Ah yes, Jungle Chaos at the ICA. After meetings, food and buying Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi on DVD, Louise and I went to the second live night of the Cybersonica festival, featuring DJ Rupture, The Bug and Kid 606.

We missed Rupture sadly, though some guys I was chatting to said he was good. The Bug was quite ragga actually. A little unexpected, but quite nice. 606 was mash up. He played the expected crazy set with quite a long gabba interlude and some serious jungle mash up midway through. It was a little bit spoilt by his playing a crap downbeat number for the last track and then just running off stage when his set ended. All in all, OK, it was nice to get out definitely.

This morning we were woken up by the arrival of the new Harry Potter for Louise and Hacking the Xbox for me. Woo, books! I finished Blondie24 last night, so the timing couldn’t be better. Sadly, Rich blew the ending of Harry Potter on Hype, breaking our usual spoiler decorum. Louise is very pissed off about it in addition she didn’t sleep after the post arrived and is currently catching up.

Hacking the Xbox was self-published by it’s author Andrew “Bunnie” Huang because his signed publisher, Wiley, got cold feet, worried by Microsoft’s might and the provisions of the DMCA. It contains a long chapter written by Lee Tien on the implications of the controversial DMCA. It has a lot of information about the science of reverse engineering and learning the tools and skills you’ll need to apply that information in a hardware context, specifically the Xbox here (“Thinking Inside The Box”). It also has a series of interviews with master hackers. It looks great and I’m really looking forward to reading it. It’s not all Xbox centric, but at some point I hope to ply one out of the hands of one of my box-owning friends. I’m prepared to wait until it’s outdated though.