CruiseControl Reporting, Attention & Posting (CRAP)

Few posts ago, I told the readers of this very blog about a device I bought from Dealextreme (1, 2) for notifying about incoming E-Mails, and how I patched the program that came with it. To freshen your memory, the USB device is a envelop shaped box, that can glow in eight different colors. The device is identified by Windows as a regular HID device, which means that no drivers are required for most OSs. The colors are generated by an RGB LED, that probably supports many other color variations (Requires hardware modifications).

Since then I’ve made a small open source Python project for controlling this device and making it useful.
Someone told me he used this device as a good start for his project of smart home gadget. As a public service, I attach here some images of the device from within.

It seems like, there is some room on this board to add more LEDs or something, please tell me if you manage to figure out more details about it. If you want to use this board to connect it to some external device, you can remove the LED (it's the white square at the middle), and weld something else instead. I couldn't figure out what kind of a chip the black one is, and whether it's possible to reprogram it. I would open another device next week, hopefully to answer few of these questions.

Recently, I’ve made a compiling / building notification system at my workplace, so I would know whom to feed to the sharks, when the build fails. Here’s a picture of the system.

I’ve added the source for this system (Everything but the CuriseControl password ;) under the XP-Dev SVN project (CControlLED.py).
Please feel free to use it, and share your own projects.

BTW, the chip in this LED box is most probably: http://www.sonix.com.tw/sonix/product.do?p=SN8P2212

Looking Into the Eye of the Bits

During the past four years I've been developing tools for research and implementation of a new type of software analysis. I've discussed these tools on a various occasions such as RECon2010, Nullcon2011 and DC9723.
The purpose of these tools is to recover internal implementation details using only passive memory analysis, and without requiring any disassembly.
These tools are now available under GPL license on the following links:
https://github.com/assafnativ/NativDebugging

The latest version of the presentation + WP is available in the SVN of pymint:
https://github.com/assafnativ/NativDebugging/tree/master/docs

For more details on the subject you are more than welcome to visit the websites of the kind conferences which gave me the place to mumble about my work:
http://nullcon.net/speakers/bakkar/
http://recon.cx/2010/speakers.html#memory
http://wiki.dc9723.org/wiki/Meetings

I'm currently looking for more places to spread my word, if you know of such, please contact me.