Strawp.net » Strawp.net Stuff

New host!

Strawp — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 15:12:18 +0000

I’ve just moved my site from the (once good value, now rubbish) ODSOL to Dreamhost, which is a blinding improvement.

I now have (about 1000 times) more web space and I’ll also be able to do nice things like host my own SVN projects. Yay!

Some of the links to other non-blog parts of the site might not work for a bit…

New blog, new danger

Strawp — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 15:45:10 +0000

The old Strawp.net blogging engine was one of the first pieces of web software I wrote in PHP and its graceless translation into PHP5 was one of the reasons I almost entirely stopped writing entries. The last two items on there I had to write SQL INSERT statements for just to get them online. It was definitely time to give it both barrels!

RIP Strawp.net News, long live Strawp.net blog!

Edit: I know how lazy it is using the default WordPress theme but I like it!

iPlayer hacks and Car PC

Strawp — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been doing two fun things this week. The first was playing around with the iPlayer again. Last Friday (7th March) the Beeb made the rather confusing move of releasing an iPhone-optimised version of the iPlayer. Now, the iPhone doesn’t support Flash, so it was all H264 over HTTP. You could get to this resource on a predictable URL just by changing your user agent to that of an iPhone. No DRM, no proprietary streaming format, and for a platform which is minority in the extreme, making a mockery of the “big platforms first” defence that the BBC used for rolling out Windows-only versions of iPlayer.

Anyway, a few days after this was all revealed, they “patched” the service, which actually meant they just checked on the “Range” HTTP header as well as the “User-Agent” one. Pretty weak. By the end of that same day, I’d updated my download script, and so had Paul Battley, followed by johnsto who has written an XBMC version of the exploit.

What will Auntie do next? Let the games commence…

I’ve also put a PC into my car this week, written up on the project page.