Roger Davies

Welcome to the new, improved Roger Davies .com!

Latest Articles:
NEW : Monkey Island Section

British Taxpayer to Foot £20m Bill for Pope Visit to the UK

Code Breaking – Why the Web Should Worry that MD5 Is Broken

The Manchester Baby, Small Scale Experimental Machine

Rise of The Pirate God – Tales of Monkey Island Walkthrough, Hints, Tips and Solutions

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11th October 2009

See our brand new Monkey Island section where you will find complete Monkey Island walkthrough solutions for each Monkey Island game, from the original Secret of Monkey Island, to Monkey Island 2 : LeChuck’s Revenge right up to (and including!) the brand new Tales of Monkey Island series. We will feature the walkthrough solutions on the web before most other sources, so if you find yourself stuck … you know where to come! So far you will find the Launch of the Screaming Narwhal Walkthrough, Seige of Spinner Cay Walkthrough, Lair of the Leviathan Walkthrough and we will be bringing you the solutions for the long awaited final two episodes of Tales of Monkey Island along with the Curse of Monkey Island and Escape from Monkey Island solutions, So stay tuned!

11th August 2009

Yes, it’s true! … I finally found time to re-arrange and redesign Roger Davies .com exactly the way I like (actually a mix of several other ideas) which included giving complete control over to Wordpress as a content management system – something it does particularly well in this latest release!

Content management is a bit of a misnomer – in that it is probably better thought of as a loss of control over content, but a handful of plugins and a little editing of the Wordpress code and I’m very pleased with the result.

Wordpress has taught me so much this last year. It was after making some modifications to help Wordpress fight spam that I realised the significance of WordPress’ taxonomy structure and how it indexes these words for search. This provided the foundation of a search tool I began work on at roger-it.co.uk. This public version, currently hosted on my shared 1&1 hosting account is now painfully outdated, but a useful demo until I finally roll out the newest version, which will need to remain on my own computers.

11th January 2009

More about Roger Davies

For a general overview, see the Roger Davies profile page. The main categories – home winemaking, web tools and development and music production sections are similar to how they always were (but organised a little more neatly).

The blog entries are now available throughout the site, but the latest entries can be found here. The sections are still divided up the same way as they always have been – from politics, social observations to retro game reviews and strange ideas. There is the forum at Roger Davies .com which has discussions on home winemaking, Anime and Japan an image area and discussions on music production. Be sure to check out Roger Davies’ music section which includes various mixes and ideas, a which is really just a testing area for random Internet ideas and a forum for you to post any thoughts of your own!

Definition, Origins of ‘Roger’ in ‘Roger Davies’

Roger is derived from the ancient Germanic name ‘Hrothgar’ (Hroðgar, Roger) meaning “famous with the spear” (hroth/hroud meaning ‘fame, glory’, and ger meaning ’spear’). There was a legendary Dannish king named Hrothgar in the 6th century, who features in the ancient novel Beowulf. Beowulf is a British novel, set in Scandinavia in which Hrothgar hires Boewulf to slay Grendel – the main protagonist. Another Hrothgar also appears in the Anglo Saxon tale Widsith, but I am not sure if this refers to the same one.

Roger is usually spelt without a ‘d’ unless it forms part of a surname in which case it can be spent with a ‘Rodger’. In American-English, Roger can be spelt ‘Rodger’

Definition, Origins of ‘Davies’ in ‘Roger Davies’

Davies is has English and Welsh roots. ‘Davies’ is the welsh spelling, and ‘Davis’ is the English way. Davies means ‘Son of David (beloved)’. Variations : DAVIES (Welsh), DAVID, DAVIDSON, DAVISON

Roger Davies is also a fictional character character in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels, who first appeared in the Prisoner of Azkaban, as a Ravenclaw student at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Noted as being handsome (yey! Well, definitely disambiguated from the Roger Davies writing this site, then!) If you are reading Joanne, thank you lol. For what it’s worth, I did have Harry-Potteresque cheap NHS glasses which were horrendous!

In September 2010, Pope Benedict XVI is expected to visit Britain. He is coming here to tell us that our UK equality laws are wrong and that homosexuals, transsexuals and women have no rights. He will attack the democratically decided laws of our country and undermine the hard-won civil liberties of our nation. But wait – for some reason – our own government is planning to spend up to £20m of your money to do it! Why?

Let me remind the reader that The Pontiff is neither a UK citizen nor resident,  and this gives him about as much right to change UK law as Mickey Mouse.  Under his watch – and those of his predecessors – sexual abuse in Catholic schools and institutions was tolerated and widespread. The question has to be asked :  is it really in the public interest to ask every man, woman and child of Britain to pay £20m for a Papal visit, when only 9 percent of Britons are Catholic? (Source: BSA Survey 2007).

Would our government be so generous to throw this much money at an Islamic leader coming here to preach equally intolerant messages?  No, of course not!  Such double standards will impair our ability to defend human rights overseas and at home.  If we provide equal rights to everyone, but grant immunity in special cases like these, where will it end?  How can we refuse when other religions start demanding exception from arbitrary sections of British law they happen to disagree with?  We are not a theocracy, and can afford nobody to be above the law.  You may even find the army or perhaps the navy saying they too should be exempt from equalities laws under the banner of national security.  Perhaps schools, scout leaders and other public institutions would follow – after all, your children’s safety is important to protect too, right?

No dear friends, we cannot cave in to such fascism, even when it wears a friendly and familiar face.  If we surrender one inch of our equality laws, we will have betrayed the single most important value of our society.  This week, the National Secular Society launched an online petition to the Prime Minister to allow the pope to pay for his own visit.  Within hours, thousands of signatures had been collected, and just before midday Friday the website went offline due to the flood of traffic it received.  At the time of writing, more than 16,500 signatures have been collected.  Allow me to use this opportunity to read a section from one of my favourite poems, written by Pastor Martin Niemöller:

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Equality is an all-encompassing idea. We cannot pick and choose which parts we agree with and which parts we do not simply to satisfy a few.  The moment we do, we may as well rip out the rest of our secular freedoms and put our monarchy back in full charge of all UK affairs.  Religious freedom exist under secular law, but freedom of belief cannot be achieved under theocratic rule – we cannot  afford to tolerate intolerance.

We must extend freedom, where such freedom does not curtail the freedom of others.  In cases where these freedoms are mutually exclusive, the freedom of the many must outweigh the freedom of the few. This is the very nature of democracy and the reason the Pope should pay for his own visit.

Just how safe do you feel right now? We put a lot of trust in the security of the web, and much of this security depends on encryption in general and MD5 in particular. Why? Well, if you run a blog, a shop or any kind of content management system then undoubtedly, the passwords are likely stored in your SQL database in MD5 (Message-Digest algorithm 5) encrypted form. If you take payments online, the SSL socket connection would (until more recently) be encrypted with MD5. It is everywhere! When it was first thought up, it was thought to be extremely secure, but this week I found several good reasons to think otherwise!

How Does Encryption Work?

The basic principle is simple. You take some data input and perform a series of transformations on it to produce a hash. The important thing about the hash, is there is no way of working back to find out what the original input was.

Let’s suppose your website admin password was ‘redqueen451‘, the MD5 sum hash for this is ‘8aa8d1d84b9f7ab18c78b69dbf6103dc‘ . Each time you log in, the computer takes your input and applies the same tranformation to see if it ends up with ‘8aa8d1d84b9f7ab18c78b69dbf6103dc‘ also. The safety of this mechanism relies on the fact that there is no easy way to work out what the original input of a hash was.

Therefore, the danger of having two different inputs which happen to generate the same output (known as a ‘collision‘) pose a mortal danger to any cipher.

Why MD5 Is In Danger And What This Means For The Web

Well, the trouble with being a popular algorithm is that everyone is obsessed with you! Hans Dobbertin identified collisions in 1995, which started to raise concerns. Plenty of people had a go. In 2005 Xiaoyun Wang was able to produce two full PostScript documents which generated the same hash.  But I feel the death blow was dealt on the 30th of December 2008, when a group of researchers announced they had generated a VeriSign certificate authority certificate which appeared to be valid when checked with MD5.  This allowed them to create as many SSL certificates as they liked, all of which would appear to be perfectly legitimate VeriSign-issued ones! VeriSign swiftly moved and began using AES (The Advanced Encryption Standard) which handles up to 256-bit encryption.

Not content that MD5 was already dead and buried, people began compiling MD5 Rainbow Tables, lookup tables that will give you possible input to generate a particular MD5 hash. In fact some people have already tried to integrate this within a neat MD5 hash reversal web service.

Needed : A Solution For The People

The days of MD5 are most definitely numbered and finite.  Being broken and having so many hands cracking it means that it can never again be used for SSL, nor within any kind of secret service institution nor anywhere that 100% security is required.  For you, me and our websites these weakness does not pose any immediate danger in most cases, but we cannot wait for the rainbow tables to be filled.  Holes have already been picked in SHA-1 (a likely candidate billed to replace MD5) and there will come a time when at least one possible input will be known for every possible combination of digits in a hash sum!  At the very least, this will open up entirely new ways hackers might exploit security loopholes. We must not wait until that happens before finding a suitable replacement for the masses!

The study of ancestry can teach us a great deal.  Knowing the origins of something gives us a renewed appreciation for where we are today, and affords us a better perspective on where we are going tomorrow.

Today I stood and basked in the awesome glory of the Manchester Small Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM) nicknamed the ‘Baby‘. Built 1948, it was the first ever electronic computer system in the world and has been on display here at the Manchester Institute of Science and Technology.  I was dismayed to learn that the computer is being packed away in to storage, but the kind staff allowed me up close to pay my respects and bring you these great photos.

Programming the Small Scale Experimental Machine

Having spent much of last weekend writing my first programs for this great ancestor of modern computing, I find renewed appreciation for the technology that is available to us now. I have written code for a few computers, including some home consoles like the Super Nintendo, but nothing could have prepared me for the Manchester Baby.

Why? Well, firstly, it has a humble instruction set consisting of 7 valid instructions, with only ONE arithmetic operation – subtract! In order to add two values, a programmer would need to use the form: -(-x-y).  Software multiplication can be achieved by creating a loop which repeatedly ‘adds’ in this manner – don’t even ask me about divide!

Another exciting fact about the SSEM is it’s memory store.  By today’s standards it would be considered backward.

How Binary Numbers are Usually Stored

How SSEM Stores Binary Numbers

No, I mean that it’s memory is literally a mirror image of how we might expect today’s computers to store binary numbers, with the least significant bit (LSB) is on the left and the most significant bit (MBR) on the right!

The memory store itself is made up of 32 rows of 32-bit words, giving the SSEM 128 bytes (0.125 KB) of total memory for both program and data. Not a lot when you compare it to computers available today.  To put everything back in perspective, the SSEM executes 1,100 instructions per second. Yet my Apple iPhone used to photograph this exhibit can execute 620,000,000 instruction per second and has 8,000,000 KB of storage and (AND!) … it fits right in my pocket.

How To Run Virtual SSEM Programs At Home

[ See The Source Code For This Example Here ]

But you don’t have to travel all the way to Manchester to use the SSEM.  David Sharp has developed a fantastic Java based SSEM simulator which you can run directly through your browser.  Not only does it include the imagery of the original machine, but includes several working program examples and the ability to import/export memory snapshots and assembly code.

Conclusion

All in all it was a very humbling experience. I am told that the Baby will go back on display in about 7 months and I strongly urge others to see this exhibit. While the Small Scale Experimental Machine may not be all that impressive technically, it provided a solid blueprint upon which all modern computers are built.  In doing so, it leaves a timeless mark in the computer world that will live on beyond it’s physical components.   These principles seem far removed when I’m sat at my desk working with luxuriously high-level language like PHP. But sometimes it helps to remind myself of the sheer toil and pain it has taken to get to this stage.

Extras

Here is the source code to the ‘TheFraj’ example featured in this article, a scrolling marquee based on an example program that comes with the simulator. Try saving this into a file and importing to the simulator!

30
1 NUM -1207943145
2 CMP
3 SUB 22
4 STO 18
5 LDN 18
6 SUB 18
7 STO 23
8 LDN 1
9 STO 18
10 LDN 18
11 SUB 20
12 CMP
13 LDN 19
14 STO 1
15 SUB 21
16 STO 7
19 NUM 1207943145
20 NUM -134217729
21 NUM -8192
22 JMP 1
23 NUM 2039410350
24 NUM 575808164
25 NUM 575808164
26 NUM 600729316
27 NUM 600729316
28 NUM 575283876
29 NUM 710025892
30 NUM 307375780
31 NUM 0


Welcome to the final exciting chapter of the Tales of Monkey Island walkthrough series. For those of you just joining us, our last game ended with the death of Guybrush Threepwood!. How will he defeat LeChuck? Read on!

Guybrush Threepwood - Tales of Monkey Island, Rise of the Pirate God Walkthrough

Rise of The Pirate God Walkthrough, Tales of Monkey Island Chapter 5

After the opening cutscene, pick up dirt from above you. Do this again to escape. Walkthrough to the right and talk to the Ferryman about his boat. Mention how clean it is. Use the dirt of the boat, then talk to the Ferryman about a spot of dirt he’s missed. While he is distracted, take some money from the tip jar. Use this in the Grog machine and press the change return slot to get two coins. Give these coins to the Ferryman and he’ll take you to the Crossroads.

Get in the boat and navigate to the sword fighting area in the North. Go up the stairs and the click on the mast to climb it. Talk to Morgan LaFlay, then pick up the ghost’s sword from the decapitated head and used the sword on Morgan La Flay. When sword fighting, use the actions that complement Morgan and insult the sword fighting ghost.

Head to the Treasure Hunter area and touch the sign and you will pick up the bone that falls off. Talk to the treasure hunter and ask him to show you how the treasure hunting works, when he leaves pick up the bejewelled anchor.

Jump back into the boat and head back to The Gateway. The Ferryman is gone, so pick up the tip jar, and go buy a grog (regular) from the Grog machine, then use the bone on Franklin the dog. Pick him up and use the sock with the dog – he runs to the Center Crossroads.

Follow him to Galeb and buy your photo from him (you now have moneys yey!), then use the sock on Galeb to get the treasure chest. Take the treasure chest to the Thief and ask him to open it. He steals the scroll and puts it in the pile. Talk to him and get him to look behind him, use the sock with dog once more, then use the dog with the pile. Head over to the Treasure Hunting area and use the sock with the dog again to find the Voodoo spell.

Sail to the Centre Crossroads and use the anchor, the dog and use the grog on the X. Head back to Morgan LeFlay in the sword fighting area and ask her about the final ingredient until she takes you back to the ‘x’ at the centre Crossroads. [cutscene]

When the cutscene ends with Guybrush on the deck of LeChuck’s ship, try to pick up the sword stuck in the mast. [cutscene]

Back at The Crossroads … Sail Gateway and enter the rip. Talk to Winslow, then jump into the water. Walk to the far right and speak to Anenome. Tell Anenome that Winslow is here. Head back up and talk to Wilmslow, tell him about Anenome and he will send a poem down to her. Jump back in and over to Anenome. Tell her Winslow and she will swim out, blowing the seaweed so that the locket is directly above the clam. Walk up to the clam, then away so the clam shoots a bubble, pulling the bag and locket to the surface. Head back up and talk to Winslow. You’ll explain to him that the locket is yours, but you cannot pick it up just now! Put your picture (you bought from Galeb)  (in the locket and ask Winslow to push the button.

[as zombie Guybrush] Surrender to be two guys in the bar. When you are taken to the jail, pull out the loose brick to discover a diary, pick it up and read it. After a few moments, you will leave your body.

Head back to the Swordfighting area and through the rip. Talk to Bugeye about how he escaped the manatee (tell him what you read in his diary). He gets mad and pulls a face, copy his face exactly (the ultimate insult). He will be taken to jail. This time if you ask Winslow to press the button and you surrender, you will be taken to the next cell. Notice the gum, pick up the mug on the barred window and the poster on the right.

Go back to the bar as a ghost and scare the dart thrower, he will throw a dart at the rootbeer, causing it to fall into the mug. Go back to Winslow and into zombie Guybrush! Surrender again and use the mug of rootbeer on the gum to find the spirit gum. [cutscene]

Walkthrough to the treasure hunting area and through the rip to meet the Voodoo Lady (now in the body of a dead seagull!). Tell her you want to shrink the Sponge. Keep talking until she disappears again.  Pick the lock of the chest with your hook and open it to get LeChucks belt buckle. Touch the seagull with your hook and pick up th feather that falls nearby.

Head back to the Gateway and talk to Galeb about lifting the curse and he’ll give you the recipe for the Diet of the Senses spell. Go to The Thief and show him LeChucks buckle. Talk to him about his secret, then when he’s done talking pick up the box, he’ll let you have it.

Head back to the bar in Flotsam, pick up the blindfold, tell the bartender you surrender and he’ll put you in jail. Pick up the (bland) ABC gum from the ceiling. Walkthrough to the gateway and to Winslow (or where Winslow was!), pick up the deodorant and dive into the ocean pick up the fishing net. Head back to the surface and to the treasure hunting area. Dig any cross and use the fishing net on the miniature pyrite parots when they alight on the sign. Put them in the empty tips jar. Go to La Sponga and use the :- the blindfold, jar of mini pyrite parots, the feather, the secret box, the deoderant, then the gum to complete the spell [long cutscene]

Beating LeChuck in the Rise of the Pirate God

You are fighting with LeChuck, who will knock you all over the place! When you are in the crows nest, use your hook on the main sail and you’ll do the ultimate pirate move of ripping down the mainsale with your hook! (Yargh!). At the bottom, talk to Elaine and ask her to attack LeChuck. When he keelhauls you, you should stop half way when Elain is attacking LeChuck. When here, get the ring of keys from the skeletons under the ship. When you are back on deck, use the key in the locked gate and a barrels will roll out. When you’re in the scene with the broken door (don’t worry you’ll get knocked down eventually!), pick it up and lay it across the barrel to make a see saw!

Shout to Elaine and ask her to light the cannon, then to attack LeChuck. Wait for LeChuck to punch you to the crows nest, use the hook on the rope and in the next scene wait for LeChuck to knock you off. Stand on the see saw and when he jumps down, you are catapulted into the cannon and shot back to the Crossroads. Use the shred of life with the portal and you get trapped in the Crossroads. Use the ring with the Centre Crossroads.

The End!!!