ucosty:io

Programming without purpose, Image dithering and a CDP Transponder

Posted Jun 19, 2009 under

Inspired by a forum post on osdev.org about image colour down-sampling I decided to have a crack at writing a program which could take a 24-bit image and convert it down to any lesser image format. The picture above shows an image split down the middle. On the right is the original 24-bit colour version and on the left is a 8-bit per pixel version with 2 bits for the red colour channel and 3 bits for the green and blue colour channels (rather than having a specific palette for the image I am down-sampling to a 2:3:3 BPP image). As you can see the colour loss is acceptable and despite the limitations it still looks nice. Obviously the image could be improved further by choosing a colour palette suitable for the image but that is for another project.

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Speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out

Posted Jun 15, 2009 under

This site and a few others that I host all run on a virtual private server. This server is quite fast by itself but loaded up with services like Apache and MySQL, not to mention hosting heavyweight web frameworks like Drupal, it’s limited resources make it not quite so snappy.

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UnHexDump

Posted Jun 13, 2009 under

UnHexDump takes the familiar output of HexDump and converts it back into nice binary format. I wrote this program to assist in extracting files off my Cisco 7970 IP phone which lacks any remote file copying capability.

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Scraping the surface - Cisco 7970G Hardware

Posted Jun 13, 2009 under

The Cisco 7970 is a black box piece of hardware and as such there is very little information about it on the internet. Cisco pretend it’s a closed appliance and as such go out of their way to prevent people for using the in a more flexible manner.

As of late I’ve been doing quite a bit of Cisco phone trickery. I’ve gotten a network of Cisco phones working with Asterisk and I’ve been building up sleek looking XML services for the 797x models. What I really want to do, though, is delve a little deeper into the spirit of hardware hacking and see if I can properly customise the phone beyond what is possible with configuration files.

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Work in progress, Cisco XML services

Posted Jun 12, 2009 under
Recently I was inspired by a thread on the Whirlpool forumsto write XML services for the Cisco IP phones I have. What I have created is something I have called (most creatively) Dashboard. It is a modular PHP script that allows people to add various blocks of dynamic content on to a page which is displayed on the IP phone’s display. This script can be called directly by the phone or pushed using the cisco XML push service. Read more