Ramblings

By George, I think I’ve done it! After deciding not to mess with the evms tools anymore, I attempted to set up our RAID array using more ‘simple’ tools. It’s ALIVE!!!

I think the evms tools are supposed to be real nice to use, but they keep hanging on my machine. Maybe I should try them again now that I’ve got the array actually working …

Starfish is a really cool random background changer. I normally am not real big on the whole random thing, but this one is nice.

I’m not normally very good at reviewing books that I’ve read. Even when asked if a book was good or not, I often have trouble giving a straight answer. Anyways, I thought I would try to kick off another section of the blog here and do a few book reviews.

I recently reread an older Star Trek book that I own (I have around 150 ST books). This book, Federation, weaves a nice story throught. It expertly weaves three distinct time periods into a very well thought out story. I always had an interest in Zefram Cochrane and this book explores Cochrane’s past quite nicely.

But the story doesn’t stop there. It goes on into Kirk’s time, where Kirk and a few members of his crew encounter Cochrane on a small planetoid many years in the future.

As I said, there are three time periods in play in this book, and the third one is Picard’s time. Here again, Cochrane has cheated time to jump to a point where the technology almost appears as magic.

The only real problem I have, and it’s not the book’s fault, is that Star Trek canon has since rewritten most of the history established in this book. The authors even state (I think at the beginning somewhere) that the back story info is subject to change.

Overall, I’d give this book 4.5/5.0

After hearing everyone around me expound on the virtues of Python, I think it’s time to take the plunge. I’d like to see what in the way of GUI development I can do … you know, work on a front end for my P2P app. I’ve also been doing a little reading in a book called Rapid Application Development with Mozilla [ZIP link] trying to see if going with XUL and Mozilla is the way for a quick GUI …

I had a friend ask about DVD ripping tools for Windows XP yesterday, which got me looking around again. It’s been a while since I needed DVD ripping tools for Win. In Linux, I’ve been using this cool little GUI front end for mencoder called QuickRip.

Back in my freshman year here at LU (Fall 2000) we really got into DVD ripping. Back in those dark ages I was still running Windows and so all the ripping stuff I had was for Windows. When I switched to Linux one of the things I missed was my ripping software. There just wasn’t much out there for Linux that was any good or easy to use. I still have all that Windows software, but needless to say, it’s all getting fairly old. New versions are out, new functionality is out, new codecs are available, and the tools don’t neccessarily still all work like I remember.

Well, I started looking around for a nice integrated package that was free for Windows yesterday for my friend and discovered that somewhere around 95% of all the links I could find for DVD ripping were Linux related. They were all talking about dvd::rip or MEncoder. I’m a big MPlayer (MEncoder is a piece of MPlayer) fan and MEncoder is what QuickRip uses for encoding. A year or two ago I ran into dvd::rip and had a world of trouble getting all the required components installed, so I gave up. It looked like a sweet little program, but it was just too much work.

One really nice feature of dvd::rip is it’s cluster mode. In cluster mode, you can break up the encoding process and pass out the pieces to several different computers running the program. I really liked the idea when I first encountered it, but since I never got it up and running, I never had the oportunity to play with it much. At the time, the dvd::rip project had a link to some other guy’s website where he had put together a bootable CD that had everything installed. It looked like exactly what I wanted (boot a normally Windows machine off the CD and use it over night). The CD was labeled Alpha quality at the time (but so much OSS is labeled that way).

I ran across the project again yesterday and it sparked my interest again (and this time I have much more experience and a better software installation method [Gentoo's Portage]). However, I couldn’t find the link to the bootable CD project anymore. A quick Google and I found the page again, but to my dismay it hasn’t been updated in the last two years. Oh well, it’s not going to stop me from trying to play with dvd::rip and it’s cluster mode this summer :)

Anyone know of an easy way to create a bootable Linux CD with dvd::rip and assocciated utilities installed?

Just did a bit of research and found a ton of commercial SFTP/SSH servers for Windows. I decided to see about getting a free one working, OSS and all. I tried using a CYGWIN & SSHD howto I ran across and what do you know, I now have a SSH/SFTP server running on my Windows XP box at work. I’m sure the network guys would love to hear that! :)

Now I suppose MacOSX has SSH/SFTP abilities native. I should check with Scum on that, as he’s my Mac resource.

Scum and I were kicking around this idea of a closed peer-to-peer filesharing network that is by invitation only. We’d like to be able to share some of our files with each other after everyone splits from school, and we aren’t really happy with anything that is out there right now (for closed p2p networks).

So Scum has embarked on a mission to create one that we could all use. It will have to be cross platform in the most extreme way (there are three operating systems represented in our small group), so he has taken a web based approach. After seeing a quick demo the other night of what he has so far, I’m convinced we will need some sort of client program to handle the actual file serving and indexing. I’d rather not have to figure out how to get a FTP server up and running and keep it secure when I could use SCP or SFTP to transfer the files.

At the same time, it isn’t efficient at all to have a remote server connect to your machine and attempt to index the files you have hosted. It would be much quicker and safer to have a client program that watches for changes in a given folder or folders and update a remote SQL server (MySQL) as needed. Then when a search is initiated on the web server, the user can feel confident that the index is the most recent possible.

The index would only contain a listing of what host has what file. It would be up to the user to launch a client program (maybe the client program initiates the query?) and specify the host and file path to actually get the file. Scum mentioned FTP (which is all he has implemented currently) because of the usual autoresume on failures on so forth. I’m not sure if SFTP can be resumed or not, but if so, that is what I would suggest. I’m not sure if there are SFTP servers for platforms other than *nix, so maybe it isn’t an option at all.

Anyways, I’m hashing this out in my head and if anyone has some input, toss it in …

Were you looking for my TJOC blog? If so go to http://www.kc5mpk.com/blog/tjoc/.