The burgular alarm dude man came to our house today to fit the all exciting smoke alarms into the system.
Unfortunatly, he's also set the engineer code (from the default of 1234 which he left it in last time). Of course one shouldn't need to use this ever... and it's for him to use... I mean we could break the alarm etc if we had access to the settings (or make it better as I did when I had access to it!)
There's two options for getting the code... the first is a full system reset. Which is fine... so long as his code doesn't begin with a 9. If that is the case then the code won't be reset, but the rest of the system will be - and you need the engineers code to get into the system to put it all back again...
The other option is to enter all possible codes. Using my high powered brain I've realised that this isn't going to be as bad as it first seems - due to the way the alarm works. Take for exammple if I enter 0123456789 into the alarm. These 10 keypresses will actually test for the codes 0123, 1234, 2345, 3456, 4567, 5678 and 6789. So that's seven 4 digit codes tested with 10 keypresses. I've made up an algorithm in my head and programmed this with a little bit of Perl. Now I've got a list of just over 10500 digits to enter in to the alarm (which is pretty damn good I think - wonder what the absolute minimum is - it's prolly on the web somewhere, couldn't be bothered to look!). The law of probabilities suggests that I'll only have to get 50% of the way through, so at a rate of 1 keypress a second, that's about 1h30 to have the beast under my control. Mu-hahahaha.
The only downside is the not so nice "keypad tamper" function of the alarm, meaning I'll keep setting it off and have to keep track of where I am. Now I just have to convince one of my housemates to read out the numbers to me. Maybe we could have a game, say everytime you walk past you enter a line of the numbers into the keypad!
I'll let you know how it goes.