Archive for the ‘project_e’ Category

Talkin’ GPS Blues (part 1).

Sunday, January 9th, 2011

A long time ago, my great and good friend Glen pointed me in the direction of a Steven Jay Gould essay about his encounter with Richard Feynman. Gould’s point in that essay was that he thought Feynman wasted a lot of time trying to understand evolution from the ground up, time that Feynman could have spent making valuable contributions to the theory instead. My response is that I think I understand where Feynman was coming from; the only way he felt like he could contribute something was to start from first principles and work his way forward until he understood each step. I’m not anywhere near as smart as Feynman or Gould, but I feel much the same way as Feynman did. Hence, the long and rambling nature of this entry.

I have six GPS systems. That’s probably more than any one sane person needs, but we can leave that discussion for another time.

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Do Androids dream of electric apps?

Thursday, September 9th, 2010

As noted previously, I finally resolved the phone issue. (And AT&T can still die in a fire.)

The number one question I’ve been getting (replacing “Where did you get that shirt?” at the top of the charts) is: “How do you like your new phone?”

Answer: I like it just fine, but…below are some preliminary thoughts on Android (at least, as implemented on the EVO 4G; I do realize that some of these may be issues with the built-in apps, rather than the Android OS itself):

  • It is disappointing to me that the alarm built into the EVO’s clock app can’t be set to play arbitrary sound files as alarms. (I fall into Ihnatko’s 2% who haven’t seen the movie yet, but I love the story behind “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien“.)
  • Ditto that I can’t set an arbitrary sound file for text message notifications.
  • It is also disappointing to me that there’s no basic Notepad type app provided with the EVO. I’m sure there’s probably 300+ on the Android marketplace, but I needed to make a shopping list this morning and didn’t have time to sort through all of them. Any tips?
  • Integration between the built-in music player and the built-in navigation app is also a disappointment; the navigation app will pause the player to make route announcements, but you have to manually start the player up again, rather than it automatically resuming play.
  • On the plus side, the sound is great; I can listen to podcasts in the car without having to hook into my (currently non-functional) stereo system.
  • The on-screen keyboard is vastly better than using the keypad (even with T9) was on the T616, and somewhat better than the on-screen keyboard on the N800. However, I still have a lot of trouble hitting the correct key with my large-ish fingers.
  • One of the drawbacks of purchasing an Android phone is synchronization with the MacBook. If I had purchased an iPhone, everything would be simple (or at least, simpler). But, no, I had to be different and resist peer pressure… At some point, I suspect I will end up ordering this. (Right now – and I do realize this is a phone controlled setting – the MacBook sees the phone as a USB disk drive with photos on it, and automatically opens iPhoto. I can browse the Android file system and copy files to or from it without problems.)
  • Speaking of iPhoto, I’ve done almost nothing with the built-in camera yet.  I need to work on that.
  • The EVO’s calendar app has a noticeable lag; it takes a couple of seconds to switch to the current date when I bring it up.
  • If there’s a way to sync the EVO’s calendar app with Google Calender, I haven’t found it, and there doesn’t seem to be a separate Google Calender app (like there is for Maps, Voice, Earth, etc.). Do I need to grab some other calender app off the Android Market? (Edited to add 9/10: Okay, I think I’ve figured this one out. You can sync the EVO app with Google Calender, it just isn’t quite as straightforward as I was looking for.)
  • The EVO also seems to lag behind in changing screen orientation when I rotate the phone.
  • I managed to get the Android SDK and the ADT plugin installed without problems on the MacBook, but the ADT plugin won’t install into Eclipse on Project e. It looks like there are some dependencies that Eclipse can’t resolve, but I can’t figure out what those are. I may have to blow away and reinstall Eclipse (which isn’t a major issue; I don’t have a bunch invested in Eclipse on Project e).
  • I either need to dig out my old Java textbook, or see if I can find an updated edition cheap online.
  • Speaking of textbooks, and having nothing to do with Android in particular, I just paid $180+ for a damn textbook. This makes me mildly cranky.
  • My old T616 in the case fit neatly into the magazine phone pocket of my 5.11 tactical pants. The EVO? Doesn’t fit. Dear 5.11 folks: maybe we could think about redesigning that pocket to fit smartphones? (I wear 5.11 tactical pants (or, as some people call them, “Kaiser blade Internet pants“), not because I’m a mall ninja, but because they are the most comfortable and toughest pants I’ve found. Plus they make it really easy to carry all my stuff.)
  • Battery life is…well, middling. I haven’t really tried optimizing power consumption, though, except for turning off WiFi and Bluetooth. (Hurrah for the EVO’s control panel that allows easy access to those settings.)
  • There’s a few applications I’m looking for and would welcome advice on finding in the Android market. The first one is a good WiFi scanning utility; ideally, it would have the ability to log access points with GPS coordinates, note if the points are A, B, G, or N, note if they’re open or closed (and if they’re WEP, WPA, WPA2, etc.), and write all this data to a XML or KML file. It looks like there are several apps in the market that meet these criteria, but I’m not sure which ones are good.
    The second app I’m looking for is a good vehicle management application. At a minimum, I’d like to be able to enter an odometer reading and number of gallons, and get a miles-per-gallon figure for that tank, as well as an average MPG for all tanks to date. It’d be spiffy if I could also enter a price per gallon, as well as other expenses (insurance, repairs, maintenance) and get a cost-per-mile figure as well.
  • I love the GPS Status app.
  • I’ve played a little with the Amazon Kindle app; so far, I’m more impressed with it than I am with the refurbished Kindle I purchased earlier this year.
  • The EVO’s screen is impressive. Much better than the N800’s. I haven’t done a side-by-side with an iPhone 4 yet, but I’m willing to bet it gives the iPhone a run for its money.
  • The EVO’s video player can decode H.264 video! (I haven’t done anything with the camcorder app, so I don’t know what format it encodes video in.)
  • Waiting for a sale on those 32GB microSD cards…
  • Edited to add: There’s also no general file browser app on the EVO.

Again, I generally like the phone; most of these are just minor quibbles that I can probably solve one way or another.

After action report: Las Vegas, NV.

Wednesday, August 4th, 2010

I covered a lot of stuff in my previous travel report, so this will mostly just be updates.

  • Project e worked spectacularly well at DEFCON. This is the first chance I’ve had to really push the battery life, and I was able to get an good 12+ hours out of the battery without running it totally dry. (This was with the machine set to “powersave” and putting it into “standby” or “hibernate” when I was in the dealer’s room, or driving around with Mike the Musicologist and Andrew. Continuous usage with the wireless would have been more like 6+ hours, I think, which is still pretty impressive.)
  • My one regret is that I forgot my Alfa external WiFi adapter. I would have enjoyed playing with that at the convention.
  • The 5.11 bailout bag also worked out well for lugging around Project e and various other equipment. Again, I was able to carry a pretty good load, including the laptop, charger, books, a couple of bottles of water,  the small camera, and miscellaneous other necessities.
  • MtM has the Nikon with him and has been taking a lot of photos. As you saw below, I did use the Nikon to take some Gehry photos. When I have more time, I’m going to put up an expanded and annotated Flickr photo set; I did some side-by-side experiments with aperture priority vs. automatic exposure.
  • Food in Las Vegas was, without exception, pretty darn good. The worst meal I had (at the Four Kegs) was still better than average (and I didn’t order the stromboli, which is the house specialty). We also had a very good (if loud) tapas meal at Firefly* on Paradise, the usual wonderful meal at Lotus of Siam, the previously mentioned dinner at Shabu-Shabu Paradise, and a Moroccan meal at Marrakech. (I had not previously had Moroccan food, so I can’t comment on how authentic it was. I certainly enjoyed my meal, and the belly dancer didn’t hurt.)

    Vegas does have something of a shortage of good breakfast places outside of the casinos (and even inside of the casinos, if you’re not looking for a buffet). We had several good breakfasts at Blueberry Hill on Flamingo and one excellent breakfast at The Egg and I on Sahara. I know that MtM and Andrew went to a good Italian place in New York, New York while I was at the convention, and I’ll let them comment on that.
  • Between Tucson and Las Vegas, the refurbished Kindle I ordered arrived, and it went on this trip. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about the Kindle later on, but my first impression is “Meh”. I did manage to read John Clark’s Ignition! in PDF format and a Project Gutenberg MOBI format copy of Heart of Darkness without too much trouble, but my experiences with other PDF files and eBooks have been inconsistent.
  • On the other hand, I finished, and highly recommend, Ubuntu for Non-Geeks 4th Edition and am almost finished with Cisco Routers for the Desperate 2nd Edition (also recommended). No Starch Press rocks. And the coupon code “DEFCON18” will get you a 30% discount. And they’re running a half-price sale on all e-books.
  • My Southwest experience this time was much more pleasant. No misplaced bags, and no flight delays. One thing that was particularly unusual was going through the security line in Las Vegas; I had, literally, no wait. Just walked straight up to the TSA agent and got in line for the metal detector. It took longer to take my shoes off and the laptop out than it did to get through the rest of security.

My thanks to, in no particular order, the DEFCON 18 staff and presenters, No Starch Press, UNIX Surplus, SEREPick, Lotus of Siam, Shabu-Shabu Paradise, Sarah at the iBar in the Rio, and the unknown belly dancer at Marrakech.

Special thanks to my high-speed, low-drag travel companions in the primary, Mike the Musicologist and Andrew “Porous concrete? What were they thinking?” Wimsatt.

DEFCON 18 notes: Day 3.

Wednesday, August 4th, 2010

“The Search for Perfect Handcuffs… and the Perfect Handcuff Key“: It seems that Sunday morning at DEFCON has become the default time for the lock picking and other physical security panels. Sometimes this bugs me a little; I can only sit through so many panels on compromising high security locks with common household objects before my eyes glaze over and I leave for the dealers room. It isn’t that these panels aren’t interesting, but three in a row…

Anyway, I say all that to say that this presentation from TOOOL was one of the better Sunday morning lock bypass presentations I’ve seen at DEFCON. Deviant Ollam and his crew gave a comprehensive overview of handcuffs, how they work, and how they can be defeated. Some key points:

  • A group of Dutch hackers managed to defeat the high security Dutch handcuffs by taking a photo of the key (hanging off someone’s belt) and using a 3D printer to duplicate it. The key can be found here.
  • You can shim many handcuffs with paper, believe it or not. Paper money (especially European paper money, which in many cases is more like plastic or Tyvek than paper) works especially well for this, as currency is generally designed to be tear resistant.
  • Handcuffs are generally a pretty simple mechanism. If they aren’t double-locked, it’s really easy to “shim” them (force a flat piece of metal, or something like that, down between the pivoting ratchet arm and the cuff itself), or pick the lock with something like a paper clip. (You know what really works well for a cuff pick? The sort of U-shaped metal arm that comes on those steel binder clips you can buy at Office Depot.)
  • If the cuffs are double-locked, it makes shimming and picking attacks harder. One way to defeat double-locking is the “whack attack”; slam the cuffs against a hard surface, and inertia will pop the double-lock locking bar back into the unlocked position.
  • It doesn’t take a lot of strength to break handcuffs. Breaking them is just a matter of binding the chains up. Once you’ve done that, it’s just leverage and simple physics to break the chain.
  • You can also rough up the chain with a small easily concealed diamond saw blade to make it easier to break. The folks at SEREPick sell such a thing; you can hide it in the seams of your clothes, in a belt, in the top of a shoe…
  • There’s a lot of design variation in handcuffs, which can cause problems, especially if you’re trying to find a universal handcuff key. Keyway sizes, size and number of pawls…lots of things can cause problems.
  • The TOOOL folks have collected a bunch of cuffs, so they got as many as possible together, took very precise measurements of the keys, and came up with a single “universal” handcuff key that opened all the cuffs they were able to try. No, they don’t sell it, but diagrams and measurements for the key were part of the presentation. The easiest thing to do, according to the presenters, is to start with a Smith and Wesson handcuff key, as that’s closest to the final dimensions of the universal key. After that, all you need is some minor cutting and filing which can be done with a Dremel tool.

(I suspect there are some people who are going to ask “Why would you want to break out of handcuffs? And don’t you feel bad about sharing this information with criminals?” In the first place, the criminals have already learned all these tricks at one of our many institutes of higher education. In the second place, the bad guys are starting to use things like handcuffs and zip ties to restrain their victims; you might as well learn how to defend yourself.)

“Electronic Weaponry or How to Rule the World While Shopping at Radio Shack“: I’ll cut some slack for this guy being a first time presenter, but this was a “Meh” panel for me. It was heavy on the theory of things like RF jamming and EMP attacks, but short on practice. Most of the theory I already knew, so there wasn’t a whole lot there for me. At the end, he did demonstrate a “sound cannon”, which was interesting. It did not, however, even approach the “annoying” level for me, much less the “weapon” one, though the presenter was running it without amplification.

“Breaking Bluetooth By Being Bored”: Dunning (who also built Vera-NG, a Bluetooth and WiFi sniping rifle) presented a series of tools for banging on Bluetooth. These tools included:

  • SpoofTooph, a utility for cloning and spoofing Bluetooth devices. SpoofTooph can also be run in a logging mode, where it will collect data on devices it encounters.
  • The Bluetooth Profiling Project, which uses programs like SpoofTooph to collect Bluetooth device profiles for analysis. (For example, which device addresses correspond to which manufacturer?)
  • vCardBlaster, a utility for running a denial of service attack against a Bluetooth device by flooding it with vCards.
  • Blueper, which sends a stream of files over Bluetooth. You can send files to multiple devices in range, or target a single device and flood it with files. This is interesting because many devices cache received files before asking the user to accept them; if you push a continuous stream of files to one of those devices, you can fill up internal storage and possibly crash the device.
  • pwntooth, a suite of automated Bluetooth testing tools.

As a side note, after some banging around (mostly to resolve dependencies) I managed to compile and install SpoofTooph on Project e. So far, I’ve only tested it in my lab environment, but it seems to work as designed. This is one of the reasons I love going to DEFCON, as there’s nothing like that moment when you say “Holy f—ing s–t, that f—ing f—er actually f—ing works! S–t!”

There was no final attendance figure announced at the closing ceremonies. According to Joe Grand’s badge documentation, there were 7,000 electronic badges made, and those went fast. I would not be shocked if there were 15,000 people at DEFCON this year, and from what I saw in the closing ceremonies, a lot of those folks were attending for the first time.

The big piece of news from the closing ceremonies is that, after four years at the Riveria, DEFCON is moving to the Rio next year. My hope is that the move will make it easier to get into the more popular panels (DEFCON apparently will be using the Penn & Teller Theater at the Rio), and provide more room to move around. (And maybe even more room for vendors.)

Coming up later on: the final after action report and thank-yous.

After action report: Tucson, AZ.

Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

My regular readers (and my irregular readers, too; come to think of it, “Whipped Cream Irregulars” would be a good name for a band) may have figured out by now that I’ve spent much of the past week on the road. Specifically, I was in Tucson for the annual convention of the Smith and Wesson Collectors Association. (You might have been able to guess that I also made a brief trip to the Phoenix/Scottsdale area so I could visit Taliesin West.)

I’m not going to talk much about what went on at that convention here, since it is a closed private convention, and I’m not comfortable discussing the organization’s affairs on a public blog. (Jay G. and the rest of the Vicious Circle gang might be amused to know that there was an actual S&W police bike, manufactured in Springfield, MA and complete with lights and siren, on display at the convention. I didn’t get a chance to take a photo.) I will say I had a great time at the convention, and in Tucson in general. Sadly, I didn’t have time to hit any used bookstores or gun stores in the area, but maybe next time.

This is the first extended road trip I’ve taken since last year’s DEFCON, so I thought it might be interesting to do some notes about what worked and didn’t work on this trip.

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Some thoughts on the ethics of open culture.

Wednesday, July 7th, 2010

Mike the Musicologist asked me over the weekend if I read Daring Fireball. The answer is “Yes, spottily.” More specifically, I pick up Gruber on the Alltop “Egos” tab, when I remember to check that. Sometimes I go a week or more without checking.

So I missed this Emily Brill piece when Gruber first linked to it. That’s a shame, because I think it merits some discussion.

Here’s the basic summary: Harvard Law has something called the “Berkman Center for Internet & Society”, founded by a guy named Jonathan Zittrain. Zittrain and the Center are generally pro what might be called “open culture”. (I’m using “open culture” to refer to a general mindset that includes open source software, Creative Commons licensing, and a generally skeptical position towards intellectual property rights.) For example, Zittrain has been highly critical of Apple and the iPhone’s closed ecology.

Apparently, though, what Zittrain and the Center aren’t telling students is where their money for the Center comes from. That money comes from large players in the pro-open culture field and Apple competitors, such as Google (the largest single corporate contributor, according to Brill). (Microsoft is also a significant contributor, but I hate to lump them into the open culture field.)

Apple, on the other hand, hasn’t given any money to the Center. AT&T apparently gave a small amount of money to fund one project in the past, but may or may not be a current contributor; the situation seems murky. (See Brill’s article for details.)

No one has alleged that anyone at Harvard Law School has formulated opinions because he or she was paid to. But Berkman and Zittrain, due in no small part to the force of Harvard’s branding, have become increasingly important players in Internet policy and media circles. The appearance of conflicts matter; even if such conflicts are not the stuff of life and death, as they might be in medical research, they do impact legislation, stock prices, and consumer choices.

I generally think of myself as being pro-open culture, more so than MtM,  and not a blind Apple fanboy. (My professional life is mostly Windows on servers; my personal life is Macs and an iPod; my current portable machine is the Project e machine, an Asus eeePC 1005HA running Ubuntu 10.04.) I will say that I don’t get as worked up about Apple products as some people I could name.

But it seems to me that no matter what side you take on the open culture debate, it’s difficult to argue that there’s not a moral and ethical obligation to reveal your sources of funding, especially if you are an academic. As Brill points out, Lawrence Lessig, another leading open culture advocate, has a detailed disclosure policy posted on his website. (At the time of this writing, though, Lessig’s website appears to be down.)

Do I practice what I preach? I think so. Any conflicts I may have are noted in my “About” page, or within posts when relevant. (Speaking of conflicts: Mike Godwin, who is mentioned in passing in Brill’s article, is someone I was well acquainted with at one point in my life. But that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.)

Thoughtful responses in the comments are welcome.

Project e, part 4: quick note on Karmicing.

Saturday, November 21st, 2009

John Wells, the guy who wrote the handy guide to installing Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) on the 1005HA and 1008HA (previously blogged here) has a new post up detailing how to upgrade to 9.10 (Karmic).

May his name be written in the Book of Life, and may flights of angels sing him to sleep every night.

Project updates.

Monday, November 9th, 2009

Project e update: I took the machine up to 2GB of memory earlier this week; it turned out to be much harder than I expected, mostly because getting the memory access door off the machine took more effort than I expected.

I just finished doing a clean install of Ubuntu 9.10 on Project e; I went the clean install route, instead of doing an upgrade in place, because there were some things I wanted to clean out, and I didn’t really have a whole lot invested in the current system. (However, I didn’t re-partition and blow away /home.) So far, wireless seems much more stable; no connection drops yet. Ethernet just works, straight out of the box (no loading of modules) and Bluetooth seems to work as well, modulo some flakiness in listing devices.

This install also took more effort, and more time, than I expected. However, much of that was my fault; the process for creating USB install disks changed from 9.04 to 9.10, and the instructions on the Ubuntu website are not clear on how to do that under OS X. I ended up having to move the 9.10 ISO over to the netbook and use the USB startup disk creator to make a bootable flash drive. I don’t see this as an Ubuntu problem as much as a “thought I knew what I was doing, should have read the docs first” problem.

Question: does anyone know of a good Karmic-compatible eeePC tray utility, now that eeepc-tray has been end of lifed?

6.00 update: I’ve been tied up dealing with some personal issues that I don’t want to go into here (for reasons of other people’s privacy) and haven’t had as much time as I would like to work on this. I’ve gone through all of lecture 2, and I’m hoping to knock out the assignment and move on to lecture 3 this week.

School: Registered for CSYS 4334, “Implementing Information Systems In Organizations” (in other words, more SQL Server 2005) and CSYS 4330, “Advanced Networking/Network Security” next semester. That second one should be fun.

MIT OpenCourseWare: 6.00, the home game (Part 1).

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

School has wrapped up for the semester, at least for me. (Yes, I’m aware it is mid-October. Yes, I’m aware normal people are dealing with mid-terms. What can I say; that’s the way the St. Ed’s New College schedule worked out this time around.)

Now that I’ve got some free time, I can engage in some useful projects, like more Project e work (I’ve got a long multi-part post in the works that I hope to finish soon), updating the SDC pages, and perhaps some outside study.

I’ve written here before about the MIT OpenCourseWare initiative, and I decided this would be as good a time as any to start working through 6.00, “Introduction to Computer Science and Programming“. As I was reviewing the various readings, a thought came to me.

“Hey,” I said to myself, “wouldn’t it be nifty to blog this as you’re taking it?”

“That’s a definition of ‘nifty’ I was previously unaware of,” I responded.

“It’d give you some motivation,” I said.

“Why am I talking to myself?” I responded.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Have you considered medication?”

Anyway, my need for psychotropic medications aside, this seems like a good idea, if only to give my loyal readers something to laugh at. So…

Lecture 1.

Course readings.

Getting Started: Python and IDLE.

Problem set 1.

My code for problem set 1. (This has been tested on Project e with Python 2.6.2, on the MacBook with Python 2.5, and on the Nokia with Python 2.5.2. I haven’t tested it on my work machine yet.)

Comments on my code or coding style are welcome; as a matter of fact, they are downright encouraged.

Project e, Part 3: The Virtualizing

Thursday, September 3rd, 2009

Work on Project e continues, slowly, as time permits.

  • The Alfa WiFi adapter worked right out of the box; just a simple plug and play operation. Who’d a thunk it?
  • Built-in wireless continues to be a problem, but mostly on my home network. I am starting to wonder if this is an issue with the access point. Wireless at St. Ed’s (where I’m spending a lot of time these days) isn’t great, but at least the connections stay up.
  • As far as I can tell, the current version of Wireshark for Ubuntu 9.04 is 1.0.7, while the current stable version for other platforms (including Ubuntu Karmic, aka 9.10) is 1.2.1. Between that and the other wired/wireless networking issues, I think I’m going to wait until Karmic drops in late October, then upgrade and install Wireshark and Kismet if networking is stable.

In the meantime, I’ve spent the last few days playing around with something else…

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Random notes from a Friday night dinner.

Friday, August 28th, 2009

First of all, if any of my friends (or even blog readers who are not friends) are considering purchasing Snow Leopard from Amazon, here’s the link that gives me a small cut. Also, someone made a specific request for the ASUS DVDRW external drive.

To keep this from being a 100% “Buy Amazon! Give me money!” entry, I want to mention a web log that’s new to me; by way of Lawrence, we have Lovely Listing. One entry that he found particularly striking was the velour people. Lawrence also included this link, but I’m not sure where he found it on Lovely Listing.

When he mentioned the names Arakawa and Gins, I thought they sounded somewhat familiar. Indeed, they were; it turns out Arakawa and Gins were two of Bernie Madoff’s clients. (That second link is by way of Nancy Nall, who has some pungent things to say on the subject.)

Clippings: August 25, 2009 (plus blogging slowdown)

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

Classes have started up again at St. Edward’s, so blogging is likely to slow down a bit. I’m planning on taking Project e with me to classes, so I may have some time to blog before class and during breaks; however, St. Ed’s made some changes to the wireless network this semester, and so far connectivity isn’t working very well for anyone. Work on Project e does continue, slowly.

I did want to point out two interesting articles: this one from The Atlantic on health care reform, and why the current proposals will do nothing to fix the structural problems of our health care system (by way of Radley Balko), and Roger Ebert’s latest journal entry on AA and his alcoholism.