Power for test Xbox

On my bench I have a test mains power input for testing Xboxes along with a test AV cable connected to a TV.

Today I wired an Xbox power safety device into the mix. There’s a tear down of this highly over-engineered device on the EEVBlog video: EEVblog #1164 – Xbox Engineering Baptism Of Fire.

Microsoft made this to cover for defective mains power connector in their earliest hardware versions. The problem was that the socket was only soldered into the board and didn’t have sufficient mechanical support. The solder joints could wiggle around, become loose, get hot, and then let go the magic smoke.

Anyway this device is both a fuse and an earth leakage detector, so very happy to have it as part of my setup.

Common C libraries and data structures

Today I discovered: Common C libraries and data structures. (C99) over on github. So awesome.

I really like the project layout too. Each module in a directory with an example, a bunch of tests, and some documentation to go along with the code. I feel like this is how it should be done. I think today I grew as a programmer because I read this code.

OWASP ESAPI PHP tests: Security configuration file does not exist

To get the source for OWASP ESAPI PHP:

 svn checkout http://owasp-esapi-php.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ owasp-esapi-php-read-only

Make sure phpunit is installed with PEAR. To run the unit tests:

 root@mercy:/home/jj5/Desktop/owasp-esapi-php-read-only# phpunit test
 Security configuration file does not exist.PHP Fatal error:  Call to a member function xpath()
 on a non-object in /home/jj5/Desktop/owasp-esapi-php-read-only/src/reference/DefaultSecurityConfiguration.php on line 226

To get a better error message:

 root@mercy:/home/jj5/Desktop/owasp-esapi-php-read-only# grep -R 'Security conf' .
 ./src/reference/DefaultSecurityConfiguration.php:            throw new Exception("Security configuration file does not exist.");

Edit ‘src/refererence/DefaultSecurityConfiguration.php’ and replace “Security configuration file does not exist.” with “Security configuration file ‘$path’ does not exist.”

Try again:

 root@mercy:/home/jj5/Desktop/owasp-esapi-php-read-only# phpunit test
 Security configuration file '/home/jj5/Desktop/owasp-esapi-php-read-only/test/filters/../../testresources/ESAPI.xml' does not exist.PHP Fatal error:  Call to a member function xpath() on a non-object in /home/jj5/Desktop/owasp-esapi-php-read-only/src/reference/DefaultSecurityConfiguration.php on line 226

So the problem is a misconfigured path to the ESAPI.xml file,

 root@mercy:/home/jj5/Desktop/owasp-esapi-php-read-only# grep -R \\.\\.\\/testres .
 ./test/filters/SafeRequestTest.php:            $ESAPI = new ESAPI(dirname(__FILE__) . '/../../testresources/ESAPI.xml');
 ...

Edit the SafeRequestTest.php file:

 root@mercy:/home/jj5/Desktop/owasp-esapi-php-read-only# vim test/filters/SafeRequestTest.php 

On line 58 change “/../../testresources” to “/../testresources”.

Now our tests will run:

 root@mercy:/home/jj5/Desktop/owasp-esapi-php-read-only# phpunit test