I've implemented a new feature in my blogging software; reporting via SMS! I've been testing and tweaking this feature during the past week and I can say it works great!

Okay, so my blog is reporting to me via SMS now. Whenever a new comment is posted, I'll get notified on my mobile immediately. I'll get a message telling me the commentator's name and the post he/she commented on. There's also an error reporting option but it is currently set to email reporting only! Any errors that occur while browsing this blog will be filed to my email inbox.

As much as it seems like I had developments with my SMS experiments, this is totally unrelated. This service is implemented through an SMS gateway that not many people know of: Orange Mail (formerly Bareed). The gateway directs messages sent from my blogging application to my mobile phone and thus allows me to stay notified of any updates on my blog :)

I've also implemented few security restrictions on commenting, add to that some basic spam filtering. This shouldn't affect anyone but spammers. In case anything blows up while you post a comment, please let me know =)

Note that although I'll get notified of your comments right away from now on, I may very well not be able to respond immediately. I might be out of home, away from my computer or just asleep. In any case, I guess it'll be fun for you to know that I'll know ;)

Ever since I got introduced to Laith, the guys have been telling me to checkout his drawings. Laith, who's now one of my favorite buddies, has been drawing for years, and keeps an album of his work. Although I don't know much about hand drawing, I asked him once to bring his album to check it out and I was really shocked; the guy's drawings are astonishing!


He uses pencils, pens, and rarely few colours. His drawings contain an unbelievable level of details; they are very difficult to visualize, yet to draw! Some of his drawings can't even be recalled few moments after you take your eyes off them.

It is hard to imagine how can someone come out with drawings so much complicated. Am still wondering how this guy's imagination works.

Yesterday I asked him to bring me his album once again so that I can scan it and upload some of his work on my blog. His album contains 112 sketches of different sizes, themes and concepts. It really takes time to go through them. It is also hard to explain the topics of his drawings or what they resemble, one has to see for himself.

I've prepared a simple gallery page containing some of my personal favorites sketches. Check it out here: http://black-extruder.net/Laith/

As some of you might know, almost all major mobile phone manufactures started to incorporate modems inside mobile phones some years ago. These built-in modems, known as GSM modems, are basically the same as any modem. They allow computers to use mobile phones’ hardware to establish data connections over GSM networks.

During the past two days, I’ve been experimenting with my mobile phone and came with neat tricks that I’d like to share.

I was interchanging commands with the GSM modem inside my mobile phone. To do that, I set up a Bluetooth connection between my laptop and my mobile phone (Nokia 6230i), then emulated a serial port connection. If you don’t have Bluetooth, or if for some reason you can’t do this, a serial cable will do.

I used Microsoft HyperTerminal to communicate with my phone. Luckily, today’s mobile phones are smart enough to deal with computers smoothly; the whole didn’t take a minute :)

Next I started trying out few AT or “Attention” commands. These are a subset of a large command set known as The Hayes Commands that are supported by almost all of today’s dialup modems.

For a GSM Modem, there are extended AT commands that are related to other GSM protocols. Some of these deal with the Short Messaging Service (SMS) we're all familiar with.

The thing that got my attention is that a short message can contain much valuable information that we all used to think. An SMS is not just a business card, a ringtone or some text!

A short message can actually contain any kind of binary data together with special headers known as User Data Headers (UDH) to instruct the receiving phone how to deal with the received data!

Another amazing observation is that Short Message Service Centers (SMSCs) do not put any restrictions on the transmitted message content! (Orange Jordan does not, to say the least).

This means that you can transmit whatever data you want inside an SMS message and the SMSC won’t mind as long as you apply to the communication protocol. Of course mobile phones generate UDHs for short messages automatically, so one has to interface a computer to the GSM network to be able to generate his own UDH's.


So what can you do? Well, by modifying the UDHs attached to an SMS, you can trick the receiving mobile phones into doing surprising things. So far I’ve been able to pull the following tricks:

• Send false server commands that notify the recipients of the arrival of a number of fax, email and voicemail messages and display sticky icons on their mobile phones. These icons can’t be cleared by the mobile phone itself and the mobile won’t display the SMS sender’s number!
  
  
• Send messages that show their content as soon as they are received by other mobile phones.
  
  
• Send messages that can delete other messages!!!

Reading the PDU Messaging Protocol can reveal a number of surprises. The biggest, probably, is that the bit indicating a Control/Data SMS is set by the SMS sender, not by the SMSC. Furthermore, some of these messages (better called “commands”!) are received and executed by mobile phones silently (no message tone, no vibration, and not even a screen light!).

Of course, these tricks were the yield of few hours of experimenting (and needless to say: the price of the messages). I think anyone can obtain more tricks by simply reading and understanding the protocols behind the whole thing to their details.

My target trick is to be able to send people anonymous SMS messages. Although it is impossible to prevent SMSCs from attaching your phone number to the message, it is still relatively easy to embed a certain UDH that can trick the receiver phone not to display your phone number!

As much as it sounds like exploiting the SMS service, this is merely a use of the GSM SMS protocol in its full capacity, unlocking the “hidden features” that our mobile phones do not let us access.

Welcome everybody to my new blog!

Although the blog you see in front of you looks like an exact replica of my former one, believe me this is a totally different blog!

This blog is processed using a brand new blogging application created by me. Just like Blogger.com used to host and serve my posts to you, the new application will do exactly the same. The blog is now hosted on my own server, and has its own domain name.

Some of you might be curious about what brought this change. Actually, there are many reasons. To start with, I didn’t like the way Blogger used to force things their way. I like my blog to be customized and coded to my detailed liking without Blogger’s interference. Blogger has many great features but it lacks many important ones that people like me need. Wordpress on the other hand, has too many options but lacks a friendly interface. Neither was really suitable for me.

Whenever I badly needed a feature, I used to code client-side Javascripts and mess with Blogger’s service to be able to tweak things the way I want them. This was a very tiring and messy process. My older blog template used to be like 50% HTML and 50% Code to handle “my own features” :D

Some features were unavailable no matter how hard one tried. Custom commenting forms, for instance, were targeted and disabled by Blogger’s latest upgrade.

Luckily, I need not worry about these things anymore. Now I can do whatever I want with my own blog! If you’ve noticed, I’ve already added little touches you won’t see available on any of Blogger’s blogs. There are tons of cool new features that are yet to come, you just wait!

One thing that is super-cool about this blogging application is that it is compatible with Blogger’s templates! This is not a coincidence of course; I made it this way to be able to migrate my blog while maintaining the exact same appearance.

My new blogging application is very light-weight, effective and user-friendly. It is the yield of a month of continuous work, but it still needs more development. I decided to deploy it as soon as I complete the front-end. Here's a screenshot of its back-end ...


So people, if you face any issues while browsing my blog please let me know! I'll be testing my blog in the coming days, if you notice anything unusual drop me a comment and I’ll be grateful!

I have more to say about my blogging application but I'll save it till later. For now, update your links to http://black-extruder.net/blog/ and stay tuned! ;)