minus zero

I bought a new camera at the weekend, a Praktica MTL 5 from eBay. I spent the weekend taking photos with Dad's LTL 3 and I realised how much more fun a Real Camera is than my Lumix digital camera. The Prakticas are by no means top of the range, but there's something satisfying about the clunkiness of the shutter release and fiddling with loading a film into the back.

I'm a bit late to the party, but Enter Shikari are fantastic - a fun blend of post-hardcore + trance that sounds like it's going to take them into orbit. And they've shunned major label interest to release their debut album themselves, a bold move indeed.

SUCS has organised a lightning talks session next Tuesday, and I've been coerced into giving a talk... I guess I ought to work out WTF I'm going to fill 10 minutes with now.

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. :)

Several issues I've been meaning to blog recently:

Music

Impulse buying is fantastic - I heard Plump DJs for the first time in FOPP on Monday and bought the CD while I was in the shop. Dance/Electronica is fairly far removed from my usual listening habits but the funk grabbed me and I've not stopped bouncing since. What is mildly annoying is that my brothers have latched on to it (as they seem to with most new music I pick up) and insist on playing the damn album on repeat. Also worth a mention is the new Finch album - I love how they've stuck to their guns and moved away from the mainstream sound and stayed true to what they want to do rather than bow to the record company's wishes. At the very least, they give a good impression of being able to do just that. :) Going in the opposite direction, Funeral for a Friend's new stuff doesn't have anywhere near the same kick as their last disc (which in itself was a step down from the raw hardcore sound they had before they signed to a major). Trivium and Avenged Sevenfold have also been assaulting my aural passageways and inspiring me to get a proper handle on how to use the double bass drum pedal properly - I swear some of these guys have 8 legs or something.

Games

I've been getting into Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and it's brilliant. Rock Star have really outdone themselves this time; the game is a thing of beauty. The story, the city, everything (so far) screams with attention to detail that I've not seen for a long time. Top notch stuff.

Code

I've been hacking on the SUCS Blog on and off since the exams have finished, it's progressing nicely. I read a few articles on AJAX which all seemed to be Ruby-related so I decided to pick that up. However I soon dropped it onto the backburner when I realised that the backend language was pretty much irrelevant. Javascript seems to get quite a bad rap, but it's actually damn useful. I've been careful to include backwards compatibility for browsers with disabled/absent JS support. The more I use AJAX, the more I think I'd find a custom library to handle it all generically quite handy, so that'll be something to code up at some point.

The hyperbole has slowly been building up over the course of this entry, so here's the big one: I've been accepted on to Google's Summer of Code program! W00t! They had some 8700 applicants and 400 spaces, so I'm dead chuffed that they picked me. The application I wrote is here. There's a crap load of paperwork to wade through in an attempt to pay the least amount of tax possible, but either way it's going to be an amazing experience and will no doubt put me in good standing for 'real world' programming.