Brian's Blog

I just got back this past weekend from a week in the Poconos for the annual fish trip. For those who don't know I've been going up to the same cabin near Pecks Pond with the same group of good friends for about 11 years now and we always have a heck of a good time drinking, playing cards, and occasionally fishing. My Dad came up and we spent a couple of hours shooting clay birds with the shotgun and target shooting with the .22 and on Wednesday we saw Dave Mathews in concert. As usual for vacations it went way to fast.

I forgot to bring the camera most places we went so I don't have to many pics to show. They are all in the gallery. The picture just to the left is probably be best one out of the bunch. I took this after we went fishing on White Deer Lake.

Somewhere or another I found a thought provoking quote that I'd like to share. I found it some time ago, liked it, and hung it on the wall then never looked at it again until now. It seems terribly relevant these days. Anyway, here it is:

You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence.

-- Charles A. Beard

I've always wanted to figure out how to stream my music collection to wherever I happen to be but never really took time to research what I'd need. Then I came across an Newsforge article about Slimserver. In a nutshell Slimserver is a streaming server designed for the hardware players they have at Slimdevices but it happens to work with pretty much any other player able to handle streams. I've used it with xmms and winamp so far and it works nice.

I downloaded the .tar.gz for Linux but it's available in rpm and even has a Windows version. It was pretty easy to install on Slackware too. It wasn't as easy as running the exe on Windows but still pretty darn painless if you read the docs. Basically I just uncompressed it, stuck the resulting directory in my home directory, and ran build-perl-modules.pl to build some perl modules then ran slimserver.pl to start up the server. From that point it was a simple matter of accessing the web interface and configure it.

The only odd thing is that each player that you connect with has a separate playlist unless you use Softsqueeze with which it lets you synchronize the playlists between different Softsqueeze instances. Otherwise, if you use anything other than Softsqueeze you have to load the playlist for each one. Not a huge pain, especially since I imagine Slimserver isn't designed to be a multicast server.

The web interface is pretty slick too. You can browse your collection by Artist, Album, Artwork, Genre, Year, and folder. You can also save different playlists and browse by those. The playlists you create can be loaded by any player that is connected. The search function is powerfull too. In the advances search you can search on attributes like bitrate, file format, file length, in addition to the normal searches like Track, Artist, Album, etc. Or there is just the simple search that searches titles.

Of additional coolness is the Softsqueeze player is already integrated into the Slimserver and it written in Java. You can follow a link that will install it on your system or run it as a Java applet. Supposedly Softsqueeze is able to connect to your stream via an ssh tunnel without having to run putty or ssh on the command line to setup a tunnel. I haven't tried that part yet though.

Right now I have my collection streaming to me at work through an ssh tunnel established with Putty. It sounds darn good too. At least on my crappy laptop speakers. Speaking of quality there is a setting to limit the bitrate of the stream. So, if you limit your bitrate to 128k and the song itself is encoded at 320k it will convert it on the fly for you. Which is nice if you are on a slower connection.

I've noticed that Nanoblogger 3.2 was released a couple of weeks ago. I'm still trying to determine if it's worth the upgrade. All I can see that it does is increase performance and add some nice but not needed for me at the moment features. The move to 3.1 was worth it for me because there was a bug fix for the "code in an entry body gets run during blog update" bug but as far as I can tell there aren't any fixes of that level of importance in this latest release.

I'm probably going to hold on a version or two and see what happens. I have a hard time justifying the time to re-edit all the templates to put my customizations back just for the sake of a higher version number.

Don't get me wrong, if I was to start a new blog I'd use whatever was current. But, as it stands now, what I have works and works well for me. So, I guess I made made up my mind to not upgrade yet. I know there are other Nanoblogger users who read my blog from time to time. If you are one of them and you have upgraded can you comment on if it was worth the switch?

This weekend the wife and I took the kids up to the Camp Biff cabin. We had a pretty good time except that Ellie seemed kind of "off" most of the weekend. She really didn't seem to want to do much of anything other than stay at the cabin and play games. In spite of her attitude we got her outside a bit to do nature thing. We went fishing for sunnies for a little but her attention span was short so we caught one fish off the boat launch at Pecks and then went back to the cabin. We got out for a walk down the Camp Biff trail which is usually very pretty. I was hoping the Mountain Laurel would still be in bloom but I must have just missed it's height. The trail is almost like waking in a fantasy world when the Laurel is in full bloom. The last time I was there at the right time the entire woods smelled sweet and there were flowers as far as you could see and big multicolored dragon flies going back and forth. That with the gurgling of the stream that runs along the trail makes for a pleasant walk. We did manage to get out on the boat a little and rowed around the lake. Angie slept through it and Ellie was cranky so we decided to head back in and got to the dock just before a thunderstorm hit. That was good timing.

The weekend wasn't the best one I've ever had at Biff with Ellie being cranky and not herself for some odd reason. She said she had a good time though and would go back again which is good. Even so though, it's better than being at work!

I'm going to be going back up again in about a week for some serious drink... Uhh, I mean fishing with the guys. I haven't really gotten any good fishing in yet this season. I'm looking forward to that.

The pictures of this weekend are in the gallery.

I'd been using Knoppix at work to bail out various Windows systems for the past few months so I decided to read Knoppix Hacks. I'd really only been using Knoppix to backup data before reinstalling Windows but after reading this book I have a few more tricks up my sleeve. My favorite ones and the ones I learned the most from are:

1. Wardrive with Knoppix
2. Check for Root Kits
3. Clone Hard Drives
4. Wipe a Hard Drive
5. Create Linux Software RAID

These are just a few of the 100 Hacks. I like the idea of checking for root kits from a read only file system and learned how to use dd for drive cloning. I've used partimage for cloning for a while but not every system will have that while every thing should have dd. And software RAID under Linux has always been sort of Voodoo for me but it turns out to be really easy. I know RAID isn't specific to Knoppix but at least I've finally learned something about it and tried it out on a system. The chapter on Repairing Linux is more useful and complete than the chapter on Repairing Windows but that really doesn't matter since the only effective way to repair Windows most of the time seems to be to back up data and reinstall the OS.

Now that I've done with this I'm not sure what I want to read next. I have a book on NIS and NFS that has been sitting on my shelf for some time waiting to be read, but I don't really have a pressing need to learn it at the moment. I'm sort of torn between learning something about SQL or sed and awk. But there are other things that I want to review and brush up on, like shell scripting in bash and getting better at using vim. I may buy the 3rd Edition of Learning bash since it covers bash 3.0 and read that to learn what's new and to review all at once.