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.