This morning, I realized my battery had swollen to the point where it was compressing the underside of my case enough to cause the button to become pressed against the trackpad. I’ll be calling Apple tomorrow, they better replace it as I can’t really afford the battery right now.

Note the gap of light under the battery:

Apple Battery Swollen

Apple Battery Swollen

The past two weeks have been action packed, as expected. Two days before graduation I saw an ad on craigslist for a 1990 Nissan 240sx hatchback. It was a relisting of one I had made an offer on in January. She had relisted it at $1100 and swore that it had no rust. I talked her down to $900, said I’d be there the next day, and without anything other than grainy cell phone pictures and word that it had *zero* frame rot, I embarked on a three and a half hour drive to Paintsville, KY with my father. I looked everywhere I could see or reach. Her word was as solid as an oak. We exchanged the cash and title, loaded it up, and embarked on the three and a half hour journey home through the Mountain Parkway.

I guess you could consider these my perilous actions, financially. I’m building a 240sx the summer before I start college. Full engine swap and everything… so without further distractions, the perilous acts s13:

And for the people that do not understand drifting, these people get it:

I also finally got my web development environment set back up. It got royally screwed while working on my Future Business Leaders of America project. So I should be back doing web development this week. Let me know if you need something done.

So let me give you a run down of just what has been going on. My last post (before the iPhone how-to) was February 20th of last year. A lot has happened since then. My absence initially started with a teacher at school drafting me into the Future Business Leaders of America (FBLA). I was to compete in the Networking Concepts category. It was a 100 question multiple choice test on various networking topics. I took 1st place at both regional and state levels, so I qualified for the trip to compete at the FBLA-PBL nationals in Chicago last summer. I went. I had no chance, being more into coding than networking, but I guess I’m not half bad at it. From the people I talked to that competed against me, every single one of them had some form of networking certification.

While I was in Chicago, I snuck off from the group and took a taxi to the Apple store on Michigan Avenue a.k.a. the Magnificent Mile. I got there right as the store opened, so I walked in and bought my iPhone in under 5 minutes. (The big wtf here is that the Cingular store had a line around the block…) Once purchased, I had a 3-4 mile hike back to the hotel. It was pretty fun.

So the rest of my summer break after I got back from Chicago was spent on IRC trying to hack the iPhone. Yep, I knew most of the hackers and even was one of the first to start a serial dock for the thing, I just suck at soldering. I didn’t get to do much before I had to do summer assignments for school. It was fun while it lasted though. I got to meet many cool people, including Captain Crunch.

Now, we’re getting to the exciting stuff. A few weeks after school started I got offered a job at a startup in Silicon Valley doing PHP coding. The startup is called Qubescape. We’ll have a sweet product out shortly, that’s all I’m going to say. It’s been awesome so far. I work with some really good people.

That brings us up to what’s going on currently. Currently, I have very little time thanks to school. AP US History and AP Physics B are keeping me slammed with work. My AP US History teacher has an insane passing record and intends to keep it that way — which I’m cool with because I enjoy the class. On the other hand, my AP Physics teacher just can’t teach. He’s a good guy, he understands it, but he *cannot* explain it; so, I’m left to figuring it out on my own.

Time is going to get even more rare as I am involved in FBLA once again this year. I will be the first from my school to compete in the Internet Application Programming category. It looks incredibly easy. The project requires a website to track class averages and GPA with simple user authentication and a presentation explaining areas of your code the judges are interested in.

Anyone else that read this blog heard of FBLA? It’s nationwide, but many people don’t seem to know about it.

Now, they did tell me one thing. The keys are embedded in the .NET binary in JLJ’s iPhone activation server. So I began working and this led to where I’m at now, a how-to. This post will not provide the tokens, nor will I provide them until JLJ says I can. This article will walk you through the process of obtaining them so you can activate your iPhone on a mac though, as suggested by the developers of the tool.zip we will be using.
As of now, you can just download the newly released iPhoneActivatorTool to activate your phone. This is a newer version of tool.zip that includes the plist file required.

Step 1:
Download the following files:

• JLJ’s PhoneActSrv – Mirror
• tool.zip – mirror
• My iPhone Decrypt App
• Lutz Roeder’s Reflector .NET disassembler

Step 2:
This step is where you’ll actually prepare the data you need to get. You will need windows with .NET framework 2.0+. JLJ’s PhoneActSrv’s binary has the keys stored within it, encrypted using AES. In order to get the keys, we need to disassemble the binary. To do this, you need to open up Reflector and go to File->Open then locate and open the PhoneActSrv.exe file.

Once it’s loaded, you will see the entry in the tree view. Right click on PhoneActSrv and click Export. Make sure you save this somewhere that you will remember, you will spend a lot of time looking at the disassembly. You also need access to it over the mac.

Step 3:
Now, open the directory you saved the disassembly files to. You should see the following files:

• a.cs
• b.cs
• AssemblyInfo.cs
• d.cs
• DotfuscatorAttribute.cs
• e.cs
• e.resources
• f.resources
• Global.cs
• PhoneActSrv.csproj

If you see these files, you did step 2 correct. If not, go back and do it again. This is where you may need some coding experience, as I can’t just hand these keys out. I provide you with enough hints that I feel you can find the keys. Unzip my iPhone Decrypt application and open up iphone_decrypt.c and read the comments. For each variable needed, I provide you with a hint on how to find it. All the values needed are located in the d.cs file.

Once you find them, plug the values into their appropriate arrays in iphone_decrypt.c. Once you have what you think are the values, open up a terminal, go to the directory iphone_decrypt.c is located in and run the following in console.

$ ./build.sh
$ chmod +x iphone_decrypt
$ ./iphone_decrypt

If all goes well, you should see something like the following on the terminal:

kalashnikov:~/Desktop/iPhone-RE/AES decrypt cody$ ./build.sh
kalashnikov:~/Desktop/iPhone-RE/AES decrypt cody$ ./iphone_decrypt
Welcome to the iPhone JLJ key decryptor. Find the data in his app and set the variables in the code to this one.
Setting AES key...done
---1076
Attempting to decrypt the key...done
Key is 

 


        

          iphone-activation
          
            unbrick

            activation-record
            
              AccountToken*snip*
              AccountTokenSignature*snip*/data>
            
          

        
    

 
??V?n9???lsQ?
Freeing up memory...done

If you do, move onto step 4, if not, keep trying.

Step 4:
Unzip tool.zip and open up the blank.plist file in something like textmate. It’s just an XML file. blank.plist contains the following:

	ActivationRecord
	
		AccountToken
		
		
		AccountTokenCertificate
		
		
		AccountTokenSignature
		
		
		DeviceCertificate
		
		
		FairPlayKeyData
		
		
	
	Request
	Activate

Copy the AccountToken and AccountTokenCertificate lines and their data lines from the console output of iphone_decrypt. Paste them into the plist file so that it looks like the following:

	ActivationRecord
	
		AccountToken*snip*
	              AccountTokenSignature*snip*
	
	Request
	Activate

Save this file as activate.plist in the same directory as blank.plist

Step 5:
Activate your iPhone by running the following command in the terminal after changing to the directory that blank.plist is located in.

$ ./tool --activate activate.plist

You should see the following output on the console:

kalashnikov:~/Desktop/tool Folder cody$ ./tool –activate test.plist
iPhoneActivatorTool 1.0
2007-07-04 15:10:43.887 tool[10443] Found iPhone Device: 1
2007-07-04 15:10:43.887 tool[10443] Connecting…
2007-07-04 15:10:43.892 tool[10443] Checking Pairing…
2007-07-04 15:10:43.905 tool[10443] Starting device session…
2007-07-04 15:10:43.990 tool[10443] ActivationState: Unactivated
2007-07-04 15:10:43.990 tool[10443] Deactivating your iPhone…
2007-07-04 15:10:44.002 tool[10443] New ActivationState: Unactivated
2007-07-04 15:10:44.003 tool[10443] Activating your iPhone…
2007-07-04 15:10:44.163 tool[10443] New ActivationState: MismatchedICCID
2007-07-04 15:10:44.163 tool[10443] Your iPhone was successfully activated.

You will probably see a popup about your iPhone having an incorrect SIM card. Just slide the unlock slider at the bottom to the right and you should be ready to go.

This caused a real issue for me. Function names are extremely different, along with how queries are performed, compared to my mysqli library. Sometime last month I tried to make a PEAR-style wrapper for my class, but for some reason it failed with the library. Well, last night I found the Wordpress OpenID plugin. Knowing that WP runs it’s own MySQL class, I downloaded it and studied the wrapper. This allowed me to see what I had been doing wrong and get a system working before school started today.

Once I had it working, I wrote a simple class I call EasyOpenID. This class allows me to minimize the amount of code in JanRain’s consumer example to very few lines of code. I’ve decided I was going to release this library, so I converted it to FileStore, which is the default the library ships with, and packed it up. I am going to release it here to hopefully get some feedback. If the feedback is good, I will probably continue to expand on the class.

I will have a page up for the library later on tomorrow, but for now, download the file located here. This zip file contains the converted consumer example and my class. The class is released under the new BSD license, while the rest of the code is GPL. Please, provide me with any of your thoughts on the library. Even if you don’t use it on a real, live site, please just let me know what you thought.

Talking with the folks in #OpenID also got me invited to be on the first official OpenID podcast recording, no idea if I’ll be involved, but I’m listening. You will be able to obtain the podcast on http://idcast.org/ sometime tomorrow night or on Thursday. I hope all goes well. Hopefully this new podcast will provide a great resource for developers looking to learn and expand on OpenID.

Last week, I got “The Knack.” It seems to bite any computer guy that comes into contact with Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) hardware. It all started when a fellow programmer friend of mine sent me a link to a DEC Easy WebServer. This is a relabeled DEC Alpha Multia that shipped with Windows NT 4.0 Server. It included some sort of Netscape software for setting up a webserver easily. Well, I figured I would go ahead and add it to my watch list, since it was only $20 + shipping. I continued browsing and around and found a DEC VAXstation 3100 for $18 + shipping. I have been wanting a VAX for a while, so I bought it. 2 days later, I bought the DEC Easy WebServer.

So in total, I spent over $100 in a week on computer hardware that is older than me.(almost as old as me in the Multia’s case) The VAXstation came and it ended up missing the whole SCSI controller board, so I’m still looking for one of those. The Multia came today and works great, but it seems to operate in “Space heater emulation mode” all the time, I’d hate to see it under a full CPU load.

I tried installing OpenBSD/Alpha on the Multia tonight, with little luck. The installer boots and then says it can find no drives, but the hardware compatibility list clearly says the Multia is supported. So, I tried to find Debian net boot floppy images and failed. I’m currently installing FreeBSD/Alpha as I’m writing this, hopefully it works better.

Here are a few pictures of my new machines, more pictures of the Multia can be found here; more pictures of the VAXstation can be found here.

School has been crazy lately. I’ve been loaded down with homework most of the time, and on top of that I’ve been drafted by a few of the teachers at school to participate in the FBLA competitions. I’ll be competing in the single person test on computer networking. The test is a 100 question test given at a local university. I’m competing in the area my school does really bad in, so I hope I can change the tradition…

As I said above, school has been crazy lately. This has had it’s negative effects on Threadbound. When I do have time to code, I’m working on my client’s website, which I got sometime after my last post, or I’m doing coding for thunder-it.com. Today, I’ve been hit with a new block of inspiration and ideas for threadbound, so hopefully I can make some time to work on it. The stuff I came up with today is definitely new for the area I plan to implement it in.

For those of you still not quite sure about this whole Web 2.0 thing, check out the video below. It’s the best one I’ve ever seen that describes how I feel about it.

The first thing you need to do for this kickass setup is to make sure you have room on your harddrive. I downloaded the ‘everything’ package which was 1.96gb. (There are alternate packages though, listed below). To get these packages, you’ll need a bittorrent client, which I’m not going to go into how to use, then you’ll need to grab the torrent files. You can choose between the following torrent packages:

• Everything: #1 #2
• Qt: #1 #2
• kdesupport: #1 #2
• kdelibs: #1 #2
• kdepimlibs: #1 #2
• kdebase: #1 #2
• kdeedu: #1 #2
• kdegames: #1 #2
• kdenetwork: #1 #2
• kdepim: #1 #2
• koffice: #1 #2

Note: All links labeled #1 are from the official mirror which is linked to at the bottom of this post. All links labeled #2 are my own personal mirror. Also, these files are only for OSX 10.4

Also, as quoted from the official page:

You must install at least Qt, kdesupport, and kdelibs for any of these packages to work. Also, kdepimlibs and kdebase are recommended since a number of things will want them. (…and it has Konqueror)

Once you have downloaded these packages, installation is a breeze. It’s just like installing any other OSX application. Double click on the dpkg, then click on one of the mpkg files provided inside the Finder window.

From here, just continue installing the files until you have everything you want. They will be stored in /opt/kde4. (It’s a Fink distribution). According to the official snapshot page, you need to launch these applications from a terminal window. Now, I did not need to do this, but I do not doubt the knowledge of the developers. (My shell setup is *way* modified compared to the default OSX release.) So to take care of these few issues, you need to run the following in a terminal window:

export PATH=”/opt/kde4/bin:/opt/kde4-deps/bin:/opt/qt4/bin:$PATH”
eval `dbus-launch –auto-syntax`

As I said, according to the main page for these files, it says to try to launch them from the terminal. If launching them by double click does nothing, here is how you can start them:

/opt/kde4/bin/kwrite.app/Contents/MacOS/kwrite

These directions are based off the official ones which can be found here. I would just like to take this time to thank the KDE developers for what they are doing. They are really taking a stand to improve the desktop interface overall. This project really shows the strength open source can have if harnessed properly.

Note: I’m still a gnome guy.

Here are a few screenshots for you:
Kwrite:

Konqueror:

Last weekend I got phpSysInfo’s Darwin support almost up-to-par with the other OS’s it supports. I still have a few things left, but I’ll be submitting them back as a patch here shortly.

Today, I spent most of the day working on ThreadBound when I should have been starting my huge project for school that is due on Friday. Besides setting up a bug tracker and doing the usual bug fixing, I actually added a completely new feature to ThreadBound — an MVC based REST API system. It’s actually pretty complete and shouldn’t change much from here until the site goes live, since all I do now is create new class files and methods. Right now, it only has clones of Flick’s flickr.test.echo and my own version of flickr.test.null. Of course, all of mine go by threadbound.* instead of flickr.*.

This site may go down for a few hours sometime within the next 3 days. I’m transferring the domain from enom.com to godaddy.com. Hopefully things will be fine when the transfer is done.

I’m off to bed now.

The Kenwood Apple Store was true to their word, they called me the day they came in. I ended up getting to the store around 6:30-7pm and it was packed. These things must be selling like hotcakes because I know they sold 3 of them while we were waiting on the cashier to see if they had any 2gb ram sticks in stock — which they didn’t. So I’m still 1gb of ram short until my reserved stick comes in. They do have a nice deal going right now though. You can get an HP Photosmart C3180 printer for free with your MacBook if you are buying it on a college discount. You have to pay upfront, but you get a rebate for the full price of the printer, similar to how they were running the iPod deals.

So far my experience of moving from Linux to OSX has been pretty grand, as I hinted at above. The built in wireless coupled with my new WRT45G, that I hadn’t tested the wireless on, seem to be working much better than my old setup. It’s so nice having wireless again, no cat5 cable to get tangled up in my mouse. Application-wise, I have already found a replacement for everything I used on Linux. I knew all of these before I even owned a Mac though, since I talk to/code with a few people that own a mac.

Heck, in the three days I’ve had this thing, I’ve already spent $50 in software. I bought textmate since it appears to be the best coding text editor on the planet for the mac and web 2.0 crew. I’m definitely liking it so far, but I’m on the hunt for PHP plugins now. They are a bit saturated with Ruby plugins. I still need to get a legal copy of Photoshop CS2 for this box though. If only it was cheaper…

I’ve also had the joy of being able to run a lot of my favorite Linux applications on this thing. Fink is quite a nice system. I already have X11 running at startup, without that stupid xterm. I’ve modified my shell settings so everything I need to start X apps from Terminal.app is there and ready to go. I suggest all of you go out and install Xdroplets. Combined with this custom X11 setup and Xdroplets, I have a pretty standard application interface for running my old applications, such as XMMS or Konqueror for testing.

To give you some idea of how fast this laptop is, I have two benchmarks for you. While I was writing this post, I started a compile of Apache 2.0.59 to start setting up my development environment for ThreadBound. Here are the command that I ran:

$ ./configure
$ export MAKEOPTS=”-j6″
$ time make

What are the results? Astounding, considering this is a 10-20 minute compile on my old Athlon64 3200+ laptop…

real 1m37.240s
user 0m53.671s
sys 0m37.242s

The other benchmark is from when I installed Windows XP on my friend’s MacBook Pro, which is identical to the one I bought. After installing Counter-Strike: Source, we ran the video stress test. These machines averaged 114 FPS on it. This test set all of the settings on high, so we tried it. We were getting about 60-90 FPS at 1680×1050 during games. This just goes to show you the performance of this machine. Considering that people don’t know that the x1600 graphics cards they ship with are underclocked by around 45% below what ATI ships them as, due to heat. So I’m going to have to overclock them a bit and see how it does.

Here is a nice picture of my MacBook Pro:

Macbook Pro Core 2 Duo Opening Hosted on Zooomr

More pictures of it can be found here.

For my birthday, I bought an HP Visualize C360 PA-RISC for $60, which is quite a deal since that included shipping and the thing is well over 50lb. I know it works, but I currently cannot use it. I’m too new school to have a serial cable so I can get any output. I think I’m making a trip to radio shack this weekend.

This birthday also marks my move to the Mac. I have reserved a brand new Macbook Pro. They finally upgraded to dual core with EMT64, so I decided it was time. The model I’m getting has 3gb ram, 17″ glossy screen, and a 160gb harddrive. The problem is, I’m on the waiting list. I got on it over the weekend, but they still haven’t got a shipment in. I’m about to go crazy, since I need it for some of the work I’m doing on Threadbound.

This “work” involves getting a development environment setup for someone else with an iMac. It’s proving to be quite difficult, mostly due to mysql bugs that show when trying to compile php. Anyway, I’ll keep you updated.

More pictures here: http://beta.zooomr.com/smartsets/codymays/4644

PA-RISC 2 Hosted on Zooomr

PA-RISC 7 Hosted on Zooomr