Sony SNC-RZ30N, SNC-RZ30P cameras online

How to find available network cameras using Google:

http://www.google.com/search?q=intitle%3A%22SNC-RZ30+HOME%22

HTTP request to /oneshotimage.jpg will show snapshot:

Snapshot from camera at http://thecam.westportmarina.com


Posted on : Apr 30 2007
Posted under Seriously |

WordPress spam

There has been a lot of and increasing comment spam on the blog engine and it finally reached a critical amount to put a stop instead of just trashing tens and then hundreds of comments. Before I already restricted comments to registered users only and it did not help much, then I disabled XML-RPC since it was second guess about spam source.

Then came a moment to sort things out and find that spam comes as pingbacks. However, the global option to disable pingbacks appeared to have no effect on existing content so spam kept coming in and the most recent hit is to take the database to phpMyAdmin and execute the following SQL statement:

UPDATE `wordpress_posts` SET `ping_status` = ‘closed’

to hopefully stop the dirt. Unfortunetely it’s clear it’s not the latest round of the resistance to spam as the bots would one day start registering as users…


Posted on : Apr 27 2007
Posted under Technology |

Managing security desciptors in registry

As it is well known, COM/DCOM per-class launch and access permissions are stored in registry under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AppID key. However the permissions are stored in binary form (as a named REG_BINARY value) and thus not easy to read. DCOMCNFG (or MMC snap-in) is used to modify the values interactively but once one needs to update the values progammatically, he has to know the format.

The binary value is a self-relative security descriptor, written to registry as an array of bytes. ATL provides atlsecurity.h header file with handy security management classes including CSecurityDesc to handle security descriptors. Among the methods, there are FromString and ToString which perform conversion between binary format of a self-descriptive security descriptor and Security Descriptor String Format, which is a human friendly (more human friendly at least) representation of security descriptor. The conversion uses ConvertSecurityDescriptorToStringSecurityDescriptor and ConvertStringSecurityDescriptorToSecurityDescriptor API functions introduced with Windows 2000.

17-image001.png

Read more »


Posted on : Apr 17 2007
Posted under ATL, Source, Utilities |

Build Incrementer Add-In for Visual Studio .NET (C++)

This is a remake of a merely old thing coming since Visual C++ 6.0. The add-in updates .RC resource script to increment file version (A.B.C.D+1 from A.B.C.D) for a binary to be compiled just before compilation. This is useful to have each build compiled with a different version number.

The add-in works with C++ projects for Visual Studio .NET versions 2003, 2005, should also be working with 2002 version (no compiler by hand to make sure though).

08-image001.png

A known problem is that if resource script is edited from IDE, the pre-build update of the .RC file forces a popup message box confirming reload of .RC file by IDE. This might be somewhat annoying, however I have not find a way to silence the environment.
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Posted on : Apr 08 2007
Posted under ATL, Source, Utilities |

ex-USSR software piracy

Essence of respect to copyright in ex-USSR:

Поддерживать”отечественного” производителя, котрый не удосужился сделать русскогоязычный интерфейс?
Лично для меня “энгельский” не проблема. Так же как 990рублей (не хочу только геморроя с их отправкой автору ), но почему нет “великого и могучего”?
Я думаю, что автор несомненно неплохой програмы априори, “соотечественников” за покупателей (таргет групп) не считает. Пираты в Росси все. Если и купит один два - стОит ли ради них упираться…
А раз так, с чего это я его буду считать за “отечественного производителя “?

Any reason to waive an obligation to abide by copyrights will do…


Posted on : Apr 06 2007
Posted under Off-topic |

Reusable AVI Resources

While fixing Vista compatibility problems, an interesting issue arose with AVI clips. It is widely known that Windows shell animations are small AVI clips linked into shell32.dll binary as a resource of type “AVI”. Other DLLs have their clips too and standard animation common control is capable of picking the clips.

It is quite convenient to reuse shell32.dll animations in an action progress UI:

image001.png

However, it appeared that Vista’s shell32.dll comes with no more AVI clip at #170 resource in shell32.dll. So I needed a replacement and finally I made an application I have been needed since long ago: a batch grabber for AVI resources to see what AVIs come with clean OS.

Read more »


Posted on : Apr 05 2007
Posted under Seriously, Utilities |