Into the Void

About 2 years ago I helped a friend mod his Xbox (v1.4) by soldering a mod chip to it. It worked fine until recently when he loaned it out to someone who, for some reason, decided to flip the Xecuter BIOS switches while the console was turned on. We tried getting the mod chip to work again, and even tested all the leads for proper voltage, but no dice… the chip was fried!

So it was time for plan B: software-modding. Since my friend already had a copy of 007:AUF and a memory card with the save-game exploit, it should have been easy. That is, until we booted the Xbox to run 007:AUF and got a “Your Xbox requires service…” error! The problem is that the hard drive was unlocked (from when it was modded before), and the only backup of the key ever made was stored on a Maxtor drive that crashed in 2005. Without the key, we could not boot the Xbox since the stock BIOS must unlock the drive with the key it has stored in its EEPROM. If the drive is already unlocked, then the unlock operation will fail. What this meant is that the only way around the problem would be to extract the key from the EEPROM, which by the way would be encrypted.

So we search Google and find an article (click here to read) that explains how to build an EEPROM reader that allows you to dump the contents of the EEPROM to a PC. The EEPROM reader consists of a hardware interface (an I²C->DB9 adaptor) that you must build and a freeware application called PonyProg2000 that will actually read in the contents. I got all the parts I needed from Radio Shack for about $13 and built the adaptor (shown below)…

Since the Xbox could power up fine, I did not need to use an external power supply. I connected the adaptor, ran PonyProg2000, and it dumped the contents without a problem. Cool! I then used a program called LiveInfo (thanks Yoshihiro) to decode the EEPROM contents and get the HDD key. All in all it was a great deal… for $13 and a few hours of work my friend can once again use his Xbox for, you know… emulating the NES and N64, watching XviD movies, running Linux, and sharing files. Who knows?… one of these days he might even use it to play an Xbox game!

Last night, my third-fastest computer, an AMD 761/VIA 686B/Athlon-XP 2100/512MB pc2100, became horribly unstable. For the past year it has run Gentoo Linux and I’ve used it mainly for development and running servers with very few problems. Last night though I started getting seg-faults during compilations, and running memtest86+ would fail in about 15 minutes. The first thing I tried was replacing the RAM, but memtest would still fail in roughly the same amount of time. Because of that I was reasonably sure the problem was not the RAM. That was bad news actually, because when memtest86 fails and it’s not the RAM’s fault, you probably have a damaged motherboard.

Luckily, I had a spare Gigabyte motherboard with the exact same northbridge and southbridge chipsets (AMD 761/VIA 686B) as the Abit KG7 I had to replace. It took about an hour to do because I had to completely rebuild the system and clean and re-Arctic the CPU/heatsink. I crossed my fingers, rebooted, ran memtest, and no errors! And since the boards were completely interchangeable, Gentoo booted without a problem, which was a nice bonus.

One thing still bothered me though… typically when motherboards go bad, you will not even get a POST, let alone be able to boot an OS. In this kind of situation the problem is usually bad RAM, but that was not the case this time. In fact, take a look at the capacitors near the CPU and memory sockets: Angle #1 | Angle #2… I’m no Electrical Engineer, but it definitely looks to me like these capacitors are damaged. Without knowing more about the physics and composition of capacitors, I can’t really speculate as to what the material on top might be. It looks like rusty solidified discharge and its texture is rigid and crusty. If you have an idea what it is then let me know!

I accepted an offer from a firm in NYC so I’ll be moving there as soon as early September. I’m definitely excited about this… a change in locale was long overdue! Next time any of you visit The NYC, don’t forget to look me up!

UPDATE (Oct-01-2006)

I moved! Check it out…
http://www.etherice.com/rmx/rmx.php?x=my_nyc

I found it fascinating that reclusive math genius Dr. Grigori Perelman solved the Poincaré Conjecture, one of the 7 Millennium Prize problems. The proof was actually published by Dr. Perelman in 2003, but it took the rest of the world 3 years to figure out it was right. What makes this now-verified accomplishment so amazing is that it was an open problem for over 100 years, receiving attention from many brilliant minds without yielding a proof until 2003. Currently, it is the only Millennium Prize problem to be solved. It also seems likely that Perelman will not claim the $1 Million prize.

The proof offered by Dr. Perelman is so complex that a good percentage of Math PhD’s cannot comprehend it. I won’t pretend to understand it either… Perelman is a true genius like Einstein, Gauss, and DaVinci. It’s sad that athletes and movie stars are the heroes of most people… we should all appreciate his hard work and hope that he continues to do great things for this world.

Read the whole story here.

It seems more and more like Google is being reduced to a Wikipedia wrapper. I recently asked several of my friends to guess the percentage of their Google searches that reference Wikipedia articles on the first page of results. The guesses ranged from 40% to 70%, which were inline with my own guess of 70%. So then I decided to take a more scientific approach… via Firefox Extensions. Most of my friends use Firefox now so they should all be able to participate in this study if I can create a non-invasive extension that tracks the number of Google searches that reference Wikipedia on the first page. It shouldn’t take long at all to create a basic implementation of the extension. The basic features would be tracking, high-lighting, and reporting. I am going to start development on the extension as soon as I finish making this post. So right now!… I’ll let you know how it turns out.

UPDATE (08-15-2006)

GooWiki is available to download at http://www.etherice.com/xpi/goowiki. Please use it and send feedback!

I’ll be in NYC this Sunday through Tuesday interviewing with several companies, including some of the top investment banks on Wall Street. From what I understand, each interview will last between 4-5 hours and consist of several interviews and a programming test or two. Sounds like fun right?… I think I can handle it.

UPDATE (Aug-10-2006)

The NYC trip was exhausting and I only slept about 4 hours total, but it was well worth it! The interviews went well and I expect to receive an offer from at least one of the companies. One of the meetings I had lasted over 6 hours and consisted of like 8 interviews that were probably 95% technical. The others I had also lasted several hours, but were not quite as technical.

This was my second trip to NYC, and everything was exactly how I remember. I didn’t plan on sight-seeing at all, but I did accidentally stumble onto Times Square once, and one of the companies I interviewed with (in Jersey City) had an incredible view of lower Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty. NYC is an exciting place to be… it’s just hard to believe that I could be living there soon.

Etherice.com was down for most of yesterday, and after restoring the server I was emailed a photo from the hacker responsible… click here to view it

I wish my phone had a Unix shell built in!

Thanks to the recent explosive growth of Social Networking Sites (SNS’s) such as MySpace and Facebook, it seems like high school reunions are quickly becoming a thing of the past. All of my friends (who went to several different high schools) say there is no official reunion for their class due to “lack of interest” or something along those lines.  With everything the Internet has to offer, who really needs to meet in person anymore, right?…

The problem is that for graduates of big classes (> 200 students, or in my case about 450) it can be difficult and time-consuming to find a significant number of ex-classmates. One reason for this is that the profiles are scattered across different SNS’s (such as MySpace and Facebook), and another is that most people do not provide information about which high school they attended. So last week I decided to address this problem by creating a virtual reunion Website for my High School class. I parked it at http://www.etherice.com/oakpark/.

The first thing you’ll notice is that I added lots of memorabilia to draw in ex-classmates, including scans of the yearbook and class photo. The second thing you’ll notice is that I don’t ask for any information from the user EXCEPT for their SNS URLs. I could have asked everyone to post pictures, bios, interests, hobbies, etc…. but everyone has done that already, and as a computer science guy I hate redundancy!… so people post their URLs and that’s it… that way everyone can just update their SNS profiles and not have to worry about replicating those changes somewhere else.  (Plus, it really simplifies the system!)

The site has been up for a few days and over 30 classmates have already signed up… not bad. I expect for that number to reach about 50 in the next month. My goal is to locate half the class (over 200), but that’s probably a little optimistic. We’ll see how this experiment turns out.

GeoLocation, sometimes referred to as GeoIP, is the mapping of IP addresses to geographic information.  In other words, GeoLocation is how some Websites will know that you’re from Springfield, USA.

For a long time now it has been easy and straight-forward to determine the country of a user with a high degree of accuracy, but determining the user’s city or region has been a different story until very recent years.  This greatly improved accuracy is why it’s no surprise that GeoLocation has become increasingly popular in targeting specific demographics with localized ad content.  So this morning I thought to myself, “Why doesn’t Etherice have this capability yet?!”  Well it does now… check out the screenshot.

The solution I found is called GeoLite City from www.maxmind.com.  GeoLite City is a free, but slightly less accurate version of the commercial GeoIP City system from MaxMind.  Installation and integration with my custom logger were incredibly simple.  First I downloaded the (PEAR-compliant) database file from maxmind.com  and copied it to a location on my Webhost.  Then I downloaded the PHP interfaces for it and added this helper function to my logger script:

function ip2loc($ip) {
 global $gi;
 if ( empty($ip) ) {
  return null_or_val();
 }
 $record = geoip_record_by_addr($gi, $ip);
 $retval = '';
 if ( !empty($record->city) ) {
  $retval .= $record->city . ", ";
 }
 if ( !empty($record->region) ) {
  $retval .= $record->region . ", ";
 }
 $retval .= $record->country_name;
 return null_or_val($retval);
}
Note: null_or_val() is just a helper function that prints a red “null” instead if the value passed in is empty.

And that’s it!  One important thing to note is that I do not perform the GeoLocation lookup on every page access.  In my opinion, it is better to do the lookup on-the-fly when the data is being presented:

echo "<span class=\"sloc\">" . ip2loc($row['ip']) . "</span>\n";

First off, this method has the advantage of not having to store the GeoLocation lookup results in my SQL database, saving space.  Second, and more importantly, it keeps the log tables free of redundancy.  If you’ve ever taken a DBMS course then you know that this allows for greater normalization.  So next month when I update the MaxMind GeoLocation database with a newer, more accurate one, older logs will benefit too.

So far I’m impressed with how accurate this free database is.  According to MaxMind it’s only 60% accurate, but it seems like “misses” are not too far off from the actual city (e.g., a suburb outside the actual city).  I also like the fact that updating the database each month will consist of overwriting a single file… in fact I’ll probably just create a cron script that does it automatically.

For now I’m simply using the GeoLocation info for traffic analysis, but I may eventually parlay it into something more useful.  When you think about it, the possibilities are near-endless.

Of all countries, I never expected North Korea to be so enthusiastic about The United States’ Independence Day.  Yesterday, July 4th, N. Korea harmlessly fired six mid-range missiles into the ocean, hundreds of miles offshore.  Clearly this was not an act of war, which means it must have been a display of fireworks to celebrate the Fourth of July.  So on behalf of my country, I would like to thank North Korea for its insane, yet thoughtful display of patriotism to the United States.

Since early 2006, Apple has been selling Intel-based PCs (so-called Mactels), fully capable of running Windows XP, and they will continue doing so indefinitely. The TV commercials in their latest ad campaign, however, seem to tell a different story. All the commercials feature two actors– a twenty-something cool-guy and a forty-something douchebag. The cool-guy represents an Apple computer and the douchebag represents a PC, comparing the two as if they are apples and oranges (pun intended) despite the fact that Apple computers are now PCs!

Apple is still shamelessly trying to differentiate itself from the architecture that it now is, essentially denying its newfound identity. In one of the new TV commercials, the cool-guy says that since he (the Mac) can “run Windows like a PC, there’s no reason to buy a PC anymore.” Actually, I can think of $everal excellent reason$.

Then in another spot, the douchebag is sick from the “latest virus going around”, and that “there are over 100,000 known viruses for PCs.” The cool-guy (who is perfectly healthy of course), says something like, “Good thing I’m not a PC”. (New Apple systems are PCs, but that’s beside the point.) The idea is that OSX is not as susceptible to viruses as Windows. I won’t disagree, but by the same logic, OSX is also less susceptible to useful software.

The third installment of this annoying ad campaign has the cool-guy bragging about how he (the Mac) can do all sorts of fun things, like make photo albums and edit videos. The douchebag PC-guy acts like all he can do is make spreadsheets and pie-charts. In my opinion, this will make every Windows user in the world roll their eyes knowing that there is far more software available for Windows than OSX, including photo and video editing software. True, Apple PCs can run Windows now, but if that’s your argument then why pay thousands of dollars for a Mac in the first place? OSX is by far the worst Unix-derivative on the planet, and it pales in comparison to Windows for desktop applications, so again, why get a Mac? Oh yes, of course… because they look pretty. Or maybe it’s just a cult-thing.

Apple wants to reap the benefits of adopting a PC architecture and claim that it’s still not a PC. So the question is, “Can Apple have its cake and eat it too?”… Well, as long as Apple continues to exploit the ignorance of its user base, I guess the answer is Yes. (Non-Apple PC users will continue to laugh and save thousands of dollars.)

If you haven’t yet seen the Apple commercials I’m talking about then search Apple’s Website for them. I’d post a link, but I’m sure Apple would find a way to sue me. In fact I’m expecting a letter from their legal department for not putting ^TM and ® symbols everywhere. Wait a second!… what’s this?!!… an email from Apple Computer, Inc… I haven’t even posted this yet! It says, “Dear Blogger, We have reason to believe you are about to upload text to the Internet that violates one of our trade secrets. We demand that you immediately cease and desist such activities or face the wrath of our legal team. […]”

I’ll take my chances.

Closing note: despite how it may seem, I personally have nothing against Apple. If you don’t believe me then just check out the Apple desktop backgrounds I created… I guarantee you won’t find any free promotion like that for Windows on this site. So instead of sending me hate-mail, download one of those delicious Apple wallpapers to remind yourself of how much Etherice truly loves Apple Computer, Inc.!

Etherice 2.0 (Chameleon) is complete! Every single aspect of the site was custom-coded by yours truly, from the graphics and layout to the image gallery and context-aware-indexing.  Read more about it here!

Everytime you plug in your USB Flash drive, Windows will mount (i.e., attach) the file system it contains to a drive letter such as E:\, F:\, G:\, etc..  An icon will then appear in the system tray that gives you the option to “Safely Remove Hardware”.  Sometimes however, the device is still in use when you try to safely remove it, and you have to wait and try again.

So you wait.  You try again… still in use.  You wait some more, and try once again… still in use!  In the peak of your frustration, you yank the drive out anyway… then out of curiousity you put it back in.  What’s this?… all your files are still there, perfectly in tact and unharmed.  After months of doing this without consequence, you start to think that safely removing hardware is something that paranoid idiots do for fun.

Well, one of my friends thought the same thing until the other day when about 99% of his file system got corrupted!…  Take a look at what he saw the next time he plugged it in:

This drive was formatted with a FAT file system.  FAT (file allocation table) file systems have an index that keeps track of where all the files are located in the logical address space of the device’s memory.  What caused the corruption is that my friend removed the drive while Windows was writing to this index, messing up its pointers and data structures.  The files are still there, but they are lost due to the corrupted FAT.

It’s normally possible to use special file recovery software to recover the lost files, but doing so can be difficult and unreliable.  Using a journaling file system (such as NTFS or EXT3) instead of FAT would have likely avoided the corruption altogether, but fewer operating systems have native support for those file systems.  The good news for my friend is that even though his files are lost, the drive itself is perfectly fine and just needs to be reformatted.

The moral of this story is to always safely remove your Flash and external hard drives, especially if you have written anything to them.  You should do the same with your Wi-Fi cards, MP3 players, and anything else that exchanges data (so pretty much everything).  As my friend will tell you, it’s better to be safe than sorry.

My college career is over. That’s right… after four years of projects and finals, I’m finally done. I met a lot of interesting people at MU. The two closest friends I had there were my roommate for 3 years, Nick, and my friend since freshman year, Chris. I’m sure I’ll stay in touch with both of them for many years to come. I also made some friends that I may or may not keep in touch with. Bryce, David, and even Rachel, it was nice knowing you. We had some good times, and I wish you all the best of luck.

For the next month, I plan to finish some projects I had to put on hold my final semester. I also want to document some of the things I did in college and compile an online resume of my coolest projects. Overall, redesigning and adding fresh content to my Website is priority #1. Then I plan to find a job somewhere on the east coast or southwest. Places that interest me are NYC, North Carolina, Texas, and Colorado. Missouri is great too, it’s just that I’m tired of living here and it’s time to move on.

Last night it became clear… The story was about me against them, and how I won because I had nothing to lose.