Confess HN: Share your Immoral Hacks, Codes or Tweaks

When I was doing my graduate course in Computer Engineering, we had to submit loads of assignments each semester for each paper. "Assignment" means something that we should write by hand (print-outs not allowed) on any arbitrary topic provided by the lecturers. There was no problem solving ability required here, it was just answering questions like "What are the features of Java?", "Explain the layers in the TCP/IP model" etc.

As you can assume, this was a rather boring and useless exercise. In the first two years I made some girls from my class to write the assignments (which I am not interested in) for me in exchange for helping them in the computer lab and projects (which they were not much interested in).

By the end of second year, I found out another way to do this. I wrote a program that wrote the assignment for me. Here is how it worked: I will fetch the data from websites like Wikipedia etc and paste it in the program and the program will make it look like my handwriting. I click print and it will print the result to A4 sized papers and I submitted those.

I scanned my handwriting and separated each character and made it look like natural when paragraphs etc were constructed with this program.

The results were so impressive that later when I told this story and showed an assignment to one of my lecturers, he thought that I was just joking!

This hack even though trivial, saved me a lot of time in college.

Too much sex with women leads to marriage with men?? LOL

The director (Han Hogeland) had asked me to do the presentation in exchange for - no laughing please - an old French car that I'd wanted to buy of him (Citroen DS).

This made me very motivated to make it work, only my 16 Mhz 386/387 combo really wasn't fast enough to make it work and I didn't have enough dough for a weitek.

So, from desperation this little hack was born. After I found out that it worked (much to my surprise, actually, testing on 20 MHz) I went to a friend who had a computer store and went through several trays of 387's before finding one that would still run at 40 Mhz, and with a large cooling element attached it even stayed reasonably cool (no fan).

The hardest part really was to cut the line on the mb without damage to other lines (this was a multi layer board), eventually I traced the line to a so called 'via' where I could scratch out the connection topside and use the remains of the via to connect the xtal oscillator (in a socket so I could try various frequencies).

The whole thing worked pretty good even if it looked absolutely terrible (imagine an ic socket piggy backed on top of a ttl IC for power and ground, then a wire running to a via next to a severed trace).

It's a pity I didn't make any pictures of the whole thing, I do still have the aerial photographs we bought of the cartographic institution that were digitized to get the layout in to the software, then extrusion by estimated building height created a fairly realistic view of the area.

The shading was quite primitive, framerate about 2-3 frames / second depending on the amount of stuff in the field of view. The graphics board was a 3x5 bits 512x512 pixels affair whose name escapes me atm.

And I got the car :)