ZBLADE2 R3 Released!

Revision 3 (R3) of my ZBLADE2 USB information-gathering tool has been released. It retains all of the functionality of R2, and has the following changes/updates/additions:

• EZ-Config section at beginning of run.cmd: each tool has a entry that you can set either to 0 (disabled) or 1 (enabled), allowing quick and painless selection of what tools to run
• Updated FirePassword to v2.5, which supports Firefox 3
• added fgdump v2.1.0 as an alternate Windows login password/DCC cache dumper. Although gsecdump remains the default tool for this, fgdump is provided for anyone experiencing trouble (Vista!) You can enable fgdump in the EZ-Config section. Though redundant, it should be fine if you choose to enable both tools.

You may download ZBLADE2 R3 below:

http://www.box.net/shared/980kc25koc

MD5: 3913BA86BFDDECBEC885FCCD6B068A0E

Weekly Travels: A Taste of Chicago

Over the past week my friends and I have worked hard and played hard. Here is a lineup of our activities so far:

On Friday, we took the Metra downtown and walked to Pizza Uno for dinner. The Chicago deep-dish they have there is superb, but so is Giordano's, and I still can't decide which is superior. Curfew was at 11:15 pm, though, and we were kinda rushed (the fact that we got out of lab at 7:00 didn't help). We waited for the train for 20 minutes, and whether due to chance or a misreading of the schedule, it still didn't come. It was now 10:50 pm, and we had to move to our last resort: a taxi. Where are those things when you need them? We waited another five minutes before a taxi van showed up. We told the Turkish taxi dude to go fast and that we had to be back by 11:10 at the latest. At times we were going 70 in a 45 mph zone. Thanks to this guy's awesome driving we made it back actually 3 minutes before, at 11:12. That was one of the best stunts we ever pulled - hopefully it will be unnecessary to repeat that.

The next day we went downtown again, this time to see (and taste?) the Taste of Chicago. It's actually still going on till July 6. Basically, it's a highly overpriced food festival with some of the most murderous crowds ever. Admission itself is free, but to eat the food or ride the rides ya gotta buy tickets (12 for $8). To put this in perspective, consider the fact that ONE slice of pizza is 7 or 8 tickets, a barbecue sandwich up to 10, and the Ferris Wheel 6. If you are a gluttonous eater, too bad for you, cuz you'll be forking over a lot of money. Oh, and don't forget the enormous number of people - it is literally packed, and a lot of times you can't even move. They really need to implement some form of crowd control.

The 4th of July means fireworks. Actually, though, Chicago's fireworks are on the 3rd, and my roommate's dad offered to take us all out to the festivities at Millennium Park. After a quick drive down to the Metra station, we hopped on and got off at Van Buren Street. The place was crawling with cops - near the subway station, their was a crapload of cop cars, cop SUVs, and unmarked police vehicles. Downtown, there were at least two cops on every street corner. After stops at Chipotle and Jamba Juice, we headed for Millennium Park. Getting there  meant (at least, according to my roommate's dad) a little shortcut through the Taste of Chicago grounds. Unfortunately, our plans were ruined by the crowds there, which were even worse this time around. By the time we escaped, it was already too late and we had to go back for curfew. But, at the very least, we had enough crowds for a lifetime.

Stay tuned for more adventures!

Z-Alarm 1.0 Released

Recently I have been dabbling into the world of programming, and now I have finished my first program - an alarm clock. I know it doesn't sound too glamorous, but the need for such a program surely exists - the existing apps are either too outdated or not free. Z-Alarm should solve this problem - it is written in Visual Basic .NET (VB.NET).

Z-Alarm can play a music file (thanks to the Windows Media Player control), or continuously beep if no music file is selected. Usage is simple - use the date/time box to set the desired alarm time, then hit "Set Alarm". To turn off the alarm and reset the alarm time and music settings, hit "Reset Alarm".

Since this is a .NET program, you will need the .NET Framework 2.0.

Z-Alarm is now available through my SkyDrive account:

http://cid-3097866033956d7a.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/pub/myapps/z-alarm.zip

On Campus @ Univ of Chicago - Food and More Dorm Life

Food

No discussion of college residential life is complete without mentioning the dorm food. Amazingly, it isn't that bad. Food is served for all three meals, and it seems that it gets better in that order. Breakfast food sucks - today there were scrambled eggs, some sort of potatoes in the form of hash browns or tater tots, french toast, and sausage patties with dots of red blood on them. The only fruit available are oranges, bananas, and canned fruit. The pop machine, thankfully, is available in the morning.

Lunch is much more diverse with pasta, pizza, fast food in the form of burgers, fries, and chicken nuggets, and fresh fruit in the form melon and strawberries. Dinner is more or less the same.

Dorm Life

There's a lot of amenities in our dorms. In the lobby there is a printing station connectable from any PC. On every floor there are lounges, with assorted equipment (TVs and pool/air hockey tables). The 1st-floor lounge has a Steinway grand, which sounds nice but a runthrough of some Chopin revealed it hadn't been tuned in quite a while. In the basement, thoughtfully, is the laundry and music practice rooms.

We are given a lot of freedom to do whatever we want after class. Curfew is at 10:00 pm on weekdays and 12:00pm on weekends. We can go anywhere we want, provided we sign in for curfew. A trip to the Magnificent Mile and/or Second City is in the works...

Meanwhile, we have been stealing all the door decorations from the girls across the hall...wonder how long it will be before they find out.

On Campus @ the University of Chicago

Well, this is my first post from the campus of the University of Chicago. I'm in a pretty new dorm (Max Palevsky is actually the newest residential building here) and the living conditions are SO much better than, say, Northwestern. The rooms are laid out in a suite arrangement - each door in the hall actually leads to two rooms A and B, 2x2 so 4 people in one "room". Each suite has bathrooms on both sides (one w/ shower and sink, the other w/ toilet and sink). There is central air, nice big closets and a nightstand, and more desk space for the two of us than we will possibly be using.

Now for the technical amenities. The entire dorm is wireless-equipped, but it's only 802.11b so it tops out at 11 Mbps. Being a speed freak I dug behind the desk and found the ethernet hardwire (only 10 MBps?!) I was required to get an ID and password (called the CNetID) which you need to use your computers on campus and get a @uchicago.edu email address; they appear to be using MAC filtering to do the dirty work of authentication.

Here's a speed test:

It'll do, but I was kinda expecting more from a private univ. By contrast, I can get 70 MBps downloads over at the U of Michigan...

P2P appz were explicitly forbidden, they read out loud some clause of the DMCA - that blows, but well, we'll see what happens with that. Not too surprising - it's a campus net, after all.