Building Custom Firmware for PS3

The 27th Chaos Communication Congress revealed the Epic Programming Fail on the PlayStation 3 security. Finally it turned out that Sony's ECDSA algorithm for signing apps use a random number generator which always returns the same number (No, I'm not kidding). The fail0verflow team, who found out this fail, used the following famous xkcd comic to describe Sony's ECDSA algorithm.

fail0verflow demonstrated their work on AsbestOS, which ...

Reads for the New Year

Now I have two new good books to read for this New Year. The classic Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs/SICP and To Mock a Mockingbird (Raymond Smullyan), a humorous introduction to combinatory logic with the help of interesting puzzles.

SICP was used as the textbook of MIT's old introductory programming class 6.001. Later this class has been replaced by 6.01, which uses Python. It is ...

Learn web development with Flask

I've seen many people jumping into web development with feature-complete frameworks like Django and Rails. But most of them will find it difficult to assimilate the web development concepts because of cluttered documentation (incase of Rails) or complexity (incase of Django). One might need to look at a simpler microframework to learn from scratch. And yes, Flask is the one you'd want to have a look at.

Flask ...

Factory/Service mode on PlayStation 3

Here is a happy news for those who updated to firmware >3.41 and didn't get a chance to enjoy the homwbrews for PS3. Yes, atlast we'll be able to downgrade the PS3 firmware to any version <3.50. The actual PSJailbreak team were the first team to release the downgrade. But many thanks to zAxis who created PSGrade, an opensouce version of PSDowngrade. Using this we can ...

Cricinfo api (unofficial) for Python

Recently I started developing a Python library for accessing live information from ESPN Cricinfo like live scores, innings details and player profiles. Currently, it only fetches live match information using a simple Python iterator.

# instantiate
matches = CricInfo()
# iterate though matches
for match in matches:
    # match title
    print match.title
    # a short desciption for the match
    print match.description
    # url to live scorecard
    print match.link
    print match.guid

I wish ...