So following my RRoD experience a few weeks ago I have been testing other avenues for gaming such as PC gaming. I have been playing console games since I was a toddler clutching onto my Atari 2600 paddle and I just can't get the hang of a mouse and keyboard to play games with. I have a Quad-Core Alienware desktop pc that I use for work that I decided to try. Even though the Games For Windows platform is suppossed to support the X360 controller out of the box, it doesn't. I was pissed after loosing more than an hour trying to get Call Of Duty: World At War to work with the controller; it doesn't. Insterad I investigated anther avenue that works with every PC game. 

Steps To Get The Wireless X360 Controller to Work for All PC Games (not just Games For Windows)

1. Get the XBOX360 Accessories Kit Wireless Gaming Receiver
2. Download Vista Compatible Drivers For the Accessories Kit
3. Synch the Controller to the receiver
4. Download & install the Pinnacle Game Profiler
5. Download the pre-configured game profile for your game so you don't need to map the buttons manually to keys

For my case, there wasn't a World at War profile yet so I used the Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare profile and it works great. I'm amazed at how fantastic PC games look at 1680x1050 resolution! Wow. 

I have defied the odds for so long considering that I had an original launch XBOX360 console from 2005 that was still working perfectly and has been used exhaustively this entire time (about 20 hours per week). Last week I started to experience a strange problem while playing Dead Space. In the middle of the 7th level when I entered a certain corridor the screen went jumbled and all the colors appeared malformed. After rebooting several times and getting the same result each time I put in a Fallout 3 and after the opening cinematic the screen went black. The lights were still green and everything looked like it was working except there was no visual. After the next reboot, Red Ring of Death. Since then I have allowed the system to sit several hours and it will boot up but after 5 minutes or so it will go black and RRoD after any reboots.

It looks to be a heat issue and I'm pretty certain I could hack at it for a few days and resolve the heat issues, if the components aren't burnt up. I decided to set it aside for the time being and dust off the Playstation 3 and use that instead for a few months until I decide whether or not to bother repairing the X360. 

For the last 2 weeks in my spare time I have been working on a desktop recipe management system which can be used to synchronize with the web system. My wife spends hours each month browsing our recipes and creating ingredient shopping lists and monthly menus. The kitchen kiosk web site is great for ogranizing recipes and sharing them with friends but it lacks that great user experience that can only be accomplished with desktop applications. The Alpha is completed and I hope to be in beta in a few weeks. When it's in a stable beta I will post it on nealosis.com

 Ok, so I occassionally watch a video game show on G4TV called XPlay and they run a segment called The Will Wright Minute. Will Wright, of course, is the legendary game designer who created Sim City and The Sims. In any event the XPlay folks have created a very clever opening song to introduce Will Wrights segment and as soon as I heard it; I wanted it as a ringtone! Watch the embedded video below (the beginning) to see what I'm talking about.  

Last weekend I found myself needing to rename some files on one of my servers. Ok, more like thousands of files because they were not named in a way that was conducive with XBMC's media information scraping features. When I looked at the sheer volume of files needing to be renamed I decided to write a small utility to rename the files in batch based on standard string replacements or Regular Expressions. 

For more details on the program or to get the code go to my code-project article on it. 

For quite some time I have had a pretty decent DVD movie server running at the house. It consists of a File Server (Buffalo TeraStation 2TB), which is used to store raw DVD rips, a X3 chipped XBOX running XBOX Media Center, and a 52" Plasma television. One of the most impressive features of XBMC is it's scraping capability, or the ability to fetch information from websites for you and import it into your media center library such as plot summaries, movie reviews, cast, year, genre, etc, etc. With the latest SVN builds of XBMC I have begun to notice that the scraper is acting strange. I guess most people use this kind of setup to watch pirated movies, but in my case I'm using raw DVD rips from DVDs I own. As such my file structure is a bit different. For example the movie 310 To Yuma is in a folder named 310 to Yuma and inside that folder are the traditional VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS directories. Whenever I launch the IMDB scraper it searches for VIDEO_TS instead of 310 To Yuma since VIDEO_TS is a sub folder. To quickly resolve the issue I wrote a simple C# console application to do this:

1. Enumerate the Movies Share
2. For each folder move the files in VIDEO_TS into the root folder for the movie
3. Delete the VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS folders

The script took 5 minutes to write and it saved hours of time of having to do this manually.

This is a follow-up post to this one (Dedicated BitTorrent Server).

My enthusiasm for TorrentFlux was a bit overblown because after using it for a few weeks I came to the understanding that TorrentFlux sucks. Sorry to be so blunt but it's a fact (at least on a Windows Server & in comparison to other Windows clients). The web script is buggy and crashes often. When it's not crashing, it's busy having no idea how to read 3/4 of the torrents you try to upload to it and the logging is so poor that the user has no clue as to the nature of a failure. 

So, we're back to using the best BitTorrent client out there uTorrent. Of course uTorrent is a desktop application but it does come with a built in WebUI feature that allows users to remote control it from anywhere from any web browser. So for this to meet the goals of the previous post we need to be able to access the BitTorrent web server from any client and we need the server to run as a service so we don't have to log in with remote desktop and turn on uTorrent each time someone on the network wants to use it.

First things first, we install uTorrent on the Windows 2003 server. Next we edit the uTorrent properties to use the correct port for our network and setup WebUI. These settings can be found in the properties sheet of the program. See this post for detailed instructions for installing WebUI. Basically, I just had to download a zip file, rename it to WebUI.zip and place it in my user's %APPDATA% directory. 

I launched uTorrent and verified that I could access http://localhost:3000/gui/ in the web browser (3000 is the port I run WebUI on). 

Next up is the Windows NT Service Wrapper. Rather than write something I used an awesome Service daemon on code-project called XYNTService. Below you can see the ini configuration I used to setup the service.

[Settings]
ServiceName=XYNTService
CheckProcessSeconds = 30
[Process0]
CommandLine = C:\Progra~1\uTorrent\uTorrent.exe
WorkingDir= C:\Progra~1\uTorrent
PauseStart= 1000 
PauseEnd= 1000 
UserInterface = Yes 
Restart = Yes

In the Service Control Manager in Windows (compmgmt.msc) I set the service to log on with the account I installed uTorrent with. It won't work otherwise.

Thats it! Now we have a BitTorrent Server running on a network server that all of our users can use and we don't have to install BT software on every machine and we can monitor our users activity! 

My wife was in the hospital for 4 days this past week and at the end of the first day my wife felt well enough to sit up and she wanted to log into her myspace page to post some photos. The hospital offered free Wi-fi internet access for staff and patients but they run a WebSense firewall which blocks just about every site online other than email sites and internal Sentara intranet sites. We tried about 25 sites and all but 4 were blocked by the firewall. You can see the screenshot below.

We tried several online proxies such as proxify.com but all of those were blocked as well as sites that outline steps for bypassing firewall filters. Ultimately, I left the hospital that night when my wife fell asleep and I went home to stand up a SOCKS SSH proxy server.

I don't have a full blown Linux server running at the house so I used my Windows 2003 Enterprise Web Server to host the OpenSSH server. 

The steps went like this:

• Install Cygwin in Windows 2003 with OpenSSH, vim, & diffutils 
• Set /var writeable for all (chmod 777 /var)
• Set /etc/passwd & /etc/group as readable (chmod +r /etc/passwd)
• Run the SSH install script (ssh-host-config)
• Answered the questions in the script allowing a service account to be created and an NTService for SSH server

After the server was installed, I went to my client and installed PuTTY which is used to create the encrypted tunnel from the client to the server. See the instructions here. Once the SSH session has been established all that's left is to configure firefox to use the tunnel as a SOCKS proxy.

Now that the tunnel was functional, I ran wireshark to sniff the traffic in order to validate that this setup wasn't going to set off alarms by the hospital admins. Wireshark revealed that firefox was leaking DNS requests, which means that even though my tunnel was fetching the remote sites, it was sending DNS requests to the host network DNS (which would setup a huge red flag).

Luckily in FireFox you canstop this behavior by typing about:config into the web browser and editting the setting network.proxy.socks_remote_dns to true.

I unplugged the laptop, set a port forwarding rule in my smoothwall router for inbound ssh traffic, and returned to the hospital and hooked it into the network there. Everything worked perfectly. 

  I have become very interested in embedded systems lately so I've been experimenting with ideas for things I could do with embedded systems. For example, detect temperatures, heat, humidity, motion, movement, etc and take logical actions based on such detection. The key ingredient for these types of implementations is the micro-controller, which is a tiny chip capable of turning current on and off based on input and output (I/O). I have started my first project and created my first circuit which you can see below. I have a program running on my work computer which traps certain events such as new email, instant messages, meeting notices, etc, etc and when new events are trapped, the application tells the circuit to blink certain LEDs in a specific sequence.

If anyone wants the schematics or code just let me know. 

  A collegue and I headed out to Las Vegas this past weekend to attend DEFCON 16, the worlds largest annual hacker convention. Aside from the fact that it was held in Las Vegas (which is the scummiest place on Earth), DEFCON was fantastic. The high points for me included the hardware hacking panels and the new tools released at the CON. There was a talk from the Electronic Engineering team at the University of Delaware on creating hardware trojans that was impressive as well as the badge hacking talks and demonstrations in the Hardware Hacking Village.If you'd like to get the slide decks from all the talks contact me and let me know and I'll get the media to you. 

I won some great prizes at the conference like a complete Xilinx Spartan 3E FPGA kit!

You can see my photostream from DEFCON here