Archive for March 30th, 2003

Date: March 30th, 2003
Cate: Regular
2 msgs

Szechuan Gnocchi?

Doesn’t sound real, does it. They have it in Flushing, NY! It turns out it’s mochi stuffed with some sort of sweet sesame paste. I was hoping for something spicy, but it was still good. I guess you usually eat them around new year, but I didn’t care, once I saw it, I had to have it.

We had it at the Flushing Food Court, along with all sorts of other 小吃. The Chinatown in Flushing is the absolute best. It’s the secret Chinatown in New York that is 8000 times better than the one in Manhattan.

Also 三喵 got herself a new cell phone with a built in camera. I offered to help her set up a moblog. We’ll see. We’ll see.

Date: March 30th, 2003
Cate: Regular

Optimus Prime has a weblog.

Date: March 30th, 2003
Cate: Video Games
2 msgs

BREAKING NEWS: Linux running on unmodified Xbox!

Found at Slashdot. Here’s the original announcement, where this unknown shows up and says “I got Linux to work, here’s how to do it” and all 800 people who have been working on this for years say “nice try, whatever, ha ha, april fool’s, go away, don’t bother us” and then post back again a few minutes later saying “Holy #*^$@(*… IT WORKS!”

Turns out “007: Agent Under Fire” (and some other games too) have a bug in the saved game handling routine, which can be exploited to run my personal favorite kind of code, arbitrary.

I find this hack very aesthetically appealing. You boot up a standard game, go to “Load Saved Game” and the Xbox goes all freaky as the cruelly composed data in the saved game causes the machine to have a heart attack and tear through its own memory, circumventing all the carefully designed encryption and lockout code. The screen blanks out, the LEDs blink, and then this alternate OS which is contrary to everything the Xbox stands for loads up quietly. The machine has been completely and totally “owned”. This is the way a system would be hacked in a Neal Stephenson novel.