Kalimat al-Mutafalsif

In High School I got a kick out of telling people “I speak Egyptian!” Back then people assumed I meant ancient Egyptian, not Arabic (though at the time I did not in fact speak the Egyptian dialect, but it was still fun to say), and we’d all have a good laugh. Ok, I’d have a good laugh, but then if it weren’t for me laughing I’d be an extremely dour kinda guy. Jokes aside I’ve decided to learn ancient Egyptian, specifically Hieroglyphics, because they’re just darn cool. Look deep inside yourself and tell me that when you saw Mummy (or Mummy Returns if you’re a true man!) you did not think “Dang I wish I could read the book of life and find a cute archaeologist.” Ya, I didn’t think you could. So I’ve started learning, and man does the linguist in me love it.

Happy Thanksgiving! I’m spending the break catching back up on the state of Bluetooth security because, hey, I love the subject. Everyone has a phone with Bluetooth, just about, and many overlook it as a security hole because they feel there’s nothing insidious that can be done with just replacing wires with some radio broadcasts. I’ll give a quick rundown on how to get Bluetooth working under Linux, then the software I use, and finally give a tool I wrote watching the Dallas Game to speed up identification of Bluetooth devices.

In high school I was a voracious reader, but since coming to college I found that my time goes everywhere else first, and reading is just an afterthought for a plane ride, or while waiting for the doctor. Recently I’ve found the time to get back into reading, and have been enjoying spending time with a good book, no 1’s or 0’s involved. My choice of literature ranges from epic poetry (Beowulf being the most recent) to “classic literature” (such as Pride and Prejudice) to science fiction, my choice in high school. But I’m not here to talk about my history, rather to write up the first book(s) that actually made me want to write a review. These come from the Black Library, the publishing house for Games Workshop, maker of Warhammer 40,000 (40k), and are part of the history of 40k. I expected a nice “history” lesson, since I like to roleplay when i play any game and now I could really curse the foul beings of Chaos, but got literature that is coherant over the entire set, is well written, and deals with many themes that are extremely prevalent in our society today.

As evidenced by my last post, I’m playing with a BF2 dedicated server on a daily basis. part of that is me and a roommate finding cool maps and adding them into our rotation. For the last weekish all we have played is Allied Intent Extended because it adds a LOT to an already good game. I went back to the mod’s website today and grabbed a bunch of map packs that the dev team had put out, about 16 new maps, to be exact. After tossing these into my dedicated server’s AIX directory I decided I did not want to add all of them into my maplist by hand. This would be picking out each new map, and then writing “maplist.append
” 16 times. Instead I cooked up a quick perl script that any BF2 server admin can use to make quick maplists.

I’ve been sick the past couple of days which means I’ve been frustrated that my brain is firing on all cylinders. When I’m sick I try to keep my brain working via coding or the like, so after I knocked out a lil script to help a math professor prove some mathy thing I didn’t understand, I turned to the Battlefield 2 (BF2 from here on out) server I run for my house. Thankfully EA/Dice has an official Linux dedicated server that is easy to set up and customize, unfortunately not all mods return the favor. I’ll quickly go through setting up the official server, then customizing it, and if I can get it running myself, the Nations at War 5.1 server!

Here’s a great example of our nation’s colleges selling out their students and bending over to RIAA’s demands. I just had an email passed on to me that originated from Indiana University’s Associate Vice President for Information & Infrastructure Assurance dealing with file sharing that is just plain sad. It shows a complete lack of caring for their students, as well as a lack of understanding about the laws involved. Oh, as well as the worst tag-lines for anti-file sharing I’ve ever heard!

A friend of mine passed on his used 60GB video iPod to me, which was very much appreciated as my old Sony MD-Walkman still works, but is hindered by all kinds of nasty DRM. Nasty enough that I have been unable to even change any songs on there in the past three years as I lost the software. Nasty enough that nobody has bothered to reverse engineer it because even with documentation it’s a bear. So I had been planning on getting something, and this was quite a nice graduation present. I immediately replaced the firmware with something a bit more “free”, Rockbox, and named her ‘Katana’. Now I’ve got a nice flat file browser that lets me drop in almost any type of file I want. This doesn’t stop at music and videos, I can also read text files, view pictures, etc. Naturally, that’s not enough for me *wicked grin*. Read on to see some fun hacks that can be had with your iPod.