{"id":107,"date":"2007-11-11T15:16:02","date_gmt":"2007-11-11T19:16:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.virtualroadside.com\/blog\/index.php\/2007\/11\/11\/inspired-by-xkcd-mbr-love-note\/"},"modified":"2008-12-31T11:14:40","modified_gmt":"2008-12-31T16:14:40","slug":"inspired-by-xkcd-mbr-love-note","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.virtualroadside.com\/blog\/index.php\/2007\/11\/11\/inspired-by-xkcd-mbr-love-note\/","title":{"rendered":"Inspired by XKCD: MBR Love Note"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am a huge fan of the webcomic, XKCD<\/a>, which is a very geeky and amusing comic for those of you who haven’t read it. On Friday, the following comic was posted:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

And this of course reminded me of when I first started programming — I started with assembly language in 2000 with an 80286 I got out of the trash. I quickly became interested in low-level system programming, and created a number of MBR-based programs and other random programs in assembly. I haven’t programmed in assembly in a couple years, but this was pretty simple once I started going. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

In any case, the comic has inspired me to write a Windows-based program that can write a “love note” to the MBR and display it when the computer starts. And of course, just for fun it shows the “Missing operating system” message as well. Shown is a screenshot:<\/p>\n

\"Roses<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

OBVIOUSLY this can be a very dangerous program, and could very well destroy your computer. In fact, I would assume any antivirus program worth its salt would detect this as a virus (I haven’t formally tested this assumption). So, don’t use it unless you really know what you’re doing. The number of people that would fit that description is around 0.001% of the population of computer programmers.<\/p>\n

DONT’S:<\/strong><\/p>\n