So I haven’t been keeping up with the blog as much as I’ve planned. But that seems to be the norm around here. As most of you are aware, I have been using twitter a lot more. Most likely going to delete the “Latest dodge coming soon” thing on the right hand side. Maybe get a new theme setup on here as well. Not sure yet about that, a lot of things are coded into this one now. :\
Changes in the past few months include:
Working nights now, 1am to 9am, instead of normal days.
Moved into a new apartment. Much nicer and better view.
Working on a few new projects, but this time with friends instead of alone.
Been driving a bit more.
Otherwise, I don’t have to much else to say. In about 2 weeks, there should be a post about one of the projects. Some of you know a bit of the details, but the one’s that don’t should enjoy it. I will also be doing a new presentation at the next 2600 meeting in June. You won’t want to miss this one.
To start out, I have been busy for the past few weeks and actually have been traveling a bit. Last weekend I was in Indiana for umm *cough* business and this weekend I was in our nations capital, Washington D.C. for Shmoocon.
This was my first Shmoocon as well as the first for many members of Chicago 2600. As we did at Defcon, many of us participated in a few of the contests. The main one that many of us were excited about was the Shmoo crypto. It was a lot of fun when a few of us completed it last year outside of the con. So we figured it would be even better if we competed during the con. Oh man, were we right.
Not only was it a lot of fun, we managed to place 1st in it. We completed the crypto at about 30 minutes after midnight on Friday. It got pretty easy near the end, but it was still a lot of fun. We not only won 1st but after that, we decided to try and win one of the other contests that a speaker was running.
GMark, was running this contest. For those that don’t know GMark, you can find more info about him at his site http://www.gmarkhardy.com/. Anyways, his contest was a lot of fun as well. It had us do a bit of running around to try and find different colored beads, and calling a few special numbers. It was a bit more complex than the Shmoo contest, but that only made it a lot more entertaining. We ended up placing 1st in that contest as well. Infact, I think we might have been the only team to even complete it. But I’m not 100% certain on that, I’ll be emailing GMark to find out about that. The prize for winning this contest is pretty freakin sweet if I do say so my self, we all won round trips to Las Vegas for Defcon.
After being 2 for 2, we decided to try the 3rd and final contest that we would enter. It had to do with the Shmoo badges, and was using a punch card system. This proved to be the most difficult of the 3, and none of us had was was needed to complete the contest. Infact, no one at the convention did. We got pretty far, but never dealing with punch cards was a big pitfall for the competition. Perhaps, I will take the time and try to learn a bit more about punch cards, but I don’t know if I’ll have the time to do that.
I’ll post about some other crypto challenge that appeared on the 3rd day of Shmoo later in the week. That one deserves it’s own post, but I don’t feel like writing it all up at the moment. Stay tuned as I’ll update more about that and others soon.
This isn’t really a hax or anything but it’s kinda funny.
I got a WoW trial yesterday from a friend at work, and so when I got home I figured I’d try it out. I played no more than 49 minutes when I got banned. I didn’t get banned for anything I did, I got banned for something an “associated” account did. However, my friend that gave me the trial, isn’t banned. So I don’t see how that would work. So I figured I would call to try and get this fixed, as I was actually having fun for those 49 minutes. I wait on hold for 50 minutes before I get connected with someone and talk to them for no more than a minute. All they can tell me is to email the email address I got in my Inbox about the ban, and they might be able to reverse it. Nothing can be done over the phone. Also he tells me that it can take up to 3 weeks for them to even reply. o_0
So, let’s see, I played for 49 minutes, was on hold for 50 minutes. I was on hold longer than I played. Thats neat. However it gets better. Since I am on a 10-day trial, I have 10 days to play, but wait, it takes 3 weeks to reply back. Thats 21 days, my trial will have been over for 11 days before I even get a reply. That is just awesome.
Moving from one server to another wasn’t bad at all. Had very little downtime, and was able to do a few things I was putting off doing anyways. Either way, site should load a bit faster for people in Chicago, which is good. Because 90% of my traffic is from Chicago or Chicago areas.
Let me know if you find any errors or anything like that.
I should have really though of a better title when starting these blog posts. Oh well.
So yesterday the app was finished and working pretty much exactly how I wanted it. A few things were left out but overall it is working. Well, that is if it has the MAC address of the router that it found while searching. And right there is the flaw. Without a huge database of MAC addresses this app is pretty useless. I’ve been working on adding MAC addresses that I find to my database and geocoding them, but that won’t really be fun for people not in Chicago, and even then people in Chicago wouldn’t have fun with it either. So that is why I contacted WiGle.net, who actually was a bit of help but not as much of a help as they could have been.
Also I was just informed that the server that HaxbyJaku.com is currently on, might not be up much longer. So I am going to end this post now and backup all my stuff and then move it.
Been busy at work so wasn’t able to invest as much time today on the app as I was the past 2, however. I did get past the point that I wanted to reach by tonight. I had Jeff and Josh help look at the code. Maybe, I should just name it JGPS or JPS, since so far most of the people that have helped have names that start with J. Either way it’s almost ready for a public beta, I really need to get a bigger database of data, I have asked the administrators at Wigle.net for assistance with using their database, but haven’t heard anything yet.
Anyways, the app does look ups of the MAC addresses that are around it. Which is what I wanted to do. The next step after this is to make it not open Safari first, this would work already if the ? in the url didn’t get changed to the hex value. But whatever, I’ll try to find a way to call the Maps.app directly with the GPS coordinates. If I can’t figure that out, it’s not a big deal and I can let the community figure it out.
After I get the MAC lookup how I want, I’ll add the cell tower lookup. I’ll try to add that on the weekend or Monday. But don’t promise anything. Anyways, the app is at the state I wanted, the app looks like an official app or at least an unofficial 3rd party app, and I hope after I finish it that people will want to use it. No screen shots or anything tonight, as the only difference in the app is the code, nothing cosmetic has changed. Anyways, I need to sleep.