Lonely Lion

MP3 server with IO::Socket

I was surprised to discover how easy it was to write a fairly robust server that will wow your friends, and impress your colleagues. Well maybe.

O’Reilly Network: Revitalize Your PC [Jul. 23, 2002]

A lot of stuff in here is kind of old hat, but they list some good resources at the end. If you’ve never upgraded a PC before, there’s really good advice here.

FYI: This is 60% case study, 40% vanity article.

My Home Network:

I’m connected to the internet via Sprint Broadband. They have a microwave dish installed on my roof, which speaks to a similar dish on the Sears Tower. They assigned me a static IP, which I’ve assigned to my Linksys router / firewall / NAT server.

The rest of the network is connected to the Linksys. As of this moment, there are no open ports inbound. My internal network is subnetted into 192.168.1.0/24 and 192.168.2.0/24. The .1 subnet is my “wired” subnet, and the .2 is my “wireless” subnet. The two subnets route through a laptop running FreeBSD (radar) with a wired PCMCIA ethernet card and Avaya wireless card. My main workstation is a dual boot system (shadow / cranston) running Red Hat 7.2 / Windows XP. I use a Sun Ultra 5 (lenny) as an NFS / Backup server. A second Ultra 5 (elvis) is connected to the wired network through a hub, and acts as an MP3 Jukebox (hence the speakers, which represent my stereo). Both Ultra 5’s run Solaris 8.

The wireless network serves my laptop (otter, running Windows XP), and Camri’s desktop (ladybug, running Windows 98). The wireless network is relatively insecure at this stage. I plan on implementing IPSEC as a VPN on the wireless subnet, shutting down all other traffic. Both wireless clients run Zone Alarm firewall.

That’s about it. My near term goals include working on elvis’ jukebox functionality (I’m trying to write a web based interface for the xmms software that runs the jukebox) and building the firewall / VPN on the FreeBSD system (radar).

New Scientist

Viagra is being given to babies and children around the world to try to save them from life-threatening lung conditions.

O’Reilly Network: Using Amazon’s New Web Services [Jul. 18, 2002]

I’m in the process of editing a short video piece for a friend of mine. I’m using Adobe Premiere, running on Windows XP. It’s been an excruciating process. There’s lots of things I like about Premiere from a functionality perspective, but from a stability one – it sucks.

Here’s a few Linux based Open Source video editing solutions that I’m going to be playing around with, hopefully replacing Premiere. As I work with these tools, I’ll try to write it up for this site.

Heroine Warrior – A linux video editing site
Cinelerra – an editing suite
An article about the above. (Cinelerra used to be called Broadcast 2000)
Xmovie – a mpeg (etc) player
Quicktime4Linux

The Improv Chicago Gamers Mailing List

I created the ICGamers list for people who regularly chat about computer games on Improv Chicago, but figured I’d open it up to anyone that reads this page. If you’re interested in a small-ish mailing list about PC and Console games, then join away.

-Chris

MD5 Homepage (unofficial)

I never quite understood what MD5 signatures were. I had some time this morning, so I checked up on it. Here it is:

[The MD5 algorithm] takes as input a message of arbitrary length and produces as output a 128-bit “fingerprint” or “message digest” of the input. It is conjectured that it is computationally infeasible to produce two messages having the same message digest, or to produce any message having a given prespecified target message digest. The MD5 algorithm is intended for digital signature applications, where a large file must be “compressed” in a secure manner before being encrypted with a private (secret) key under a public-key cryptosystem such as RSA.

Know you know. Knowing, as the saying goes, is half the battle.

use Perl | Damian Conway Teaches in Chicago, Aug 19-23

Date::Tolkien::Shire.pm

Nerds.