So your friendly neighborhood tempter in training is spending part of his day today hacking Examsoft. Or rather, that's a colorable interpretation of his actions.

More specifically, I'm playing around with alternate shells to Windows XP, because I like the way that some of the shells at Deviant Art look, and I'm feeling insufficiently vain about my current desktop setup. Specifically, I'm looking at Deviant Art's BlackBox gallery, for the popular BlackBox shell. (The other option is Aston. Any recommendations are welcome.)

My thought is that it's completely possible to make either of these shells look exactly like the standard Windows interface, but with a bit of tweaking, allow ExamSoft to load whilst enabling Alt-Tab-style switching. Which, of course, would defeat the entire purpose of the program. As long as I'm going to all the trouble of trying to implement a new shell, I might as well see if bugger up the software.

Now why would a rule fetishist like myself want to break ExamSoft, and even more so, why would I admit to it? Well, first of all, near as I can tell I'm not violating any rules. I'm just implementing a shell and making sure all my software still works: certainly the ExamSoft users agreement can't forbid that. But more to the point, I'm doing it because if I can publish a workaround that makes ExamSoft useless, Columbia might just decide to junk the piece of software I want least on my computer.

Ever since I've installed ExamSoft, I've experienced some system instability that I really despise. I can't tell exactly what it changed when it installed, but I have a feeling that it's one of those, "This won't cause problems on a standard machine, but if you've modded anything, good luck" programs. My machine is heavily modified.

And now ExamSoft has made my life even more difficult. I've switched over the language options on my machine so that the default non-Unicode code page is Japanese, the date and time settings are Japanese, the Office XP language is Japanese... basically conviced my machine that all it needs to be a Japanese version of Windows XP is change its Passport. (Sorry, bad techie pun.) But near as I can tell, this means that ExamSoft is going to encode any exam I take in the wrong codepage, and thus may not decrypt correctly when Columbia tries to read the exam floppy.

Trouble is, I can't tell. I know that when I encode two test exams with different Unicode code pages, I get different encryptions even though I have the same text in the exams. But I can't tell if this is a function of the code page, or merely ExamSoft's encryption method. But I don't feel like finding out in the exam itself.

So... if it does appear that the my shell shift will break ExamSoft, I'll be sure to publish it here.