2004-07-29

soft1901

The parser is still in the works, the following has been done as of today:
  • xml declaration validation: checks for support version/encoding
  • user access parsing: now gets the proper user access levels from the CDATA section
  • attribute parsing: parses an element tag for attributes
Actual construction of objects and such should be done sometime this Friday night, XMLCore should have working reading portion done by Saturday night/Sunday morning, and writing functionality added Sunday night.

The funky query string stuff should be done by Wensday. Really looking forward to getting that working :D

Oh, and gnatt chart might get done sometime tomorrow/friday/this morning, depends really on when I wake up :P

I'll leave you with something to laugh at, and head off to sleep :-)
Steve


2004-07-26

auto_ptr

Its about time I introduce auto_ptr, my good friend and mentor. He taught me most of what I should know about coding, and online etiquettes. Being the talented and nice programmer he is, he wrote GPassport, a win32 library for C/C++ for connecting MSN services, and released it for the world to use, minus the source :)

A quick copy-n-paste from the site:

GPassport is a library for C, C++ developers for Microsoft Passport authentication. It is available in a DLL and thus can be used from other languages as long as the functions are exported (based on name) correctly. It is intended for developers of network client application looking to implement basic and secure passport authentication in their software, with little overhead or hassle.

While it still lacks documentation, it hardly takes any shine off this quality piece of work. Check it out if you are interested in writing your own MSN client :) A *nix version is under way, which would make it a real gem in the programming world.

Keep up the good work G
Steve

2004-07-25

Engineer's approach to short-sightness

So, how do you retard the gradual degradation of your eyesight?

First you need to identify why is causing it. Thats simple, my constant focus on things closer then 6 meters: monitor, book, wall, picture, cat. This causes my eyeballs to deform due to muscles always deforming it to focus properly.

Then you need to propose how to fix it. To slow it down, I need to start focusing on things further away then 6 meters. Now every 30 minutes my trusty palm beeps at me, and I focus on the picture in the stairway, ~5 meters away from where I seat as I type. In addition, I have measured out a spot 6.5 meters away from my front fence, and will throw a tennis ball at a target, today an apc cdrom, with out the use of glasses. Speaking of which, on the 5th hit, the tennis ball shattered the apc cdrom. :-)

Lets see if these measures have any effects...

On to more mudane matters: The bane of my uni experience are 8am starts. I hate them, they hate me right back. I have 2 of them again this semster... joy >8(

Dropped astronomy (PHYS1500) this time around, I'll do it some other semester when I wouldn't end up with 30 hours in a week, giving me no time at all to socialise and work. Dropped Discreet Mathematics too, I really shouldn't change my first year subjects :)

Tomorrow uni starts, and I am going to have a 5 hour break between 9am and 2pm. Might see shrek2 by myself... but that seems a little... sad. Didn't get a chance to see it during the holidays, and I really don't want to miss out seeing it on the big screen!

Now for my continued saga on rescuing my linux-install: managed to get a working 2.4 kernel booting, but now I have to deal with a kernel panic.. its trying to mount ext2 for some reason! The trick was to boot into knoppix, then mounting root of the hd install with mount -o dev in order to have working devices. Once that was done, it was smooth sailing as far as fixing lilo was concerned.

One last thing, eden lost has been updated with new revision. Keep finding these tiny mistakes :P

Good will and peace,
Steve

2004-07-23

I, Robot

Not one to pimp movies in public like this, but I, Robot was a pretty decent story: good character development, fairly strong plot and good pace. There were some plot holes, but they are forgivable. The animation however was absolute TOPS. Robots actually felt like they were moving, and their postured changed visibly yet subtley as a human would. Sonny was a definite center point, very convincing and loving character. The rest of the cast played their parts well, and some of the concepts in it are pretty cool :). See it if you can't decide between King Arthur/Spiderman2/I,Robot.

After seeing I, Robot with John, we met up with a few old friends for bowling. While there I noticed one thing: no matter how fit/graceful some one looks, the truth is revealed when they bowl. Some people lose their balance, some walk up to the foul line holding the ball awakardly, the number of variations are just too many to list! Next time you go bowling, pay careful attension :) Personally I am rather terrible. I did managed to get above 110 for all my games, except my left handed one :)

Two quick game of air hockey followed, won both, the latter barely. Could have gone either way if the operators weren't do greedy and stopped the game at first to 7! A rematch has been called for :D

Still fleshing out the story for the Forgotten World series (first of which is Eden Lost)... more on that later :)

Cheers,
Steve

2004-07-21

Random Thoughts Collection

Got a random thought/rant/comment on something? Add it to this collection by commenting below! :)

2004-07-20

eden lost

That little story (5259 words) have mine is responsible for my lack of updates! But its almost done now, so give it a read, and let me know of any bugs :D

Went over to atomic anth's internet cafe place (King Internet Epping) to setup the dual PII I sold him as a dedicated CS server. That was a rather educational experience :) Ran into Chris Gi, which was a pleasant surprise. Downloaded openbsd 3.5 off his 1.5mbit connection :D

If he had rebooted his modem as I told him to, I should be able to ssh into the box...

Any who, today I had a hair cut, now I am lighter, my head colder. I don't know what to think of it either... its... well... interesting :) Before that however I had my first piano lesson in some 3 years. Picked up a lot of things, mainly playing style and the subtleties of elegance and style. An enlightening experience.

Before any of that however, I had to work. Mother exchanged stories of post liberation China with the workers, stories of how 4 people and a child lived in a room 11meter squared, of units with out toliets or showers, of students fainting in class due to lack of food. All the suffering was brought up on them by the decisions of one man who had China's people on a leash: Mao Ze Dong. His insane attempt to make China top of the world through production of low quality steel drove the country to the knees.

Here is an example of how bad things were: father of three was beaten to death because he tried to steal a cabbage in hunger.

The saddest thing is the people of today still worship him as China's saviour.
/rant

Now to write the outline for the Eden lost's 3 sequels.

2004-07-16

Tale of an old VCR

Mum got a copy of "daddy day-care", on VHS today. Naturally I was then called upon to setup the required AV appliances to get it playing on our TV. Now normally this isn't much of a problem, except the VCR and our new TV haven't met yet, so configuration was required on my part.

Fine, I said to myself. Piece of cake, you have done much harder stuff. So in I come into the living room, VCR under my arm, expecting to be on my merry away in around 5 minutes.

Boy was I in for a surprise.

Firstly, when I said old, I mean OLD. As in, no AV outputs. The VCR sits between the aerial and the TV, and inserts its pictures into an unused channel. The trick to get it working is to find that channel. I brought up the TV's menu, located the proper setting, and told it to "auto tune" after setting the VCR to play so I know when the right channel comes up.

First pass from 40-800Mhz... nothing.
Second pass... nothing.
Third pass... nothing.

At this point I was about to give up. It takes 6 minutes for the TV to scan its entire range, and auto tune didn't find anything. Bah!

One more scan I thought. Just one more. I sat myself down in front the brain-killer, and set auto tune to work, watching the snowflake patterns as a fish would watch a lava lamp. At 592Mhz, my then bleeding eyes picked up the distinctive image of Eddy Murphy (sp?)! Aha, found it I thought, and waited with glee for auto tune to realise it has found a signal it doesn't already have and stablise. Only that didn't happen. Auto tune kept sat on 592Mhz, then kept going.

The world tripped over and fell on its face.

I stopped auto tune, after some choice swear words under my breath due to proximity of my mother, and manually tune the frequency to 592Mhz. My mother finally took notice and made appreciative noises, then called out for my cousin to join her.

I was given a lolli-pop for my troubles.

Wasn't that exciting? I thought so, you wished you were there, totally. To add to your growing excitement, here is a list of things I picked up today:
  • middle click on a tab in fluxbox allows you to group windows by dropping it onto another window.
  • aterm's transparency option doesn't work with qiv any more. One needs to use something like feh to set background
  • nestle is pronounced ne-sle, silent t, not l, hence, not nes-le

This informative blog entry was brought to you by a credit in ma1001, a distinction in ma1002, in conjunction with another distinction in phy1901.

Cheers,
Steve

2004-07-14

reverse-vw

As promised, its up now. Head over to the new download page to get it :)

Have fun,
Steve

Catching up

Still trying to catch up with my online life after ruxcon :) So here is a quick summary to bring everything upto date:
ruxcon
ruxcon 2k4 ended last Sunday. It was absolutely fantastic! On the second day I managed to:
  • buy a ruxcon t-shirt. I thought they ran out!
  • participate in CTF and managed to crash .20's sshd :P
  • went in the THC trivia with profx, aday, zardoz and others, and won!
  • due to winning trivia, got myself a copy of Hacker's Delight.
  • got really familiar with knoppix-std

Productive no? :)

Ruxcon was an immensely educational experience, some memorable talks included:
  • hiding data in file system grey areas (FIST'ing any one?)
  • hybrid approach to network monitoring (PAPmap)
  • social engineering, with real life examples


Kudos to the ruxcon crew for organising such a fantastic event! They even subsidised the drinks at the end :D

deviations
For some unknown reason that strangely makes sense, I was more productive in the last week of 6 work days then I ever was. Pushed out 3 more deviations, all vectors, which I am coming to love. Its very *me* :)

reverse-vw
It was only natural, the night after ruxcon I a program for reversing the virtual world hash austnet uses to protect its users. Nothing exciting, but it works :) I'll upload later tonight when I am finally happy with the code.


Thats more or less it, not very exciting is it :S Now to get back to this lava lamp I have agreed to do for ~beef... grr..

Steve

Downloads

Here is a summary of some stuff I wrote for one reason or another. Source is provided where I am not overly embrassed by the code :)

Please submit bug reports etc by commenting on this entry :)


  • html2pml
    Converts simple html to pml

    Features

    • Works where python is available

    • Works pretty well :-)

    • Preserves bold and italic

    Download




  • lagrange polynomial solver
    Attempts to fit a lagrange polynomial through the give data points using the matrix solver library, which has also been updated to be cleaner and better.

    Features
    • Small
    • Works :D
    • Portable to almost everything under the Sun
    • Outputs in a format that can be easily pasted into mathpad or matlab for plotting

    Download



  • ictor
    An OISC interpreter written in C as a base for obfuscation excercise.

    Features
    • Small
    • Fast
    • Portable to almost everything under the Sun

    Download


  • arp-deny
    A quick program I wrote to make life easier when I need to do MAC based filtering on my wireless netbsd 1.6.2 router. It simply prints to stdout IP/MAC mapping in a format suitable for use with arp -f taking in to account allowed hosts etc. This was used in my efforts to create a wireless router using netbsd.

    Features
    • Command line based
    • Easily scriptable
    • Works!

    Download


  • reverse-vw
    Another basty hack I wrote one late night/early morning after ruxcon. Reverses austnet's vw about generation of possible hostnames from a given format string, then creates the vw string using austnet's hash function. When collisions are detected, the generated hostname is looked up via dns to make sure its not a false positive. It must be noted false positives are possible, even if the hostname resolves. Only works in *nix! You will need to modify source to compile under windows.

    Features
    • Command line based
    • Flexible format string
    • up to 8 numerical replacements
    • DNS lookup to reduce false positives

    Download

  • myroom[2]
    My first 2 game, simple break-out-of-room style puzzle.

    Features
    • Makes you hate me
    • Opengl accelerated
    • In game console
    • GlUT library for portability

    Download

  • mp3Organiser
    A Visual Basic program for oganising your (massive) mp3 collection :)

    Features
    • Sorts files into directories based on specified fields of ID3v1/2 tag
      • Sorts incrementally by artist/song/genre/album/etc, in any order
    • File renamer to rename songs based on ID3v1 tag information
      • File renamer supports format strings to create your own combination
    • ID3Tag removal utility to remove ID3Tags
      • Can be applied to entire directories
    • ID3Tag Editor with single and multiple file support
      • Can add id3v1 tags to files that doesn't have them
    • Very cool busy animation :)
    • Extensive online documentation included

    Download

  • n30n
    A visualisation I wrote for a friend's band. Started off as a particle engine, then had motion blurr, scripting, and sound recording added to it. Can you say feature creep? :P

    Features
    • Opengl accelerated
    • Scripting support
    • Motion blurr
    • Induces motion sickness in some ;)

    Download

  • matrix solver
    Update 7/5/2005 - solves for parametric matrices. Update 4/5/2005 - proper detection of the nature of solutions, code clean up, as well as fixing the infinite loop that occurs for certain matrices. A simple program I wrote after learning about matrixes. It performs Guassian elimination on a given matrix, then uses what I considered a very elegant loop to perform back subtitution to solve the system of equations where a solution exists.

    Features
    • Command line based
    • Detects unique, parametric solutions, as well as no solutions
    • Prints unique and parametric solutions
    • Works! :)
    • Will print out working
    • Small

    Download

  • img2text
    A basty hack I wrote one late night/early morning after seeing a image represented by letters of different colors in html. It could use more work, using an index system with CSS for example to drastically reduce the size of the produced HTML. W3C compliant html would be nice too :) Only works with tga images!

    Features
    • Command line based
    • (Auto)scaling

    Download

2004-07-10

Coming live from ruxcon

At ruxlan right now, where zardoz, aday, dt and some other crackers are working at full speed to CTF 192.168.0.20.

There were 2 talks earlier, Reverse engineering malicious binary, which was some what enlightening, and Recent developments in network intrusion detection, which was really interesting.

Got a dead tree copy of Phrack 62, horrah! Mitch(#linux-help) and I entered in the pool competition, where we were knocked out one game away from the final! Truth to be told, we only got so far because our opponents keep fouling on the black :P

Any who, just got the box up, going to play on the network a little :)

Thankee-sai, long days and pleasant nights,
Steve

2004-07-09

Oops

Sorry! I have been neglecting this due to erm... various stuff, like work :)

Ruxcon is tomorrow, Aday and ProFX are sleeping over tomorrow night. Finally get to meet ProFX :D Boy are we going to have some fun :)

Work is surprisingly art-inducing. There are 2 more new vector pieces on my deviantART page. Check them out :)

Speaking of deviantART, sydneyDA meet went well :) I met Thoran on the way there, what conincidence! I sat in the right place, looked down at the right time, and cityrail had track maintenance on Thoran's line on the day. Afterwards Thoran and I trekked from Milson's point back towards Central to attend Sil's b'day bash, which was *also* fantastic. Had my first tequila shot, with lemon and salt :)

Oh, we met a guy giving away free hugs in the city :)

Any who, gotta run and watch Pay Check.

May your spirit ride always the thermals of life,
Steve

2004-07-04

Pain

Nothing hurts more then this, not even tooth aches.

Its twists your heart, a knife to cut you down where you stand. And yet you won't fight it, won't resists, just to glimpse the face behind the pain.