Archive for November, 2007

More silly software…

Sunday, November 11th, 2007

I am not really a programmer, or at least I have never really thought of myself as such. I am more of a ’systems & network engineer’ in the typical benevolent BOFH jack of all trades, master of the electric stapler kind of guy, but lately I’ve been flexing the software muscles a little bit more than usual.

I have been meaning to start learning python AND to start playing with the Gnome libnotify stuff a little bit here for a while now. Using Ubuntu 7.10 has sort of re-ignited those desires due the the large amount of python on the backend (as well as plenty of notifications from the various little applets). There seems to have been a push at work to start using python more, and the big application that I have been working on is purely python except for the web UI layer (which I will rewrite at some point) which I prototyped in PHP because it was fast and I needed access to visualize the datasets so I could continue work on the backend.

Anyway, all of the current event crap aside, I tossed together a little python guy that works on both OSX and Linux because I wanted some excuses to work with OSX a little bit. It trolls your last.fm profile and pops a bubble when one of your friends listens to a track. It’s kind of neat in that it lets you see what deranged music your friends listen to. It currently will even fetch the artist picture from the last.fm site for the popup bubble.

It’s not done, but it’s usable, and you can get it from my cvs web. Enjoy, and drop me a line if you like it!

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Moved out, partied hard, now what?

Friday, November 2nd, 2007


So I’ve moved out, gotten the new place all setup and have started sort of getting into the groove here. My first revelation was to find out that my internet service here isn’t as nice as it was at the old place. The outside plant here is old and oversubscribed so it’s tough. I finally threw down and colocated a server with DigiNex and as such imladris.ub3rgeek.net was born. I’m busy moving things off my server here at home onto the colocated box. This is a good thing though, because it’s time to audit a lot of that crappy old code that I have running all over the place. It’s running OpenBSD, so many things are different. But most of the websites I host are over there, as is most of my e-mail stuff and my irc client.

Last weekend was the annual Halloween party that a couple of my friends have been trying to get me to go to. I blew it off in 2005 and 2006… but wentthis year. It was a fantastic time, lots of really awesome people. A co-worker and I camped out in the back yard of the hosts’ house and despite the wind and rain it was a relaxing, refreshing weekend. We went hiking, there was a ton of fooling around with DDR, Guitar Hero and some kick ass old school Roland electronic synthesizers (a 303 and 808 were on hand along with a Moogerfrooger MF-104 ANALOG delay / feedback pedal, a Micro Korg and a MetaSonic Scrotum Smasher). I didn’t even unpack the laptop once throughout the whole weekend, which is a pretty crazy thing if you think about it. The only downside is the fact that reality is a harsh mistress and coming back to the real world after such a great weekend is a total bitch.

That said, I’ve been having a good time with the MediaTomb transcoding feature. It works really well and I’ve watched a bunch of stuff on it, including the season of Top Gear (so far), a bunch of Bleach, and the last episode of the new Doctor Who. I still have not gotten mencoder working on the damn thing, so I still don’t have a few media types playing, but if I ever get that done, I’ll post the stuff here somewhere.

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