Russian Roulette

I had a nice little chuckle yesterday. I was having trouble opening a PostScript file using the Ghostscript interpreter. Not sure of what was wrong, I went into the application directory using a file manager and started double-clicking on every executable in the hopes that I could use one of them to open the PostScript file.

When I double-clicked on "Gsv16spl.exe" a window came up with the message:

  Playing Russian Roulette are we? GSV16SPL is called automatically from
  GSview or Ghostscript.

This put a smile on my face and reminded me that I have done this more than once - opened executables without knowing exactly what would happen in the hopes that what would happen was what I wanted, or simply something interesting if I was just mumbling about on my computer looking for a thrill.

one imagines there are better ways to get a thrill from a computer than randomly opening executables

Since I do this mostly with old applications that I authored, but have forgotten what they do, I encounter minimum danger. However, doing this with untrusted applications certainly fits the phrase RussianRoulette!

When was the last time you played it, and did anything notable occur?

Kudos to the authors of the Ghostscript package for including this neat response - it certainly gave me a nice feeling and they are probably cool fellows to get some pints with!

-- RodneyRyan?

This <ahem> activity of executing random .EXE files is reminiscent of another phrase sometimes used in certain circles -- "Russian Roulette with an automatic."

---

There was, at one point, a Unix "utility" complete with a ManPage, called "rr"--a terse abbreviation (in the grand Unix tradition) for RussianRoulette.

This utility randomly selected a program out of /bin, and executed it with the arguments "-rf ~". If the user is the SuperUser, it instead used the arguments "-rf /"

Might have been an AprilFoolsJoke?; not sure if such was ever written.

---

CategoryIdiom