Rusty

How do you like my new Theme by the way?

XPCOM

So I have been pretty busy the last week-end. I have decided to look into how Mozilla plugins work. So I have started to learn about XPCOM, XUL & JavaScript and it’s damn cool! I was able to write a Mozilla (Firefox) component using the gecko sdk. I found some really cool tools:

– A Firefox extension to debug Javascript
– An Eclipse plugin to write Javascript (haven’t tried it yet though)

I am slowly becoming a Web 2.0 expert. Who knows what the future lies in front of us now!

WordPress upgrade fun…or not

K. has been complaining about the spam she gets in Comments in her blog so she turned off the Comments which is kind of a shame. So I decided to install akismet. Of course, it required WordPress 2.0 and she was still running 1.5. Somehow I never installed her blog using the dreamhost goodies so I had to upgrade myself…

First, found and installed a nice plugin to backup the database, made an extra copy of the entire folder, installed the new WP 2.04 and followed instructions. Pretty simple. Of course, 2.0.4 doesn’t work with K. theme so it’s all busted. They also removed some features like being able to choose the picture thumbnail size during upload which is LAME!

While messing around with dreamhost, I also accidentally forced wordpress on Plutinosoft to be upgraded to 2.0.3 which of course broke a few things like the StatCounter plugin for WordPress 1.0. After playing around with a new theme, I figured it out so I should be able to get statistics again. I was getting worried. No traffic yesterday! Well I haven’t posted anything new and fun anyways…

Meanwhile dreamhost has been very flaky these last few days. Apparently they had 2 major power outages judging from the email I received and their blog.

Webcam streaming to PSP

So K&I are expecting a little one soon (yeah very soon like in 5 weeks OH MY GOD!). Anyways, as geeky as I am, I have been looking into these baby monitors that let you stream video/audio to a little device. Well I have seen them and quality sucks. And they cost something like $200 minimum if you want video. So I have decided to look around for some cheaper solutions.

The first thing that came to mind was to buy a new IP camera like this one or this one. If it works like advertised, I could put it in the baby’s room and attach to the stream from XBMC and see the little bugger on TV or on my laptop (or even from work!).

Then I looked at the capabilities. MPEG-4. Now what device plays MPEG-4 content and is small enough to be carried? THE PSP of course! So I have been poking around today and guess what, I got it working!

I pulled my little PC webcam and through a set of (complicated) steps was able to stream the live feed to the PSP.

Here are the instructions:

1/ Download logisphere here. It’s a nice freeware that can deliver a live stream of your webcam. And unlike Windows Media Encoder, it does work. Run it, it should send a stream @ http://localhost:8090/

2/ Download VLC 0.8.5 and follow these instructions. VLC will attach to logisphere, transcode it to a PSP compatible format and retransmit on port 1234.

3/ Download PMP VLC Player 0.0.8 here and follow instructions. I tried on a v1.5 PSP. Modify pmp.ini to set the server (VLC) IP & port.

4/ Attach to live stream. Voila!

Check out the video here of myself going silly.

PSP hackers rule

A while back, I had blogged about how it was possible to downgrade the PSP firmware. Now why would you want to do that? Well, the v1.5 firmware is the only firmware that permits running “homebrew” applications on the PSP without restrictions. Sony soon after realizing that, started to release firmware updates with security that would block such features. To achieve wide adoption, Sony would require game publishers to force people to upgrade their firmware (with an updater on the UMD) before they could the game. So you see the dilemna.

The hackers community and Sony have then been playing a game of cat and mouse. Hackers trying to find ways to run homebrew applications on newer firmware (including the ability to downgrade back to a v1.5 firmware) and Sony blocking them. A month ago, Sony was the clear winner with no way to downgrade from their latest firmware (2.6) back to 1.5. But the Hackers have found ways. Not only is it now possible to downgrade, it is also possible to run most homebrews (some kernel access is still restricted) without downgrading.

Yesterday, I was able to run the infamous Super Nintendo Emulator (instructions here) on my brother in law’s 2.6 PSP with the latest eloader from fajita. I was also able to downgrade it to a v1.5 successfully (without bricking it) and upgrade it back to 2.6 using a game firmware update.

Now if you think this is cool, something else is even cooler. The devhook app was released a few weeks ago and allows you to emulate firmware in software! So basically, you can emulate a v2.5 firmware on a v1.5 PSP without needing to upgrade – all in software! I tried it on my PSP, and it works like a charm (though a little slow) including the web browser capability. A few days ago, Sony released firmware v2.71, where the firmware is apparently now encrypted. Well in a matter of hours, some dude had the encryption cracked and the new firmware was runnable on devHook. Yes sir re bob.

All this geeky talk just to show that you don’t need tons of marketing to make a product successful. Just let the hackers community act.

Rhapsody + XBMC

Ok I have had one comment asking me about this and I responded but it’s worth its own entry so that I don’t have to repeat myself:

Even though Rhapsody is a UPnP Server, they actually use a DRM on top of it. A secure protocol must be established between a device that wants to stream from Rhapsody and Rhapsody for it to let it stream the content. The content is encrypted when it is being streamed to the device and only the device can understand how to decrypt it. A similar but different method is used by Windows Media Connect to stream protected content to ‘compatible’ devices. (A similar method is also used by iTunes and the airport express although this has been hacked).
XBMC cannot and will most likely never (legally) stream Rhapsody content, Windows Media protected content or any Premium content acquired on a Music store for that matter. The reason is that being open source, it cannot meet the robustness requirements imposed on device manufacturers by the Rhapsody service or the WMDRM-ND spec (which is what WMC implements to let you stream to compatble devices content acquired on other stores like Yahoo or Napster).
Sorry.

ps. On the flip side, if you wish to use Platinum in your device and wish to support Rhapsody, this is totally possible (and already supported) if you wish to get a commercial license for Platinum. I released it under a dual license (GPL for open source projects and Commercial for closed source projects). Please contact me directly here for more info.