Welcome to my digital home! There are lots of articles you might find helpful buried in this site on topics such as modifying an Alfa Romeo 159, rebuilding a Lotus 7 (Robin Hood 2B), not to mention a ton of stuff on technology in general. It’s all here somewhere, so use the search function or navigate using the menu structure. if you want to talk, reach out via the contact function, I usually do answer!
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ElectronicsWell I finally got round to purchasing an Arduino Uno Open Source Prototyping Platform and first impressions are !WOW. I am genuinely impressed with the overall package, its flexibility and quality of the hardware and software. First off, getting up and running on your favourite OS is a breeze, with detailed step by step instructions available on the Arduino site.
Aside from the basic Uno itself:
I invested in a few extras from a UK outfit called Cool Components that sell the Arduino and plenty of shields and extras. To give me enough to start with, I picked up:
140-Piece Wire Kit
Electronic Brick Kit
Generic Starter Kit
Jumper Wires – Female to Female
Jumper Wires – Male to Female
Although in hindsight, I should have bought a few more male to male jumper cables as these seem to be the primary cable type!
Getting up and running was a breeze, remembering my basic electronics from my childhood stood me in good stead to build a small circuit, and google/youtube filled in the blanks easily!
So what did I build?
Essentially its 5 LEDs running in a sequence, with the timing controlled by an analogue rotary switch or potentiometer, as I learned it was called. It actually took longer to figure out it wasn’t called a “rotary encoder” which is apparently something very different and digital, than it did to code the entire program and build the circuit!
The circuit is simple:
…and so is the program:
/*
Jabawoki Light tracer V1.0
22/07/2011
*/
int potpin = 0;
int val;
void setup() {
pinMode(12, OUTPUT);
pinMode(11, OUTPUT);
pinMode(10, OUTPUT);
pinMode(9, OUTPUT);
pinMode(8, OUTPUT);
}
void loop() {
// Read the Analog Pot
val = analogRead(potpin);
// Switch the LEDs on
digitalWrite(12, HIGH);
digitalWrite(8, HIGH);
delay(val);
digitalWrite(11, HIGH);
digitalWrite(9, HIGH);
delay(val);
digitalWrite(10, HIGH);
delay(val);
// Switch LEDs off
digitalWrite(12, LOW);
digitalWrite(8, LOW);
delay(val);
digitalWrite(11, LOW);
digitalWrite(9, LOW);
delay(val);
digitalWrite(10, LOW);
delay(val);
}
What more could you ask for in a prototyping platform?
You can download the code and schematics for this project from the downloads section
Watch this space, I have 5 key projects I am planning once I get my head properly around this, some of which will blow your mind.
Here is some video of the project working in all its glory!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9rIHjsyiUsRelated Images: [...]
LiveMixeshttps://jabawoki.com/wp-content/mp3/Jabs_20092001_Summer_House.mp3
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
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InfoSecOpen post to see coverage:
North West Insider – August 2007 – IT Security
North West Insider – August 2008 – BERR Survey
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Alfa 159 / ElectronicsFor a while now I have been looking into alternative power solutions for the Alfa due to its power hungry nature that is not helped by the many auxiliary systems I have added over time.
For the most part, the stock battery can cope just fine, but I have always wondered about the use of capacitors and what real value they hold. In years gone by, the capacitors you could get hold of were simply not that useful. A 1 Farad 12v capacitor like you would use in an car audio installation was simply too expensive and had far too little power storage.
One reason I had been considering capacitors was not for power storage but for the side effect of cleaning up the overall noise introduced by the power system in the car. This would serve to improve the overall sound quality of the entire system as well as benefit all electrical systems with a cleaner supply. A good explanation and test is here:
https://youtu.be/T9mlvbF0flM
Capacitors have come on a long way though and the new generation of “Super” or “Ultra” Capacitors are starting to become a viable alternative to a battery in a car. Because of this, I thought it only sensible to buy some parts and see what it was all about 🙂
Here is a video of a car replacement battery using 6x 2.7v, 500F super capacitors to show you what I mean:
Obviously starting the car and providing long term, offline power for the systems when its not running are two different things, so if you seriously wanted to replace your traditional battery you would need a hybrid solution that combined batteries with capacitors.
I’ll be looking into that next 😉
Super capacitors come in a few common shapes and sizes but by far the cheapest for the power are the common 2.7v 500 farad units. To hit the target voltage I needed (12-14v) I needed a few wired in series to increase the overall voltage. Fortunately this is a common solution as its a typical voltage used in solar installations.
Wiring the capacitors in serial actually decreases the overall farads of the bank, so 6 x 2.7v = 16.2v but the farads are divided by 6 to give you 83.333F. You could add a number of additional banks in parallel to bring the farads back up, but it starts to get a bit big then and you would be better looking into a different style capacitor. such as the Maxwell Ultra 2.7V 3000F, 6 of which would deliver a 16.2v 500F pack !
Also, a point of note is that even though the planned bank has a capacity of 16.2v it will only operate at the voltage its charged too, so if the car charges at 13.5v then the bank will be charged to 13.5v. Its also important to balance the load across a serialized bank of capacitors to prevent damage. Fortunately due to the commonality of the target bank design, a balance board was readily available:
The plan was to build a 12v 83 farad bank that would act as a power reserve for the bass amplifier in the boot as this would be a good starting point and bolster the overall power system on easily accessible, existing 4AWG wiring
I first bought a few common, cheap and easily accessible parts off ebay:
6 x Green-Cap (Black) Super Farad Capacitor Parallel Battery 2.7V 500F 35*60MM @ 26.99
6 String 2.7V Super Capacitor Protection Balancing Board 100F – 500F 240x40mm @ 8.75
10 rubber lined 35mm pipe clamps @ £7.29
8 AWG power cable with in line fuse holder and fuse @ 4.99
So for less than £50 I had everything I needed for the experiment. I could have bought a pre-made board with unknown capacitors on for about £26 but I have read a few things about the capacitors being junk so went for a known good brand and DIY.
I first assembled the capacitor bank with the balance board to achieve the target solution. Hot gluing the capacitors to the board before soldering them to make sure the finished unit was as solid as possible. It took some real heat on the iron to get the solder flowing, especially soldering in the 8AWG wires.
I soldered the 8AWG cables directly to the board to ensure maximum power transfer:
Once the bank was ready I used the pipe clamps to install the unit in a free space within the amp enclosure and connected it to the positive and negative 4AWG distribution blocks I already had in place from the original installation of the enclosure:
I must admit, I was extremely worried when I first connected the fuse that it would just explode in my face, so it was a tentative and careful moment! Some people recommend installing a resistor inline initially to slow charge the capacitors and protect the systems in between, but as I was on a 4AWG connection direct to the battery I was not worried about the charge / discharge issues.
They did make a fizzing sound for a few seconds when they took there initial charge but I was stood by with a fire extinguisher!
Once the fizzing stopped and nothing looked like it wasd going to explode I checked the units for discharge / earth shorts and also for temperature. As everything was ok, I decided to start the car and run the amp.
The car started quicker than normal so clearly the extra high current supply had already made an impact on the overall electrical system. Its actually possible to start and run an normal engine on a bank of capacitors like this and replace the battery with them as can be seen in one of the videos at the top of the page. Although for the Alfa, I would need a larger bank with more capacity as the 2.4 is a bit of a power hungry beast!
I ran a Bass test loop to get the amp hot and push the sub to its limits for 30 minutes. The amp got very hot as expected but the capacitors only got a little warm which is great as if they got very hot that would be a problem.
Once it was all back together you could hardly notice the upgrade unless you looked very closely at the vent holes!
All in all this was a great upgrade and I am definitely going to explore more super capacitors in the engine bay in some sort of hybrid battery/capacitor solution next!
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GeneralWell, after the change of room size the RP6G2’s lack of low frequencies eventually pushed me to go the extra mile and get the KRK10s. Initial feedback on it? Its got so much bass! I know that’s the whole point of it, but wow, I like bass and even I struggle with this sometimes. So much so that I actually bought the Boss FS-5L latched foot switch so that I could bypass the sub from time to time and allow the full range of frequencies back to the RP6G2’s!!!!
So….. what does all this mean?
Well, first off the KRK10s is one hell of a good sub, well built, sounds great and can really pump out some power, so much so, it rattles all of the radiators in every room of the house when its wound up! that said, it more than matches the RP6G2’s and compliments them well. The unit itself acts as the hub of your system, so you route your main outs to the unit from your source, then plug each of the other 2 speakers into the sub. My preference for this was to use TRS Balanced Jacks from my mixer to the Sub, then XLRs from the Sub to each speaker. A good, cheap cable provider I use regularly is: Vision Sounds on eBay, they are quick to process, cheap to buy and decent quality, so that works for me!
The KRK10s comes with a built in Crossover, with a knob on the back to set the Crossover frequency. I have played with this for a while now, and for me, I find that the best option is to keep some of the bass going to the RP6G2’s and let the sub handle the low stuff. To that end, I tend to have my crossover point at around 50Hz, which lets the RP6G2’s handle the punch in a beat while the KRK10’s handles the roll. I find this approach keeps the imaging better in my opinion.
The built in amp comes with the same +-6db of gain through a control knob on the rear. Mine is set to -4db and that still, on some tracks and sources, overpowers the RP6G2’s at 0db gain! For this reason, I find that it is very useful to have an EQ of sorts in the mix so you can compensate for different sources. I make use of an Alesis MultiMix8:Firewire to bring each of my audio sources together, which gives me a low/med/high EQ on each channel (except the Firewire output, but that’ a whole different article!).
The final, but very useful feature that comes with this unit is a bypass ability. You can plug in any latch-able foot pedal, but the Rokit site recommends the Boss FS-5L. I have the FS-5L and agree with them, its well built, but not so hard a switch that you can’t use it by hand if you want it on your desk. The reason for the bypass is actually quite a good one. Sometimes, you need to remove the bass effect of the sub and revert back to just the bass of the RP6G2’s. To do this without a bypass and making use of an EQ, you would taint the bass feed to the RP6G2’s and actually not give an accurate image, however, the bypass, when engaged, simply kills the Sub, bypasses the EQ and outputs a full range signal to the RP6G2’s leaving you with a nifty way of getting an accurate frequency reproduction for those absolute moments of audio clarity!
If your seriously thinking of adding a KRK10s to your setup, here are some tit bits of advice for you:
Buy the Boss FS-5L Latched Foot switch at the same time to give you the ability to bypass the sub easily when needed
If possible put at least a basic 3 band EQ between your source and the entire setup, as the ability to gently retard the bass is very handy
Make sure you have no neighbours attached, above, below or to the side of you, or you will quickly make some new enemies!
All in all, I am genuinely blown away with my overall investment into the Rokit camp, and will happily pick up an ERGO when funds can justify the £500 price-tag!
KRK10s Specs:
225 Watt (peak) Powered Sub woofer for Studio Use
SPL: 110dB Music and 113dB Peak
10” High-Excursion Glass Aramid Composite Woofer
Frequency Response: 34Hz – 50Hz to 130Hz Variable (+/- 1.5 db)
Variable and Sweepable Low Pass Filter
80Hz High Pass Filter
Radically Curved Front Baffle Design for Amazing Performance
Front-firing port provides low frequency extension without boundary coupling
Bypass Control using Standard Foot switch
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RH2B Build DiaryAnother big issue with the hoody was the tune. It was all over the shop. really rough and just a bit shit. This was an easy fix though, I just needed to add a 14point7 Spartan 2 Lambda to the Megasquirt ECU and get some help!
Lambda ready to go in!
The main issue with the current engine setup is the horrific ITB’s (f you can actually call them that). They are difficult to balance and will eventually be replaced with a whole new setup I am building on a new engine. That said, they needed to work for this summer so I called up a guy called Shaun who runs MS2 Tuning and knew the car from its previous owner.
Shaun is awesome. A really friendly guy that gave me, a total stranger, support and advice over the phone and then came over to help me to a basic setup tune on the car for beer money. You dont get much better than that in this game.
After about 3 hours playing, diagnosing and fixing some earthing issues, we had the ITB’s balanced, the AFR dialled in, and the engine was purring. This was exactly what I had hoped for and the potential I knew was in the car when I bought it.
I do love an underdog!
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InfoSecWhich Penetration Testing Qualification is best from a client perspective:
Which Penetration Testing Qualification is best from a Testing perspective:
(NB: I have deliberately excluded “accreditation schemes” such as CREST and CHECK)
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RH2B Build DiaryThe original seats in the 2b were a little worse for wear when I bought the car, but I had mistakenly thought that it would be a relatively cheap thing to fix. Little did I know that trimmers charge a small fortune for their skills!
In fact, I was being quoted around £200 per seat to have them fixed, and new seats were about £200 per seat! So, well, you know….. I bought some new seats! That said, I wanted to minimise the cost here as I had hemorrhaged way more than I initially budgeted to get it ready for the summer, so I set about some ebay stalking, and after several back and forth’s on buying expensive branded, quality seats vs something secondhand and cheap, I found a seller with a new pair of the exact seats that were in the car currently (retro style buckets) but in plain black vinyl.
The best part about this find was that the seller was clearly just a regular guy that thought he would get rich selling motorsport parts on ebay but clearly didn’t have the roaring success he planned for and was sat on some stock he needed to shift. This presented an opportunity for a cheeky offer! So an offer was made, and accepted, that got me 2 brand new seats for £260 delivered 🙂 #Result!
New Seats
As part of the change I also wanted to put in new low profile, double lock rails, so that added another £50 to the bill but it was necessary to get the seats fitted in the best possible way.
Double lock low profile adjustable rails
Once I had modified the rails to fit the bolt pattern of the new seats (nothing is plug and play in the kit car world!) I offered the seat into the car and sat in it for an initial test. This is where my heart sank. I was a good 4 inches over the top of the windscreen at eyeline 🙁 Not an ideal seating position by any means. It turns out these new seats had a 6″ pad in the base that meant I was 4″ higher than the set that came out. This was not going to do, so after several emotional responses from frustration to anger to sadness, I decided there was only one option….. heat a large carving knife up till it was glowing red and trim the foam!
Its not that difficult to do as it stands (although i do recommend breathing apparatus as you get very dizzy very quickly!). Just pop the staples off the bottom on one end, remove the foam seat base, heat the knife, slice (like butter) through the foam, then reinstall the foam, glue back on the cover, staple the excess material out of sight and your back in business… all be it a lot lower to the ground! Its not perfect, but I do plan on a major rebuild this winter, and I am likely to be looking for some better / more modern low profile buckets as part of that so this is just for the summer.
Once I had the seats ready for install it was onto the floor. I wanted to reinforce the floor where the seats mounted to as the floor had developed flex in one corner of the seat mounting position whcih made the seat seem loose and rock. To solve this I decided to replicate what the builder had already done to reinforce the floor in the front seat mounting location. Essentially adding a 25X25x3mm angle iron from side to side. Again, this was a seasonal fix as come the winter I want to weld in a lowered floor to gain an inch of height inside the cabin.
Front (existing) and Rear (new) angle iron reinforcements
A purchased a 25x25x3mm 2m length of stainless steel angle iron and cut it to size. I then mounted it on the front edge of the 3mm steel subframe mounts in the rear floor location whcih was the right daytum to provide me a straight line side to side I could use as the rear seat mount. After measuring, cutting, drilling several holes, painting and bolting it all in with M8 stainless bolts, I had the perfect strengthening part that meant the weight of the passengers was spread evenly across the chassis on both sides via the subframe mounts and in the middle via the tunnel mounts, so therefore would not move.
Floor reinforcement rail
Now the seats, floor and seat runners were all ready, it was just a case of making a cardboard template, measuring, drilling, and then bolting it all together with M8 Stainless bolts. The finished article is great IMO. they look period to the car and are much less garish that the ones that came out, which had some interesting colours and the word “dubollox” embroidered in….
Old vs new seats
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GeneralI have been working with a large retailer of late who is a heavy user of Sun & Solaris. As you can imagine, this is perfectly normal, and in fact, considered best practice for what they are doing. That said though, in an area such as retail, with low margins and profits based on sheer quantity, surely a leap of faith into the “dark side” or as we prefer to call it, Linux, would be a better option?
Once upon a time the argument was simple, RISC architecture was simply ahead of the game, by a long way, but guess what, x86 grew up, caught up, and overtook. These days, the performance you get out of multi-core x86 is significantly more than it’s RISC based equivalent. I realise that point could be considered contentious by the purists out there, but for mainstream computing in a world that is ever more cost concious, I struggle see how any argument for RISC can win over x86.
Once you have your x86 base, you can go with an x86 version of Solaris (not that you would) or thanks to Sun not playing silly games, you can actually use something useful, such as Redhat, Suse, Ubuntu or if you so desire, Novell.This additional flexibility is core to getting the base of your platform right. Large scale architectures need solid foundations to remain stable, perform and scale as desired.
Lets consider it for a moment. Sparc vs x86 & Solaris vs Linux, well to be honest, there is barley anything in the comparison except cost. Sun make x86 hardware based on multi-core AMD processors which are blisteringly fast and being manufactured by Sun, they are rock solid.
Now. If I were that retailer, I know where I would be looking to spend my money, but thats not what I am there to talk to them about, so I’ll keep it for my blog and not overstep my scope.
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InfoSecI have seen some comments of late about the PSN hack being due to Sony having no firewalls in place and out of date Apache instances. A brief amount of research defuncts this assertion, however, I was genuinely surprised at the level and voracity of the comments around it. Most of which related to people essentially “living and dieing” by their firewalls. This position is ludicrous to say the least, as a firewall is but one control, not the be all and end all of security, and in my own personal experience, sometimes, they are simply not up to the task and you need to think outside the box.
So here is the problem……
You are designing/running a global gaming platform that is highly latency sensitive, your planning on having all the worlds gamers use your platform and push it to its limits. If you even drop one packet, you could frag someone in game and cause the most heinous flaming you have ever experienced resulting in lost customers for the company, but, it needs to be secure. What next?
Believe it or not, I have personally been in this scenario during my time at EA. I had to design, build and deploy the EMEA Online Web & Game Platform, as well as co-develop the global gaming platforms for the wider business. What I can share with you is that firewalls, no matter how big/good/expensive they are suffer 2 problems…. 1) They are a bottle neck into your environment that when you scale up to millions of users, is a problem, and 2) they introduce latency by doing their job.
So what are the options? Well on the one hand, you could design around the problem, spend a large amount of cash on the “biggest and best” firewalls money can buy, create smaller firewalled segments and multi-layer your network to cope with the limits of the firewalls perhaps? True, yes you could, but this additional complexity introduces more routing hops and more kit for the packets to flow through, which increases latency & degrades the overall experience for the players. Another option is to not use firewalls…..
So what do you do, when you cant put a firewall in place? easy 🙂 All a firewall is doing is a) controlling the flow of IP using an Access Control List & b) looking at the packet for something malicious in it (please note, I am specifically talking about a basic statefull inspection firewall (L3) and not anything extra in the UTM (L7) space, as these add way too much latency to packets for gaming consideration). Given that the firewall is performing these two simple tasks, all you need to do is replicate them elsewhere. Firstly, all your existing network infrastructure can handle the ACL function, easier and faster, and given the packets are already going through this kit, it doesn’t add any latency to the path. Next, its all about understanding the attack and being vigilant…..
Essentially, if your gonna break into a computer system, you need a few basic components:
A Threat Agent (Bad guy with motivation, we will call him Fred)
An Attack Vector (Something Bad he cooked up, like an SQL Injection)
An Attack Surface (Your infrastructure, applications etc)
A Vulnerability (Something you missed that matches Fred’s attack)
So, if Fred needs all these things to line up before he can achieve success, its all about making sure that you minimise your attack surface, and keep it vulnerability free.This is going to mean that you design your environment to be simple and easy to manage, and that you have some solid, well executed vulnerability management programmes in place, typically including real time (or near real time) monitoring of services for vulnerabilities, and excellent patching programmes, fully automated. Essentially, you want one system to identify a vulnerability in one of your web services, and tell the other system to patch it. It is possible to do and works well, but your gonna have to clean up the odd system failure, so make sure your system is highly resilient (by definition of the type of environment, it would be anyway). Now, I appreciate that a 0Day is going to pwn you, but guess what, it still would even with the firewall, so don’t get all upset about it, just have your CSIRT ready to go and make sure it is well oiled!
On that subject, this is one of the key controls you should have anyway, but wont. Your ability to respond to an issue, and appropriately deal with it is what people will observe. It doesn’t matter how good you are, how well you have designed something, at some point its all going to hit the fan. The other key control your going to need is monitoring, so you know when you need the CSIRT! You will need to implement full monitoring and alerting for the environment, from availability and security perspectives. You need to know everything, every device is doing at all times, because correlating this information can help you identify attacks in progress before they get anywhere near success. All your kit is already logging issues silently to itself, so your not going to add any extra burden on the environment, and typically, you would create a separate network to handle management traffic to keep it off your primary network anyway, so its not going to impact service delivery.
Also, when your talking about the gaming industry, typically, aside from the usual raft of web services running, your talking about very specific, proprietary services running on random ports to facilitate multi player gaming, so your “Threat Agents” are a limited pool of elite gamers, who’s typical motivation is not to pwn your systems and steal your data, but is usually limited to 1) administrative control of the game so they can kick who they don’t like out, and b) the ability to alter scores and leader board positions!
I would like to finish my brief rant/educational spout on a simple truth, firewalls don’t make you secure, they make you lazy.
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