Quotes

"If I'm the president, we're going to have emergency

-room care, we're going to have gag orders." - George W. Bush

This quote has been randomly selected, I have no control over the quotes displayed here.

Android Robot SVG

Hey, to anyone that cares,
I asked my wife if she could convert the android robot here to a more usable vectorized android robot and she did! Here it is for anyone that wants it.

archlinux wallpapers

So one boring Saturday evening I got a bit tired of looking at my present background wallpapers and decided to make my own. First let me say that I am no artist, but I do hope you like what I threw together. I have two monitors on the machine I usually work on, the laptop screen (1920×1200) and an old, but still one of my favorites, HP LCD screen (1280×1024). The wide screen wallpaper is pretty simple, the square one (5:4) is a bit more complex. If anybody wants the wider one in a different resolution, just ask, it was created in inkscape as a vectorized image and can be modified/scaled easily. They are henceforth released into the public domain for anybody to use for any purpose, just remember to give credit where credit is due.

Motorola Droid Rooted

After a long wait, the Verizon Droid (Motorola Sholes) has been rooted. The method is being kept secret until it becomes patched to slow down the process as long as possible. As with many android hacks, we owe our thanks to zinx (#android-root on freenode) for finding this vulnerability. zinx does not own a Verizon Droid, his Droid owning helper is [mbm], a big thanks to him too!

Before applying this update, be sure to install the 2.0.1 patch first, as doing it second will un-root the device. This has been tested and does work providing the SHA1 checksum matches as shown below. A safe copy can be downloaded here. Place this item in your SD card as update.zip. Reboot the phone and hold the x key on the hardware keyboard until you see the Motorola logo, than release. You will see an exclamation point and a phone, do not panic, press Volume Up + Camera at the same time. You will see a menu, slide out your keyboard and navigate to Apply sdcard update in the menu, press in on the center button. The update will install and you may than reboot.

???842634563f78ecc11c7d4155684a09cc06d4c9c8  signed-voles-ESD56-from-ESD20.84263456.zip

To get root on the Verizon Droid, firstdownload droid-root.zip and copy it to your SD card as update.zip and follow the steps below.

• Reboot your phone.
• Press x on the hardware keyboard while booting until you see the white Motorola logo, then release.
• Press Volume Up + Camera when you see a picture of an exclamation point and a phone.
• Navigate through the menu using the arrows on the hardware keyboard (portrait mode) to Apply sdcard update.
• Apply the update and reboot.
• You now have root.

This is not a traditional Android “rooting”, root access is presently only available through the adb shell. Install the Android Debug Bridge to your PC and enable USB debugging in your phone by going to Settings -> Applications -> Development and selecting USB debugging. In your systems shell (or command prompt for windows) type adb shell (assuming your paths are correct setup) and you will be connected to your Verizon Droid. Type su and you are root. Be very careful with this as you can do damage to your phone when in a root shell.

It should now only be a matter of time before a custom firmware is available for the Motorola Sholes. Do not flash any other firmware updates as this may patch the vulnerability used by droid-root.zip.

If you would like to have root on-the-go inside of say Better Terminal Emulator follow these instructions.

Download this modified su command here. Push the new su command to the phone with adb push su /data/local/su. Now, launch a shell on your computer with adb shell. Type the following commands [checked that mtdblock4 is the correct device for /system using the mount command with no arguments].

• su
• mount -o remount,rw /dev/block/mtdblock4 /system
• cd /system/bin
• mv su osu
• dd if=/data/local/su of=su
• chmod 6755 su
• sync

Now if you open your phone and enter a terminal emulator of your choice and type su, you will have root.

Broken Droid

Well, I got to get the new Motorola Sholes (Verizon Droid) in an attempt to reduce my phone bill from AT&T, which was quite high. This will not be a review as there are plenty. This is a post to announce the destruction of the first Verizon Droid to the best of my awareness. The phone was accidentally left at a restaurant and when I got it back, it was destroyed. Asurion has already come through and replaced the phone, for which I am very thankful, and glad I bought the insurance. For the community and my own record of stupid things I have done, I will now post the photographs. I am being strongly urged by the community to disassemble the phone and take pictures. Any input?

For photos: http://www.michaelpurcell.info/gallery/v/Droid/Destroyed/

The DBT Handle.

While reading the C API reference for the Berkeley Database [now owned by Oracle] I came across a gem.

Storage and retrieval for the DB access methods are based on key/data pairs. Both key and data items
are represented by the DBT data structure. (The name DBT is a mnemonic for data base thang, and
was used because no one could think of a reasonable name that wasn’t already in use somewhere else.)
Key and data byte strings may refer to strings of zero length up to strings of essentially unlimited
length. See Database limits for more information.

I felt that this needed publication.

Luster over Functionality

The State of Delaware has released they’re new public sex offender’s registry. It is quite an improvement upon the antiquated registry they once displayed. However, I have quite a few reservations of my own. Apart from lacking any originality the registry is entirely written in Adobe Flex, a flash/AIR based product produced by Adobe. Now I agree that luster has it’s place in IT, however that place is far down at the bottom in the list of priorities. Functionality and security must always be the foremost concern in any application. Obviously my opinion is quite biased since I am the founder and developer of DelawareOffenders.org. But let me list a couple of reasons not to use flash for a production grade product.

• Accessibility – Good luck getting that screen reader to work with Adobe Flash (yes, it is possible if the site is designed well).
• Bandwidth – The registries application is over 1.9 megabytes. This does not take API communication into account!
• Browser interface interference, the user cannot use browser features like history, favorites, text based find tools, and of course the back button.
• Search engines – Flash applications are notorious for causing SEO problems.
• Printing – Many systems still have trouble printing flash based web sites.
• There is more, but my point is quite justified so far.

A sex offender’s registry is by far the least appropriate place for such an application. Unfortunately many things on this project were not implemented correctly, especially the mapping system. New information will soon become available to DelawareOffenders.org, including vehicular information for sex offender’s.

While DelawareOffenders.org currently cannot receive updates, rest assured a patch is on the way. Within hours the new registry’s flash application was reverse engineered and a new back end is in the works. Unfortunately I do not have as much time available as I would like to devote to this, so please bear with me for a little while.

The above article is strictly my opinion, if anybody has a problem with the above stated disagreements, feel free to leave a comment.

YubiKey Security Token

Yay, my Yubico security token finally came in the mail! I have been pouring over the developers documentation for this for quite some time now and am quite excited to see what this little guy has to offer. I’ll be sure to post more as development comes along. So far I am looking into writing a PAM module for secure XML-RPC requests for authentication to a secure back end. I am hoping to add support for both legacy authentication and more secure two factor authentication through XML-RPC. The XML-RPC will make use of RSA key pairs for negotiation and symmetric encryption (probably AES-128 or higher) for the actual authentication/session management data. In case anybody is wondering why I chose XML-RPC… I don’t really have a good answer, kind of an impulse. I am developing this module for personal reasons, but if it works out I will probably clean it up and (L)GPL it for the community, so wish me luck.

For those interested in two factor authentication, check out the Yubico technical manual, its a great read.

Mike – Release Canidate 4.

So it has been a little while since my last update. Things have changed. Let’s see.

• I left Delaware Technical & Community College.
• I work for Delaware Criminal Justice Information System (this may have been mentioned).
• Several programming projects started and left as vapor ware.
• Quit playing video games for the most part in January to get some of my life back.
• Switched my entire desktop experience to Debian.

To proceed in relative order. My life-long intention has always been to proceed in a self-employed direction, with a slight niche in conquering the world. I spent far too many years of my life in Delaware Tech. No ill feelings toward any of my teachers, they simply taught the programs agreed upon by the department. There was little left for me to learn at Delaware Tech, and if your not there to learn then why are you there? I decided to proceed with my life. It would be against my own politics to continue my “education” at Delaware Tech merely to acquire an expensive piece of paper.

Now for a twist. Remember that my lifes intention has always been to continue dominating the world, then why am I still working for the State? Honestly, my life is far from the point where I could support myself under my own business, and the fact is I feel quite comfortable at Delaware Criminal Justice Information System (DELJIS). At DELJIS I can work on projects that let me explore my creativity while helping society. I have no intention of leaving DELJIS for some time. By the way, ePayment is now complete for the JP courts, now is the time to pay those old speeding tickets

Unfortunately my brain has entered crunch time and several programming projects have be pressed into abandonment. These projects are listed below.

• Cup Holder (automotive car computer environment)
• Call of Duty 4 modifications and server side hacks. (I don’t play games anymore)
• MySpace wordpress widget (this is not vaporware, I just am not maintaining it and recent MySpace updates have broken it)
• Facebook wordpress plugin (Who cares)

So I finally ditched Windows completely (sort of). My only remaining Windows environments are virtual machines maintained for Photoshop and work (The state has a proprietary love affair). My distribution of choice is Debian and it is serving me well. In fact I recently acquired a new quad core server for my home, quite pleased with it so far, good to move beyond 600MHz.

Check back in 6 months or so for an update.

AT&T HTC Fuze – Opera problem.

I am the so far happy new owner an HTC Fuze (AT&T’s HTC Touch Pro). However after purchasing the phone with data coverage I noticed that only PIE (Pocket Internet Explorer) worked as a browser, but Opera complained about a failure to connect to the proxy server. This immediately seemed strange as there is no set proxy server for the data plan. The fix was pretty simple, I am just posting it incase anybody else has this problem.

In Opera type the following into your address bar opera:config

After this the Preferences page should come up, scroll to the word Proxy, tap on it and a series of options should present. Uncheck any checked boxes and clear any entered text in the boxes (mine had wireless.cingular.com or something to that tune). After saving your settings you should be good to go. Good luck.

Some thoughts to enlighten.

Life is complicated by so many factors, most of which are outside of our immediate control. These complications dominate our psyche through physical manifestations like escalated gas prices, poverty, war and disease. These outside factors are a part something else, something not biological but foreign, not your mind.

Inside your mind you are always free. There never has been a more true definition of freedom than the human mind. Inside it you may do whatever you please. These outside complications can never break into this dimension of yours, even when they seem to have done so already. These complications or "attacks" wage war on your senses. Your mind polls external sensors for information it can learn from or react to, and that is where the problem lies.

Consider This

When the hand holds the coals of a dying fire the nerves signal the brain with details about their situation. The brain processes this information, extrapolates a good solution using the resources it has available to it, such as visual and smell. This message is sent to the conscious mind in an encoded message containing information about what is happening to the body and a possible course of action. The conscious mind is you, and the way you receive that message is through pain. With pain you know that something detrimental to your health is happening, you know where. You will probably make the decision given by the message and drop the rock. This is what is special though, you did not have to drop the rock. You had every ability to hold onto that rock until the muscles holding it burned to ash. It would have been a foolish choice, but it was a choice.

So what does all of this mean?

As a species we are very lucky to have a conscious mind. The ability to have preprocessed data granted to us takes away much of the work of survival. We do not need to decide whether or not to dive head first in to the acid pit, our minds will give us a valid idea of what will happen, and we simply act on it.

The commander and chief has no more power than this. But what about when depression strikes us, what then? Depression is the source of an external stimulus like all other messages. Not all messages are perfect, some are malformed, some are malicious. But like all choices we are given, we often choose the easiest one. The hardest thing to do in life is to live. Our ability to choose is a precious gift. Sometimes we just need time to find the right solution.

 

Michael