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 

Obviously I use the mp3-cms everyday and basically from the beginning it's been the same layout. The last few weeks the blog layout of the application has started to really bother me and I'd really like to add support for multiple themes. In the meantime though, I'm experimenting with different look and feels just to see how the system will handle various CSS templates. I'm having a little trouble getting some of our custom AJAX controls to render correctly in the non-default themes but progress is being made. You can see from the links below one of the themes I'm considering adding into the system. I'll probably end up dragging my feet on this unless I get some feedback regarding whether this is a good idea or not. 

• New Theme 01 
• New Theme 02
• New Theme 03

A few months ago I finally got my copy of the Photoshop Top Secret DVD Series and started going through the training courses in the program. I'm still in the amatuer learning stage in my Adobe Photoshop skills but I put together basic DeviantArt portfolio to share my progress so far. Up to this point I have focused on simple composites from obvious art sources (Super Hero comic books) but I've been itching to do something a bit more challenging and realistic.

Last night I attended the 2008 Mayhem Festival featuring Slipknot and Disturbed (among many other groups) and while I was there I picked up a copy of the concert program. There was a lot of great photography work in it and I starting thinking about a way to create a slick composite of photos in the program. I spent a few hours this morning scanning, cropping, and cleaning until I ended up with a Wallpaper composite that I was satisfied with. 

You can see the composite here.

So if you haven't heard the term seedbox here's a quick explanation: basically a seedbox is a dedicated server that is used to seed or leech BitTorrent files on the net. The idea of running a seedbox interests me  not because I want to seed anything online but because each of my machines  currently have  BitTorrent software like uTorrent  or Azuerus  installed and it's a big hassle having to administrate these applications by going to the SmoothWall to configure port forwarding to each client every time I want to download something. (I refuse to trigger the BT ports through the router into my network so when I want to download BT files I manually configure forwarding).

By having a dedicated seedbox I could remove the BitTorrent applications from all of the devices on my network and force my users to use the seedbox for all BitTorrent activity. Additionally, I can monitor and report on all the BitTorrent activity.

So I decided to run TorrentFlux on my server. Problem is that TorrentFlux is a mySql/PHP application and I run a windows server. I found this guide online for setting up a WAMP server and it worked out good other than having to set the listening port to something other than 80 since IIS is using that. 

I have it running now and to this point I'm inpressed. There are some features that are missing that I'd like, such as the ability to select individual files in the torrent to download but all in all it meets my needs. I had to work through some hacks in order to get it to work properly (and some torrent files still don't work) but so far I am impressed.