Winter

Winter came too soon this year, I mean it's just 5 November! and the picture was taken in the morning.

DVB-T Modulator

Recently I've got to play with Fabrice Bellard's low cost analog and digital tv modulator.

It took me a while to get it working, it didn't work with nvidia cards so I've tested a ATI Radeon 9200, like Fabrice mentiones on his webpage. What Fabrice doesn't say is that you need to use "radeon" driver, not vesa, not ati.

I've used a Pinnacle 320e receiver, which can scan the two DVB-T channels but no preview.

That was sad, I was expecting it to work, but now that it doesn't work, how to debug it? you can't, Fabrice didn't publish the source code.

Me, Myself and someone else...

A nice picture of me (Cristi) and my girl (Simona) don't you think?

MSDN

As a C++ programmer when you want to use MSDN just for C++ and STL the filter "Visual C++" is not helping. You get all sort of matches but not the ones you need.

You need to filter just the right stuff. You need to go to Help->Edit Filters and create a new filter with these contents:
("DevLangVers" ="kbLangCPP") or ("TechnologyVers" ="kbSTL")

Now if you want to search for map, you'll get the right match.

Windows XPE

I have just finished hacking my first Windows Live setup - I have accelerated video drivers, audio, I can see movies using ffdshow, Mozilla Firefox, Total Commander, Norton Ghost, DirectX.

I have used BartPE and Sherpya WinPe Stuff.

The hard part was getting NVidia drivers to work and then the sound drivers. Now I can say that I have a better undestanding of manual loading of drivers on Windows XP :)

Pretty nice stuff, but you have to work to get it working...

Viewing CHM files from a Network Drive

This issue was bugging me for a long time, now I found out how to fix it.

All you need is this key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp\1.x\ItssRestrictions, with a DWORD entry MaxAllowedZone set to 1.

This was a side effect for a security patch from Microsoft.

Root Power

Writing rootkits is fun. I needed to a device driver for Windows XP that could hide a process, disable keyboard and mouse and hide directories, these are some definitions for a rootkit.

There are some inconveniences, like resetting the operating system because you did something wrong... things don't work like in userland.

Tools like Compuware VToolsD (for Windows 9x) and Compuware Driver Studio (for Windows NT+) make your life way easier. For the first you don't have to write code in assembler, you can write code in C and C++ and for the latter you can write code in C++.

I guess my next root kit, after the one for Windows 9x and the one for Windows XP, would be for Linux, but on Linux having access to the source code of the operating system is a big bonus.

In the end it's not that hard, with proper tools and with proper knowledge you can do anything :-)

Tarom

And now for my fist blog photo...

Brainbench

I've taken some Brainbench tests, now I have more than "Typing Speed & Accuracy" results :) Here is my public transcript.

And now for some pictures:

xterm fonts and colours

The default settings for xterm in OpenSUSE 10 are crappy, the font is small, white background, black foreground... yucky.

Ok, it's not that obvious to configure X applications, they don't have menus, dialog boxes like the KDE applications. You have to edit ~/.Xresources and add some lines and then run xrdb ~/.Xresources (you can use -merge to merge the settings). You can find out what lines to add to ~/.Xresources by having a look at /user/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults/XTerm and by consulting the manual page (man xterm).

Here is what my ~/.Xresources file contains:

xterm*background: black
xterm*foreground: white
xterm*faceName: Andale Mono
xterm*faceSize: 9
xterm*geometry: 100x30

I usually use konsole, but some applications open xterm for shell access. SlickEdit is one of those applications ;)

Portable Thunderbird

Now I can have all my emails, contacts, extensions, settings into one folder, all thanks to Portable Thunderbird. Easy to backup, just archive one folder and that's it. Did your harddrive crash, your laptop stolen? No problem, just unpack the archive and you're back in business.

You can find Portable Firefox on the same site, and the story is the same: all your bookmarks, extensions, settings in one folder on your 1GB USB pen drive...

8051 Programming is fun

I've completed the practical part of the microcontroller course at the University with a house alarm project. The objectives were to sense if the door or window was broken and to program how to arm the alarm. Feedback was given on a led display, input/output was done through the serial port.

Man it was exciting! The programming was done in assember, that was a pain in the... but the "firmware" was only 381 bytes long, I haven't tested a C program though.

All that matters is that I had allot of fun programming the 8051 microcontroller! School is fun. Ha!

Portable Gaim

While reading the Gaim Windows section I've found out about Portable Gaim (on the bottom of the page), it reminded me about the days when you had to reinstall Windows 95 every month and the less applications you had to reinstall the better.

"It is relatively easy to set up Gaim to run from a USB Drive. Most of Gaim is very good about not assuming that it is installed; a slightly customized launcher makes it all come together nicely."

Gaim has these features that make it indispensable:

• I can use the programmer's layout of the official romanian keyboard layout
• it can use a spellchecker (this doesn't work at this moment in the portable version)
  
• it can handle multiple instant messanging protocols
• it works on multiple operating systems
• you can carry it on your USB pen drive
  

I'm hoping for Gaim 2.0 as a Christmas gift.