RebeccaTheDev

I once made a homebrew GraphLink parallel port cable so that I could upload games and programs to my TI graphing calculator. Made it a lot easier to write programs than to tap them out on the calculator itself.

A friend and I wrote a chat program that used the calculator-to-calculator GraphLink cable to send messages back and forth so we could chat in class. This was a neat hack, but considering the cable that came with the 85 was like 2 feet long, it was kinda useless in practice unless we were sitting at the same table. So I made a longer cable at home out of stuff from RadioShack.

Everything was cool until we got caught using the homebrew cable in class. Fortunately, once we showed the principal what we'd done, we were told that it was very clever, but not to have the cable in class anymore. :)

You know, I think I might still have my TI-85 and homebrew cables in a box somewhere. I wonder if any of my old programs are still there.

After a few weeks without checking your notifications, they start emailing you things like this.

Pretty much, yeah. I never noticed it on campus because I was sitting on a 10 megabit connection.

That added an extra dimension to the confusion because I was sure this never happened when I was on campus, only when I was sitting 300 miles away. It was still happening if I had bothered to look at the network stats, just not enough to entirely saturate the connection.

This reminds me of one of my favorite old tech stories.

A long while back (seems like this was the late 90s or early 2000s) I was working on a script that did some data processing on a remote machine. It had to loop through a bunch of text log data and generate some reports. Being as that I had no idea if the script was actually working until it completed awhile later, I decided to put in a neat little ASCII spinner in it when you ran it with verbose options.

At the time I was on a slow dialup connection as I was on break from school, and something weird would happen. Every time I ran the script to test it, my Internet connection would become nearly unusable. But as soon as the script finished, it would suddenly start working again.

As you can imagine, this was very confusing since the script was running entirely on a remote system. What the hell is going on?

This stumped me for an hour or so until I ran it without the verbose option ... and it didn't happen. Then I finally realized what was happening: I was refreshing the spinner on EACH ROW and remote machine was going through the rows so quickly that sending refreshes for the spinner saturated my tiny dial-up connection. Changing this to only update once a second fixed it entirely.

And that's how I DoS'd myself with a spinner.