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Erik at Carwoo posted an interesting codebreaking challenge to the Carwoo blog earlier today.

This particular challenge piqued my curiosity. One of my hobbies is rooting Android phones and I enjoy all sorts reverse-engineering problems. More importantly, this one happened to match up with some downtime I had this afternoon.

I fired up Python and quickly got to work. At my day job, Gri.pe, we use Java. I love Java as a development language, but I find that Python’s interactive mode is best for quickly experimenting with data in unknown formats. There’s a great deal of power in the standard Python libraries and it’s well-suited for quick byte and bit manipulation.

I had a lot of great feedback on my AppEngine post the other day. We put our trust in the AppEngine team to keep things running smoothly while we work on our app and live the rest of our lives. Today is pretty quiet around the Gripe virtual offices (aka Skype channels): it’s Thanksgiving in US and I’m getting hit by a cold too hard to do much today besides write a short post.

We had a great surprise this morning. The View episode we were featured in was in re-runs this morning and we had a huge traffic spike. Nobody noticed until about 30 minutes in, since  everything was scaling automatically and the site was still serving up as quickly as ever:

There’s been a handful of articles critical of Google’s AppEngine that have bubbled up to the top of Hacker News lately. I’d like to throw our story into the ring as well, but as a story of a happy customer rather than a switcher.

Neal Stephenson’s latest interactive serial novel project, The Mongoliad, launched last night at midnight. Readers subscribe to the project to receive access to the new material as it becomes available and can interact with fellow readers in the forums. They can also contribute to the book world’s ’pedia, a wiki focused on events and characters within the story.

I had a chance to ask Neal some questions about the project:

MM: How has the format and the collaboration between yourself and the other authors of the Mongoliad affected the creative process you use for writing?

As you might have seen on Wired or Engadget, we were poking around on the pre-release EVO from Google I/O and managed to get root access to it before it had been shipped. You might remember my blurrycam video of the event:

We didn’t mention how we did it at the time, only that we exploited a serious vulnerability and recommended other users root their phones. Now that Sprint’s patch has been out in the wild for a while and everyone has updated, we’re releasing more details on what the security vulnerability is.