Gameboy advance Learning tool

The game boy advance learning tool is a great way of learning how to program for the ARM platform. It might seem daunting at first but with the help of the documentation and some tutorials you will be all set to start programming for the GBA.

BIOS hacking and other fun stuff

Heres a great way learn assembly on the X86 platform (WARNING: this is not for the faint of heart). These articles teach you how to flash a BIOS, Backup the BIOS and write a new ROM file into the chip.

Checking file integrity with MD5 hashes

Click on image to see actual size.

The next time you are downloading a file off the Internet and want to make sure the file is not corrupt or virus infected try to see if the file has a MD5 hash file or a SHA1 hash file. Simply put each file  generate an unique signature when hashed using the MD5 algorithm  The signature changes if the contents of the file change or gets corrupted

 

.You can download the tools to verify file integrity here. or here for a graphical tool.

Football playing robot

A PhD student from Shanghai JiaoTong University (SJTU) Research Institute has developed an RTLinux-powered robot that plays football ,The robot has two color cameras for seeing and a laser range finder (LRF) for goalkeeper location. Communication is through  wireless LAN which allows communication among the robots on the team. The robot’s embedded operating system is Red Hat Linux enhanced with the RTLinuxPro real-time extension.

Alternative operating systems

If you ever thought that Windows was the only operating system and there are no alternatives to it, then think again. Here is a small list of mostly free alternative operating systems that match and sometimes surpass Windows features.

Multiprocessor simulator for the PC

If you want to try developing program’s that run on multi-processor systems and cant afford the hardware then LIMES is what you need. It is a multiple processor simulator that can run parallel programs. It serves as a testing environment for programs written for multiprocessor systems.

EICAR – Dummy test file to check you Antivirus software

EICAR.org has got a dummy test virus file that anyone can download to test the effectiveness of the antivirus software on their machine. The file is available here. most self antivirus software should warn you when downloading the program. THis itself is a good sign. Download all 4 kinds of files listed and check if you get warnings for all 4. If not its time to switch to a better antivirus program.

Note: I have mentioned the free AVG antivirus in my previous blog posts.

A good ARM7TDMI project idea

Here is a very good project idea based on ARM7TDMI, develop a ARM emulator/simulator the project is very challenging as it requires in-depth knowledge of programming both for the PC platform as well as for the ARM platform.

Open source hardware designs

Now that the idea of Free software is gaining acceptance,here is an exciting concept called open source hardware design. www.opencores.org is an online collaboration of like-minded people who are developing free hardware designs emulating functions of most popular hardware architectures any student doing VLSI or other technologies might find some useful information here.

Great firefox extensions

Here’s a useful list of Firefox extensions. I have been using these extensions to extend Firefox’s functionality and they work great 🙂

Adblock 0.5.2.039

Add Bookmark Here 0.5.3

BlogThis 0.2.1

BugMeNot 0.6.1

Download Statusbar 0.9.2

eWebMail Color and Graphics 1.6

Ext2Abc 0.2.1

fireFTP 0.86.2

FoxyTunes 1.0

ListZilla 0.5.1

Nuke Anything 0.2

QuickNote 0.6

ReloadEvery 0.5

SpellBound 0.7.3

SpellBound Win32 Components 0.7.0

Tweak Network 1.0

US Department of Homeland Insecurity Idiocy Level 0.1.1.1

Wikipedia 0.6.0.7