Hello Again, Neko the Desktop Mouse-Chasing Cat!

I too first met Neko as a young teenager playing with Windows 3.1. Neko would always come running to the mouse pointer and park himself above it. He would scratch and clean himself a little bit, and then, if the mouse pointer was not moving, yawn and take a nap.

Over the next few years, I kept bumping into Neko across subsequent Windows flavors - Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME and Windows XP, and IBM OS/2 Warp. We had eventually parted ways somewhere around the tail-end of the last millennium. Neko had remained with me as a sweet memory.

That is, until I discovered this awesome post by neozeed. The author of the post has done all the hard work in finding Neko, including making Neko source-code available to the public and bringing him back on 64-bit Windows 10.

I downloaded the zip archive containing the source code and compiled it using Visual C++ 6.0 on a Windows XP 32-bit appliance. There were no compilation errors for the Neko executable and just two ignorable compilation warnings for the Neko configuration utility "NekoCFG".

Say hello again Neko! I missed you.

Here is my Neko build directory download.

beef dead beef dead beef dead beef dead (Cookies/index.dat)

So I installed busybox on a legacy Windows XP Pro system, and while playing around with it, took a hexdump of Cookies/index.dat, and got the following line at the end of the hex dump.

beef dead beef dead beef dead beef dead

I do not know why or what it means.

~ $ uname -a

Windows_NT wexpee 5.1 2600 i686 MS/Windows
~ $ hexdump Cookies/index.dat
0000000 6c43 6569 746e 5520 6c72 6143 6863 2065
0000010 4d4d 2046 6556 2072 2e35 0032 8000 0000
0000020 4000 0000 0080 0000 0020 0000 0000 0000
0000030 0000 0080 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
0000040 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
*
0000250 ffff ffff 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
0000260 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
*
0004000 4148 4853 0020 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
0004010 0003 0000 0003 0000 0003 0000 0003 0000
*
0004240 0001 0000 5100 0000 0003 0000 0003 0000
0004250 0003 0000 0003 0000 0003 0000 0003 0000
*
0004390 0001 0000 5200 0000 0003 0000 0003 0000
00043a0 0003 0000 0003 0000 0003 0000 0003 0000
*
0004630 0001 0000 5000 0000 0003 0000 0003 0000
0004640 0003 0000 0003 0000 0003 0000 0003 0000
*
0004660 0003 0000 0003 0000 0001 0000 5000 0000
0004670 0003 0000 0003 0000 0003 0000 0003 0000
*
0004ac0 0003 0000 0003 0000 0001 0000 5000 0000
0004ad0 0003 0000 0003 0000 0003 0000 0003 0000
*
0004c80 0003 0000 0003 0000 0001 0000 5100 0000
0004c90 0003 0000 0003 0000 0003 0000 0003 0000
*
0004d30 0001 0000 5000 0000 0003 0000 0003 0000
0004d40 0003 0000 0003 0000 0003 0000 0003 0000
*
0004dd0 0003 0000 0003 0000 0001 0000 5000 0000
0004de0 0003 0000 0003 0000 0003 0000 0003 0000
*
0004e10 beef dead beef dead beef dead beef dead
*
0005000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
*
0008000