Quincying and you…

It seems the much anticipated Playstation Home has, rather then revolutionise the game lobby experience, spawned a rather strange behavioural trend. Apparently all the male avatars gang up on the female avatars pestering them with their attentions… somewhere in the distance, the strained cry of “WOMAN” punctuates the silence followed by a left 4 dead style mobbing. Well, I guess that is what happens when you let pimply love starved socially inept geeks loose on the Internet… but I digress.

I chanced on a great little article describing in detail the act of ‘Quincying’. In the infinite world of Ying, yang and Newton’s third law, the Internet has come up with a comical rebuke to this sort of behaviour. Simply take one part beautiful avatar, mix with a pinch of deviancy. Stir for twenty minutes and add a sprinkle of button mashing and what do you come up with?

The process if trivial, create  a beautiful avatar and glide along seductively where-ever other avatars roam. Human (and online geek) nature being what it is, you will have a nice gathering in no time at all. When you have their attention, suddenly change your avatar from striking blond or giant ogre and watch in amusement as your digital ‘peers’ recoil.

Full story and description here.

I am sure there is scope for a detailed sociological study somewhere here… oh well.

Android G1 : Hands on review

Since the first mobile running on Google’s Android software platform was announced, I have been eagerly awaiting it’s release here in the UK. Well this week it finally happened, so yesterday I went into a T Mobile shop to have a play with one. Unfortunately it is a bit of a mixed bag, whilst looking quite stylish (it looked a bit ugly from the photos) there are a number of bad points about the G1 which unfortunately terminally let it down.

First off, the slide. I actually rather like this part, despite being highly dubious about overly elaborate mechanisms, the G1 screen slides up and to the right cleanly and locks into place with a fairly reassuring click. The problem is the G1 is not comfortable to hold in the horizontal position, and I found the keyboard buttons to be inadequate for any serious use. However the most serious problem with this was that the screen was not fully locked into place. Given that it is a touch screen the fact that the whole screen section flexes backwards and strains against the sliding mechanism, even the smallest amount of force is exerted against it, is very worrying.

The touchscreen itself worked quite well and Android has definitely incorporated several design elements that Apple initially came up with. However it feels like Google were as eager to incorporate finger swiping functions as they were not to look like they were copying Apple and as such there are two different ways of scrolling through icon menus like the ‘desktop’ and the application menu which just feels silly and inconsistent. The overall layout and design of the menus and functionality felt poor and counter intuitive. This was felt especially in the web-browser which, whilst working well ( and really showing how nice the screen was) felt clunky and unfriendly to navigate and use. There was also an issue with flash plugins but I am assuming that would be fixed by an update.

Overall, the G1 very much feels like the unfinished article. The black one looks surprisingly nice in the person, but an inconsistent GUI / navigation system lets it down as well as the quality of the screen sliding retention mechanism. Still, thankfully this is not the Android phone, but the first version running the software platform. I have high expectations of future phones and can only hope that meager sales will not put off other companies from adopting this platform.

Up in the cloud

Microsoft has a number of core business revenue streams – otherwise known as cash cows. Despite strong indications that regardless of the recent lightweight application paradigm shift to the ‘cloud’ Microsoft have remained staunchly of the view that the operating system, as we know it today, will still be present in the future. So todays announcement indicating a potential branching from the desktop application centric philosophy is quite astonishing. According to ComputerWorld, Microsoft are looking to unveil a version of Windows codenamed  ‘Windows Clouds’ within a month. It will be very interesting to see the approach Mircosoft take with this project considering they are were quite keen to emphasise this will not detract from the ongoing Windows 7 work which is the planned successor to Windows Vista.

I previously weighed in on my opinion on cloud computing and very little has emerged to change my mind so far. I recently tried gOS v3 codename Gadgets which is the lightweight Linux distribution formally its own flavour based on the Enlightenment DR13 window manager and I am not that impressed. I found the integration between Google services (presented via barely concealed HTML widgets) and the operating system felt very amateurish. This coupled with the fact that version 3 is based on the more feature rich Gnome window manager, any assertion of this being a ’stripped down’, light weight operating system for ‘netbooks’ sounds rather strained.

I do not doubt that one day, a certain percentage of desktops and laptops will be light weight (or thin client) systems accessing storage, applications and processing power from a ‘mothership’ in much the way cloud computing is evolving now. However it seems to make much more sense for a family or household or even a group of people to buy a central ‘home server’. This will however be very different to Windows Home Server and will resemble more the old style dumb terminals where multiple clients connect to one central machine.

Well that is my prediction, we will talk in ten years! For now, long live monster power rigs! As a final note, it will be interesting to see where Apple fit into this in the coming years. iSlim? iWeb? iJot?

New iPod design leaked?

I normally don’t pay much attention to ‘leaked’ designs or pictures as they invariably turn out to be fake or photo-shopped. However, I do trust some sources more than others and the following picture caught my eye.

Apple’s strategy of radical redesigns every couple of years form a clever strategy for separating people from their money periodically. This built in redundancy by design is quite remarkable, just look at the first generation nanos if you don’t know what I mean. Anyway, it may be real, it may be fake, but I thought I would share it.

The ‘new’ iPod nano (3rd generation presumably) … not sure if I like it much, although it is hard to tell from this blurry shot. The orientation is interesting and might suggest a landscape style view for movie playback.

PSP Touchscreen Mod

I must admit I was a bit surprised to see this, but it appears the PSP now has some limited third party touch screen support. Although noble in aim, I have grave doubts about the viability of this project. Its welcoming to see that there is no soldering iron required, although for any serious game developer to take notice would require mass adoption, which lets face it, is not going to happen.

According to the developer, the original idea was to turn the PSP into a fully functional GSM mobile phone, although this was later scaled back to just a touch screen device. I think they made the right call on that one, N-Gage anyone?

Some youtube videos of this in action:

A calibration / test program:

So bottom line: its ugly and lacks any serious support. Still, it is a testament to the ingenuity and resourcefulness of members of the community. Speaking of the PSP homebrew community, I wrote a few months ago about a n64 emulation project for the handheld which was then showing a fair amount of promise. Unfortunately, to my great sadness, the developer Strmnnrmn seems to have dropped off the face of the earth not having updated his blog since last December. Its always sad to see projects just die like this.

Distributed Computing : Folding @ Home Update

I used to be quite an avid F@H contributor, I ran several folding rigs and wrote a bit of code for addins to the project. I have not done any real folding since late 2007, that is until this week. I built myself an awesome gaming system last week containing an Intel Core 2 Duo 8400 CPU, 4Gb of RAM and a ATi 4870 GPU. I am extremely pleased with the way this system works and decided to try out some of the high performance clients the F@H project offers.

These essentially break down into SMP and GPU. The former, SMP (Symmetric MultiProcessing) is a client designed to spread the unit workload over the physical (or virtual) cores available on a system rather than using the single threaded normal clients. Disappointingly it doesn’t appear the cores have been modified to achieve this, instead it looks like a managed series of single threaded processes are used. I will need to investigate this further as I had some problems getting it to work – more on this hopefully at a later date. The latter takes advantage of the stream processors on the graphics cards to perform folding, it is in essence a great example of GPGPU. This client absolutely rocks on my ATi 4870’s 800 stream processors currently giving me an approximate PPD (points per day) of greater than 2200 using the Gromacs GPUv2 core.

So, to anyone interested in Folding at Home, despite not being on the ‘officially supported’ list, the ATi 4870 is a work unit crunching beast.

(Profile)

Windows Media Center 2005 woes

I managed to acquire, for the price of a nice lunch, a brand new Elonex media center Artisan LX a couple of days back. I was initially very excited because up to then I had still been running my first media center was really just an experiment, built from scratch containing mostly old components I had around my place. A year and a bit on, I am firmly hooked on a PC based PVR system the cornerstone of my entertainment system. It contained an Athlon 2600+ processor with 512Mb of DDR coupled with a DVB-T Hauppage tuner and an 80Gb drive for recordings running the open source MediaPortal software. So as you can see, there was plenty of room for improvement.

This was the first time I have really had a tinker with the Windows Media Center range of Operating systems that Microsoft produce and I went in with few expectations, apart from wanting at least as comparable an experience in terms of functionality and flexibility as I have enjoyed with MediaPortal.

The first thing that struck me was how fickle Windows Media Center 2005 was, even with all the roll ups (essentially what Microsoft call Service Packs for Media Center OS) installed. Wikipedia sums up the ‘capabilities’ of WMC 2005:

‘Media Center originally had a limitation of 1 analog tuner, but was raised to 2 analog tuners with Media Center 2005. With Update Rollup 1 for Media Center 2005, support for a digital tuner was added, but an analog tuner must still be present for the digital tuner to function. With Rollup 2, up to 4 TV tuners can be configured (2 analog and 2 HDTV). All the tuners must use the same source, for example they must all be off an aerial or a set-top box using the same guide data, you cannot mix Sky Digital and DVB-T for example.’

XP Media Center really shows its age here – I do not watch any analogue transmissions, so for a Media Center to require a legacy piece of hardware just to be able to access DVB (digital) seems preposterous. But that was not the worst thing! Windows Media Center 2005 is not capable of pulling EPG data OTA (over-the-air) instead requiring an overly elaborate system that relies on a permanent, always on Internet connection. This also raises some privacy concerns as ‘anonymous’ data, which is not entirely anonymous as Microsoft asks for your postcode during set up, is fed back to Microsoft which can include recording / watching trends and general EPG usage. Hitherto my media center system has not been networked. Considering it is in the opposite corner of my house, and I do not stream my recordings or have formal media shares, I never felt the need to network it. It was nice to just have a static, secure system without any security programs or periodic updates – now security monitoring of my media center has been added to my list of digital chores.

None the less, I was determined to give it a fair go, so I added a wifi adaptor, added some plug-ins and configured everything. After spending eight hours getting everything working, playing around and testing… I went back to my custom build. Not all the problems can be put squarely at Microsoft’s feet however. Elonex declared bankruptcy shortly after launching this range and the malicious part of me can see why, if this mediacenter is the sum total of their expertise.

Whilst the case looked rather nice from the outside, the hardware and the design of the internals is what really lets it down. The only element Elonex got right was the noise (or lack thereof) – the media center barely gives out a murmur when idle due to only a since fan which is housed inside the power supply. It runs at 690rpm, which draws air over the CPU heatsink (which has four heat pipes) and directly out the side of the case. However, I stressed ‘at idle’ before for a reason. When the media center does anything the incredibly noisy hard drive starts very audibly clicking and crunching away and it completely lets the machine down.

However that’s not the worst thing about this mediacenter. Due to the fact that there is only one very slow fan the airflow in the case is restricted to circulating around the motherboard tray, the processor then out the power supply. The harddrive and PCI / AGP cards are completely neglected. This point was slammed home when the harddrive consistently reported temperatures of high 50s to 62 degrees Celsius!!! Worse still, when I idled the system, that heat didn’t dissipate. The hard drive is locked into place with a pretentious plastic locking mechanism which neither improves the accessibility of the drive bay nor decreases the vibrations from the drive. There is no thermal (or thermally viable) contact between the hard drive and the case and as such, the hard drive is left smouldering away with no way to cool down predictably with next to no drop in temperature. There is a valid point that maintaining electronic components at a set temperature prolongs their life by avoiding constantly repeating thermal differentials (i.e. heating and cooling) however the fact remains that 60+ degrees centigrade is far too hot for a hard drive. Although my brief research on this did not yield any definitive threshold, most sources agree that 50-55 degrees Centigrade is about the absolute maximum recommended operating temperature.

Couple this practically zero thermal conduction with a lack of airflow and you have a recipie for a very short hard drive life. Even worse, this thermal issue was not limited to HDD, the south-bridge and GFX heatsinks were equally poorly cooled and get unpleasantly hot to the touch.

Worst of all, it is just slow. CpuID and the BIOS disagreed with each other about the exact Intel processor that powers the system. I believe it to be either an Intel Pentium 4 530 (at 3.06Ghz) or a Celeron D 345. There is no way the much older Athlon 2600+ processor with the same RAM should be out performing this setup and yet it does so without breaking a sweat.

All in all, very disappointing. A remarkable demonstration of technical ignorance on the part of Elonex. But hey, I didn’t pay for it and now I have an extra DVB-T tuner back in my original, self built machine.

Design (cosmetic) : 8/10 - Pleasing, with a nice Hi-fi look.

Design (technical) : 2/10 – Poor components poorly arranged.

Cooling : 6/10 - Great CPU and powersupply cooling, but everything else is woefully neglected.

Acoustics : 6/10 - Silent until it has to touch the harddrive, still a good effort though

Connectivity : 8/10 – Lots of connectors for digital Audio and Video

Capacity : 5/10 - 200Gb harddrive with a portion taken for recovery. I wouldn’t trust it though and by modern standards it is rather anemic.

Overall : 2/10 – Great for free, if I paid anything for it I would have been annoyed.

Choplifter III – 15 years on

The game I briefly want to talk about was released over 15 years ago on the SNES, I played it back then and found it thoroughly enjoyable. I recently picked it back up and thought I would give it a whirl, given that my media center has a SNES emulator – and I must say I very pleasantly surprised. It is very easy to be carried away by simply drooling over improved graphics in new game releases. This can save all but the poorest modern releases, however, games like Portal on the other hand, bring us crashing back down to earth showing us that the way the game plays can (and normally is) far more important than any visual polish the game studio applies with a trowel afterwards.

I didn’t realise until I did a bit of background research for this post, but the Choplifter ‘franchise’ began way back in 1982 on the Apple II and has enjoyed a release on the gameboy as well prior to the final version on the SNES. The gameplay elements do not appear to have changed much, the game is still a sideways scrolling action shooter, but they have been perfected in Choplifter III.

So, what’s the story? Simply, you are a helicopter pilot who is tasked with rescuing a quota of downed pilots or hostages in each mission. This sounds simpler than it is, as the game throws you from Jungle to Naval encounters, culminating in a vicious city fight followed by an intense and unexpected setting for the final ‘world’. You pick up a variety of special weapons along the way and the enemies get progressively tougher as you go along. For those who find the game too easy, there is a non-’practice’ difficulty setting which is a lot less forgiving.

Below is a video of some of the early action made by someone else.

All in all, the game is a little short – taking between 3 and 4 hours depending on player ability, but it is varied enough to be a lot of fun. I get the impression that it was not one of the major releases back when it came out and as such may have been overlooked by many gamers which is a shame.

Graphics: 8/10 – Nothing special, but fairly detailed and pleasing to the eye.

Sound : 4/10 – Unimaginative, the main let down of the game.

Gameplay: 7.5/10 – Simple premise, not enough reward for rescuing extra hostages.

Overall: 8/10 A classic, casual game that is worth picking up and trying.

ATi are back in the saddle

We have been hearing rumours of a 480 stream processor equipped card from ATi for a while now. Featuring crazy capacities of GDDR5 memory and even coming with its own cold fusion generator which glows red and pats you on the ass periodically telling you ‘Well done my pet, now worship me’ ….

Ok, so most of that is not true, but some is! ATi have announced in the last few days two flagship cards from the new R700 range – the 4870 and the budget 4850. Rather than the 480 stream processors, both cards feature an even more impressive number – 800 (!) clocked at 750Mhz and 625Mhz respectively. A good preview and very promising benchmarks can be found over at gamespot. Its great to see ATi finally bringing out products to be excited about, rather than the recent damp squibs like current generation Phenom and the R600 series graphics cards.

Oyster card security broken.

Oyster cards are cards containing RFIDs which facilitate transport on the London Underground (and overground) networks. I had been wondering for a while how exactly they worked, but not finding much detailed information online I based my conclusions initially on my observations.

Here is what I have deduced.

1. Each RFID card has a unique ID which is recorded during each transaction with a card scanner.

Any Oyster user can access their usage history, either online or via a Oyster top up machine. This presents an interesting problem – if you can check up on where your card has been, what is to stop Transport for London from using the same information? Either individually or as part of the collective, it presents a very detailed picture of individual and mass use of the transport network.

2. The RFID works passively and contains a small amount of EEPROM.

Given that the Oyster card needs to be ‘tapped’ on the reader every time, it is safe to assume that the RFID does not have an internal power source. Instead, it only becomes ‘active’ with the energy it obtains via induction from the electromagnetic field close to the surface of the Oyster touch point. This energy is sufficient to power up the (presumably) CMOS device which then sends the encrypted data to the reader. It is not clear at this point whether the reader then sends back a response with the new balance to the card, or whether the entire ‘transaction’ process is done on the RFID card.

3. The information stored on the EEPROM is encrypted, most likely with symmetrical cryptography.

4. When scanned, the information from the Oyser card is used, it is not pulled from a central server.

When updating the Oyster card the card itself must be touched against a scanner. If this is not done the balance is not applied. I initially believed all balance and travel card information was securely stored on a ‘mothership’ server. This clearly can’t be entirely the case. Although, when a top-up is bought online, it is stored in the Oyster system until the Oyster card is touched on a reader somewhere in London. This suggests there is a ‘mothership’ server which records all this information, although it is likely it is only linked to newsagent kiosks and top-up points, not the barriers themselves otherwise there would be no need to store the information on the card.

5. Not only can the RFID store a balance, it can also store season tickets for a variety of durations and zone validities.

However, the title of the post suggests the security is broken, and indeed it is, although not through my investigations. A Dutch team took this a step further.

It turns out almost all my assumptions were correct, the Dutch team used a portable device to ‘touch-in’ on an Oyster reader, this disclosed the encryption key used on the Oyster device which they then stole. In possession of this, not only could they decrypt any Oyster card to determine how the information was stored but they could also theoretically generate any balance or season ticket, which encrypted properly would be indistinguishable from the real (paid for) thing.

However, to avoid no doubt countless hours of reverse engineering, the Dutch team brushed up against commuters on the tube and wirelessly interrogated their cards, stealing the information that was on them. This allowed the team to effectively clone cards which were valid, entitling them to free travel.

But the story does not end there, it turns out the company that makes the RFIDs for Oyster cards is called MIFARE, and their chips are used in a wide variety of sensitive installations in a variety of countries.