Fuppes take 2

Well, the ipkg version of fuppes for unslung doesn't have virtual foldes (so I can put songs/artists/albums into subfolders -- say ABC,DEF,etc). And it crashes processing my images. And so, the adventure began to upgrade to the latest from SVN.

It installs and runs...but a lot of the secondary elements were not enabled. Translation, no music (m4a files) on the PS3. So I had to install another 10+ packages and figure out how to use ./configure. I think I finally have LAME and FAAD2 enabled. Rebuilding one last time.

If that does not work, I'm going to convert the files to mp3s.

And there is a crash in nanosleep. Caused by the console loop but most likely caused by running out of memory. In the meantime, I now have firefly (itunes server), ushare, mediatomb, nethack, gdb, and more installed on the little machine that could. It is empowering to be able to build your own applications. But the promise of "ipkg install fuppes" and a few configuration changes is not the case.

The downside is that it really was that easy on the Windows box.

Slug to Unslung

Trying to do this with a 2GB thumb drive. But it in the end, decided the existing drive was going to work. Backed it up for safe keeping first.

My box is slow (133MIPS) so I'll need to Turbo it soon.

Went to unslung 6.10-beta. No issues.

Installed openssh and fuppes (media server).
Installed python and perl.

PS3 Media Server

Day 2 with the PS3 was all about setting up a media server. It started with a test on my desktop before going to the planned production location: the NSLU2 NAS. But no luck tonight. Ends up my router is pre-universal plug-n-play. Had to update the firmware. Then things acted a lot better -- just not just from the laptop. I should have rebooted the wireless router but time for sleep.

Bad luck of the night besides spending two hours to discover the router firmware issue = changing the router admin password to something I no longer know. Very likely I'll have to reset to defaults and reconfigure. Writing stuff like that down is extremely useful.

This weekend, turning my SLUG into something it wasn't meant to be. unslung me baby! Very likely, fuppes is the media server of choice. SimpleServer was a great test bed because it was simple to configure under windows.

Day 1 was all about PAIN. And most of Day 2 too. I'm downloading lots of other demos which will be Day 3-N.

Python and Eclipse

First a book recommendation:
Dive Into Python

Things I've installed today:
- Python 2.5
- PyDev (eclipse editor plugin)
- Subversion for Eclipse
- PyUnit Comes with Python 2.1+
- Cruise Control...


Some eclipse hints: (from an IBM site)
Ctrl+Shift+L - show page of keyboard shortcuts
Ctrl+3 - search menus for a command
Local history on files!

Mylyn:
Now part of Eclipse. A tool to make task management easier. Added a task to figure this out.

Other cool stuff...
-Timeline and timeplot from Simile @ MIT

Python, Twisted, Rally, CruiseControl, and ?

Today I am setting up a new development environment.

Goals:
- continuous builds
- scrum (for one?)
- Python and server framework
- External source control

Tools:
- Python and Twisted
- Rally
- BuildBot for Continuous Builds
- subversion for source control
- Eclipse as editor

Alternatives:
- Trac instead of Rally
- CruiseControl instead of BuildBot


BuildBot uses Twisted and Python. So that seemed like a good fit.

I'm not so happy about Rally being a hosted solution but one thing at a time.

Code camp

Woody summarized my talk at the Fullerton Code Camp:
summary

Overall, it was very useful to me to see his approach.

I thought of this today as I ran into someone visiting SOE that saw my presentation in Seattle on Wednesday.

API: Google Social Graph

http://code.google.com/apis/socialgraph/

Looks interesting.

Flash 9

I finally upgraded to Flash 9 and ActionScript 3.0. My work still requires AS2 and so don't expect tons of AS3 stuff. But I'm ready to join to bleeding edge of technology again.

Technology: Amazon Web Services

Facebook and Amazon Web Cloud

I need to go take a look at this technology. I'm interested to see if I can run a SmartFox server there too. Runs about $75/month for a server. Definitely something to look into instead of using a dedicated server someplace.

Project: Bracket Challenge

I created my own basketball bracket and ran the tournament at Kongregate.com. The Flash part was easy. The server (mySQL) was simple. The challenge was tracking the winners and losers and all the admin stuff. And so rev 1.n has better tools.

I released the entire project under the zlib license today on MountAbbey.com at Bracket Challenge. This is my first real code release for the site.

Coding is more fun than running a tournament. I came in 30th of around 300 -- most of them one time users. I was hoping for 2000. At least next time, I'll have the bugs removed.