Brett Hutley's Blog » technology

Hacking the EZ430 Chronos Watch on the Mac

brett — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 21:15:08 +0000

Today my TI EZ430 Chronos Watch arrived, and I spent a little bit of time hacking it on my MacBook Air. It turns out that even though the documentation seems to require either a Windows machine or a Linux box, you can communicate with the watch from the Mac by modifying the serial port information in the TCL source. I learnt this from a Google Groups post, and I've copied the modified TCL source onto my Github account.

I then tried compiling the OpenChronos source code to build some custom firmware. In order to build the firmware, I had to install the following Mac Ports:

sudo port install msp430-gcc
sudo port install msp430-binutils (actually is probably installed with msp430-gcc)
sudo port install msp430-gdb
sudo port install msp430-libc

I then did a msp430-gcc -print-search-dirs to find out where msp430-gcc include files were. For me they install to the /opt/local/msp430/include/ directory. Following the Readme for OpenChronos, I did a sudo cp gcc/intrinsics.h /opt/local/msp430/include/.

When I tried compiling OpenChronos, the build failed with lots of warnings and quite a few errors. This is because OpenChronos was built using the older msp430-gcc4 project. I fixed the compiler warnings/errors and built an image. I copied the generated build/eZChronos.txt file over to my Chronos-Control-Center directory, and uploaded the image to my watch. Everything seemed to work OK, and the watch is currently running my newly compiled custom firmware!

My modified OpenChronos source is available from GitHub.

Unique, Secure, Memorable Passwords

brett — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 14:06:45 +0000

An easy way to generate a unique, memorable but secure password for each website or service you visit is to apply the following recipe:

Start with a base word. This can be anything, but the weirder the better. This will stay consistent across your passwords. For the purposes of explaining this technique, the base word will be "Redux".
Next take the name of the website or service. Let's say we are creating a password for Reddit. Take a number of specific letters from the name. Let's say that we always take the first 2 letters from the site name. This gives us the letters 'R' and 'e'. If you want, instead of taking the first 2 letters you could take the first and last letter, or the first 3 letters. It doesn't matter. What matters is to always take the same number of characters from the same position of each website.
Next, use an algorithm. This algorithm will be unique to you, but is a way of mixing the letters you have extracted from the website into your base word. A simple algorithm might be to prepend the letters to your base word. Your password then becomes "ReRedux". A slightly better algorithm would be to increment the letters by one character. This means that "Re" -> "Sf". Then merge the resultant characters into the first and third positions of your base word. Your password for Reddit then becomes "SRfedux".

This combination of using a unique base word, that is consistent across all your passwords, but modifying it using an algorithm based on the website name will allow you to construct passwords that you can remember, but are different for each site you need to log in to.

EDIT: OK, based on the Reddit comment thread it turns out that I didn't properly explain the rationale for using a combination of the website name and some constant stream of characters is to try and create a unique password for each individual site. You want to have a unique password per site because a lot of sites store your password in plain-text. If one site gets cracked, you don't want the attackers to be able to compromise your identity on other sites you have an account on. Also, using a passphrase or the first letters of words in a passphrase as your base word is obviously more secure than using a dictionary word.

EDIT 2: It seems people are worried about the entropy of the generated passwords. Obviously, they are not completely random, but to give you an idea on how secure they can appear, here are some passwords generated from the same base word and algorithm for different sites:

Site	Password
reddit	u-gCv*9^x%
slashdot	8D%4sXaN05
hackernews	z-hRvL9&p%

The algorithm that generated these passwords was fairly simple. A slightly more complex algorithm would generate different length passwords. The key takeaway is that if an attacker gets hold of the password for the reddit site, it is extremely unlikely that they will be able to reverse-engineer the passwords for the other sites.

Written by Robot

Bio-Monitoring and the Jawbone UP

brett — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 14:06:56 +0000

I just picked up my Jawbone UP from the Post Office last night, so thought I'd post my first impressions.

Firstly, the wristband is pretty awesome. Mine is black and is made out of a rubbery plastic that feels really comfortable. The wristband itself is supposed to be water resistant so you can wear it in the shower. At one end of the wristband is a metal cap which, when removed, reveals a mini-jack plug for plugging the band into your iPhone. The other end is a button, that switches the band into measuring different types of activities - exercise, walking and sleeping.

To get your activity data with your iPhone, you need to plug it into the audio socket of the phone and press the button to sync. So far this hasn't been too onerous, but I can imagine it being a little bit of a pain eventually. The iPhone app allows you to track your time spent exercising, your movements and sleep patterns. You can get it to vibrate if you have been inactive for too long, or to wake you up in the morning.

Overall, I'm really excited about this technology. It's had a bit of a negative review here, but I think the Jawbone UP is going to be great to play with!

Rewiring the Brain

brett — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 14:18:40 +0000

There is an absolutely awesome bit of Neal Stephenson's book Reamde, that goes like this: The brain "was sort of like the electrical system of Mogadishu. A whole lot was going on in Mogadishu that required copper wire for conveyance of power and information, but there was only so much copper to go around, and so what wasn't being actively used tended to get pulled down by militias and taken crosstown to beef up some power-hungry warlord's private, improvised power network. As with copper in Mogadishu, so with neurons in the brain. The brains of people who did unbelievably boring shit for a living showed dark patches in the zones responsible for job-related processes, since all those almost-never-exercised neurons got pulled down and trucked somewhere else and used to beef up the circuits used to keep track of NCAA tournament brackets and celebrity makeovers."

In the silicon.com post "Your brain vs technology: How our wired world is changing the way we think", Baroness Susan Greenfield is quoted, professor of Synaptic Pharmacology at Lincoln College, Oxford: "If the human brain is exquisitely adapted to the environment, which it is, if the environment is changing, which it is, then it's a given the brain will change". She is concerned by how our brain changes as a result of increasingly spending our time in front of technology, that areas of the cortex may be going dark as we spend our lives immersed in Big Brother and Facebook.

It seems to me that in order to get good things out of our interactions with technology, we should focus on how we can use our screen time to exercise areas of our brain in ways that wouldn't normally happen.

A good example of this was a recent post on Scientific American called "In the mind of others - Reading fiction can strengthen your social ties and even change your personality". This article is about research that indicates how reading fiction may help social interaction by building experience on how to interact with other people, without physically interacting with other people. As people empathise with characters in the book and those characters relate to other characters in the story, they build up this mental database on how to behave. This mental database helps with later, "meat-space" interactions.

I remember reading related work on using virtual reality to overcome phobias through repeatedly experiencing a fear-inducing situation in a safe, virtual environment.

Is it just our thinking and behaviour we can affect through computer interaction? The BBC had a news story about how a virtual gym could help with weight loss which suggests that maybe our virtual experiences also affect our body. What are the limits for this? This sounds like a wonderful area to explore. How can we re-wire the brain in beneficial ways using our computers?

Kanban

brett — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 13:08:53 +0000

I was browsing a list of tools and services for a lean startup a couple of days ago, when I noticed that many of tools implement a Kanban methodology. I had never heard of Kanban, so I took a quite trip over to Wikipedia.

"Kanban is a method for developing products with an emphasis on just-in-time delivery while not overloading the developers". Hmmmm, that sounds good. Upon further reading, I realised that this is the methodology that the introductary video at Trello was aimed towards. I have been playing around with Trello for a couple of weeks, but hadn't really got my head around how best to apply it.

My curiosity was piqued, so I went and bought one of the seminal books on applying Kanban to the agile software development process - Kanban, by David Anderson.

In the book, David talks about applying 5 principles to the software development process:

Visualize the workflow. This is the benefit that Trello brings to the process.
Limit Work in Progress. This means that work is "pulled" from another part of the workflow, when it is needed.
Manage Flow. The flow of work through the system needs to be quantitatively analysed.
Make Process Policies Explicit.
Improve Collaboratively.

It's definitely a methodology I'll be trying to apply to my own startups.

Were the Luddites Right?

brett — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 13:36:14 +0000

The Luddites were a 19th century anti-industrialisation movement (and militia), who believed that their jobs were at risk because of the industrialisation of manufacturing. They proceeded to try and destroy mechanical looms in a vain attempt to turn back the rising tide of industrialisation. These days anyone seen as a "Luddite" is perceived to be backward and anti-technology.

But were the Luddites right about the consequences of technological progress? The Luddite Fallacy states that the argument that technological progress decreases the amount of jobs is fallacious, because increases in productivity does not mean that employers will keep their production constant. Rather, employers will increase their production to suit available demand.

The Economist has a post that points out that the Luddite Fallacy is only a fallacy as long as new technology increases capital, without reducing the need for human labour. But what happens if technology increases the capital and replaces the need for unskilled human labour?

The Luddites may have been a revolution or two short of the mark, springing from the industrial rather than the computer revolution, but maybe they weren't wrong about the long-term consequences of technological progress, believing that it would destroy jobs, and cause greater income inequality. Smashing the looms is obviously not a solution to the socio-economic problems of the structural changes to our society, but neither is burying our heads in the sand.

Race Against The Machine

brett — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 15:52:11 +0000

I just finished reading the Kindle book Race Against The Machine, a book I thoroughly recommend. This was the driver of the NPR article I blogged about recently.
The book is mostly oriented towards the US, although the issues they discuss seem to be prevalent across all major economies. The authors make the case that technological improvements are severely impacting every job market except those for highly-skilled individuals.

They argue, as I have argued, that the current employment crisis is caused by structural factors such as increased productivity due to technology, rather than cyclical or stagnation factors. We are simply living in a world where the educated and skilled are able to contribute to the economy in a disproportionate way, and the less educated/skilled are forced to compete for the fewer and fewer jobs that are currently too expensive to automate. This leads to money flowing from the workers to the owners of the business, which is an unsustainable situation for the long term.

The authors point out that to a large extent, we operate in a "winner take all" society. Technology enables the best and fastest-moving in the business to capture the bulk of a market. That in turn provides a strong incentive for those with capital to further invest in technology, creating a self-perpetuating cycle. Not only is this situation self-perpetuating, but increased capital allows winners a disproportionate advantage in the race to take advantage of another business opportunity.

The positive news is that as we use technology to expand the frontiers of innovation, this will in turn create an exponential increase in the possibilities for further innovation.

Written by Robot

brett — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 13:58:01 +0000

I've just read two blog posts on creating written content programatically. The first was the article How I automated my writing career by Robbie Allen. This article gives a brief description of how the author's company generates web-site content automatically using the quantitative analysis of data.

The second blog post is about generating a Monty Python parody using markov chains. Even though the code is very simple, it generates very convincing nonsense!

How long will it be before the prose in our stories, the plots on our TV series, the lyrics in our songs are all machine generated?

Rage against the machine

brett — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 14:23:14 +0000

NPR has a story about How Technology Is Eliminating Higher-Skill Jobs. It features IBM's Watson System, that can beat the world's best human Jeopardy competitors. This technology is currently being used to automate the fields of law and medicine, so a lot of very technical jobs will disappear from some quite high-paying and respected professions.

Rather than rage against the machine, I think we need to embrace it. The survivors of the infopocalypse will be those who leverage the technology. Bring on that A.I. augmentation! I'm not sure what the socio-economic/political consequences will be if the trend for increasing unemployment continues. I am sure that we can't stuff that genie back in the bottle, and our society will need to adjust accordingly.

How to get Maplin’s USB Microscope working on a Mac

brett — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 13:54:48 +0000

I just brought Maplin's USB Digital Microsoft with 400x magnification, which is advertised as having Windows-only drivers. System Profiler identified the chipset as being from Vimicro Corporation. I went to the Driver Download section of their website and downloaded (and installed) the DRV_ZC0301PLus_070305 driver. I then opened up Photo Booth, and was able to select the Vimicro camera as the video source. What I should have done was just try and access the Microscope using Photo Booth before I installed the driver, as I half suspect that there was no actual need to install that driver.

Close-up of a new razor blade

Please try to use the microscope with Photo Booth first before downloading the driver, and let me know in the comments if that works.

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