mp3 streaming with SqueezeCenter

i've been using ampache for a while, though i've recently had trouble streaming through a squid firewall. but i'm always on the lookout for a better way. SqueezeCenter (formerly slimserver) might be the answer. haven't tried it yet, but it's on my radar.

quantlib

the quantlib project has seemed interesting ever since i first found out about it. looks like many of the most of the lead developers are at banca imi, an italian investment bank. some others are at statpro, which provides data and analysis services. so it looks like at least some of the people involved are real pros in the business. i should take a more in-depth look some time. and there's a python binding! check out luigi's book as a great ref.

parallel python

i just read through the examples for parallel python (pp package on gentoo). some day i'll have to try it. it basically makes a queuing service to which you can submit function calls as jobs. so you submit the function calls to run and then block for the result later in the script. very handy and easy parallelism. maybe i can hook it up to an object caching/generating database as an aop aspect. now _that_ would be cool.

apache upgrade

i recently had to update my apache server from 2.0 to 2.2. they made some major changes to the default http.conf file, so in order to get ampache working again i had to add this: Alias /ampache/ "/usr/share/webapps/ampache/3.3.2.1/htdocs/" <Directory "/usr/share/webapps/ampache/3.3.2.1/htdocs/"> Options Indexes AllowOverride None Order allow,deny Allow from all </Directory> previously, i think i only needed the alias. but apparently some security settings were changed because with 2.2 i would get 'client denied by server configuration' in the error log. also, i had to add -D PHP5 to APACHE2_OPTS in /etc/conf.d/apache2 just like before.

couple of problems fixed

i managed to fix a couple of problems recently, and i figured i should record how i did it since i know this wasn't the first time i had to figure either of them out. my cisco 678 had been so reliable that i hadn't needed to log into it for years. i only needed to do it now to get the settings to put on the new modem, but it had been so long i forgot how to get minicom to connect. i finally figured out that i need to turn off both hardware and software flow control. i don't think any of the other settings is as critical, and defaultish settings (8n1) should work. another problem that i had once again was with getting my laptop to start the wireless interface when i plug in the card. i fixed the broken ld dependencies in pccardctl and pcmcia-socket-startup, but it still responded with 'eth0: no such interface'. i randomly tried running pcmcia-socket-startup manually, and that did it. according to the docs, this should run from the the pcmcia_socket.agent hotplug script whenever a new socket is registered with the pcmcia module. so i'm not sure why it didn't work automatically, but at least i can connect.

google app engine

looks like google is opening up an app engine that runs python. maybe they'll even take this in the direction of commodity computing. i might need to check that out later.

aspect oriented programming

every once in a while i think i might play around with aspect-oriented programming. wikipedia seems to have a good article to get started. i realized from reading about one python implementation (lightweight python aop: aspects.py) that i could use this to make a caching object database that automatically decides whether to compute store objects or recompute them. or maybe i should read the wikipedia page on programming paradigms first, so i don't jump from one rut to another.