Daniel’s Stuff

I have just released the source to a HP48GX emulator for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

I’ve been having some “fun” with my new Mac Pro.  In order for me to be able to use it for my daily work I need to be able to connect to a Microsoft SQL Server instance from the Rails app I’m working on at my day job.  Normally this is just a simple matter of installing FreeTDS, Ruby-ODBC and the Ruby DBI and DBD packages.  When I did this, as soon as I tried to make a connection to the SQL Server instance my application would crash with a bus error!  After a bit of digging around with gdb I discovered that the application was crashing when FreeTDS was trying to deallocate a string using the standard C library memory function free.  The really weird thing is that the string was pointing to a valid string.  I dug a little further and found that if I changed the code that was allocating the string to use malloc and strcpy instead of strdup it worked!  If anybody out there knows why this might make a difference I’d really like to hear from them about it.

I had a bit of time yesturday to spend working on the Windows Live compression reverse engineering.  I successfully decompressed around 20 bytes.  The previous record was 2 bytes  There are two parts to the compression.  First is the compressed data and the second is pointers back into decompressed data.  The compressed data is working quite well, but the pointers to repeated blocks that have already been decompressed is off a little so I see some correct data and some rubbish.  Hopefully I’ll get some more time in the next couple of days to work on it some more. 

For one of the projects I’m working on I needed a nice looking tab bar control.  Under previous versions of Mac OS X I used the PSMTabBarControl.  The control is nicely integrated into Interface Builder 2.0, but I no longer have IB 2.0 installed as I’ve upgraded to more recent versions of XCode.  I’ve done a very quick port of the code for IB 3.0 and made it available here on github.

As many people are aware Apple released Mac OS X 10.5.6 yesterday.  Unfortunately this broke the HttpMail plugin  After a little bit of poking around I found and fixed the problem.  The result is a new release of the plugin 1.53.  

Just a quick note to let everybody know that I’m making good progress reverse engineering the Windows Live Mail protocol.  With the help of a couple of other people I’ve managed to determine the nature of the compression used on the message data.  We’ve successfully managed to build the decompression table and I’m now working through the routine to do the actual decompression.  IDA Pro is an amazing piece of software and I highly recommend it if you ever need to do any reverse engineering of compiled programs.

Something really strange happened in the previous post.  There were these weird characters appearing in the text.  From what I can see it is WebKit trying to be helpful and create non-breaking spaces.  Unfortunately rather than insert a good old   it is inserting 0xA0 characters.  I’ve just added some code to look for these characters and replace then with  .  It should be interesting to see if it works

I have been working on a little blog posting app for my wife for some time called BlogThing.  The first version worked well enough that I released it for download from the Automagic Software site.  It used some pretty nasty stuff that iterated over the chunks in an NSAttributedString, and while it worked pretty well I decided I wanted something a little more future proof.  To that end I decided to look into using WebView in edit mode.  Under 10.4 this worked really nicely.  I could drag in imanges, set the fonts and do all sorts of really neat things.  Unfortunately under 10.5 dragging and pasting images into the blog posting just stopped working and I’ve not had a lot of time to look into it.  Tonight I’ve managed to get it working well enough that I think I can finally give it to my wife to play with.