Grammerjack

A very thorough talk describing the Nintendo Wii game console security model and the bugs and weaknesses that allowed the Wii to be compromised: Console Hacking 2008: Wii Fail In a nutshell, security is provided by an embedded ARM CPU that sits between the CPU and the IO devices, and handles all the IO. The two main flaws were (a) A bug in the code that compared security keys, such that it was possible to forge security keys, and (b) secret break-once-run-everywere information was stored un-encrypted in RAM, where it could be extracted using hardware modifications. There's a nice table at the end of the presentation showing a number of recent consumer devices, what their security model was, and how long it took to break them. The PS3 is the only console that's currently unbroken. The PS3's security model seems similar to the Xbox 360, but somewhat weaker. But it remains unbroken. This seems to due to the existence of an official PS3 Linux port, which means most Linux kernel...

...as seen on the Beyond3D GPGPU forum , here are the presentations from the recent (December 12th 2008) "Beyond Programmable Shading" course: SIGGRAPH Asia 2008: Parallel Computing for Graphics: Beyond Programmable Shading There are good presentations from both GPU vendors and academics. My favorite presentations are the Intel ones on Larrabee, just because I'm so interested in that architecture: Parallel Programming on Larrabee - describes the Larrabee fiber/task programming model. Next-Generation Graphics on Larrabee - how Larrabee's standard renderer is structured, and how it can be extended / modified. IBM / Sony missed a bet by not presenting here. That's too bad, because Cell sits between the ATI / NVIDIA parts and Larrabee in terms of programmability. And Cell's been available for long enough that there should be a number of interesting results to report. Note to self: consider buying a PS3 and learning Cell programming, just to get ready for Larrabe...

This weekend I reorganize my home source code projects. I have a number of machines, and over the years each one had accumulated several small source-code projects. (Python scripts, toy games, things like that.) I wanted to put these projects under source code control. I also wanted to make sure they were backed-up. Most of these little projects are not ready to be published, so I didn't want to use one of the many web-based systems for source-code management. After some research, I decided to use replicated git repositories. I created a remote git repository on an Internet-facing machine, and then created local git repositories on each of my development machines. Now I can use git push and git pull to keep the repositories synchronized. I use git's built-in ssh transport, so the only thing I had to do on the Internet-facing-machine was make sure that the git executables were in the non-interactive-ssh-shell's path. (Which I did by adding them in my .bashrc file.) Git's...

I just tried creating an avatar on Microsoft's new Xbox dashboard. As you can see (at least when the Microsoft server isn't being hammered) on the left, they provide a URL for displaying your current Avatar on a web page. The character creation system is not too bad. In some ways it's more flexible than Nintendo's Mii (for example more hair styles and clothing), but in other ways it's more limited (less control over facial feature placement). My avatar looks better on the Xbox than it does here -- they should consider sharpening the image. For example, the T-shirt my avatar is wearing has a thin-lined Xbox symbol. I think they do a good job of avoiding the Uncanny Valley effect. I look forward to seeing how avatars end up being used in the Xbox world. In othe Xbox-related news I'm enjoying playing Banjo Kazooie Nuts & Bolts with my son. All we have right now is the demo, but it's great fun for anyone who likes building things. It's replaced Cloning C...

I'm a big fan of CPU architectures. Here's a conversation between David Moon formerly of Symbolics Lisp Machines and Cliff Click Jr. of Azule Systems. They discuss details of both the Lisp Machine architecture and Azule's massively multi-core Java machine. http://blogs.azulsystems.com/cliff/2008/11/a-brief-conversation-with-david-moon.html The claim (from both Symbolics and Azule) is that adding just a few instructions to an ordinary RISC instruction set can make GC much faster. With so much code being run in Java these days I wonder if we'll see similar types of instructions added to mainstream architectures.

This one can: XKCD: Someone is Wrong on the Internet --- this comic's punchline has saved me at least an hour of a week since it came out. That's more than I've saved by learning Python. :-)

The next generation of video game consoles should start in 2011. (Give or take a year). It takes about three years to develop a video game console, so work should be ramping up at all three video game manufacturers. Nintendo's best course-of-action is pretty clear: Do a slightly souped-up Wii. Perhaps with lots of SD-RAM for downloadable games. Probably with low-end HD resolution graphics. Definately with an improved controller (for example with the recent gyroscope slice built in.) Sony and Microsoft have to decide whether to aim high or copy Nintendo. Today a strong rumor has it that Sony is polling developers to see what they think of a PlayStation 4 that is similar to a cost-reduced PlayStation 3 (same Cell, cheaper RAM, cheap launch price.) http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=50037 That makes sense as Sony has had problems this generation due to the high launch cost of the PS3. The drawback of this scheme is that it does nothing to make the PS4 easy to program. In the l...