Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?

The lingua franca of theatrical lighting control is a physical-layer protocol designed for custom cabling called DMX. Light boards emit an array of 512 values in the range [0,255] and dimmers, or lighting instruments themselves, interpret these values as parameters like intensity. For various reasons it's useful to carry this signal over an IP network, and proprietary standards to do so have proliferated.

Light boards these days are just computers with some domain-specific IO. Tired of our ancient ETC Expression console, my colleagues and I wanted to start using ETC's new Nomad control software on our laptops. Our venue's dimmers only understood ETCNet2, while Nomad could only speak the newer ETCNet3 (and a few other open standards we couldn't use). Attempting a software upgrade on the dimmers themselves seemed incredibly risky. To bring Nomad's output to DMX would have required an additional $500 hardware purchase on top of the already-not-cheap software license.

On the message boards, I discovered a strange fact. The ETC-branded DMXNet2 interfaces we owned were actually white-label manufactured by a company called Pathport. Pathport boxes spoke a much wider array of protocols using the same hardware. These things handled firmware updates by flashing themselves with whatever was served to them over BOOTP. Pathport firmware images were free to download straight from the manufacturer.

Net3->Net2 was too much to ask for, but they could do ArtNet (an open standard) to DMX. Nomad could also emit ArtNet. So I flashed and configured one node to operate as ArtNet -> DMX, and plugged it into another node configured for DMX -> Net2.

So now, locked in a closet, there is a very strange loop of switch -> hacked ETC box -> normal ETC box -> switch which seems bizarrely redundant, but actually makes the world go 'round. And I could run lights and sound from any network drop in the building.

I use a posh script like this when i dont want the computer to lock.

$ws = New-Object -COM wscript.shell;

while($true){ $ws.SendKeys("j"); Sleep 60;}

Ive used it for demos that way the computer doesnt lock before the demo starts, its pretty short and easy to remember. Also on windows if you spam SendKeys("{Left}") everything you type is backwards and when you hit the windows key it freezes the computer in an interesting way, pretty fun.

I did something similar in my last job: We used a custom terminal services client to log in to our data center, and the servers would kick you off after something like five minutes of inactivity. I ended up modifying the ts client to send a shift keypress every four minutes.

Descendents of this still exist in many codebases, especially libm's. I've found it in my own codebase as well. It's surprisingly maintainable.

On a windows machine you can start a powerpoint presentation, then minimise it. This stops the screen lock from starting.