wine on os x - almost just worked.

I needed to run some windows only stats software on os x (WinBUGS/OpenBUGS).

The authors suggested running it in wine.

port install wine

That almost worked. MacPorts can't seem to deal with upgrades of anything at all, so I ended up getting rid of the macports directory and building everything from scratch.

Then, it worked. Really well.

I was surprised. I guess wine has got a lot better in the 10 years since I last tried to use it. And maybe this program was simple enough that it didn't trip on anything fancy.

google ads on my blog

I put google ads in the top corner of my blog for a few weeks to see what happened.

When i've visited it, the ads seem kinda non-specific. I guess my content isn't good enough to get good ads?

In the 5 weeks I've had googles showing, I've had 796 page views (as far as adwords is concerned) and a single click worth 28p (= USD 0.45).

So pretty much not worth polluting my pages for and I'll take them off again, I think.

bunny webcam

I got this webcam for looking at pet rabbits for my girlfriend's birthday. (webcams, dear children, are something still fascinating for people born before, say, 1985)

The set up was pretty straightforward. I plugged it into the local ethernet and it appeared at 192.168.1.239. The local ethernet uses 192.168.1.0/24 but I think maybe have been just chance that it configured itself that way - it wasn't using DHCP out of the box. When I switched on DHCP it reconfigured itself to a DHCP-allocated address in the same range.

The supplied manual (on paper) describes downloading and installing some setup.exe to configure, but I ignored that, and using nmap discovered it was running an http server on port 81. Logging into this as admin, with no password, I found myself able to view and control the camera without need for any software.

I couldn't get the wifi working, but only spent 10 mins or so on that - we decided it would be best placed right by a wired ethernet port, so there was no need for that.

We attached it to the underside of an Ikea table using electrical tape. There was a balance to strike between being low enough to get a good angle, but high enough that they can't eat the camera or the wires. I would have loved to have put it in the cage with them, but the lifetime of the wires would have been measured in minutes, or possibly seconds.

The camera has motors to pan and tilt, though where its installed that isn't really necessary, and the whirring of the servos seems to scare the white rabbit a bit. That one likes to sit looking at the camera on the other side of the fence, hanging off the underside of the table.

There's a night vision mode too. The camera is surrounded by a ring of infrared LEDs - actually also a bit visible red too. These are turned on by a CdS cell above the camera lens (so you can trigger them with your finger rather than needing to put the camera in the dark).

The user interface is clunky but functional. The main page looks like this, with arrows at the top left to drive the servos. There are admin menus too, which appear even if you aren't authorised - they just don't work for non-authorised users. This clunky interface means its not a good camera for streaming to the public at large.

So, for £40, was this worth it? yes

(btw, not all the pictures in this post were made with the webcam - for example, the pictures of the webcam were taken with an iPhone rather than a complicated mirroring optical arrangement)

Manhattan would be squarer if it had diagonal streets too

There are different ways of measuring distance - that's the abstraction of metric spaces.

The usual distance that people use looks like this:

Points at a certain distance form a circle around the point that you're measuring from.

Another metric is the Manhattan distance, where rather than moving in any direction you can only move along one axis at once. This leads to diamond contours instead of circles.

Those are both well known metrics. I wondered what the Manhattan distance would look like if you were allowed to move diagonally as well as along the axes. The distance seems to be max(abs(dx),abs(dy)), and that looks like this, all square:

suPHP vs CVE-2012-1823

I needed to investigate CVE-2012-1823 for a few sites that I help look after.

They all use suPHP (some of them via cPanel, some directly configured).

I couldn't find anything in Google about whether CVE-2012-1823 affects suPHP - they all talk about php-cgi, and suPHP does something very similar, but with a bit more functionality.

As far as I can tell, the exploit comes specifically from CGI handling; and relates to how a URL turns into an invocation of PHP.

From looking at the suPHP source code, it looks like that exploit path is not available. The arguments to pass to PHP seem to be formed totally differently in suPHP compared to a CGI execution.

I'd love to hear anyone else's opinion though...