minus zero

It's been brought to my attention that I don't post as often as I should.

I have but one retort, Mr Blackstock:

Swansea was blanketed in snow overnight, and the sight that greeted me when I peeped out from the curtains at 7:30 this morning prompted me to brave the cold to take some photos.

Walking across the crisp and unmolested snow in the almost deserted park was a nice way to start the day, rather than the drudgery of having to haul myself onto campus for lectures.

Click a thumbnail for the full-size view:

The whole gallery is here (generated by the Rather Good f-spot). Comments and critique are both welcome!

So I turned 22 last Friday. I spent the day relaxing with my lovely lady, which was rather good. I worked my first shift at the new student shop in the evening, and although I felt slightly bad about leaving Jen on her own she assured me that she'd be fine, and would keep herself entertained.

The 5 hours at work dragged on and on, until I was finally set free at 10. Jen came to meet me and we wandered home, discussing the romantic night we were going to spend together. When we got back to the house, Jen instructed me to go through to the kitchen and get a bottle of wine from the fridge. With a huge grin on my face, thinking it was my lucky night, I blundered into the lounge and fumbled for the light switch in the darkness.

All of a sudden, the lights came of their own accord and the sound of loads of people shouting "SURPRISE!!!" greeted me. The house was incredibly warm compared to the bitter Swansea air outside, and my glasses had fogged over. I was completely taken aback and didn't really have a clue what was going on! It soon became apparent that the room was packed with loads of my friends all wishing me a happy birthday and wondering why I looked so shell-shocked. A huge grin came across my face as I realised what was going on, although I staggered around for a short while not quite sure if I was awake or dreaming. The rasterbated photo of my ugly mug just added to the surrealism of it all.

The party was a huge success, and I'm totally in awe of how much effort was put into the organisation and secrecy of the whole enterprise. Big thanks, kisses and love to Jen, Steve and Sey for all the hard work you put into it, you're the best! Jen's sangria was delicious, and a little more intoxicating than was assumed (right, Sara?).

Thanks of course to everyone who came along to make the night so much fun, hope you enjoyed yourselves as much as I did. It was really humbling to have so many people there for a party for me! Wow.

Oh! I almost forgot the cake. It was a true masterpiece (if you're wondering what the hell the design on the top is all about, I refer you to Goatse), and delicious to boot. Sey, you did a brilliant job, though I just can't picture you in an apron in the kitchen with a tube of pink icing.

More pictures of the event: Andy's and Seyhan's.

Oops. (from Boing Boing).

While procrastinating hard in the library, I was taken by a sudden desire to listen to some music from my ever-expanding collection. The only slight drawback was that I'd left my iPod at home, which made it somewhat difficult given that my laptop is devoid of any music.

Realising that my desktop PC has its music shared (using Samba) with the rest of the home LAN, I set about trying to connect to it from my laptop on the University's VPN.

On Windows, the process is as follows:

1. Execute net stop server from the command prompt (Win+R>cmd>OK). This stops Windows' Samba server on the local machine (we're effectively replacing the local server with the remote one).
2. Open PuTTY and select the 'Tunnels' option from the 'SSH' menu in the left-hand pane
3. For each of the following port numbers: 137, 138, 139, 445; enter the port number in the 'Source port' entry box and hostname:X (where hostname is the name of the box with the Samba shares, and X is the same port number you put in the 'Source port' box) in the 'Destination' entry box, and then click the 'Add' button.
4. Return to the 'Session' option at the top of the left hand pane and enter the name of the remote host you're connecting to (in general, the hostname of the internet gateway on the home LAN).
5. It's probably a good idea to save this little setup for future use, so give it a name in the 'Saved Sessions' box and hit 'Save'.
6. Click the 'Open' button, and enter your username and password when prompted (assuming you don't have SSH keys set up...)
7. You should now be able to enter \\127.0.0.1 in the Windows 'Run' box, and after authenticating with a valid Samba username and password you'll be presented with all the visible shares of the remote machine. These can be browsed and mapped to network drives, as with any Samba share.
8. That's it!

Of course, this makes several assumptions - you need to have a machine on the home LAN you can SSH into, for one. But it's a simple hack that seems to work. It's also got the added benefit of being encrypted.

Something like Icecast would probably be a more sensible long-term solution, but for a quick and easy way of listening to your tracks, it does the job nicely. :)

Readers who visit the actual blog rather than via RSS will notice the rather nice new-look blog theme. It's in keeping with the main site and was (mostly) done by Andy. Thanks Andy. Thandy.

I'm all settled in to the house and it's certainly come to life now that everyone has moved in. Fun times are ahead, I predict :). The kitchen is a little on the small side considering there's 6 of us, but nothing's perfect. The landlord/lady seem to be on the ball as well, which is nice. A few days after requesting a dining table, they arrived with a gigantic refectory-style beast, which has pride of place in the middle of our lounge.

The Great Job Hunt paid off, and I've been offered an evening job at Woolworths... It's only a temporary position, so I'll probably have to go through the whole process again in January, but whatever keeps the wolves from the door in the meantime. I had a group interview today which was a bit scary but I must have done a good enough job of impressing/deceiving (pick one ;)) the interviewers so no complaints there.

This year I'm going to try harder to give my bike the love and attention it deserves, and it's not a moment too soon. 12 months ago (when I started riding it with any degree of regularity) I was fairly routine with the maintenance - a weekly clean, oil and tweaking of the brakes - but it didn't last long and the poor thing has had nothing but maltreatment since last January. It all came to a head this week though, and I've replaced brake blocks, an inner tube, bearings, rear spindle and handlebar grips with about 15 trips to the bike shop. Nothing major, but it still needs work. On the TODO list as soon as the loan comes are the bottom bracket bearings, re-adjusting the gears and an overall clean and grease.

Jen's coming tomorrow, which is going to be good fun, and then on Monday it's Jo's Quarter of a Century Celebrations AKA the Mumbles Mile in wigs. Can't wait. :D

I've become something of a man of leisure since my return from the holiday. It's rather nice to not have to worry about deadlines, going to work and other such things. I should be a slacker more often :)

I've been able to indulge in some pet projects - the current focus of attention is an AJAX webmail client. At the moment I'm doing it the hard (easy?) way - Python CGI. No doubt this isn't the most efficient or sensible way of doing it, but it's a scratch for an itch. Redeveloping the system using a framework like Django or mod_python (ok, not a framework per se) would probably be a simple task because there's not a lot of code written yet.

minus-zero.org finally has some kind of coherent design and content, although there's not an awful lot to see yet. The pages are static HTML, generated from a template by a simple script. This could be interesting when the site expands, we'll see.

In other news, I'm heading back to Swansea on Sunday. The Great Job Hunt will then begin, as I attempt to find some form of income to offset the new house's huge rent costs. Hopefully having my CV (which I've yet to write...) bolstered by having 'Google paid me money!' splashed across it will help. Though having said that, I doubt if the average shopkeeper gives a monkey's. :)

My holiday and the Google Summer of Code both ended on the 1st of September, and they were great fun.

I put together the final (as far as being accepted for my SoC submission) release of pyBackPack and it's the best yet.

Screenshots

Changes

• SSH Backups and restores
• When performing a backup, a progress indicator is shown.
• Increments on the restore page are listed most recent first.

Download

• .tar.gz: pybackpack-0.4.tar.gz
• SRPM: pybackpack-0.4-2.src.rpm
• RPM: pybackpack-0.4-2.noarch.rpm
• deb: pybackpack-0.4-all.deb

Update - The RPMs were re-rerolled with fixed dependencies, they should work OK now.

Bugs
If you come across any bugs or problems don't hesitate to get in touch, either by leaving a comment here, e-mailing me, or using the bug tracking system at http://sucs.org/~davea/trac

Thanks
I'd like to say a huge thanks to Elliot Lee (my mentor from Red Hat) for all his help, guidance and invaluable advice.
Also to Graham Cole (chckens) and Jeremy Katz for bug spotting, and pointing out some of my slightly weird interface design choices. :)
I almost forgot! My eternal gratitude goes to Jen for letting me take her laptop on holiday so I could work and for putting up with my hacking instead of relaxing by the pool. :D

Of course, it's not finished yet, and all you hundreds of faithful readers will be pleased to know that the future releases of pyBackPack will be documented right here. ;)

Here's the latest batch of updates, nothing too major - a more streamlined interface, better checks on overwriting files, etc.

Download
.tar.gz: pybackpack-0.3.tar.gz
SRPM: pybackpack-0.3-1.src.rpm
RPM: again, still on holiday so no RPM. Sorry!

Let me know how you like it :)

Fresh from the shores of Lesvos, I bring you pyBackPack 0.2.999.

No screen shots this time (I don't think my wallet could handle the GPRS bill :)), but here's what's new:

• Editable backup sets
• Nicer interface for including and excluding files/folders in a backup set
• pyBackPack now uses nautilusburn to provide a much nicer way of writing CDs
• Single-click backup of your home directory to a CD from the main pyBackPack window

Download
.tar.gz: pybackpack-0.2.999.tar.gz
SRPM: pybackpack-0.2.999-1.src.rpm
RPM: I forgot to install the right packages on the laptop before I left, so no RPM this time unless someone else is able to build one... :)

Bugs
I've run into a frustrating bug with rdiff-backup - namely that it doesn't like restoring from directories with a '.' character in their name. It throws an AssertionError. This bug seems intermittent, so any feedback you can offer would be greatly appreciated.

Update - The problem disappeared when using pyBackPack on a different machine, so perhaps I screwed up rdiff-backup on the laptop. Ho hum.