I went hunting for Wordpress plugins the other morning and, among other things, came across the excellent wpStats by Joe Newing. This awesome plugin collects visitor stats and displays some detailed analysis of visitor locations, browsers, OSs, pages visited, and search bots.

I thought of a few hacks that would improve the plugin, which I submitted to the author, hoping that something of mine might get included in the next release. He responded by making me “official hacker”/developer of the project, as he unfortunately has little time to work on it.

So, in the next few days I hope to be publishing my latest work on wpStats - mainly extending its features. Lucky for me the area of stats collection has great potential, so I should be able to keep thinking of improvements to make :-).

In the meantime, why not check out the most excellent current release of wpStats, right here.

Despite my Uni being pretty liberal (read “utterly relaxed”) about permitted ports and programs, the firewall for the residential network here blocks most of the common ports used for P2P filesharing programs, restricting usage to internal sharing, unless cunning tricks are employed. SSH to the rescue however (and this is another great benefit of keeping a server or two at home) - Limewire works just fine through an SSH tunnel.

All that’s necessary is to use the “Dynamic” (SOCKS proxy) tunnel setting of an SSH client like PuTTY on a port of your choice, say 1234, then instruct Limewire to use a proxy server at 127.0.0.1, port 1234. Provided your SSH server allows tunneling, you should have no problem using Limewire, but the download/upload speeds you’ll get will of course be limited by the connection your SSH server is on.

I tried doing a similar thing with Azureus, my BitTorrent client of choice, but that didn’t work out. However, I would imagine that other P2P clients such as Kazaa (*puke*), eDonkey etc. would work fine.

Disclaimer: Downloading and/or sharing copyrighted files remains illegal in most countries, so don’t even think about doing it. Not ever.

And no, I won’t give you a shell account on my box :-).

Yesterday started badly, inasmuch as I woke up at 9.30, sat down at my PC, and found that it had rebooted during the night. That alone isn’t so abnormal - once before Windows Update decided that an update it was applying needed a restart *right* *now*, and so rebooted the machine, but I’d disabled that option since. So I log in, and I find that I have no sound. Programs that use sound recording (like Skype) are giving errors. There do not appear to be any sound devices present on the machine.

Shit.

I reboot; nothing. I reinstall sound drivers; still nothing.

Shit.

I then happen to glance through the window in my case, and note that the chipset cooling fan and heatsink is resting peacefully on the case floor, thoroughly detached from the chip it is supposed to be chilling.

Fuck.

Cue the fastest shutdown operation in recent history.
I pop open the case and gingerly feel around. I touch the chip in question, and it’s cool. This is the first good sign, but it goes unnoticed in the general panic. I curse the bastard who designed the cooler (an Akasa AK-210 with a pretty blue LED); for thinking that a fan and heatsink could be secured on to a vertical chip with only a sticker. I try sticking the cooler back on. It stays, until I hit the power button, when the infinitesimally small jolt of the fan springing into life causes it to detach from the chip once again. I start trying to think of ways to attach it. Eventually I decide to try to locate some thermal paste, cursing the fact that all my hardware bits and bobs are at home. I walk over to Lazer Lizard - what passes for a computer shop on campus. I ask the cashier, “this may be a long shot, but do you have any thermal paste?” I receive a strange look. “It’s a sort of goo,” I offer, but no, she responds, they don’t.

Walking back, I realise that laying the PC on its side will probably work, as the cooler will just sit on the chip, unencumbered by gravity. Once home, I do this, and it’s working fine so far. Plus all my cool LEDs are projected skywards, which looks sweeter than before. After booting up, the sound was working again (it was that chip), so I can only assume that the mainboard shuts the chip off if it gets too hot on boot. No lasting damage, thank fuck.

Yesterday was deadline day for CS118 Coursework 1 (Java). I got mine finished on Sunday night, and submitted with the nifty online system.

The coursework centred around the Warwick Maze environment, which provides a graphical maze and the hooks needed to interact with it. Our part was to create a series of increasingly complex controller modules for the robot.

The marking method was refreshingly personal - once I showed up at my allotted slot, I sat down with one of the postgrad tutors, and we went through each exercise in the coursework. He looked through my code; I told him why I’d done certain things the way I had, and how the complicated bits worked. Then he ticked off various criteria on his marking sheet. It took about 5 minutes in total, and I ended up with 135/135 :-D. This after getting soaked in the rain, and having major PC trouble (which will be covered in another post :-)), it was an upshot to a day that started poorly.

A message went out on the Peacefire mailing list this morning, announcing a new public “Circumventor” site at stupidcensorship.com. The site is running CGIProxy, which I’ve found to be a decent bit of kit, so all the downtrodden students in need of uncensored web access should give this a go.