Call of Duty: World at War isn’t worth £29.99

Don’t get me wrong, it was a really good game. It was beautifully done with really well thought out levels and an excellent story.

It was just rather short.

I was kind of hoping for it to be about twice as long. It cost more than renting a film for the same amount of gameplay time. What happened to games taking 40 hours to complete? *mutter* *grumble* it were all fields etc. It was the only thing that let down an otherwise excellent game, and a fairer price would have been £15 to £20 in my opinion, especially considering the tiny distribution cost as I downloaded the game using Steam.

Maybe I’ll buy it off eBay next time.

Protecting yourself against the WordPress login page exploit

Anyone that runs a wordpress blog will hopefully be aware of the recent exploit against the login page:

“You can abuse the password reset function, and bypass the first step and
then reset the admin password…”

and

“An attacker could exploit this vulnerability to compromise the admin
account of any wordpress/wordpress-mu <= 2.8.3″

There’s no fix in any released version yet but you can protect yourself with a bit of Apache config until one is released. Just add this to your wordpress virtualhost replacing “you.re.ip.add” with the IP address you want to access the login page from:

<Location /wp-login.php>
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Allow from you.re.ip.add
</Location>

This will present any user not accessing your login page form that IP with a 403 Forbidden error. If you want to block all IPs until a fix comes out just miss out the Allow line:

<Location /wp-login.php>
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
</Location>

NWRUG Code Surgery and an introduction to Zsh – Tonight

the June NWRUG is tonight. There will be a code surgery and introduction to Zsh. Plus free pizza!

Email me or leave a comment to sign up.

NWRUG February 2009 – Nanite talk

For the first time in quite a while we had a talk at NWRUG, it seemed to go well and the free Pizzas and Beer provided by Engine Yard were very popular. About 12 people turned up. I was the only speaker and did a 45 minute talk on Nanite with a brief introduction to cloud-computing as that’s the environment I see Nanite being most useful.

Thanks to everyone who turned up and Engine Yard for the sponsorship. I promised a blog post with links to some of the resources from the talk, and here it is!

Useful links from the talk

Nanite (of course)

Kestrel (a starling replacement)

Delayed Job

Warren (A wrapper around AMQP from brightbox)

Engine Yard Solo

As I mentioned in the talk you can probably get away with using third-party APIs and calling it ‘cloud-computing’, this set of slides is really interesting:

Web Hooks and the Programmable World of Tomorrow

Lastly the slides on SlideShare, though they don’t make as much sense as they do with the talk & my notes.

*update*

Pastie: control rabbitMQ using Nanite, controlling god using Nanite.

Next Month

More talks! Asa Calow has agreed to do a talk on Solr and I rather foolishley agreed to do another talk on Sphinx.

I certainly won’t be missing 1234567890, and you don’t have to either!

The point at which time since the epoch reaches 1234567890 is momentous historical occasion happening today and I don’t want to let it slip past unnoticed, and now you don’t have to either! Just run:

watch -n1 echo 'Time since epoch: `date +"%s"`s'

in a terminal and bathe in the magnitude of the moment. It should work on Linux and Mac, Windows users will have to have a little cry instead or something.

Connecting to your Engine Yard MySQL database using SSH tunneling

Quite a few people want to access their Engine Yard hosted MySQL databases remotely which is fine, just complicated by the fact that the database slices are only accessible from the slices themselves. There is no remote access available by default.

Lee Jensen posted a useful forum post Accessing your DB externally, but this advice doesn’t work so well for windows users so here is a brief tutorial.

First, download putty if you haven’t got it already, open it up and configure an SSH connection with the IP address and SSH port of your slice. You can get these from the welcome email you were sent:

Next, go to the Connection -> SSH -> Tunnels config section and configure as following:

In this example I have used mysql50-staging-1 as the MySQL server hostname, replace this with the one you are trying to access. When you have entered the source port and destination click ‘Add’, then ‘Open’. You should see a screen like this:

Enter the slice login details (not the MySQL login details!) and you should see a standard login prompt:

Right, that’s the last of putty for now. Open up your MySQL GUI (I am using MySQL Administrator in this example) and configure it like so:

Make sure you have specified localhost as the mysql hostname, that you are using the MySQL database login credentials and that the port matches the local port you set up in Putty, in this case 13306. Click connect and you should see something like this:

Success!

You should be able to change these instructions for any MySQL GUI (the putty config will remain the same).

Next NW Ruby User Group: 20th November

20th November – Pub meet: RubyConf aftermath

This month the meeting will be two weeks after RubyConf so we will all be getting together to discuss any exciting news that may have found it’s way out onto the blogs. Maybe drink some curry and beer too!

Schedule

7:00pm :: Social meeting in The Paramount

Sign Up

If you would like to attend this event, please sign up on the Upcoming event page

Monthly meetups

This month also marks the start of regular monthly meetups. These will be the third Thursday of the month, guaranteed, if no speakers are available the meeting will be social.

Q. Does GTA San Andreas work on a MacBook Pro using WinXP and Boot Camp?

A. Yes it does, perfectly and at the highest detail level.

This is going to take a while…

Funny wireless network names

I saw these amusing wireless network names on my way into Manchester to meet Paul Robinson the other week.  Not had a chance to post them until now.

My wireless network is less imaginatively named ‘foo’.