Felipe Martín

Recently, I've been working on a tool to extract data from iOS backups, and one of the files that a backup have is the Manifest.mbdb (or mbdx for old versions).

The Manifest.mbdb is a binary file that contains records for the hashed files that the backup includes, the hashed files can be anything that a certain application requires or saved, from a image thumbnail to a sqlite3 database file.

Reading the file can be tricky, since the record itself have a variable length, so you can just split the file based on a delimiter, you need to read it byte to byte. I'm going to expose here the data structures this file contains:

A few days ago, I bought Warcraft III. I never finished it before, since I didn’t own the game, and lately I had this inner urge to play a game on the Warcraft series. Since going back to World of Warcraft isn’t an option, I decided to rollback to the part of the Warcraft lore that is unknown to me.

Sadly after buying the game I discovered that they dropped support for the game when Apple did the conversion of their hardware from powerpc to intel. There was no way of running the mac version of the game on newer hardware, and I even contacted Blizzard support about the matter, but the answer was the one I feared: I had to use wine. This reminded me of the old days when I was a linux user and this was needed in order to play anything on linux.

Not so long ago I’ve been gifted with a Yubikey. It’s a two-auth hardware solution with multiple auth methods (OTP, Challenge-response, OATH-HOTP and static password). It easily scaled to one of my favourite and most useful gadgets.

I’ve been a google authenticator user for a while, but the yubikey is just much easier to work with: when configured, you only need to tap a button on the usb stick to generate your key. You can use this in many ways, but in this post I’m focusing on ssh authentication and how to install the yubico-pam module into an Arch installation.

For those who don’t know, I started a site a while ago minecraft related (yes, [the one I dropped](/blog/2013/1/12/weekly-project-status-dropping-projects- hard/)). If you don’t know what minecraft is (really?!), you can check the official site, since this game can be a little difficult to explain.

The project (which is online at minecraftcodex.com) is just a database of items, blocks, entities, etc. related to the game, but as in any other site of this kind, entering all this information can lead to an absolute boredom. So I thought… what if I can extract some of the data from the game classfiles? That would be awesome! Spoiler alert I did it.

After finishing zombiepress a friend of mine wanted to use it but asked for some kind of conversion to static since he uploads its current blog to github. That’s how this project was born.

Django as a static site? Of course, it’s possible, only if your project it’s using a simple backend infrastructure, it doesn’t let users modify the database, and also doesn’t have contact forms or that kind of stuff. The conversion of a blog into static content was really easy, in about 30 minutes I had an alpha working -which is the 0.1.2 version uploaded in github/pypi-.

It finally happened. I got tired of octopress and decided to finish what I started: my own blogging CMS.

It’s a really modest thing built with django. I’ve added some thing to make it easy to use (in my oppinion):

• settings.py main preferences (required for running the app) are set on environment variables instead of environment dependant settings files or the not so cool local_settings.py.
• A a key->value preferences config in the admin (a simple django model with 3 fields) for settings that may be needed to modify in a live environment and would be a shame if it were on the settings.py file. In example, I use it to set some RSS preferences and the Disqus shortname for the blog comments. To disable blog comments I just need to uncheck the “pass to template” option on the required variable.
• Theming: Not an absolute state of the art, but it’s function works: a themes folder and a variable to select one on the settings.py, I just need to create the basic theme.
• (experimental) Multilanguage support. A friend asked for a easy to use CMS with multilingual support, so I want to give it a shot. Since I never used django with managed multilingual content, it may be easy or it may be not. The code is there, someone has to try it.

Summary

Haiba Sumio is a student at a Tokyo High School with an interesting ability… He occasionally falls asleep and wakes up with premonitions of the future written out on his “Dream Diary”. With this ability, Sumio helps out people in trouble before anything bad happens, until one day when his peaceful life completely changes.

Volumes: 7 Chapters: 56 (finished) Genre: Adventure, Mystery, School, Shounen, Supernatural Story/Art: Sakaki, Kenji