Well 2012 is over or will soon be.

Crazy year for me, we (the family)
moved countries and are still dealing with the extra stuff accumulated along the way. Also the stuff lost or damaged.

New bike was great on my ride the other day.

On the blog front. The worst year for number of posts, the best for traffic and comments. 17 posts across the whole year.

On the Nikon front. Slow but steady progress. Made some good progress on understanding how the B firmware works while Leegong has mastered the A firmware and Vicne has been kicking butt on the disassembler/emulator front. Lots of more to learn before mass hocking/injection of new code can happen but so many of the pieces are coming together or becoming understood.

Wow, Eric referenced the fantastic fan fiction Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, and I have being enjoying it so much. I read up til chapter 30, then discovered the equally awesome podcast/audio book of the same material, which is equally awesome, and then I listened to all the current episodes, then dropped back to the web-site, and now am fully caught-up and was very please that chapter 86 was released in the last couple of days, and now am sad that I greedily consumed it, as now I just have to wait….

Just released Nikon Patch version 1.7, a minor update for D5100 users only.

Two changes added the ability to choose

• Lossless NEF compression

• Fixed Uncompressed NEF option to allow changing shooting mode in the settings menu.

These two options are mutually exclusive.

So on the LA to Auckland flight I watched three movies, and here’s what I thought of them.

Prometheus - I really enjoyed this movie, especially if you don’t think to hard about why any of it is happening. I’d seen the honest. Groan the rolling ship, run sideways, and the rock gap. Stop thinking retrospectively..

Men in Black 3 - Wow this was a really good movie. The plot made real good sense, and behavior/actions of the characters were believable. Heck I even cried about the J/K/father twist. Really enjoyed the future seeing character.

The Dark Knight - I’d avoided this for ages, due to the whole DC/Marvell comics to movies, and having seen a few of the earlier Batman movies, and been less than impressed. But wow, this was a great/dark batman movies. Wow the joker was nuts and so chaotic. I really enjoyed it.

Well I’m still alive. I’ve been hanging out on Google+, joined a photo scavenger hunt, done non hunt related photography (posted to G+), and done a little Nikon hack work.

Oh spent lots of time planning the move back to New Zealand in October. So all in all been quite around here.

Which has been weighing on me.

Debugging a recent issue, where our _matherr handler was logging a call to sqrt with -1.#IND00 as input, and in this same scenario the system was crashing (the actual problem needing to be solved).

So to find out what input was going into the sqrt, as I suspected there was rubbish being passed in, I wanted to know what -1.#IND00 was in binnary.

I knew that passing -1.0 to sqrt would result in -1.#IND00 in the result, so I altered the code:

int main ()
{
  double d = sqrt(-1.0);
}

int __cdecl _matherr(struct _exception *e)
{
  informf( "\\nMath Error: %s, Parameters: %lf %lf, Return: %lf\\n",
    e->name, e->arg1, e->arg2, e->retval);

  union ccc
  {
    double d;
    struct {
      long a;
      long b;
    } ll;
  };

  ccc aa;

  aa.d = e->retval;

  <break point here, and inspect aa in debugger>
  if( _isnan( e->retval ) ) {
    e->retval = 0;
  }
  return 1;
}

results in the values:

aa.ll.a = 0;
aa.ll.b = 0xFFF80000;

And I posted this because Googling for -1.#IND00 got me no results.

We’re back from a family trip to Colorado. We drove there and back, because I’m cheap, and I’d always wanted to do a ‘road trip’.

It was a really good experience, getting to see parts of the USA not seen before, and experiencing the change in landscape.

So I have posted the above picture as my new header to remember the trip by.

Will post some pictures once I’ve processed them…

I’ve just updated the online patch tool to v1.4 which brings two picture related changes:

• Uncompressed NEF files, 33MB every timer verse 14-22MB (lossy compressed)
• Jpeg Quality, up to 12MB verse up to 9MB

The D7000 already has these as menu options, albeit the NEF files are compressed in a lossless format, so are generally 22MB.

Now we just need someone to doing some “real” testing to workout if it’s worth it.

Interested in more, come join the us at Nikon Hacker, or use the Online Patch Tool (Help)

Thanks to the testing efforts of Brett Dikeman we now have a verified D7000 version of the of the Time Restriction Removal patch.

The FirmwarePatch tool has been updated to v1.2 and supports patching Nikon D3100 & D5100 & D7000 firmware.

[Update 24th April] A web-browser cross platform patch tool is also available.

Interested in more, come join the us at Nikon Hacker, or use the Online Patch Tool (Help)

I have just released a Silverlight based patch tool. Thus it works on both Mac and Windows PC’s

https://simeonpilgrim.com/nikon-patch/nikon-patch.html

It auto-detects the supported firmware models (D5100, D3100, D7000) and shows a list of available changes (current just one for each model).

This will be how I’ll release future versions of patches.