Minor changes to the site backend today, I got around to migrating it from FastCGI to Passenger WSGI as is now supported by Dreamhost (yay), which resulted in a couple hours' downtime while I moved files around.
The 404 and 500 pages should now work properly, as a result.

I figured this deserved a mention: get free Snuggies. Who knows how long it'll last, though, so act fast.
Go here and enter whatever information is relevant. Be forewarned that confirming the promotion will sign you up for their 'newsletter', but that can easily be avoided by, say, putting a Mailinator address into the form...

Look, I'm blagging, and it's only been a month since my last post! I have no excuse for not writing- maybe I should attempt to make a post daily. We'll see how that goes.

What's new? A couple rather interesting new projects:

• First, there's WinMPD, which is an implementation of the Music Player Daemon in C#/C++ (server) and VB.NET (client). Progress is rather slow, but that's because I haven't been working on much of anything for a week or so.
• Second, there's RAPTOR PANIC, a silly game concept, inspired by sir_lewk in #tcpa and XKCD. I haven't really fleshed out the gameplay concept, but the current idea is like a roguelike based on question 3 in the XKCD in question.

On the games front, Left 4 Dead 2 is on the way, and I'm all set for the demo to unlock sometime today. I'm optimistic about that one.

Anything else interesting..? Mostly making my CS assignments massive overkill. Maybe I'll elaborate on that sometime, because it's highly amusing.
I also got some fresh electronic bits, like an Olimex PIC programmer and some DIP MAX232s, so hopefully I'll get something interesting going with that soon-ish. I'm either doing something terribly wrong, or the chip I'm testing things with is fail [interrupts are failing to fire when they should, but the thing is booting fine].

On the photography front, I've taken some interesting new pictures. They're (mostly) up on Flickr, so go ahead and take a look. Speaking of which, I should get around to implementing a gallery on this site, maybe just linking into my Flickr stream.

I guess that's it for now. Poke me to write more. Please?

Well, it seems I'm obscure enough not to warrant any attention from TI, which is something of a pity. The whole RSA project has gained some interest among some rather high-profile media outlets, which I find extremely gratifying and awesome.

The general consensus among everyone who seems to know what they're talking about (and I concur) is that TI has been flagrantly abusing the DMCA. In the spirit of that, I'll provide a copy of the keys to all takers. Get it here.

In other interesting calculator news, DanE, member of Detached Solutions and all-around cool guy, was interviewed by a Wall Street Journal reporter for a piece they did on the Nspire and how much of a failure it is (I paraphrase, but that's the gist of it). It makes for an interesting read, especially if you don't follow the TI scene to the extent I do. If you don't follow the scene at all, you probably don't care, though.

From the saw-it-first-on-RPS department, we have AI War, a neat (little? probably not) indie RTS.
General form is as follows: one or more human players get dropped into a large interstellar map (à la Sins of a Solar Empire), which contains two AI enemies. The game ends when the systems controlled by the AI players are captured. The catch? The AI cheats, and does horrible nasty things.

For example, the AI can easily begin with thousands of units, while players only ever start with four ships. Fun? As long as it doesn't rush you.
Really, the one thing about this game that most piques my interest is the AI system itself- the traditional decision trees used to make AI-like systems in most games (such as 'if I have 23 units, go attack') is gone, and replaced with a little bit of strategy in each of the individual units, presumably where each of them makes decisions about what to do based on their own state and what's happening around them.
A little snippet of insight from the developer:

If that doesn't make you drool, you clearly don't appreciate it yet. :P

You can read more about the AI in AI War here, or just go get the demo (or buy a license) at the developer's web site.

This time the 0A (84+) key has been cracked. The gory details below:

• p=94489014C63CC9E1E1ADB192DBBDD1F78F90A630DA9C86EFC4CBCA44E5B4D54D
• q=19D431AF2794229620B884E3750D622D1C74F2E4569DC15486FC8D5A3BCDFE2F5
• n=EF5FEF0B0AB6E22731C17539658B2E91E53A59BF8E00FCC81D05758F26C1791CD35AF6101B1E3543AC3E78FD8BB8F37FC8FE85601C502EABC9132CEAD4711CB1
• e=11
• d=2A3E1B2010F318D9BD7C7E19300980B055A0E2A9554B77E7142E23CDF7C7CA13C233A3D462FDFC968B1F9CEAF2AC2CF305147992AD9E834192ACEBB517DB9941

Side note, but this one was a group effort, so it went much faster. A number of people contributed relations, and quick work was made of the rest with a BOINC project.

This is probably old hat to many people by now, but the ever-intriguing Ben Moody has factored TI's 04 OS signing key.

So what does this mean? We can now easily write and cryptographically sign operating systems for TI's 83+ line of calculators (actually, the 84+ series uses the 0A key, which he's working on next) without any mucking about in the certificate to add a 05 key for community development.

For posterity and as another mirror, here are the graphic details. This is a 512-bit RSA key, all numbers are big-endian hex.

• p=B709D3A0CD2FEC08EAFCCF540D8A100BB38E5E091D646ADB7B14D021096FFCD
• q=B7207BD184E0B5A0B89832AA68849B29EDFB03FBA2E8917B176504F08A96246CB
• n=82EF4009ED7CAC2A5EE12B5F8E8AD9A0AB9CC9F4F3E44B7E8BF2D57A2F2BEACE83424E1CFF0D2A5A7E2E53CB926D61F347DFAA4B35B205B5881CEB40B328E58F
• e=11
• d=4D0534BA8BB2BFA0740BFB6562E843C7EC7A58AE351CE11D43438CA239DD99276CD125FEBAEE5D2696579FA3A3958FF4FC54C685EAA91723BC8888F292947BA1

My project now is finishing my own version of pack8xu supporting 04, 05, and 0A (when we have it). Maybe this will motivate me to work more on LIFOS, too.

We crossed the border from Canada again a short while ago, so I have reception again. I won't be writing much now, due to the slow refresh on Kindle, but a comprehensive overview with pictures is on the way.

Arrived at the Seattle airport about 1.5 hours ago on an Airbus A380A320. This airport is much nicer than O'hare.
Currently looking like we'll hit the Canadian border in about two hours, so it's time to sit back and photograph some of the local sights as we head North.