I STILL BLOG.

It's been ages, and I mean ages since I have blogged anything. Mostly because I have nothing to share that anyone would want to read. I have somehow managed to fill my days and nights cooking, cleaning, doing home improvement projects, and sleeping. As for spare time at work - I don't have any. I am too busy working. But as I am wrapping up work orders that I have had for months and my phone is not ringing, I am feeling a slight sigh of relief.

I suppose I could work on my Android projects, but they aren't really making me much money any more, and I have for the most part abandoned them. I had high hopes that PVault would do better in the MiKandi market. But after a few attempts to revitalize and update the app, I am not really seeing any reward from it. Some of the worst apps I have ever made still bring me the most money. And for the record, we are talking about a few cents a day. ;-)

I have been looking into streaming media players to replace my Wii as my primary Netflix device and it looks like I will probably be buying a Roku sometime soon. Yesterday I noticed that they have a development kit and it got me excited about the possibilities for building my own "channels" for streaming content. But I'm not sure I have the desire to run out and learn an entirely new language so that I can pay someone to stream my content to the masses - and then wonder if advertisers are ever going to pay me.

So hey, Ray is still alive and well. And he may (or may not) be thinking of new things to do with this site to justify the hosting fees.

Google Market Account Banned (Happy Thanksgiving)

Well, congratulations to all of you assholes who went through the trouble of downloading my applications only to flag them, and/or leave retarded comments such as "Flagged". I'm not sure why people feel the need to play policemen (or policewomen, or in the case of Cashelle, police-transexual), but consider yourselves a special breed of asshole and take this day to congratulate yourself between your bible readings, hating of gays, and watching recorded episodes of Fox and Friends on your DVR. THIS ... is YOUR day.

By the way ... you are aware that for $25, I can be right back at this? And I can easily make $40 a day in advertising revenue, per application. But hey, enjoy this moment. Because I am going to take some time off to enjoy the holiday and work on some all new and ultra-offensive applications - just to piss you off.

In the new year I will be working on getting some new applications on the MiKandi market (which allows mature content) and I will be restoring all of my old apps there to bring them back to life. Be sure to check out my stuff there.

In related news ... Google now has content ratings to ensure that you are targeting your applications to the right audience. The categories are "All", "Pre-teen", "Teen", and "Mature". That would indicate that you can create applications with mature content, right? Wrong! All the same guidelines apply that applied before. So if your application contains something to do with gambling, it should be rated mature. But only play-gambling. Not real gambling. And if your application deals with adult-ish content, it should be rated mature. Just make sure it has nothing to do with pornography, nudity, or ... anything sexual. Yeah. I don't get it either!

Look for an update here soon folks, and HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL YOU TURKEYS!

Dr. Zoidberg Soundboard

After creating my Professor soundboard and updating it several times I decided it was time to branch off and attempt to create a new soundboard using my existing design. With that, I created the long awaited Dr. Zoidberg soundboard for Droid phones.

If you are a Zoidberg fan (or even a Futurama fan) you need this on your phone.

Coming soon - Zapp Brannigan!

Good News Everyone!

I have posted my first application to the Android Marketplace. The "Ultimate Professor Farnsworth Soundboard". I have spent countless hours pouring through Futurama episodes these past two days and then had to figure out how to package them up. You actually have to pay to publish apps to the Google Market and so I am asking for a very nominal fee of $.99 for it to recoup my 'investment'.

I actually still have a lot of episodes to go through so I plan on updating this one as well as putting out a few others (Bender, Zapp, and Zoidberg). In the meantime ... if you have a Droid phone ... get on over to the market and buy my app!

Cracking the "DROID CODE"

Recently, the folks at Verizon/Droid started airing a new Droid X commercial featuring a couple of astronaut types exploring some sort of moon-like base. It's pretty creepy and cryptic - and it ends with an obvious clue around frame 0:59.
The code is "JXYDAQWQYD". Some clever folks over at Droid Life figured out that there is a place to put these codes on the droiddoes.com website. When you enter this code into the box, you get the "transmission log" from the astonauts. Pretty neat.

Is there more to the code itself? It seems like a really easy crypt of some sort so I got out some scrap paper and tried to reverse it. The code actually says "THINK AGAIN". And with that - I made a simple letter chart. What you will find is that the words that they chose to reveal the code actually leave letter gaps and made it VERY easy to crack. Here is a letter chart which you can use to perhaps crack "future codes".



I have to assume that there is more to the "secret page" so I started looking for additional clues. The page iteself drops some interesting word clues such as "Shaefer" (who must be the unfortunate astronaut whose cracked and damaged helmet they pass). And also some numbers in the form of an energy blast that passes the new crew (+240, +46, +0). It seems like GPS coordinates so I tried my luck at that and didn't get very far.

Google maps took me to a place in in the UK called "MotorSolve". I didn't think it was at all related. But the address of the place is 64 Cecil St. One of the astronauts in the commercial is wearing a helmet with his ID of "C-64" stamped on the side. This could be a far stretch. Perhaps I am conspiring too much. ;-) Also, I have been at this all morning and I need to shower now.

If anyone can find other codes that work - share your findings with me!

USB Serial Adapter Drivers for Chromium

A few weeks ago I downloaded Chromium OS Flow and tried it out on my netbook using a jump drive. I really liked it a lot, although the USB device was slow and had a tendency to stall out. So I pulled out an 8GB SDHC SD card that I had been hoarding and installed Chromium Flow to that. And all I can say is *WOW*. This OS is awesome. It boots (and shuts down) on a dime. The interface is quite slick. And it has a full screen terminal with apt-get and a lot of installable software.

But then I ran into a problem. Lately I have been resetting a lot of router passwords using a console cable (don't ask). To perform this technique, you need a serial port. No laptop or netbook made in the past ten years has a serial port on it so I usually get by with a USB to serial adapter (aka "a serial dongle"). We happen to have one at work, which was lucky. Except it didn't work at all in Chromium.

Long story short ...
1) I had to use gparted on a jump drive to resize some partitions. Chromium Flow is a 2GB "image". So I needed to move some boundaries to take advantage of all that empty space on my SD card.
2) I had to relocate /var/cache/apt. The tiny slice that the directory sits on didn't leave much room for installing software. I moved the directory to /, and then created a symbolic link to it.
3) I installed the build-essential and kernel source (2.6.31) packages.
4) I unzipped the kernel source, turned on all of the USB serial drivers as modules, and then built a kernel.
5) Now I have a little stack of kernel modules for a slew of USB to serial adapters.

I can load it with insmod ./pl2303.ko. If I do a dmesg | tail I can see that it loaded properly. Now when I plug in my dongle, it gets a serial device assignment whereas before all I got was a notice telling me that it was plugged in.

If you are in need of a USB serial adapter driver for Chromium flow, just use mine. This should save you a couple of hours. ;-) You can download the bundle of kernel modules here: http://www.oddree.com/rayhaque/usbserial.tgz

Tomorrow I can fire up minicom and start rocking out Cisco console ports with my little netbook and not have to drag around a 25 pound P.O.S. with Windows XP and Hyperterminal! Hooray!

** EDIT ***
I guess I should tell anyone who might download this how you should use it.
1) Get the file downloaded. From terminal ...
wget http://www.oddree.com/rayhaque/usbserial.tgz
2) Untar/zgip it...
tar -xzvf usbserial.tgz
3) Move the directory into the right place alongside your other kernel modules ...
mv usbserial /lib/modules/2.6.31-4-intel-menlow/kernel/drivers/usb
4) Change to that directory and optionally rename it to what it would normally be...
cd /lib/modules/2.6.31-4-intel-menlow/kernel/drivers/usb/usbserial && move usbserial serial
5) Make the kernel aware that there are new modules out there ...
depmod -a
6) Now, load your module. If you were using the same one as me ...
modprobe pl2303
7) Check the dmesg output for clues as to whether or not the driver is working ...
dmesg

ENJOY! :-)

"Too long WEP key" Problem Resolved?

I know many of you using IZ2S have had trouble with getting your Zipit to accept a 128-bit WEP key in hexadecimal format (26 characters).

I may have traced the problem to the use of double quotation marks in the configuration file. It seems that wpa_supplicant assumes that if you are wrapping your key in quotation marks, then it must be ASCII.

I have made some changes to the wifi script which will now ask the user if they are inputting a Hexadecimal or ASCII key. Ideally it would be nice to have the Zipit figure this out on it's own and not even have to ask the user. But I am providing a quick fix for those of you have been struggling with this.

First, you will want to get the latest version of IZ2S which at present is the BETA. If you are all ready running the BETA, don't re-download it. It's unchanged.

http://www.oddree.com/zipit/Z2S-v205-BETA.zip

Then, you will want to grab this new script ...

http://www.oddree.com/zipit/setup-wifi.sh

Put it in /mnt/sd0/bin or the "bin folder" of your SD card. You can replace or overwrite the current file. Then, reboot and choose yes when asked if you want to change your wireless settings. You should get a new question after choosing WEP. If you have a long 26 character key, you should choose "H)exadecimal".

Please post your success and failures to me in the comments area. I can't do much testing here without reconfiguring my own access point (and my wife wouldn't appreciate that too much because she is using it).

Also - sorry for the absence lately. I hope to be back to developing soon!