Posts tagged error-message
Is Windows XP the right OS for an ATM?
Jun 10th
Have you ever wondered what the ATM runs on? Most 0f the ATMs in India (and all around the world) run some flavor of Windows. Nowadays they use XP (some with SP2, if the technical team is good) but I remember seeing Windows 98 (saw BSOD once in one of the Chennai ATMs); Also read somewhere that they used to have embedded Windows NT, OS/2 and sometimes even Windows CE! I know what you must be thinking now – How safe is it, right? A good design should put the ATMs in their own private network, if so I only will be worrying “Who is going to reset the ATM when Windows crashes? 
 ”; now I realize why the security person in ATM seems to be knowledgeble on the machines…talk of all the ways one can gain some IT gnaan!
Above is an ATM of the famous VTB bank of Russia, powered by an unactivated copy of Windows XP. 
Look at a closeup of the activation dialog box below.
I wonder why ATMs don’t have their own OSs! When we talk so much about security / WORMS & malware stuff, does it make sense to use a general purpose OS for something so critical as an ATM? Even a cellphone costing a mere INR 4000 has so any OS flavors to choose from, why is the ATM you withdraw that INR 4000 from is stuck with a most-often-unpatched version of Windows? As Obelix would have said – “These ATM makers are crazy!!”
Check out these interesting links related to Windows Crashes:
- Windows crashes on Flight information screens and ATMs
- ATM crash here and here
- Slot machines too…
- Gallery full of Windows crashes on ATMs/slot machines
- Oh no! Even trains are not spared & other Public computer errors
Coolcode.cn (Wordpress plugin) site down!
Mar 16th
Today morning I was surprised to see a couple of mails complaining that the videos I posted earlier here and here are not working! I checked them last night (ok…at 1am..technically it is today morning!) and they were fine. I use the excellent coolplayer 9.3 plugin in my Wordpress blog. I logged in to my account and checked the coolplayer options. They looked fine, anyway I didn’t change any of these things and they were working fine yesterday. So, what’s wrong?
Then, I noticed that the RPC server ping was not working. As you can see from the picture (click to enlarge, the RED ones are the errors), the coolcode.cn is returning a 503. My page just gets blocked for 19-20seconds, trying to get the rpc.php in coolcode to work! The site is obviously down and has taken all my videos down with it, I wonder how many more sites are also affected by this!
Man, how I wish I had installed the RPC server in my machine 
I couldn’t find a mirror with that zip anywhere. Till I setup my own RPC server, please do bear with the slow loading speed. Thanks.
Update (Mar 16,07 02:07pm IST): Hooray….the site is up and I have downloaded the needed zips
Update (Mar 16,07 03:00pm IST): Ok, I have the RPC setup in my machine now. No more worries.
Dumb Error Messages
Sep 20th
I use Intel VTune performance analyzer with VS.NET 2003. Today, when I opened my solution, I got these really dumb error msgboxes from VTune…
First this one… EmbeddedHtmlHelp.cpp??? Very helpful!
Next it told me there was something wrong with VT projects, as if I didnt know that!! (Sorry, if this doesnt make sense, this is an in-house joke! ) More >
