Older blog entries for Stevey (starting at number 24)

 I had a lovely evening last night playing video games with a friend. We started off playing Micro Machines v3 and Wipeout on the playstation then decided to get pizza + ice-cream and watch films.

 We saw Spawn which sucked to be honest, and Wild Things which I've seen before and quite enjoyed - she seemed to like it lots; though we both agreed that Denise Richards is pretty to look at, if you like that kind of thing, but she can't act.

 I've been making code cleanups all over the place during the past few days, so now I'm happy with the structure of the program.

 Today I implemented file caching for all the theme template files. Previously they were re-read for each connection which wasn't optimal.

 The simple scheme I've come up with is based upon the modified time of the files and provides a snappier feel to the system.

 It's nice when simple changes like this produce a noticable performance gain.

 After having installed Netsaint last week we now have a decent network monitoring system!

 Today I'm just mildly irritated that there's no obvious way to turn off telnets 'connecting ..' messages. This means that I can't do this:

export START="`telnet localhost daytime`"

 *shrugs*

 This made me laugh though, from 'man telnet'

BUGS
     The source code is not comprehensible.

Documentation

 I wrote a simple mp3 streaming server and the documentation which accompanies it.

 I'm would freely admit that neither the code nor the documentation is perfect - but short of acknowledging that and asking users to contribute if there's an area where it's woefully inaccurate or hard to read what can I do?

Article Submission?

 I've been writing a little page about the history of my server - could that be the basis of an interesting article? I look forward to comments.

 (I always find it intruiging reading stories of the history of 'big' projects like Samba. I know my server isn't that big, but it's history contains implementations in Python, Perl, C, and C++ - which I guess makes it fairly unique ;)

 I've spent around 2 days fighting with a problem with my mp3 streaming server.

 It turns out the problem was simple enough to solve once I knew what it was - The ./configure script was adding libC to the link line, and I hadn't noticed. The program being written in C++ this caused random crashes at strange points in the code.

 All fixed now - but I'm quite paranoid about making a release, although the release early mantra has been repeated lots I'd rather not make a release which is broken for many people.

 I guess I'll have to play on the sourceforge compile farm for a few hours tonight to be sure it's OK.
Work

 I think that I'm starting to settle into the new job properly now - I've been here for two weeks and I know the names of all the cute women - and most of the server's I'm supposed to be adminning ;)

 After playing with autoconf and automake for the past few days I have a new release version of gnump3d ready for testing - if I don't hear anything bad from the members of the mailing list I'll make a release.

 If you're interesting trying this pre-release on your machine, (and I'd appreciate any feedback on this), then you can grab a copy from here

Clubbing

 To celebrate the autoconf pre-release - and because I would anyway - I'm be going to the local goth/metal club Vain tonight :)

 I don't know if this is a coincidence or not..

 In my last journal entry I posted a pointer to my Amazon Wishlist (deliberately not linked this time;) and today I noticed that somebody has bought me a copy of the Autoconf, Automake and Libtool book on it.

 This means that an upcoming release of GNUMP3d will certainly have autoconf support!

 I'm about to make a new release - I'm just waiting for my pacakge sponsor to upload the new version to the Debian repository.

 Did I mention that my server had made it into Debian's unstable distribution? :)

 It also appears to be available in the FreeBSD ports tree, and Gentoo Linux too :)

 The only downside to the inclusion in different distributions is that poeple aren't finding the main site, and the contributions to my wishlist have fallen down - which isn't so good!

 So far I've had around 4 DVD's and a few nice books - just sent in appreciation of the software, and one individual promised to send me something if I implemented password protection of the music archive now.

 I implemented it immediately, he was happy, he sent gift, I was happy. A wonderful means of encouraging development..

 (No I'm not some capitalist; it was a suggestion a friend made when I was unemployed .. and I think I've struck the right balance. The source is free (GPL), the binaries are free. I fix bugs when I discover them I just put a couple of pointers online to the list - and if people choose to donate that's entirely optional.)

Home..

 I'm having seriously murderous thoughts about a family of pidgeons that are living in the 'lightwell' which my kitchen looks out into.

 They are too far away to poison, and to fast to throw things at .. Maybe I should let Tigger out of the kitchen window .. Mwahaha

Advogato

 I think the best word I could use to describe the recent journal 'attacks' is amusement. If this were real life and two friends were arguing I'd just tell them to stop .. or make sure I only was one of them at a time.

 Here, without the constraints of real interaction its just too easy to get carried away and make a real scene in front of people. Hopefully it's all resolved now, if not *shrugs*

My cat Tigger has been ill recently. He's back from the vets and I'm left with a huge bill to pay, I'm just glad I got him back in one piece; he's worth every penny, and more!

Programming

Work continues on my MP3 streaming server; I've recently discovered it made it into the Gentoo Linux distribution - and now I'm starting the process of getting it included in the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. I hadn't appreciated quite how involved the process was - although it appears to be remarkably well thought out.

Well it's been a long time since I posted here, I do still follow the site but I've been making most of my online diary posts over at livejournal.

GNUMP3d

GNUMP3d has taken off bigtime, I've got lots of users and lots of process has been made on the project since it was last mentioned here. I even linked to an Amazon wishlist on the project page - and received a few presents from it! Wow; free software really pays!

Work

I'm due to start a new job at the start of next month. This pretty cool - I'll be one of their two sysadmins.

The company uses Linux servers exclusively which is sooo much better than the Windows/Linux mix I had at my last company.

 Well all the code is now C++, and looks correct - but I'm getting a segfault after its been serving for a couple of days, so I'm holding of a release till I can track down the source.

 I've got a script which attempts to download a new file every five seconds - and I'm impressed that this works correctly for over 48 hours! Its just a pain that I don't know whats causing the server to crash.

OGG Vorbis

 I can't parse the OGG Vorbis files for comments without using libvorbis.

 I've done loads of websearching but I can't find sample code - so I'm not having OGG support in GNUMP3d, because I don't want to impose a dependancy.

 Sigh. If only there were a spec I could look at...

Life

 My life @ LiveJournal.com