Via the Nike website, a scaled picture of my lunch ‘run’. This is the Nike+iPod as posted, click for the fullsize screenshot. The dip in the middle is dining; the sensor actually paused itself so I did actually eat for longer than it shows.
Damn, this is cool.
As Terri noticed, there’s a new sidebar on the website. I got it installed last night, but due to the downtime I haven’t posted about it yet. It’s a bit of a tale…
Late last week, in a historic moment, I sold my Blackberry 7290 to a co-worker. Yep, an era has passed, and life is simpler now. Then again, I may get another one, or maybe an iPhone if I stumble upon a pile of small unmarked bills.
Post-sale, I had thirty bucks burning a hole in my pocket and was at the campus bookstore. I happened to see the Nike+iPod kit, and voila! Money spent, happiness purchased, a new gadget to play with. (I also spent ten bucks on a generic sensor holder, so I don’t need special shoes, but don’t tell Chris that.)
The kit is an amazing thing. Check out the review on iLounge for details, but the basic idea is that you have a sensor in your shoe:
which sends acceleration data to a 2×3cm sensor that attaches to your iPod nano:
Wireless, baby!
Once you get back to your computer, iTunes sends the run data to Nike’s servers, where they have a bunch of Flash applications that use it. You can plot runs, compare goals vs performance, compete against others around the world, etc, etc. All very nifty, and it still amazes me that the cost is thirty bucks! No use fees, either, just the one-time.
While reading about it, I found the Nike+iPod plugin for Wordpress. It, very cleverly, can download your data from the Nike servers and display it in Wordpress. It even uses the GD library to plot speed versus time!
A reader who knows me might well observe the spectacularly useless nature of all this effort and complexity…since I don’t run. To such a reader, I would reply that this entire weblog (Anna pages excepted) is a veritable monument to the spectacular and the useless, all the more better if combined.
My current plan is to use it for my shuttle walks. It’ll be thrilling data, you can be sure. I still need to calibrate the sensor for my stride length, so the current data is erroneous by an unknown amount. I would guess that the distances are too short, given that I have a longer stride than average. We shall see.
I am really tempted to send a couple of these out as gifts to the walkers in the family. Competitions would ensue, friendly ribbings and other such fun. Hmm… some of ‘em even have Nanos already…
For more info, check out the iLounge review. You can get the kit everywhere; I’ve even seen it at Nordstrom’s in the mall.
Oops. Turns out that mod_rewrite isn’t enabled in Debian’s Apache2. Or in the mods-available directory. But it is there to be used. Confusing, eh?
Anyway, everything except the front page of the blog was down because of this. I’ll test some more, but we seem to be back up. Sorry, Terri!
Props to this explanation of how to fix it.
Yep, blog was down for some hours today. Debian testing removed PHP support from Apache 1.3. On purpose.
So, forced march to Apache 2 today, kudos to Kevin for his help. We’re back!
Serious EE humor there.
(Click for full-size version, this is scaled to fit here)
There’s also XKCD, “A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language.” S/he is great at puns and wordplay, too:
There’s a lot more where that came from. The comic on Lisp and Star Wars is a must-read.
Enjoy!
Yeah, been doing alliteration a lot of late. Hard to halt halfway. Today she was ‘the chubby-cheeked cute child.’
Stop me before I pun again.
Oh yeah, here’s a set of pictures for y’all to enjoy!
We were down last night from about 11:30PM until today around 11AM. Somehow, some [censored] managed to add a link to my sidebar by inserting into the wp_links table for wordpress.
After thinking about it for a bit, I’m updating this post: The link was to www.snjpc.com. It’s an online casino site, and while I dislike giving them hits it seems worthwhile to say that they, or their hires, are doing this sort of blog cracking.
How they managed this, I am still trying to determine. The mysql logfiles
cd /var/log/mysql
mysqlbinlog *.0* | grep wp_links
show no inserts, the mysql instance is only available from localhost (firewalled to boot), and system logs look good. Checks for rootkits and similar are negative, firewall logs are clean, and I am puzzled. Props to this page for mysql tips.
One piece of evidence - they seem to have borked wordpress, probably on purpose - if you invoke the theme editor (or plugin editor) you get
Sorry, that file cannot be edited.
which is patently false. My working hypothesis is, for now, that someone managed to either inject an exploit into Debian’s wordpress package, or found a generic Wordpress exploit. I am continuing to investigate and take various measures to prevent a reoccurence. This sucks.
Oh yeah, swapped themes for a while as part of the cleanup and diagnostics. Let me know what you think.
Update: Added paragraph naming snjpc.com
Update: A fresh download of Wordpress 2.2.2 from Debian or wordpress.org produces the same result… interesting. So either the default WP is broken, or its a config file/database problem. Debugging continues…
Update: Looks like the problem is related to the list of files passed to the validate_file_to_edit function. It looks like the first file passed is the wp-config.php, which on Debian is a link to the system file in /etc/wordpress. Hmm, maybe that’s how they got the MySQL access information… You can hack around this by adding the following to theme-editor.php. Change this:
if (empty($file)) {
$file = $allowed_files[0];
}
$file = validate_file_to_edit($file, $allowed_files);
to the following. This overrides the file list that was passed in, so you have to change the index to match the file you want. Other than that, it totally fixes the problem. Hmm…
if (empty($file)) {
$file = $allowed_files[0];
}
$file = $allowed_files[3];
$file = validate_file_to_edit($file, $allowed_files);
(Pic from this Flickr page, not related to story)
From EE Times:
LONDON — Intel Corp. (Santa Clara, Calif.) has demonstrated its 45-nm, four-core “Yorkfield” multiprocessor at the Leipzig Games Convention in Germany.
Intel said in press statement that it would start selling the Yorkfield multiprocessor later this year. The Yorkfield processor operates at 2.83-GHz and includes 12-Mbytes of level-2 cache, according to online reports.
Intel usually creates multiple part numbers from each processor die by specifying lower clock frequency versions and disabling functions such as areas of cache.
Damn. I guess all those parallel programming classes with Bader are paying off yet again. Heh.
Commodity quad-CPU ‘personal computers.’ Pardon me, as I simply must be old-computer-geek mode for a minute and savor this. Simply bloody marvelous times to be alive and a computer geek!
A confluence from two good sites. First off, we have “The Most Dangerous roads in the world”:
(Both vehicular and trail)
Part one, part two, part three and part four. Then, on to English Russia for these crazy 300m towers in Belarussia:
Mixed quality on the pictures, super-long pages clogged with ads (DRB only, ER is good that way) and well worth your time - fascinating!
Update: One more, from a post about balancing things:
Whoa.
Annalog Asaph microblog Shared from Google