Blog Compromised

April 5th, 2009

Sorry about the ads that some of you are seeing on RSS feeds. It looks like over this weekend a script leveraged a vulnerability in WordPress to promote a draft post (hence the broken video), attach a bunch of ads to it, and publish it. I’ve demoted the post with all the ads but I’m still getting emails from readers that use RSS saying that they see ads appended to their feeds, so perhaps the hack has modified some of the core scripts for syndicating RSS feeds. I probably have to wipe and re-install wordpress to remove this problem, and probably manually edit the database as well, which will take some time…which seeing as I’m already late on posting last month’s Name that Ware you can tell I’m not having a lot of time these days. Thanks for your patience…

In the meantime, if someone can confirm that their RSS reader is still seeing ads in-line with content after this post is up, I’d appreciate it.

Posted in Administrative | 7 Comments »

Chumby on Multiple Platforms

April 4th, 2009

For the readers of this blog that follow chumby news, here’s a tidbit for you. Below is a YouTube video of chumby running on multiple platforms. A lot of people have the impression that chumby is all about the leather-bag device that I write about on this blog.

In actuality, since the company’s founding chumby has focused on the content and the services that a chumby device could provide; this is part of the reason why, for example, chumby still has only one hardware engineer (me). Growing the hardware product line internally is not core to chumby’s business. Rather, the long-term goal of chumby is to be a multi-platform technology that you can embed in any product; chumby’s hardware efforts simply provide a reference design to get the ecosystem bootstrapped.

At CES chumby demonstrated a picture frame reference design, but chumby actually has the ability to run on much more than just that. Below is a video demonstrating chumby running on several target platforms. None of the these except for the leather bag chumby are officially supported or available for retail as shown, but as you can see it’s relatively easy to hack the chumby client software onto many existing devices, and chumby does have some new home-grown hardware reference designs in different form factors available to hardware manufacturers that desire a full-custom solution.

(The video above is narrated by chumby’s VP of Bizdev, Steve Adler. It shouldn’t be private, as the draft post had it marked…the guys at the chumby office had to reshoot it a few times, so the post was held for a while.)

Posted in chumby | 6 Comments »

Name that Ware February 2009

February 28th, 2009

The Ware for February 2009 is shown below. Click the link for a much larger version.

One of the guidelines I have about picking wares for this competition is that they should have been “in production” at least once upon a time, even in small volume. In other words, I avoid posting one-off prototypes (unless there’s a really interesting story behind it) so that there is a reasonable chance someone could positively identify it.

Thanks to the recession, I have a bit of a spin I can put on that rule. The ware above was “in production” (there’s a factory in China sitting on a pile of these) but the company that ordered them is now defunct, so I don’t think it ever made it to market. That would define this product as a pre-production prototype — normally kept secret — but since the company is gone, it’s fair game for a teardown (or at least, they stiffed the factory, so what would you expect?). It’s not a particularly tough ware to guess in terms of function (its form factor is a bit of a giveaway), but it will be interesting to see if anyone can identify the exact model number (one was assigned) and company — or business model — for this ware.

Posted in Hacking | 17 Comments »

Winners of Name that Ware December 2008 and January 2009

February 28th, 2009

I did a double-post last time for Name that Ware, so I’ll do a double-judging this time as well.

January’s ware is the Philips XP3422 photomultiplier tube, and Jim is the winner for correctly identifying it and providing a link to a document that discusses how to use this tube. I didn’t realize it was for use in gamma ray camera arrays! The hex shape for dense packing makes sense now. Thanks for the info, and congrats.

December’s ware is a Wintek Wince 6800 control module. Johny ^_^ got the answer correct first. And Keith, yes, I’d be happy to send the TGIMBOEJ on to you!

Congrats to everyone and drop me an email to claim your prizes (or your box of stuff as it may be — just need your mailing address).

Posted in Hacking | 2 Comments »

Aerial View of the Mobile Phone Megamarket

February 27th, 2009

I managed to snap a shot of one of the cellphone markets from the 30th floor of the SEG tower (this distinctive octagonal building sits on top of the electronics part market, so from this perspective you get an idea of how close these two markets are to each other).

The actual market itself is highlighted in red — it spans this entire building and all the lower floors. There is actually another market just as big as this one down the main road to the the lower right of this image — it’s obscured by other buildings from the office I was standing in, and even if I could see it I couldn’t fit it all in the field of view of my camera.

Posted in Made in China | 11 Comments »

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