Git 'er done

I'm really really digging git. I've been able to pull tons of projects with little more than a single command line, and it just feels cleaner than cvs/svn. I'm certainly no Linus Torvalds fanboy, but when he has a need he writes a damn elegant solution.

As far as the mini2440 board is concerned, I'm in the process of writing some embedded apps for it. The first of which is a cheops-like tool. It'll be written using the GTK toolkit, but will be closed source. My plan for the device is to develop a suite of software for different models of device, and the first model will be for security testing / network analysis. My thought is that if I can put out a quality product, and charge 1/2 of what the competition would charge, I will be able to clean up. Even if I only sell a few hundred units, it'll be some spare cash for my daughter's college fund (yeah, never thought I'd write those words this young).

Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. There are a lot of features I really need to have before the device will go anywhere. Plus, there are a lot of features that the features need. For instance, because the keypad display will end up being so small, the better approach to a 'keyboard' interface would be handwriting recognition. However, that's a pretty tough nut to crack on its own, and I'm not sure I have the gusto to get it done in such a small amount of time. Still, if I can get a prototype done by December, and still meet my deadlines at work (meaning there ain't no rest for the weary... not that a screaming 1 month old would let me sleep anyway). We'll see how that goes.

u-Boot on a FriendlyARM

So, I recently ordered a FriendlyARM development kit, with jtag & cmos camera. It's a small handheld unit with touch-screen, usb, rj-45, and SD card reader. The goal is to build a portable diagnostics device for anything I could imagine.

It came pre-loaded with a 2.6.13 series kernel, Qtopia, and a few odds and ends worth of tools. As for the bootloader, it comes with vivi, which is a fairly lightweight flash loader. It used a different version of gcc to build each component, from vivi to qtopia to the kernel. Plus, it doesn't feel like I can "get under the hood" as easily with their versions of things.

So, first order of business was to get u-boot running in place of vivi.

The vivi image is located in both the nor and the nand flash on the board. I used the nor flash as a bootstrap to put uboot on the nand flash. To do this, I first did a git pull from a public repository for the mini2440, as well as getting a publicly compiled mini2440 unified toolchain (not from sourcery, or whatever it's called). I built the u-boot image, and ended up with a nand512 image, which I then copied to the nand memory area via xmodem (minicom is great). Set execution to that point, and then bam, flashed the nand with the uboot image (I got it again via tftp, but that was so that I could use uboot to update the bbt which is a bad-block table).

Now, I'm building a 2.6.31 series kernel (the latest) and will be building a custom system which includes the latest qtopia as well as metasploit, nmap(with a frontend), and a few other neat security tools. We'll see if I have enough space (64MB of flashable space is not much).

More updates later.

Another Brick in the wall

I've been playing with dynamic symbol loading. It's actually pretty cool! The gist is, you don't know what another developer will be doing, so you try and provide enough hooks so that they can get done what they need. However, if you give that person too much power, there's always the chance they will abuse it and then your users are left blaming you for some nefarious code someone else wrote.

The approach I'm taking is to have a bunch of places where the developer can hook, and give them copies of the actual data that I use internally. That way, I can run sanity checks before I decide to use that data myself. This gives me a bit of extra control, at the cost of some performance.

But, no system is bulletproof, and this approach still doesn't prevent someone from breaking things. Only makes it so that they probably have to be intentionally trying to break things instead of being able to claim that their buffer overflow which manages to get a remote shell up is a lucky accident.

AMG Return of the Monkey!

A year and half later...

... Our intrepid hero plays World of Warcraft. Gets good enough to down Illidan (the end boss man). Is among the roughly 5% of players in the world who have reached such heights. Our hero is saddened by his realization that this is not a societally relevant achievement.

... Our intrepid hero breaks the laws of Massachusetts and launches fireworks on the 4th of July. Using only consumer grade product, and with his brother, a display of aerial IEDs lights the night sky, in a spectacle which surpasses most local professional grade pyrotechnical displays. People cheer.

... Our intrepid hero has wandered the beaten path of engineering. Fork()ing off a little at work, he decides to investigate the amazing technology that is - Fuzzers. He writes one. The world is scarier.

... Our intrepid hero does manly married guy things and will be a father before the end of July.

zen and coding

I'm gonna change it up again, and talk a little about the zen side of software. I think that everyone, no matter how much they choose to fight it, has a certain activity that puts them into a trance-like state where they hyper focus on that one activity and get more in touch with themselves. For me, that activity is engineering. More specifically, software engineering.

What prompted this thought? I started my work day today by writing software. I know, an odd thing for a software engineer to do is write software, right? All jokes aside, when I finished working and reworking one particular piece I noticed the following:

1. About 4 hours had passed.
2. I was intensely hungry.
3. I received 4 emails (when I get emails an annoying pop up clutters my screen)
4. I had written a lot of code.

That got me thinking: How did I end up losing track of so much time, ignoring basic bodily necessities, and even ignoring other thing happening on screen? It's a scary thought, really. That one can become so entrenched in an activity that they lose track of themselves, their environment, and their basic survival instincts.

The worst is that when that trance-like state ends, there is little to no recollection of what happened. Almost as if some primal part of the brain had taken over, and disabled any short term memory processing to squeeze out all the processing power it could. I'm not sure if that's the most accurate assessment of how the brain works, but that's how it feels.

I know I'm not the only one who gets these periods of asceticism. I use that word because it actually fits very closely with what some religions view as meditation. My understanding of meditation is that it is an attempt to release the spirit (if such a thing exists) from the body and reach some higher enlightenment. I can't say for sure whether or not I reach that while I'm coding in these trances. I can say, though, that some of my best code is born from these trances. Usually, said code is elegant, descriptive, and clean. This is in contrast to my normal code which is painfully brutish. In fact, I can go back right now and look at most of the code I've written over my lifetime (I keep a CVS repository with almost everything I've done since 1998, when I was programming more than just 'hello world' or a ridiculous variant). Instantly, the difference is evident. The projects which I spent a long time working on over a small period of sittings (usually 1 sitting would be 5-12 hours) look much better than the projects where I spent a lot of short sittings fitting the stuff together. I can even see where I got sloppy, and had some pressing interruption which I was forced to deal with and broke me from my development.

So, is there a zen to coding? Some hidden interpretation, whose meaning we must glean? I'd like to think that we can discover worth by doing the work that many deem worthless. Not many would think that developing software could add personal value (financial is a different story). I'd like to think that I have.

1 month later

My heap is done, mostly. I can do dynamic sized allocations, and have pooled allocations from specific buckets. Just set the config options, compile and voila! I'm gonna keep it underwraps for now, and probably either sell it as part of a platform package (doing BSP as a consultant) or release it open source if I can't do that.

I started work on an encryption suite. It's pretty cool, as right now I can generate a very large block based on a seed set of 7 4-byte integers. That gives a total of 224-bit encryption. Yeah, it isn't 256 bit, but I could expand it. The best part is that the seeds rotate, so changing one part of the seed will change the whole seed. I haven't proven that the resultant keys are unique, yet, but I'm working on it. Because they use 3 different psuedo-random sequences, I have to prove that each sequence will have unique values. The three sequences I'm using are Fibbonacci, Farey, and Look-And-Say. I'll have links to them later.

The settop box is working as well as I'd expect. I want to upgrade the capture card to an HD based card, but I haven't seen any good ones on the market yet that are supported by linux. I'll wait a few months for a driver to be written (don't have time or patience to write a driver). Once that happens, I'll upgrade to all HD. My parents already have it and it looks amazing.

As far as google goes, I didn't get it. Oh well, there's other ponds out there. The odd thing is, they contacted _me_ about a job, not the other way around. Usually you don't fill a position when you go out and contact someone, but most likely they had an amazing candidate.

As for sycamore, I'm writing the software architecture. I'm a little rusty on my writing of technical documents, so I'm expecting a few rounds of reviews (1/week) until the final review version is ready.

That's all for now.

PS, BS, and all manner of S

I'm a touch frustrated at the moment. It seems that most software architects at companies really feel like they have the only valid opinion. Since starting at Sycamore, I've felt exactly how I felt at Airvana: namely, like the corner-stool dunce of the class. No one listens to them; everyone feels as though they are inherently superior. I've found one person here who's taken the time to listen to my thoughts, and routinely comes to the same conclusion. But after seeing the way that architecture responds to his questions / concerns as well, I just get the feeling that he's in the same boat.

We have one consultant here who worked on the wireless technology for one vendor/operator pair. His word is taken as gospel. I've got the same amount of experience with wireless. My word is brushed off to the side. The consultant routinely has the same concerns and thoughts that I have. If I voice them, no response. If he voices, then there's dialog.

Honestly, if this keeps up, I may have a real reason to go to google besides "It's Google." Too much patent seeking (PS) and not enough real work. Too much (BS) from a lot of people that don't understand technology.