i’ve just started the steven levy book crypto. so far it’s great – i’m done with the first chapter – but there are many references to other books that sound great! gotta find the codebreakers by david kahn. (i dig that ww2 crypto history shit!) the broken seal sounds cool too.
in with the recent pile of “crap” i retrieved from my parents’ house, i found a book i bought at the indianapolis children’s museum back in the 6th grade called cryptography – the science of secret writing. i didn’t understand it all back then, maybe now i’d be able to grasp it. it was written in 1943 by laurence dwight smith, so it’s dated compared to computers now, but the material is facinating.
also have to finish flatland. quite interesting! so far that old cartoon “the line and the dot” keeps popping into my head!
wild tangent has some cool new online 3d technologies coming out. didn’t work great on my non-3d laptop, but was still cool. supposedly they have a lot of hackers downloading the developer kit to make games. might be cool…
i spent a little time today going over the old kim-1 that i posted about the other day. i noticed that the board has the commodore name and logo on it. turns out the kim-1 was commodore’s first computer! well, mos was bought by commodore. maybe i should see if this thing “boots”.
it’s awesome how much information companies used to provide. the kim-1 came with a full schematic poster, programming notes, even the monitor program that’s stored in rom.
any fan of legos should check out legodeath. simply hilarious!
this past weekend my mom and dad gave me an ultimatum… i had to get all my old “crap” that was still at their house moved to mine. it was nice having that storage available, but i do have plenty of space at my home now. so anyway… i loaded up my car with and odd assortment of “crap” – that’s what my mom called it. let’s see… a commodore vic-20 (my first computer) with tape drive, a trs-80 color computer 2 with floppy disk drive (and 300 baud modem, speech synthesis card, edtasm cartidge), teac reel-to-reel tape deck (used before i could afford a digital delay), a 1976 kim-1 board computer from mos technologies (6502 processor just like the vic-20!), a beta vcr and an assortment of books, including the 68000 docs from my digital lab in college and those “semiconductor reference guide”s from radio shack (1986, ‘87 and ‘88 versions). ah, those good ol’ days! i just can part with the stuff! i still regret pitching the original ibm pc my dad snagged from work when they upgraded – including a dual 10 meg external removable winchester hard drive.
so this got me thinking back to my hardware hacking days. bread boards all over. soldering irons. trips to radio shack for caps and resistors. phase locked loops. fun stuff. if i get some time (ha!) i should do a hardware project of some sort!
i wonder if my collection of radio-electronics mags is still somewhere in the house?!?!
on sunday morning i finished the fugitive game. litman’s account of the mitnick story seems more accurate than markoff’s story – i’m going to reread bits of takedown to jog my memory on that account (shimamora and markoff) of the story. litman’s account jive’s more with my own understanding of the story. i had always heard that mitnick was more of a “script kiddie” than a true hacker. his “gift” was not technical hacking but “social engineering”. (he even has a book coming out on the topic.) i’m not saying mitnick didn’t commit crimes, but it’s amazing how much bs markoff was allowed to print. anyway it’s a really good book and litman’s manner is an easy read – if you like that sort of subject matter.
also, in reading the book, i’ve also watched the movie “takedown” a few more times and continually find faults in the movie. i think only the old time movies are acurate portrails of the technology and hackers – “wargames” and “three days of the condor”. being a geek, i do try to own (or have aquired) all the hacker flicks – “hackers”, “swordfish”, “antitrust”, etc – but nothing seems as “real” as those two. “sneakers” was pretty good though.
holy crap! the master of expensive license agreements, real, has released helix, which looks like an open source streaming media server. in the coming months, we’ll get access to the code!
obviously this is real’s last stab at survival in the world of microsoft. this could be a good thing – we’ll have to see how it pans out. real’s technology seems to have dipped over the last year. and i think we’re all sick of the damn real one player taking over the system. (i hate all those apps that try and take control by running little crappy agents – including winamp!)
wanna laugh your ass off? check out the hbo show “sketch pad”. i just caught the last 15 minutes and was rolling! it’s basically sketch comedy from around the county. too funny – and we need a good laugh with the economy the way it is!
sunday morning i finish reading nick hornby’s lastest book, how to be good. it’s really good. not as good as high fidelity, but then again, that’s my favorite book and is going to be tough to beat. what’s interesting to me is that hornby tells the story from the point of view of an unhappily married women. quite entertaining. still not sure about the “good news” character, though.
it’s amazing to me that the nimda attacks are still so widespread. our logs at work and even my home box (via adsl) constantly show hack attempts with nimda’s signature.