Back in the day, there were those of us that reveled in the new found notoriety of being on the edge of High Tech development.
People started calling us ‘Hackers’. The term being generally considered an accolade.
It took a long, long time before the concept broadened to include just about any backyard contraption.
It took even longer before the notion of ‘Phreaking’ (stealing – power, phone, TV, whatever) got rolled in under the catchphrase.
We tried to fight back. insisting that nefarious, surreptitious activity was proprly termed ‘cracking’.
For a while that worked.
Until the lines were not only blurred but almost erased by P2P and digital anarchy.

Then, as now, there is a discernible line in R&D in any form or discipline. Ethical, or not, malevolent, or not. There ARE ethics, and there IS justice. from the Cottage, to the Super Colliders.

If a lone researcher, had posted working code for a browser exploit before giving the developers notice or warning. He’d be damned and reviled for dropping a 0 day on the planet. Even were that exploit to be known inside the security community.

What has happened here is no different.
This, is enabling, and abetting the publication
of a 0day against certain revenue tracking machines.
A hack, is a hack. and a crime is a crime.
Only those with the morals of a ferret, fail to distinguish amongst them.

Intellect is not the measure of a man.
Brilliant criminals, are still sub-human.
“There’s no such thing as right or wrong, only fun and boring…” is something expected from a 4 year old. By the age of 5, a rudimentary grasp of the concept of ‘fairness’ takes hold.
By 6, The ‘Golden Rule’ is usually not only understood, but demonstrated.
Is is possible to be both bright, and morally retarded.

Content Management System

Goodness me! I *have* been busy!

We now have a dev section, powered by a content management system (CMS) and I would like to take a few moments to explain what that means:

With CMS, someone with no knowledge of HTML can make web-pages that display content from a database.
Using CMS, content can be easily added, replaced,or referenced from existing HTML sites.

Here is a real world example:

An estate agency keeps a database of properties. As new properties become available, the agent uses a web browser to visit the CMS site and upload photographs and information about the property. No knowledge of HTML is required, everything is done using a familiar interface that resembles a word processor.
This way, the agent can quickly add or update information without the need to know anything technical.
Using a CMS is also advantageous to the host, as the client site can maintain itself, lowering admin fees.

Pricing for individual hosting packages is still being finalised. However, it is likely to be around £2.99/month


Of course this is justthe tip of the iceberg. CMS is capable of so much more. If you would likto gain more understanding, further reading of the following topics is encouraged:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_system

http://www.contentmanager.eu.com/history.htm


 The dev section can be found (in beta) at the following address

http://dev.mothdesigns.co.uk

Try it out. Let us know what you think. And keep checking the main website for updates.

Game Mapping & Modding

Alright, yeah. I play a lot of games. What you may not know is that I play games mostly to figure out how the various engine work, and find ways in which to tweak them and stretch them beyond their original purpose.
For example, although there's nothing on the relevant sections of the website (yet!), I actually have five or six mapping projects going on for most of the idtech games (prey, Doom3 and Quake4) and I recently purchased the excellent Neverwinter Nights from Bioware (the original, not the sequel. Old-school!) so am attempting to learn all about the Aurora engine.
I have so much design work for other people at the moment, that I can only work on the MothDesigns site in my free time. (Free time- hahahahaa! the concept is laughable!)

Over the next few weeks, expect some content to appear on the game design page. Even if it is just map downloads, there will be source included as well, along with some tutorials.

Once again, please bear with me with regard to the broken links and missing pages. They *do* exist on the server, but it's a mess in there at the moment. Watch this space....

Site Re-Design

Hi everyone!  The site is currently undergoing construction. You can see the new home page right now, it's written entirely using CSS. Over the next few weeks, a database will be brought online for a brand new kind of indexing. More info to be reveled later.

in the meantime, hope you enjoy the new site. Keep watching, and bear with me as I make some changes and possibly mess some stuff up temporarily.

HTML5 and Internet Explorer 9

So you may have been reading about HTML5. If you don't know what it is or how it affects you as a developer, but it's basically HTML, CSS, DHTML XHTML and pretty much every ML you can think of, rolled into one and dubbed 'HTML5' - it's goinf to bring a lot of ease to cross-browser and cross-platform development of web-apps in the near futre.

Internet Explorer 9 is just around the corner, and whilst I have been using Google Chrome for ages now, it's interesting to read about Microsoft's development of Direct2D, which will use the GPU to render vector graphics in the browser for the first time, making things like Google Maps scroll smoothly.

Further Reading:

http://live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/WKSP01 - 

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/11/18/an-early-look-at-ie9-for-developers.aspx

Modifying a BIOS dump image:

Long time since last update. By now you've probably noticed that the ads on this page dynamically update themselves to match whatever content I post here. Help me if you can just by clicking on something interesting.


I've been playing around recently with downloading BIOS updates for my ASUS laptop, and modifying the 'Energy Star' logo to my own custom design. Why do this? no reason really, except it's fun.


The following code (in C) is used to modify the section of the BIOS update file, which I know resides in the first 4096 bytes of the file header:




#include
#include

typedef unsigned char uint8_t;

// be *very* careful not to screw things up!!
#define FILE_SIZE 8998
#define IMG_START 0x100

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
uint8_t *buf;
FILE *in;
FILE *out;
int check;

buf = (uint8_t *) malloc(sizeof(uint8_t)*FILE_SIZE);

out = fopen(argv[1], "r+");
in = fopen(argv[2], "r");
fseek(out, IMG_START, SEEK_SET);
check = fread(buf, sizeof(uint8_t), FILE_SIZE, in);
if (check != FILE_SIZE) {
printf("Error reading image\n");
exit(1);
fclose(in); fclose(out);
}
fwrite(buf, sizeof(uint8_t), FILE_SIZE, out);

fclose(in);
fclose(out);
}


Screenshots to be posted later, but what we end up with is an identical image to the first, but with a modified 8bit bitmap image inside.

Windows 7

I've been following the progress of Windows 7 since the PDC build 6801. Indeed, I have had it installed on all of my home computers since the public beta. October 22nd marks the release to manufacturing (RTM) stage. Now we can all stop using crappy Vista.

Website

You may have noticed the mothdesigns.co.uk site is currently undergoing maintenance. Basically I'm trying to do as much as possible using just static HTML and CSS. This doesn't mean I'm too lazy to learn Dreamweaver, I believe that there are too many designers now that *assume* end users have broadband, and their sites have background processes, fancy flash animations, and other things which will quickly saturate connections.
I'm going to show you thata website made with plain HTML and CSS can be just as impressively flash as some others (I won't mention which at this moment in time)

In the meantime, sorry for the delay in sorting the site out. If you have a login for the site it shoudl still work. None of the back-end stuff has been altered. Maintenance is scheduled to last at least a week, but it'll be back, bigger and better than before.

Stay Tuned!

Puppeteer v2.7a

Puppeteer is a freeware audio mixing, scratching and beatboxing tool similar to eJay. Over two thousand music samples are included for you to mess around with, in addition to voice samples of famous people like George W Bush and Tony Blair.
New features in version 2.7a include: improved performance, real-time recording and NT 6.1 (vista) compatibility

Head on over to the Puppeteer project page for further information or to download.

Windows Mobile build 23071

A new build of the Windows Mobile 6.5.1 development branch has appeared, numbered 23071. 



WinMo users will note from the screenshot that the start menu and taskbar buttons have been moved to the bottom, more closely resembling a PC desktop. 
It's important to note that builds from the 23xx chain are not the same as what will be released as Windows Mobile 6.5 in October, but serve to form the basis of Windows Mobile 6.5.1 which will be released sometime around the beginning of 2010.

The xda-developers website has ROMs available for most htc devices, as well as the Samsung Omnia.