is a very stylish neoclassical flat. Even at the party I could not miss my geekness. I went and fixed their 'puter. Installed a spam filter and adaware. But the poor machine is loaded with adware and spyware, so I'm not sure that will be enough. Actually it would be worth to install OpenBSD with Firefox and matching mail client, as I don't think the machine is being used for anything besides mail, web, and looking at an image CD sometime.