A lot of people have asked me what happened to the Alky project. The short answer is that we made a lot of bad business moves, but that answer glances over a lot of the fun little details. Having gained considerable knowledge from other stories of failed startups, I figure I'll throw one of my own into the ring.
History

The Alky project's ( Read more... )

This is the current Renraku OS FAQ.  If you have a question that's not answered here, feel free to join us in #renraku on irc.freenode.net.

What is Renraku OS?

Renraku is a pure managed code operating system, written in Boo from the ground up.  The goal is to produce a high-quality operating system without the traditional security, ( Read more... )

Developing Renraku has led me to some interesting thoughts, not the least of which is the feasibility of a .NET computer.
Concept

Existing computers know only a few core things:

• Move to/from memory and registers
• Branch
• Perform arithmetic

All the other smarts are built on top of that, leaving us with layer upon layer of complexity. What ( Read more... )

There hasn't been any news on Renraku in a while, so I figured I'd throw up an update on what's going on.
Where we are

Not a whole lot has changed since the last post. We have a clear direction on where we're moving and we're making progress, albeit more slowly than in the first few months.

The biggest new thing is networking. We have Ethernet ( Read more... )

You know, I'm not a picky customer. When I find a company that does
the job well and without causing problems, I tend to stick with them
for a long time. I also tend to advocate for good companies, because
they're becoming less and less common. Today, a company just lost my
business forever, and I doubt anyone else who sees this will ever deal
with ( Read more... )

Texas Instruments has decided to C&D the UnitedTI forum for distributing the TI83+ signing key (as reported here).  This makes another beautiful illegal number.  Distribute it far and wide -- no number should be illegal to distribute.

Gentlemen,

A mathematical morsel for your entertainment and edification.

The number
6,857,599,914,349,403, ( Read more... )

Yesterday I read about a comment from RMS at Software Freedom Day in Boston. He referred to Miguel
de Icaza as "basically a traitor to the Free Software community".
Sorry, but this is too much, even for him.
RMS was a driving force early on and is responsible in large part for
the open source movement. Since then, I believe he's done far more to
( Read more... )

(Some quick notes before the article. My Pokerstars reversing series
is still in the works, but I've been on vacation for a few weeks and
haven't given it the attention it deserves. There'll be a new post
shortly. Also, I'm currently looking for contract work, and you can
see some info here: Read more... )

I've decided to open up for contracts for a little while. My
interests are generally in reverse-engineering and
kernel/compiler/emulator development, but I've extensive experience in
all sorts of development and design. If it piques my interest and I
know what I need to do, it'll be done.
 Key skills:

• Extensive software reverse-engineering ( Read more... )

Let me start with a little background. I got into poker botting after
reading James Devlin's great series on Coding The Wheel. I tried a
few different attempts at the IO layer (hooking the poker client
directly, screenscraping (wrote a cool little library), etc) before
settling on hacking the protocol directly. However, I also started
getting into ( Read more... )