LeeNukes

Hello all,

I have a program in my head, but there is a problem. I’m not a programmer. I’m currently learning Python as I’ve heard its a good language to write applications quick, and that should keep my interest.

In the meantime, I’m looking for assistance or offers of assistance.

Now, the application. I work in a support environment, we have customers who require remote assistance, currently that is often offered by some means of VNC, normally a reverse connection. This however means interaction between a none technical user which doesn’t always go quite so simply.

So, my thought is why not have a middle man, or a gateway program. This program will be installed on customers machines and will provide a hook into the local VNC. It will connect to a web server and check to see if there have been any recent requests for connections, if there are it will forward that connection request onto the VNC service locally thus starting the connection without the need for user interaction.

I’d go into more detail but I think thats enough for now. If you are a developer, or maybe you would be interested in this application, drop me a comment and I’ll see what I can do regarding sorting out a project.

OK, I’ve heard that if you eat passion fruit before you goto bed it will give you fantastic dreams. Well there were some reduced at the shop, 25p each so I thought why not.

Now, I’ve never had one before, it was odd once I was into it, no effort in eating, its not the prettiest though, like eating snot and pips but its tasty, very acidic though.

So, now for the scary part, when you finish eating it, its like something out of predator:

Well, I went to login to my excite based email this morning, which I have had for coming on for 8 years now I think. And I was greeted by this message:

“eXcite email scheduled maintenance

We are currently conducting unscheduled maintenance on eXcite email. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you, and thank you for your patience. We expect to have service restored in a few hours.”

Oh, ok I thought, I’ll take a look at their main page, see if there is anything on there:

Oh, ok fair enough, its currently 8:20am GMT so I thought it can’t be long until its back, then I noticed the date, odd I thought.

The EST time is currently: 3:20am on the 14th.

Oh oh, me thinks Excite are having problems.

Thomson TG585v7

This is quite possibly the worst router I’ve had to deal with, maybe not the worst but its certainly up there, top 5.

The issue I had was I wanted to forward ports 80 and 443 through it to a web server. So, I did as you’d expect, used its interface, Applications and Gaming (urgh, I hate this on a router used in a workplace) and set to forward HTTPs and HTTP to the server. Well, HTTP worked but HTTPs was a no go. I tried again, this time using the Secure Web Server option which was also there but mapped the same ports for 443. Still no go.

After hours, almost a full man day I found out I needed to telnet into the device (after creating myself a different admin account so I know the username and password) and then run these command:

service system ifdelete name=HTTPs group=wan
saveall

I’m assuming that what this does is turn off the web interface listening on port 443 on the wan interface which stops bypassing my attempts to forward it.

And before anyone mentions it, no there isn’t a way to do this in the web interface, or change the management ports.

I hate Thomsons.

Well, the names were submitted, the votes were counted and the winner has now been announced.

The possible contenders were:

* Cambridge
* Farnsworth
* Mississippi
* Nile
* Nitrate
* Saltpetre
* Terror
* Water
* Whiskey Run

Picked a favourite?

Good

You can now refer to Fedora 10 as…….

Cambridge

The other possbile candidates and their actual votes are below.

1. Cambridge 1547
===
2. Nile 1503
3. Farnsworth 1435
4. Water 1408
5. Nitrate 1295
6. Whiskey Run 1281
7. Mississippi 1145
8. Saltpetre 1076
9. Terror 953

Well I’ve got the task of creating two Samba File servers at work. Its using the Dell SC440 hardware. I’ve had a few problems with the gfx card in it. Its some ATI based affair. Found that if I install Gnome and other bumpf from the CD/DVD I am able to get an X session. If I don’t and install it after, invoking an init 5 gives me an error stating that the X session started and stopped too many times. This happens with many different configurations of X.

Running a reconfigure of the X service gets me a background and a mouse pointer, but on a reboot back to it crashing the X session and falling back to CLI.

So I’ve just left it at command line only, thats all I need anyway and having X on a server just makes me go all funny.

Random comment of the day, until most computers don’t come installed with an operating system it will always be in the best interests of the person providing that OS to ensure that upgrades to their PCs will, over time slow that machine down.

Got a message through Facebook that they’re new album was available, I knew they had a new single out but I didn’t expect the album to be out for a little while yet.

Anywho, it also said where to buy it and for how much, well 7digital had it on an MP3 non-DRMed download for £5! Thats an acceptable price to pay for a non-DRMed album.

With DRM then I just wouldn’t buy it as I don’t want to be locked into what I can do with my music. At least with these mp3’s I can stick them on my server and play them on my Linux machines which as we know DRM doesn’t exactly work with them in its current guise.

Having the option for an ogg would have been nice but as I don’t have an ogg playing device its best not to bother.

The album is still available here

Its not often that I see something released that I like the look of and when I look at the price am even more impressed.

The first thing was the EeePC, which I am on right now, its a cracking little laptop. Unobtrusive, powerful (given its size) and runs Linux.

Now, take the XO, sure I like that too, however its bulkier, looks odd, is bright green and looks more like a toy. I would have gotten an XO laptop, however the give one get one campaign took its time coming to my fair shores so it missed out to the EeePC.

Now, the OLPC association have revealed their concept for the XO-2. I must say I’m very impressed and just hope that they are able to turn this concept into a reality.

Feast your eyes on these pics:

Now, that is enough to make me want one, however they are thinking they can sell this fantastic looking piece of kit for $75. Thats right, $75!!

I highly doubt that they will be able to acheive this and more realistic is $150 which I still think is more then reasonable for it. As long as they don’t do the age old £’s to $’s conversion basically 1 to 1 then I’d probably get several of these. Its what ebooks have been waiting for.

More information here:

http://government.zdnet.com/?p=3831
http://blogs.inquirer.net/m-ph/2008/05/22/sneek-peak-olpcs-xo2/

I was following this site: http://www.tomtaylor.co.uk/blog/2006/09/01/how-to-rip-bbc-radio-streams-to-mp3/ and I thought it would be a nice time to create a script to do this as I always forget the commands required.

So here it is:

#!/bin/bash
#Downloads Audio from BBC Radio Streams and Outputs it to a dump file
echo "What is the rtsp location of the stream? [ENTER]:”
read stream_loc
echo “What do you want the dump file to be called? [ENTER]:”
read dump_loc
mplayer -dumpstream -dumpfile $dump_loc “$stream_loc”
exit

Now to get hold of the rtsp location for the download you need to obtain the .rpm file and open it with cat or some document reader such as less, more or kate.

Inside that should be a url starting with rtsp.

Once you’ve gotten that file (its going to download it in realtime, so a 2 hour show will take 2 hours) you need to process the file, assuming the dump file is called file.dump

mplayer -ao pcm file.dump

This will output a likely large .wav file in the folder you ran it then do

lame -h -v -b 192 file.wav output.mp3

This will output a 192kbps mp3 file from the converted dump wav file to an mp3.

Job done.