We finally finished last Friday, and so far everything is working very well (with the exception of an ongoing problem apparently caused by a partner this morning). Everything is working and groovy, and we now have premium content such as Arrested Development available on our partner's web pages. There were some snags but overall it went really well.
For fear of the mighty search engines finding me, I'm still not going to name names, but overall it's been a great experience. Things definitely didn't end up the way I thought they would, but I think everyone got a lot out of the project, and we are all really really happy that it's finally over.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Laying low
Just waiting to move from one project to the next. To break the ennui, I've started experimenting with a less resource-intensive alternative to Azureus. I finally settled on rtorrent - it's a really neat ncurses-based torrent client, has a very small memory footprint (less than 50M when it's cranking, and that's including shared libs), and can be conveniently run in a screen session (making it easy to check from anywhere). Furthermore it can be almost entirely event-driven so it's really easy to write hooks however you like. As an example, it's easy to define hot-drop folders for torrents, and when a torrent is deleted the program stops dl'ing / seeding. Very very cool.
So, Azureus has a few features that I really need - mainly SafePeer and RSSFeed. To replace SafePeer I've installed MoBlock - it's an extremely lightweight PeerGuardian-esque tool that works as a set of iptables queuing rules. So far it's been working out well for me, the only drawback is that I haven't found a good place to automatically check for updates to the p2p file, but I expect to have that sorted soon.
So, all that was left was RSSFeed. And, believe it or not, nobody seems to have written this yet. There is a Perl GTK client for this, but the whole point is to be light and (preferably) gui-free. And, oddly enough, nobody seems to have written a text-based client for this - what I wanted was something that could be daemonized, because further down the line I would like to have this all as part of the startup scripts for my home server.
I was able to find this script on the Interweb, and I've heavily bastardized it to fit my own needs. At some point I will probably re-write the whole thing entirely (since it now bears little resemblance to the original script), and then maybe release it into the wild. Let me know if you're interested in trying it out (it's still Perl, so theoretically it should work on a Windows box, although I don't know how useful anyone else would find it). It's definitely been a fun little project to work on.
So, Azureus has a few features that I really need - mainly SafePeer and RSSFeed. To replace SafePeer I've installed MoBlock - it's an extremely lightweight PeerGuardian-esque tool that works as a set of iptables queuing rules. So far it's been working out well for me, the only drawback is that I haven't found a good place to automatically check for updates to the p2p file, but I expect to have that sorted soon.
So, all that was left was RSSFeed. And, believe it or not, nobody seems to have written this yet. There is a Perl GTK client for this, but the whole point is to be light and (preferably) gui-free. And, oddly enough, nobody seems to have written a text-based client for this - what I wanted was something that could be daemonized, because further down the line I would like to have this all as part of the startup scripts for my home server.
I was able to find this script on the Interweb, and I've heavily bastardized it to fit my own needs. At some point I will probably re-write the whole thing entirely (since it now bears little resemblance to the original script), and then maybe release it into the wild. Let me know if you're interested in trying it out (it's still Perl, so theoretically it should work on a Windows box, although I don't know how useful anyone else would find it). It's definitely been a fun little project to work on.
Tuesday, October 09, 2007
WTF mate?
OK, so I've gotten a taste of the new 720p rips of shows that are now out there. Oo-la-la, they look nice. Unfortunately, the G4 Mac Mini just doesn't have anywhere near the horsepower required to play them, so I've got to look into getting a new Mac Mini. I took a quick look at the Apple TV, which I could hack to get it to do what I want, but really we're talking 300 dollars for a medium-power Apple TV plus a lot of hacking around (and voiding the warranty) vs 700 dollars for a full-power Mac Mini and a lot less hacking around. I'll probably go with the more expensive and easier option.
While I was shopping around, it occurred to me "hey waitaminute! I have a badass XBox 360 - surely it can handle some hi-def content?!?" But alas, the Xbox 360 suffers from being completely crippled, and it can't really handle much in terms of video out of the box. You can, however, connect it to your PC running Vista or Windows MCE, which will transcode your video from the Windows PC to the XBox on the fly and stream it. I suppose that just being able to mount a share on your PC and watch it over the network is so, like, 2003. No, it's way cooler to transcode my media into another codec and stream it - after all, why just saturate the network when you can saturate the network _and_ spike the CPU load on your desktop? I think Microsoft has become a lot less evil over the years, but stuff like that just completely chaps my ass.
In other news, Switzerland was awesome. It was great to see Fabienne and I felt particularly honored to be invited. I made an ass of myself more than once but overall it was cool. We brought home lots of chocolate and duty-free booze, which we later discovered was actually more expensive than just getting it in the states. Live and learn.
Work is nuts, I have a good idea of what I'll be working on next but I don't wanna jinx it. More on that later.
--Nate
While I was shopping around, it occurred to me "hey waitaminute! I have a badass XBox 360 - surely it can handle some hi-def content?!?" But alas, the Xbox 360 suffers from being completely crippled, and it can't really handle much in terms of video out of the box. You can, however, connect it to your PC running Vista or Windows MCE, which will transcode your video from the Windows PC to the XBox on the fly and stream it. I suppose that just being able to mount a share on your PC and watch it over the network is so, like, 2003. No, it's way cooler to transcode my media into another codec and stream it - after all, why just saturate the network when you can saturate the network _and_ spike the CPU load on your desktop? I think Microsoft has become a lot less evil over the years, but stuff like that just completely chaps my ass.
In other news, Switzerland was awesome. It was great to see Fabienne and I felt particularly honored to be invited. I made an ass of myself more than once but overall it was cool. We brought home lots of chocolate and duty-free booze, which we later discovered was actually more expensive than just getting it in the states. Live and learn.
Work is nuts, I have a good idea of what I'll be working on next but I don't wanna jinx it. More on that later.
--Nate
Tuesday, October 02, 2007
Travel plans
We've been trying to work out travel plans for a little while and I think we're finally set. We're heading to Zurich this weekend for Fabienne's wedding - it's just a quick trip, leaving Thursday evening and coming back on Monday afternoon. Still, I'm looking forward to the wedding, and at least there should be good chocolate. Too bad the dollar is doing so poorly now, since it means I'll be paying a lot more this time around than the last.
We've been debating what to do for Thanksgiving - last year we went to Aruba, and we've decided to follow in that same vein this year - having two free days and employers that will generally give you a freebie day or two for TG is just too good an opportunity for vacation to pass up.
So, this year, we're heading to Grand Turk island in the Turks and Caicos - the island is 6 square miles and it's reputed to have fantastic diving (and not much else). It's also considerably less expensive than we initially thought it would be - overall it's probably gonna run about three grand for a week of diving and beach solitude, which is about standard for a week-long vacation these days. We wanted to drag Sam and Matt with us, but they're trying to save up for an apartment so they'll probably be responsible and stay in NYC. Claudia is jumping up and down in anticipation and I'm getting pretty excited, too.
For Christmas / New Year's we'll be in Brazil - it's been at least two years since we were there for the holidays and we're definitely due to spend them with her family (I can't for the life of me remember what we did last Xmas - I think we stayed in NYC but it's all blurry - hey, I suppose I can check my blog later and find out!). We'll be in Rio / SP for Xmas, then head up to Joao Pessoa for the New Years - another break of nothing but beach and beer - man, life is good!
--Nate
We've been debating what to do for Thanksgiving - last year we went to Aruba, and we've decided to follow in that same vein this year - having two free days and employers that will generally give you a freebie day or two for TG is just too good an opportunity for vacation to pass up.
So, this year, we're heading to Grand Turk island in the Turks and Caicos - the island is 6 square miles and it's reputed to have fantastic diving (and not much else). It's also considerably less expensive than we initially thought it would be - overall it's probably gonna run about three grand for a week of diving and beach solitude, which is about standard for a week-long vacation these days. We wanted to drag Sam and Matt with us, but they're trying to save up for an apartment so they'll probably be responsible and stay in NYC. Claudia is jumping up and down in anticipation and I'm getting pretty excited, too.
For Christmas / New Year's we'll be in Brazil - it's been at least two years since we were there for the holidays and we're definitely due to spend them with her family (I can't for the life of me remember what we did last Xmas - I think we stayed in NYC but it's all blurry - hey, I suppose I can check my blog later and find out!). We'll be in Rio / SP for Xmas, then head up to Joao Pessoa for the New Years - another break of nothing but beach and beer - man, life is good!
--Nate
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