Posts Tagged ‘Update’

New Project Completed

Thursday, May 22nd, 2008

It’s been a while since I posted on here. There are several reasons for that. The main reason is that my latest project has been taking all my spare time and it was a secret. I didn’t log any of it until just a few minutes ago because I didn’t want the secret to get out. It is an anniversary present for my girlfriend. You can check out the project page for more details on that.

The second reason is that my web server has been down and I haven’t fixed it until recently. My server rebooted one day when I lost power and Apache refused to start for some reason. Rather than sitting down to fix that, I just spent all my time working on the anniversary project. It turns out there was some other instance of httpd running in the background hogging port 81. I have no idea why this was. I’ll have to reboot the system again to see if the problem occurs again. At least I’ll know what the problem is.

In other news, I have started the Near Space class at school last week. I am really excited for this class. We will be sending a balloon equipped with computer, science experiments, and a camera into near space in just a few months. Ryan is splitting the class into teams and should have them posted on the e-shell this weekend at some point. Hopefully I’ll have access to the shell soon. I just e-mailed a local enthusiast to see if he wants to come to class to share his experiences and offer some words of wisdom. Hopefully that will go over well.

My dad should be sending me another radio, antenna and a Tiny Trak 3 module next week. I can’t wait to get that stuff. I want to start messing with APRS tracking as soon as possible to get a feel for it before we actually do a launch. I’m hoping to be on the tracking and telemetry team for the near space class.

I suppose that’s enough updating for now. I have to take some photos of the anniversary lamp to stick on that page, as well as get a schematic up. Man, I still need to get a schematic up on the graduation hacks page… I’ll get on that soon. I’ll also post a video of the lamp in action. Until then.

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Another new idea and a cantenna update

Tuesday, April 8th, 2008

Today I only went to one class: Law370. Normally, I really hate the thought of going to the class, but it’s always a lot of fun. That professor really knows how to teach. I always learn something new from that class. Today, we were separated into groups and each group had to research a specific law regarding cyber-crime. This whole activity spawned a new project idea.

My group was assigned the CAN-SPAM act of 2003. This act basically has all these rules regulating how spam e-mail can be sent. I’m not going into that because it’s long, it’s complicated, and it really doesn’t matter for my project idea. My project basically will be a script that will crawl social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace to collect e-mail addresses. It gets more diabolical than that, though. The script will log onto someone’s MySpace account and get their e-mail. Then, the script will log onto each of that person’s “Top 8″ friends and get THEIR e-mail addresses. Now, the script can send a phishing e-mail to each of the friends on the “Top 8″ list and spoof the e-mail that it originates from to look like it is coming from the original person. I think this would be an awesome and fun proof of concept. I would never use actually use this for my own malicious purposes, although I would be interested to see how well it would actually work. I really just want to write this script just to do it. It would give me an excuse to brush up on my scripting and programming skills.

I think I’ll get started on this idea soon, seeing as it won’t cost me any money.

Another update here. I started working on the cantenna project some more. I bought the pigtail that I need, cut off one end and soldered it to the PCMCIA card. I’ve also soldered the piece of copper wire to the jack that attaches to the can. All I need now is a can to attach this thing too. The solder points on the PCB were so small, I’m not sure that the connections will be good enough. Hopefully I’ll find out tomorrow. I don’t have any class so I have the entire day off. I plan on getting a can either form the cafe at school or from the supermarket. I shall update the cantenna page as time permits.

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