I decided that I didn’t want all my music just sitting on my home machine, so I moved it all to my file server in the basement. The problem was that outside of mounting one of the samba shares, I couldn’t access my music anywhere but in the house. That solution worked for about a week, until I got curious to see how I could listen to my music anywhere. Well, by anywhere, I meant, anywhere there was an internet connection and a modern browser.

I tried a couple of different products, but none really did what I wanted. Then a coworker told me about the software from Slimdevices that streams music to their hardware is open source and free for download. Never one to pass up a deal that included the word free (ye gods I am cheap, I admit it), I downloaded the source and eagerly tried to install it on my Ubuntu server. That lasted about as long as it took me to find that they have a package repository for debs. Just add the following to your sources.list:

deb http://debian.slimdevices.com testing main

then ‘apt-get update’ then ‘apt-get install slimserver’ and your running. I forgot to mention that you need perl installed on your machine too, but that usually comes standard anymore.

Oh, and I tried running APF last night for about 3 hours to no avail. At this point I am ready to give up, there HAS to be a better way to manage iptables than manually specifying everything.

Steve Yegge has an interesting take on Javascript’s place. I for one can honestly say that since I have been doing massive amounts of JS coding, I have become a better programmer overall. There is nothing I can specifically put my finger on. Just better overall I suspect.

It makes me wonder if Javascript will ever get the respect of other “high” level languages do.

Alright, Google just had the gauntlet thrown down on it. Yahoo! Maps seriously ups the ante in the online mapping arena.

Some of the features that I found really cool:

• Automatically supports way points in a route. If I want to get from one place to another, but I absolutely must go through another place(s). Google maps doesn’t do this easily, or at all that I am aware of.
• You roll over a part of the directions and it highlights the part of the route on the map it is referring to. Very cool.
• Traffic view. You can overlay current traffic congestion/problems on major roadways on you directions.

Those were the first things that really jumped off the screen at me. Oh, and another thing for developers, Yahoo! is offering all the Javascript libraries that make Yahoo! Maps work, available for download at developer.yahoo.com

There is nothing like talking with someone and being made to feel like a total idiot. I was talking with a Senior Developer at another company and he was to gauge my technical ability by asking me some questions. Needless to say I did terrible. But I am convinced it wasn’t all just me being stupid. First, he called a day early. So I had start answering his questions as I walked in the door from getting out of my car. Second, I have never been good at understanding Indian accents, his was unusually thick and difficult to understand. The phone conversation was pretty much a total waste of time for both of us.

It spooked me enough to realize that I have gotten majorly lazy in my programming though. Most of the questions I knew, but couldn’t recall the answer. He was asking me things that I has used in the past, but since I hadn’t used them in a long time, I just couldn’t recall the specifics. It really kinda ticked me off. So I have decided to start kicking my butt back into shape. I am going to start writing some basic programs that stress a full gambit of functionality of a language, not just what I am comfortable with. Time to start using some of the obscure functionality that I have been avoiding.

Enough blogging, time to fire up my text editor!!

So Google’s Summer of Code 2006 is preparing to start up but I am just enjoying the nice weather. I really wish the Summer of Code project was around when I was in college, its a great opportunity to advance Open Source projects, for college students to get some money and get some great experience. I wish I had th time to contribute to some OS projects, but at this stage in my life I just don’t feel I have the time. Someday tho, someday.

My parent’s have been here for almost two weeks now. They are camping about 30 minutes away so we both get little breathers from each other in the evenings. Not that we can’t stand being around each other, but most scientists will agree that long enough exposure to ANYTHING will cause cancer. Its been great having them around, my Dad and I have finished some projects around the house that I have been itching to finish and my Mom helps out with the kids, which is a mini vacation in itself.

I have been using a new framework (CMS) for a few projects at work. Its called Cuyahoga, and I am really enjoying it. Its almost like when I found Maverick.NET. This is one reason I think programming is such a great profession. Usually programmers enjoy hobby programming too, so its a hobby that usually doesn’t cost alot of money, doesn’t take up space in the garage and can be worked on it all weather. Then you can share you work with other so everyone benefits! Yeah, I know I can be a bit of a fan-boy at times.