Remember the Boxing Day Tsunami? Chances are, like me, you paused only momentarily to consider those people so far away, as you were so busy enjoying your Christmas. Sad but true. Now one of my friends has a cousin in Israel, remarkably they still have e-mail, which they use to communicate with him and suddenly the whole thing seems more real. We have a lot to be grateful for living in peaceful times. Heres an extract from one of the emails:
Half the world, or so it seems, has been in contact with me by email or phone to ask if all is well.
Well, in one sense the answer is "Yes, all is well. I'm here." But, in another sense, all is not well because we are living in a totally nervewracking, unnatural, demoraliziing situation which seems to have increasing ill effects each day.
Our days begin about 5 or 6 a.m. when we crawl out of our makeshift beds in the shelter and attempt to stretch those abused bones and muscles which did not totally relax all night. We turn up the radio (we never close it) and listen if there is any news about Safed or towns close to us.
One has to listen for news because the siren situation is not like it was in London as I recall from second World War. There is no "All Clear" perhaps because how can they know. Sometimes there are the sounds of rockets falling long after the sirens have been silent and other times, there is a second siren to keep you in your shelter...
We have our breakfast and my neighbor even waters the flowers on the porch (and the cactus are in flower).
After I answer messages in the email, I try to pass on some jokes or act as on a normal day - but it comes hard. The underlying tension is awful. My plan daily is to go down before 9 so that people can come to the library - and many have come and are endlessly grateful for material which breaks the boredom of the shelters..
Being handicapped by the cane and the bad hip (well, the substitute one..) I have to plan a day so I won't need to come back upstairs. One issue is always the telephone. Do I leave the upstairs one in its cradle and use the library one? Have to handle this issue in an organized way.
When you hear the thump, bump, thud as I am hearing even while I type this, one wonders if these are our thuds or theirs. And one hopes a siren will warn if some are coming our way.
Yesterday, I managed the one flight of stairs to go up to my neighbor for lunch - but in midswallow, I heard that dreadful siren, put down my fork and made for the door, the stairs and the shelter... Later, my neighbor got our plates and brought them down to the shelter where we finished our meal.
I was finishing a jigsaw puzzle when my son Aryeh and his friend appeared. They drove here from Jerusalem and brought with them a lot of vegetables and fruit purchased en route. They travel the Jordan valley road thru many Arab villages and it's not ideal at night but the usual roads could be even more dangerous now (A man was killed in his car by a ketyusha yesterday).
Time was when I wrote fairly well.
I find that my skills have evaporated with the situation.. Sorry about that and hope that withal, I have given a bit of the feel of what goes on... We had the siren 5 times yesterday but all is OK with all whom I know. We finished the jigsaw puzzles and my neighbor just packed up the games and puzzles I found around to give to people for their very bored kids. And we have a new puzzle ready to do and I also soak stamps for the stamp club which hopefully will be reactivated after this mess...
Monday, July 24, 2006
Wednesday, July 12, 2006
Xbox 360 'modding'
One or two people who know I'm a hardcore gamer have asked me about the new 360 'mod' and if I am considering getting it done, some even believe it is the first step in getting home brew and other such niceness running on the console.
Well no, I don't intend to carry out this modification, legal and ethical issues aside if you think this mod is a good idea you probably don't understand how the security on the 360 actually works and what has and has not been broken. I will try to explain.
When Microsoft designed the 360, they decided to allow for certain programs to run from DVD recordable. This was probably to allow stores to quickly and easily duplicate demo or promotional disks. In order to accommodate this, an Xbox 360 executable file has several flags or markers embedded into it, that tell the 360 if it can load the file based on what sort of media it is on.
The mod that the pirate community is currently distributing works by getting the 360's DVD drive to lie about what kind of disk you put in it, basically it tells the machine that the disk is actually a factory pressed disk and not one you just bought down the market and recorded.
Now, here comes the technical part. All the 360's software is protected with a digital signature. This is basically an encrypted 'fingerprint' of the file. If you change the file then the fingerprint no longer matches. This is why nobody has produced their own software and put it on DVD-R and managed to load it into the 360. Since the fingerprint is encrypted, you cannot simply change the fingerprint based on what you have done to the file. In fact you cannot change this fingerprint unless you are in possession of the key that originally created it and only Microsoft is likely to have that and they aren't going to be sharing it any time soon. This isn't some sort of voodoo, it based on tried and tested encryption techniques that are used all over in business and the Internet, generally by paranoid geeky people who like to pretend someone might actually go to the trouble of intercepting their e-mails :)
So, obviously this means no home brew, but what else does it mean? Well, you are likely to get banned from Xbox live if you use this mod, if not now then certainly at some point in the near future. Since Xbox live is pretty much the best part of many X360 titles and also a lot of fun to use just to keep in contact with your gaming mates, its a bit of a large chunk of functionality to sacrifice. Furthermore, even staying off Xbox live isn't likely to do you much good in the future. Future titles are likely to require an update to the 360's BIOS before they will run(much like the PSP titles do now) It is a pretty safe bet that these updates will check for such things as this mod, and prevent the game booting. Many believe that the hackers will simply hack new titles that do this and remove the firmware check, but of course thats not actually possible because of the digital signing. Remember that changing even one bit of a file will mean that the digital signature won't match and thus the game will no longer boot.
So, to sum up, this mod will let you play pirate copies of the current crop of games and possibly a few in the near future, and only off line. So unless you are happy with the current selection of games and don't use Xbox live (including Xbox live arcade) this really is a waste of time.
Well no, I don't intend to carry out this modification, legal and ethical issues aside if you think this mod is a good idea you probably don't understand how the security on the 360 actually works and what has and has not been broken. I will try to explain.
When Microsoft designed the 360, they decided to allow for certain programs to run from DVD recordable. This was probably to allow stores to quickly and easily duplicate demo or promotional disks. In order to accommodate this, an Xbox 360 executable file has several flags or markers embedded into it, that tell the 360 if it can load the file based on what sort of media it is on.
The mod that the pirate community is currently distributing works by getting the 360's DVD drive to lie about what kind of disk you put in it, basically it tells the machine that the disk is actually a factory pressed disk and not one you just bought down the market and recorded.
Now, here comes the technical part. All the 360's software is protected with a digital signature. This is basically an encrypted 'fingerprint' of the file. If you change the file then the fingerprint no longer matches. This is why nobody has produced their own software and put it on DVD-R and managed to load it into the 360. Since the fingerprint is encrypted, you cannot simply change the fingerprint based on what you have done to the file. In fact you cannot change this fingerprint unless you are in possession of the key that originally created it and only Microsoft is likely to have that and they aren't going to be sharing it any time soon. This isn't some sort of voodoo, it based on tried and tested encryption techniques that are used all over in business and the Internet, generally by paranoid geeky people who like to pretend someone might actually go to the trouble of intercepting their e-mails :)
So, obviously this means no home brew, but what else does it mean? Well, you are likely to get banned from Xbox live if you use this mod, if not now then certainly at some point in the near future. Since Xbox live is pretty much the best part of many X360 titles and also a lot of fun to use just to keep in contact with your gaming mates, its a bit of a large chunk of functionality to sacrifice. Furthermore, even staying off Xbox live isn't likely to do you much good in the future. Future titles are likely to require an update to the 360's BIOS before they will run(much like the PSP titles do now) It is a pretty safe bet that these updates will check for such things as this mod, and prevent the game booting. Many believe that the hackers will simply hack new titles that do this and remove the firmware check, but of course thats not actually possible because of the digital signing. Remember that changing even one bit of a file will mean that the digital signature won't match and thus the game will no longer boot.
So, to sum up, this mod will let you play pirate copies of the current crop of games and possibly a few in the near future, and only off line. So unless you are happy with the current selection of games and don't use Xbox live (including Xbox live arcade) this really is a waste of time.
Sunday, July 09, 2006
Windows Mobile Upgrade Woes
So those of you with Pocket PCs that don't run Palm might have noticed that Microsoft have recently updated Windows Mobile 5. By now most manufacturers have issued the firmware upgrades to allow you to upgrade your PDA or Smartphone to the latest version.
I decided I would try doing this on my MDA Vario this Sunday. Before I began I took a complete backup with Sprite Backup, as updating Windows Mobile will reset everything on your device (Imagine if updating Windows did that :) )
Everything went fairly smoothly as far as flashing goes, it took about 15-20 mins to fully complete and Activesync was able to restore all my contacts. However, the problems began when I tried to restore everything else from my backup.
OK, so doing a full restore was probably not a good idea, the system has been updated and sure enough trying this approach ended in disaster. Hard reset later and I do a restore of my e-mails and documents with sprite. Everything seems to go according to plan and I even get my text messages back. But lo and behold I now have a phantom IMAP account on my today screen. Clicking this account (which says it has 10 unread e-mails in it) does nothing, and trying to set up an account with the same name in Pocket Outlook brings up a "Account already exists" error. but you cannot change the settings of the phantom account because it is nowhere to be seen in Pocket Outlook. I even tried deleting all registry keys pertaining to "IMAP4-HOME" (the name of my account) but still it would not go away. Kind of disappointed with Sprite backup as it is supposed to be the best backup program and this is the first time I've actually had to use it and its performance has been less than stellar.
Oh well, at least I have all my important information back, I just hope I don't have to restore again any time soon as I don't want two phantom accounts on my device!
I'll post again when I update the Dell X51, don't think I'll bother with sprite for that as there are no SMS or E-mail messages on it that are not already on my IMAP server.
I decided I would try doing this on my MDA Vario this Sunday. Before I began I took a complete backup with Sprite Backup, as updating Windows Mobile will reset everything on your device (Imagine if updating Windows did that :) )
Everything went fairly smoothly as far as flashing goes, it took about 15-20 mins to fully complete and Activesync was able to restore all my contacts. However, the problems began when I tried to restore everything else from my backup.
OK, so doing a full restore was probably not a good idea, the system has been updated and sure enough trying this approach ended in disaster. Hard reset later and I do a restore of my e-mails and documents with sprite. Everything seems to go according to plan and I even get my text messages back. But lo and behold I now have a phantom IMAP account on my today screen. Clicking this account (which says it has 10 unread e-mails in it) does nothing, and trying to set up an account with the same name in Pocket Outlook brings up a "Account already exists" error. but you cannot change the settings of the phantom account because it is nowhere to be seen in Pocket Outlook. I even tried deleting all registry keys pertaining to "IMAP4-HOME" (the name of my account) but still it would not go away. Kind of disappointed with Sprite backup as it is supposed to be the best backup program and this is the first time I've actually had to use it and its performance has been less than stellar.
Oh well, at least I have all my important information back, I just hope I don't have to restore again any time soon as I don't want two phantom accounts on my device!
I'll post again when I update the Dell X51, don't think I'll bother with sprite for that as there are no SMS or E-mail messages on it that are not already on my IMAP server.
Welcome
Welcome to my blog. Here you can expect to read mostly techno-babble related nonsense as I play, err I mean experiment with my toys, err I mean PRODUCTIVITY TOOLS. You can probably also expect some video game related musings too.
