Shortlog - a log of everyday things

2011-03-10

Sometimes I wonder if it's weird that I only really have one drawer of files. Financial records on the same level as middle school papers.

Tonight, Andrew and I are hosting a dinner party. I'm supposed to make bread bowls. I hope they turn out well.

I've also been thinking: are there tools to empower or assist manual reverse engineers? I basically stared at hexadecimal digits until they made sense when working on the Kinect, but are there tools to do the same sort of pattern-matching that happens in my mind? Could they suggest structure and interpretation of the data? Would they actually be useful, or only an academic novelty?

I am in the process of writing up an explanation of how I worked out the Kinect audio protocol. I intend for it to:

1. Show you the way I approached and solved the problem
2. Share some insights and techniques that might be reusable for other reverse-engineering tasks
3. Be at least marginally entertaining to those interested in the topic

Sebastian Ortiz posted more USB logs, including some during calibration, so I may be able to get a better understanding of how the noise cancellation works. That will make the aforementioned article longer. Oh dear.

UPDATE: bread bowls turned out AMAZING. Also, I need to learn to get over the dough being sticky on my hands and add more water to bread dough in general.

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