Most memorable gigs I've ever been to

• Level 42, Birmingham Dome, 1983
• Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band, Wembley Stadium June 1985
• Billy Bragg, Wolverhampton Civic Hall, May 1986
  
• Eden Burning, Brixton Academy, August 1994
• Kevin Prosch, The Forum, April 1996
• The Vigilantes of Love, The Borderline, June 1999
• Counting Crows, Wembley Arena, September 2003
• Julie Lee, The Borderline, August 2005
• All Star United, The Half Moon, Putney, November 2007
  
• Martin Joseph, Union Chapel, September 2008

Babbage's Analytical Engine

In December 1837, the British mathematician Charles Babbage published a paper describing a mechanical computer that is now known as the Analytical Engine. Anyone intimate with the details of electronic computers will instantly recognize the components of Babbage's machine. Although Babbage was designing with brass and iron, his Engine has a central processing unit (which he called the mill) and a large amount of expandable memory (which he called the store). The operation of the Engine is controlled by program stored on punched cards, and punched cards can also be used to input data.
John Graham Cummings is trying to get together the money and team necessary to actually build an Analytical Engine - aside from it being the coolest Steam Punk project ever it will give a real insight into how computation is independent of physical arrangements (we won't always be running our computers on silicon) AND it is possible for someone to be literally a century ahead of the curve. Remember - this machine was Turing-complete and so can be considered in the same category as modern computers.
As an aside the Science Museum made a Difference Engine in the early nineties using only materials and techniques that would have been available to Babbage and it worked well. The difference engine is not a Turing-machine, it was used to automate the production of printed log tables but is equally as impressive.
If you want to hear John talking about the project then he is on this week's TwiT and is jolly interesting.

Replacing the DVD drive in an XBox360

Microsoft realised after the original XBox that folks would find ways around the games' DRM and so in the case of the 360 they make it as hard as possible to use anything other than the stock optical drive that came with the machine. Every motherboard and DVD drive pair each have half of an AES key pair and so if you install another drive it'll play video DVDs but not games. They hoped this would stop people sticking in non-stock drives that could (for example) read home-burned disks. However, the hacking scene around XBox is extensive and so in pretty short-order there were hacker tools to read the drive's key and then flash it into a replacement drive.
Microsoft got wise to this pretty quickly and the summer 2008 update to XBox requires not only the key halves to work together but the drive ID strings to match. So - if you had a machine with an Hitachi drive and replaced it with a BenQ drive (for example), even if you extracted the key from the Hitachi and re-flashed the BenQ the XBox's OS would now query the drive ID and stop it working if that came back wrong.
Hackers are clever people and since v4.5 of Firmware Toolbox it's been possible to include the old drive's ID in the firmware for the new drive. This is what they refer to as 'spoofing'. It turns out that the drive ID is just that - a string that has no bearing on the drive's operation. So - your BenQ drive can now report it's an Hitachi 79 with this key and the XBox is happy.
Well, it's spy vs spy and the rumor is that the next update to XBox will include routines to test the ballistics and responses of the DVD drive to ensure it's the model it claims it is...!

So - if you have an XBox with a DVD drive that is on the way out (and it's almost always the laser) then you have three options which may/may not work;

1. Open the machine, remove the DVD drive, open it and clean the lens with some IPA or some such. Seems to work for lots of people.
   
2. Buy an identical model DVD drive on eBay (there are plenty of all four kinds for sale sub £20 from broken machines or around £30 for brand new ones). Then swap the controller cards between the drives. This means you have the old electronics but new mechanics/optics.
3. Extract your old drive and using the right tools read-out the key and drive IDs, save them and then write them into a replacement drive (which can be another brand and model). This is potentially the most risky as anyone who has flashed firmware into any device will tell you. Browsing the forums reveals many folks complaining about having bricked their newly acquired drives. Also - if the XBox detects what you've done you'll be kicked off XBox-Live (both your machine and your account).

Anyway, if you're any kind of engineer and have any experience opening up equipment the first two are trivial. If you choose the third way (Mr Blair!) then it's worth giving some guidelines.
Whichever way you proceed you'll need to open the thing up and it's mostly held together with fragile plastic clips, and so here is the best tear-down instructions I have found.
Also remember - the XBox DVD drives have a standard SATA connector but a proprietary power connector. For all these tests I left the drive in the XBox (which powered the drive) and I used a long SATA cable to go to the eSATA port on the back of the PC. Now then - the XBox has a class-two (double-insulated) design and so the internal metalwork is floating at some undefined DC voltage. I suggest an earthing lead from the XBox's internal chassis to the PC's metalwork.

Extracting that precious key from the broken DVD drive

1. Connect the "Original/Broken DVD drive" to your PC via SATA or USB-SATA adaptor.
2. Place the DVD drive into MODE B with SLAX - SLAX is a live Linux CD that allows you to issue SATA commands directly. A good tutorial is here
   
3. Please Note: Once you have the drive in MODE B you will notice it will take 3 presses on the eject button to close the drive.
4. With the Original/Broken drive now in MODE B restart your PC and make sure that the new drive has been identified by Windows. Once the new hardware has been found and installed it will be shown in the my computer/explorer area on your PC as a additional DVD drive.
5. Insert a DVD Movie or an XBOX 360 game into the "Original/Broken DVD drive". Even if the laser is nearly dead it may read a DVD movie just fine so try it.
6. Open Firmware Toolbox (at least v. 4.5.1.6) and choose 'Tools -> Direct Drive Dump (GDR ONLY)
7. On the next screen choose 'RAW DUMP' and save the file as "original.bin". If you have problems with 'RAW DUMP' try 'CLASSIC DUMP', eg. c:/xbox360/hitachi0047/606HG324277-may2006/original.bin
8. Make sure you can identify the backup firmware in future by placing it in a directory that matches the serial number which is located on the sticker of the DVD drive. This will make it much easier to identify in the future.

Replacement Xbox 360 DVD Drive

1. Connect the replacement DVD drive to your PC via SATA connection.
2. Place the DVD drive into MODE B with SLAX
   
3. Please Note: Once you have the drive in MODE B you will notice it will take 3 presses on the eject button to close the drive.
4. With the replacement drive now in MODE B restart your PC and make sure that the new drive has been identified by Windows. Once the new hardware has been found and installed it will be shown in the my computer/explorer area on your PC as a additional DVD drive.
5. Insert a DVD Movie or an XBOX 360 game into the Replacement DVD drive.
6. Open Firmware Toolbox and choose 'Tools -> Direct Drive Dump (GDR ONLY)
7. On the next screen choose 'RAW DUMP' and save the file as "original.bin". If you have problems with 'RAW DUMP' try 'CLASSIC DUMP'. eg. c:/xbox360/hitachi0046/606HG324240-may2006/original.bin
8. Make sure you can identify the backup firmware in future by placing it in a directory that matches the serial number which is located on the sticker of the DVD drive. This will make it much easier to identify in the future.
9. When the firmware is backed up it will ask you if you want to open it. Choose"yes". Now select "Tools->Spoof Firmware" from the Firmware Toolbox 4.5 menus.
10. Choose the version that you would like the fw to report back as. Leave all other options as they are.
11. Please note: - Spoofing a drive as itself has the effect of UNSPOOFING it
12. Now Click "APPLY SPOOF"
13. Choose "Tools->Smart Hack Patcher", a window warning will appear, choose OK.
14. Choose the output file name, I suggest calling it "final.bin" and save it at the same location as the original. The ruleset option should be automatically selected for you so leave it alone. eg. c:/xbox360/hitachi0046/606HG324240-may2006/final.bin
15. Push the "Generate File" button, if everything goes fine the file will be generated almost instantly
16. Once the file has been generated it will ask you if you want to open it. Choose "Yes". The Main Window will show the generated file (final.bin). You will notice that the spoofed information is shown in bold.

Original/Broken Firmware Key

1. Open the old original/broken DVD drive firmware which you backed up in step 1. Choose the Browse for file button "..." to load the original/broken DVD firmware.
2. With the old broken DVD firmware now loaded you will notice the "Key Information @" area in the center of the 360 Firmware Toolbox application.
3. Highlight the entire key and copy it by right clicking your mouse and selecting copy or press Ctrl + C so you can paste it into our new replacement drive.
4. Open the replacement DVD drive firmware named "final.bin" which you created in step 2. Choose the Browse for file button "..." to load the firmware.
5. Paste the Key into the "Key Information
6. Click on "Replace Key" and it will update the firmware with the new key you have just pasted.
   

Check Firmware Differences

Before flashing the drive I suggest re-opening the old firmware from step 1. Then open the final.bin firmware you just created in step 3 and make sure keys and other information match just to be safe. If you're happy that your keys etc match then move onto flashing the drive.

1. Choose "Tools->Direct Drive Flash->Differential Flash Patch". Make sure the DVD drive you want to flash is selected
2. Click the "Read Drive and Detect Differences" button, after a few seconds the sectors list below the button should be populated.
3. It will now ask you if you would like to keep the keys from the drive.. Choose 'No'.
4. Click the "Start Flashing" button and choose the flash mode.. I suggest using the 0047 flasher for 47 drives etc etc..
5. After a few seconds the flashing is complete.

Replace the DVD drive into the XBox and test - you don't need to re-build the case and re-attach the hard drive.


Resources;
SLAX Linux live CD
Firmware Toolbox

The end of universal benefits?

I watched Mr Cameron's speech yesterday with some interest. I had thought for a while that child benefit for all was strange (although Sarah and I have come to depend on it over the last few years) and I'm surprised higher rate tax payers have received it for as long as they have. They should have avoided the debacle over the aggregated salary issue, but there you go.
Anyway - it got me wondering about other universal benefits which could (presumably) be cut for those folks who make too much (or contribute to the system too much?!);

• Healthcare - why should people who make enough to pay 40% of it back into the system expect to receive free hospital treatment?
• Education - This is an area where a gradual erosion of support for teachers and head-teacher's rights to run their schools they way they want to has caused a defacto segregation. Those who can afford it and value education end up paying for it. Presumably by means-testing state-provided education you could free up loads of money.

All of this breaks the fundamental aspect of the welfare state that says we're all in this together - you contribute as you can and you're provided for as you have a need. For this reason the government shouldn't be looking for ways to take low-earning workers out of the tax system. The danger of building a welfare state where some provide (and are still told they need to 'shoulder their part of the cuts') and some take is that eventually the providers wind up voting for government that stops spending their taxes on things that don't benefit them - as in the US.
It may not be the case that cutting one universal benefit will lead to the others becoming means tested but the UK may have crossed the Rubicon.