Moved into Place

Posted on 24th April 2011 in Something Daily

I’m learning a lot about assembly and C as a result of reading this book I got called “Hacking: The Art of Exploitation” from No Starch Press. And no I was not paid to plug them just now. The reason I was originally attracted to this book is probably obvious: because the idea of being able to crack computer security sounds awesome. But as it turns out, being able to stuff like that requires a huge amount of prerequisite knowledge, or so this book would have me believe. I’m learning to use the GNU C debugger and write in C, as well as look at actual assembly instructions generated by the code that I write. This is some deep stuff. Fun, but it seems impenetrable sometimes. I’m having fun anyway. Of course I’m having fun. I’m coding.

Also, my roommate moved into our new place today, so I was able for the first time to see it with some real amount of furniture in it. Surprisingly, it looks a lot bigger when it’s crammed full of stuff. But it’s awesome to actually be moving into an apartment instead of a dorm. I made a trip from my 14th street dorm down to our 9th street apartment this morning in the pouring rain carrying four bags full of various things from my room to put in the apartment, so that was interesting. I was soaking wet by the time I got there. But it was worth it.

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Blade Monster Blade Monster Blade

Posted on 17th April 2011 in Something Daily

Yesterday was my 20th birthday…so I’m not a teenager anymore. I can’t read my favorite book “How to Build a Time Machine Even if You’re a Teen” anymore, at least not legitimately. I started to move into my new place – brought a bunch of boxes and books and shelves and such over. That was cool. Rooms, strangely enough, start to look bigger when you put furniture in them. Weird weird weird. I also was treated to a dinner that there is no way I could have paid for on my own at Blue Water Grill on Union Square – I had my first MAHI MAHI SANDWICH and it was incredibly delicious, if a little bit on the spicy side. Of course, I forgot to write yesterday, for possibly obvious reasons. I saw Garrison Keillor do a performance of A Prairie Home Companion at Town Hall on 43rd, which was also awesome. I did find that crowd was mostly made up of people over 40, and I really didn’t see a single other twenty-ish person there (there had to be some, right? guys? guys? right?). The show was great though, and I care not if nobody else in my age group is into it. I love the foley guy and the sketch comedies.

After being completely soaked and destroyed by the rain, I came back and attempted to start working through one of my birthday presents “Hacking: The Art of Exploitation”, which conveniently includes a primer on C and assembly languages, which is of course invaluable to me, as I plan to take a class that’s taught in assembly next semester. I didn’t get very far last night, but I really dug into the book this morning, and I got the basics of assembly. How memory actually works is something I need to get used to, but GDB makes it EASY! You can step through a program one machine instruction at a time, and track all the memory locations at each step. This is great. This is great. Guys, this is so great.

My friend Eric was gone all weekend, missing my birthday (the jerk) and leaving me to bury my nose in a book where about half the text is made up of hexadecimal numbers WITHOUT playing any Super Mario World whatsoever. So he’d better come back and rectify that situation sooner rather than later. Let me tell you, person, that today was an incredibly good day, for reasons I will not go into here. But it was. Seriously, trust me. I had a burrito, there you go. That’s it.

Just kidding, that’s not really why. But I’m still not going to write it here. What kind of person do you think I am? Come on now. My external monitor wallpaper is a piece by Paul Robertson that has a large turtle-penis thing shooting out rainbows and kittens while being ridden by a nazi blademonster thing with alien in her mouth and surrounded by glowing fetuses. This link is, like many that I have posted, NOT AT ALL SAFE FOR THE WORKPLACE OR WORKPLACE INHABITANTS. Seriously, don’t click it unless you want to see a cartoon drawing of a big weiner and lots of blood. That’s the kind of person that I am.

Let’s go structure some data and illicitly browse 4chan while my roommate’s not looking.

Great job!

HackNY Hackathon has at last Arrived

Posted on 9th April 2011 in Something Daily

This weekend I will be at the hackNY hackathon at the NYU Courant Institute from 2PM until 2PM. I went last year, but didn’t really know any of the technologies that were being used there, and I ended up not collaborating or presenting anything. But being there set me on a path of learning web programming and becoming more confident in my own abilities, so today/tonight I’m going to shred all over the place on this hackathon. It won’t know what hit it. Hopefully I’ll be able to join a team and work on some part of an awesome project with them. That all depends, we’ll see.

I’m taking pledges for Mountain Dew. You tell me how much you’ll donate per can, and then tonight, I’ll keep a record of how many cans I drink, and then you donate the amount that you pledged. It’s going to be a marathon. A hackathon, if you will.

And I’ll be live tweeting it, probably. Watch me <a href=”http://twitter.com/#!/emmett9001″>@emmett9001</a> because I’ll be very silly and working hard. Probably learning lots of cool stuff.

I will see you all on the other side. Wish me luck!

Preparing for Hackathon 2

Posted on 3rd March 2011 in Something Daily

Something exciting is on my mind since Tuesday: the next HackNY hackathon has been announced. I attended my first in October, but I didn’t know enough about anything that was going on there to really participate at all. I spent about five hours coding Spaceratops there, which I was in fact working on back in October. Side note: this is why I want to be done with that project. It’s taking too long. But anyway, the idea with the hackathons is that a bunch of representatives from startups come and demonstrate what their company’s API can do and then they give you a key and tell you to go nuts for the next twenty hours and hack together some sweet app from the tools that everyone’s given you. In October, this really was my first exposure to PHP, HTML (in recent years) and the idea of using API calls to build apps. So I didn’t join a team, I didn’t really meet anyone, and I didn’t build anything. I did make a lot of progress on Spaceratops that night. The experience of hanging out until all hours coding is extremely appealing to me, though (as is the prospect of free snacks, soda, and burritos all night), so I’m doing everything I can to prepare myself for the upcoming event. Whether I go by myself or with a friend, I’m going to introduce myself to some people, join their team, and help build something awesome. It’ll be awesome.

So to that end I’m going through as much of the W3Schools PHP tutorial as I think is necessary, and then I’m going to make something cool on my own. That’s the only way to learn this stuff: by actually building something. It may very well end up being something that uses Google maps or a calendar API – the choice is all mine. I just got PHP and MySQL running on my local server (for about the fourth time) and I’m tutorialing like crazy. Also Eric gave me subdirectory on his website, so I have some actual hosting. This may allow me to make Spaceratops into an applet that would be playable in a browser…that would be super rad. We’ll see.

And guess what I’m doing this weekend!? That’s right, more homework and coding. If I have my way, I’ll also finally finish Chrono Trigger. I’m at the last battle and it’s so nuts. Let’s do this.

Operating Systems Dilemma

Posted on 1st December 2010 in Something Daily

This week is becoming interesting. Mondays and Tuesdays are always pretty easy: I don’t have a lot of classes, and homework is usually due later in the week. So when I go home, I can hang out. Like how I didn’t really accomplish anything yesterday and just played New Super Mario Bros. Wii with Eric. I mean it’s a pretty good game – almost as good as being productive. Almost. We finished all the regular levels, including the crazy frantic battle at the end where giant bowser is running after you – we were all screaming. It was crazy. But now, since we apparently don’t have better things to do, we’re going through the game again and getting all of the star coins to unlock the really difficult secret levels. It’s not as bad as the replay gimmick in Super Mario Galaxy 2 that makes you play the whole game twice, but it’s similar. But who am I to complain? It’s fun – I mean I’m playing it, right? Anyway the week is getting interesting because I know that tonight is going to involve a large amount of frantic work that’s all due tomorrow. And the South Park season is over, so I don’t have that to break up the craziness tonight. But today’s the craziest. Tomorrow will be better. And now for something completely different.

Considering the process of building my own desktop computer has made me a bit uncomfortable with my affinity for Mac OS X. My original idea for a computer build was essentially “Make a computer that runs OS X”. Doing a little research, I found out about the Hackintosh community and the compendiums (compendia?) they keep of OS X compatible parts. This is all good, but doing a bit of research on the process outside of that community has led me to the realization that installing X on a non-Mac computer is ultimately more work than it’s worth. Choosing the correct parts seems to be the easy part, with the numerous lists of compatible motherboards and processors floating around the internet. The impression that I get is that hacking the OS, installing and running it successfully are the hard parts. I’m positive that it’s doable, and I’ll probably try to do it eventually. I won’t however, have a very high expectation of success, and I’ll pick hardware that’s compatible with both Ubuntu and OS X.

The thing is, I’m worried that using OS X exclusively will lead to me wasting money in the future, not to mention becoming married to one company/OS. I don’t want to have to ‘settle’ for an operating system that I’m not amazing with, or that doesn’t run the software that I need, because it doesn’t run on my hardware. My ideal situation is, of course, running OS X on non-Apple hardware, for the experience of building my own computer for a cheaper price than Apple and running the software that I know/require. I can see why Apple makes it so difficult to do this, though. They really don’t want me to do this. So I’ll try and make a Hackintosh when the time comes.

However, short of getting that to work, I’m practicing as much as I can with Linux (which isn’t a whole lot different anyway), because apparently Linux can run on tons of hardware types. I dual boot 10.6.5 and 10.10 on my white MacBook, and I pretty much only use the Linux partition these days. It’s good practice, and I love finding all of the downloadable packages for added commandline functionality that you can’t really use in OS X. It’s a great system, I just reeeeeally wish that Logic and Steam were compatible with it. If they were, I’d drop OS X in a second. Seriously. Watch, I’ll do it.

And no, I won’t use Windows. UNIX owns DOS and the system under Vista and 7.

Hey, I found a picture of young Stephen Colbert. Believe it.

How to hack a Wii

Posted on 7th November 2010 in Tutorials

Since I’m home for the weekend, I spent about two hours yesterday hacking my family’s Wii to allow it to play media/games from a USB flash drive. I found some instructions on how to do this on a site called wiihacks.com, which has a bunch of forums for people who write and use homebrew Wii software. It was sort of hard to find the actual steps to go through, since the site is a bit convoluted, so I’ll reproduce the steps here in case you care to try this out for yourself.

I ran into a lot of warnings that doing certain steps in the wrong order could break the system and make it unusable, but managed to avoid doing this during my hacking process. These steps work for Wiis running version 4.3 of the software, and no others, according to wiihacks.com. And you also need a specific game for it – so if you own a copy of Super Smash Bros Brawl, you’re in luck. There are also a few games that you can also do it with, but I’ll just share my experience using SSBB.

DISCLAIMER: Not following these steps exactly, or trying to follow these steps on a Wii running a version other than 4.3 can easily result in your Wii being unusable. Please read these instructions before you begin, and make sure to follow them as closely as possible. Help can be found at wiihacks.com.

Things you’ll need:

  • 1 or 2 GB SD card
  • Internet connection
  • Wii running 4.3 with at least 300 free memory blocks
  • Super Smash Bros. Brawl

Part 1 – Obtaining Homebrew Channel and BootMii

  1. Format SD card as FAT32
  2. Download this file and extract contents to root of SD card
  3. Turn off WiiConnect24 in the Wii System Menu
  4. With SD card removed from Wii, launch Super Smash Bros Brawl
  5. Go to the Stage Builder, delete all custom stages, and exit the stage builder
  6. Exit all the way to the main SSBB menu
  7. Insert SD card, return to Stage Builder
  8. HackMii installer will load
  9. Read the warning and wait for the “press 1″ message to appear – press 1
  10. Install the HomeBrew Channel
  11. Install BootMii as boot2
  12. Prepare the SD card
  13. Create a backup:
  14. Load HBC, press ‘home’, launch BootMii
  15. Make a backup (press Power, Power, Power, Reset, Reset)

Part 2

  1. Download this file – password is www.wiihacks.com
  2. Extract to root of SD card
  3. Using the computer, run md5summer.exe
  4. Click “Verify Sums”, then ModPack-AnyWii.md5
  5. This should complete without errors
  6. Insert SD card to powered-off Wii
  7. Start HBC, press home, launch bootMii
  8. Multi-Mod Manager should start
  9. Select WAD manager, press A
  10. Press 1 to “install all WADS”, press A
  11. When installation is complete, press A
  12. Return to the main MMM menu by pressing B twice

Part 3 – Protection from future destruction of your Wii

  1. At the MMM main menu, select App Manager, press A
  2. Select Priiloader, press A
  3. Read warning, press +/A to install
  4. It will probably glitch or freeze when it’s done – don’t worry, it worked
  5. Remove SD card and reboot Wii while holding reset
  6. Priiloader will load
  7. Select System Menu Hacks, insert SD card, press A
  8. Enable “Block Disk Updates” and “Block Online Updates”, save changes
  9. Reboot Wii without SD card

Final Steps – Obtaining Software

  1. Download this file and extract to root of SD card
  2. Opening Homebrew Channel with this card inserted will give you access to a few nice apps, including a browser that allows you to download new ones to the card.
  3. I recommend MPlayerCE for playing media from a USB flash drive
  4. It’s now safe to turn on WiiConnect24 again

So those are the steps that I went through to hack my Wii. Note that it is incredibly easy to break your Wii after doing this if you install any system updates. The automatic updates should be disabled by Priiloader, so as long as you don’t install any manually you should be ok. Happy hacking!

And here’s an introduction to the Whitest Kids U Know - a very funny comedy group who put a lot of stuff up on the internet.

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