Harry Tuxxer and the Amazing Kindle

Harry stared gloomily at his laptop as he closed the browser. Life at the new steel and glass Academy just outside a large housing estate some where in the North of England was dull compared to the fun he had had at Bogwarts with its towers and oak panels. Now it was all personal target setting and endless magic exams.

'Things had really changed since the death of Stallmandore,' Harry mused ruefully. He was supposedly poisoned by too much junk food. That's what they said, but Harry knew better.

Worse, Ballmermorts' new fenestra curse was everywhere, it had even stuck to most of the Linux wizards who were now infected with the bloatware curse. Harry's laptop struggled to spin its cube anymore.

Even Hermione did not seek out Harry nowadays. 'She', he almost said out loud, 'She just hangs out with that bunch of weird geeks'.

He had not been encouraged either by her description of their 'embedded' interests, and was horrified when she offered to upgrade his wand with their latest illegal chip.

All in all it was with an air of resignation and boredom that Harry picked up his amazing Kindle and headed for class.

A Lesson to Remember

Harry walked through the sliding doors to the school which irritatingly opened a fraction too late and shut just that bit too quickly so that many of the young witches got their hair caught. No elf would go near them for fear of losing their little tails.

He did not expect for one minute that the door would be right as it gushed 'The Wow Starts Now'.

He had double .NET framework with old Snipe coming up. This kind of lesson made the Cruciatus curse redundant.

Inside the building he could hear his Kindle inside his bag automatically downloading the day's lessons, sighing to itself contentedly as it did so. Harry liked the Kindle. It seemed friendly in a strange way and he had stored thousands of his favorite books on it, the majority were about supercharged brooms.

Hermione was very keen on it, was always going on about it and had most of her spells stored in flash. Harry had not really been listening, it was something to do with her new friends no doubt.

In class now, he sat down. Snipe was already droning on about 'compatibility' and world domination. Harry noted idly he no longer even attempted to hide his deathly tattoo of four coloured squares. Across the class Harry could see Hermione laughing, almost silently, but still rather too much, with four of the most unhygienic looking warlocks he had ever seen.

The Kindle was turning the pages as the lesson proceeded, occasionally singing little songs to itself, which Harry was sure it was not meant to do but it seemed happy enough. Suddenly the screen changed. No longer was there a list (a very short list as it happened) of fenestra command line words but a black and white picture of Stallmandore, and he was talking to Harry. 'But you're dead!' whispered Harry his head spinning with joy, 'Ballmermort poisoned you!'

Slowly Stallmandore explained to Harry that yes he was dead but that was never the end of an Open Source Wizard, they lived for eternity within the community of souls. He told Harry too of the work Hermione was doing with the Warlocks to embed Linux in devices where they could not be seen or harmed by Ballmermort.

Suddenly everything was clear to Harry, his Kindle was running Linux. All his gizmos were.

That's why it was so friendly and never crashed. That's why Hermione was spending so much time with the Warlocks. How foolish he had been! If only he had accepted her offer of that wand upgrade.

'That means, that means,' stuttered Harry as a whole host of odd recent event came back to him, 'That's why my Samsung 360 keeps winking at me! They are all in this together'.

'Yes, young Harry,' said Stallmandore smiling kindly from the book while eating a pizza at the same time. 'The time has nearly come... this is what you must do'.

In the Playground

Hermione walked up to Harry smiling knowingly. 'Hand me your wand,' she said. Harry did so without hesitation and deftly she opened its tip and inserted a tiny gleaming chip. 'There she said, that should do it.'

It was break-time, the time when most connections were made across the Academy's net. Harry's eyes went blank as he raised his wand to the sky and uttered the command, 'sudo caedo omnes'. As he did a shower of tiny brilliant chuckling points of light streamed out as one

Each point of light was in fact a deadly fenestra septem virus. The chip that Hermione had put into Harry's wand contained countless millions of them. Harry had released them into the ether, no Windows machine was safe.

Within seconds, thousands of tiny electronic screams were drowned out by the shattering glass of the automatic doors. It was saying '..starts now' over and over again. From the Kindle, Stallmandore looked out gravely, 'the fight back has begun,' he murmured.

Harry slumped, exhausted while thousands of chips on countless Linux devices quietly booted up.

Trackback URL for this post:

http://dev.siriusit.co.uk/trackback/993

(c) 1998 - 2012. Except where otherwise noted this site is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.5
Sirius, Sirius Corporation, the Sirius logo, 'the way of the future', 'control through freedom' and 'The Open Source Experts' are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sirius Corporation ltd in the United Kingdom
Website terms and conditions | Legal disclaimer | Privacy policy

Account menu

Resources

Harry Tuxxer and the Amazing Kindle

A Lesson to Remember

In the Playground

Trackback URL for this post: