Andy's Blog

Sheetal's Wedding

I drove down to Peoria, Il on December 26th for Sheetal's wedding, which was really just an excuse to do a UIUC reunion with the undergrad-type folks:

The wedding experience was pretty fun. This was the first Indian wedding that I have ever been to. The ceremony itself was quite long, but relaxed. People come and go freely, have conversations, etc. There was even food. I'm told that the reception was somewhat atypical -- more of an Indian/American hybrid. There was a live band, which played some more traditional songs as well as some Bollywood favorites. There were also some dance performances, as well as an open dance floor at the end.

Anyways, I spent the night in Peoria (shared a hotel with Kevin and Rushabh, because I was promised a lot of Urban Terror [which didn't materialize, due to no fault of my own, thankyouverymuch]), and went back to Chicago via Champaign, so that I could visit with Chee Wai and Keith.

-Andy.

Changes

So, Kevin and I are going to do the roommate thing, starting on Saturday, the 18th. This means quite a lot of upheaval in my life -- the biggest thing being that I'm moving. Again. It really hurts because -- despite my best efforts -- I'm not going to have Internet for awhile. DSLExtreme may be a good company, but they are royal dicks when it comes to minimizing downtime when moving. But I'm getting such a good deal, that they have me by the balls, and they know it.

*sigh*

So, what this means is that redefine is going down on Friday, and it probably won't be back until the new year. Which really sucks, because I had a whole bunch of stuff that I wanted to blog about while I was home over Christmas. So, my first-annual end of year "best of" lists will just be a little... late this year.

-Andy.

Why I haven't been posting

Why haven't I been posting so much lately? One word: "Metroid". To use a few more words, I have gotten sucked into "Metroid Prime 2: Echoes" for my GameCube. And pretty much all of my spare time has been going into it. My addiction has been a little better this week -- but only out of necessity. I have a lot of other things going on (that I have been neglecting), that can be ignored no longer.

But, back to the game. It's pretty fun -- just like it's predecessor, "Metroid Prime". I just went over the 50% mark in terms of completion last night, by getting the Spider Ball. Total gameplay so far: probably around 25 hours or so. Unfortunately, it's not looking like I'll be able to finish before the holidays, which means that my addiction will have to go into a painful withdrawal period...

-Andy.

Comment spam

So, we have been getting a fair amount of comment spam for the last several months. Once I installed Jay Allen's "MT-Blacklist", it has really only been annoying. When I got home from work today, however, I noticed that my machine was thrashing. It was working so hard, that the console was unresponsive. A reboot later, and I was back in control of the thing. Doing some initial investigation, it looked like somebody (or somebodies) was jamming on the comment system for the blogs that are hosted here. I disabled it quickly, so that I could get on with my life.

Later (after dinner & "The Daily Show"), I found that as soon as I re-enabled the "mt-comments.cgi" script, the box was immediately hammered again. I managed to narrow all of the spam traffic down to 4 IP addresses, being served by an ISP called SAVVIS. Looking in DNS, it looks like these IPs are being used by a company called "Marketscore". From their website, it is hard to tell if they are legitimate or not. For the time being, I have firewalled them off, and fired off an e-mail to the abuse department over at SAVVIS. But in 2005, I'm going to have to do two things:

1. Come up with a better anti-spam solution for the blogs hosted here.
2. Tune my FreeBSD machine -- because getting pounded with HTTP CGI requests shouldn't hork the box to the point that I can't login on the console.

-Andy.

I really should have gone to bed a long time ago (but this is just too cool)

So, on MacNN today, I noticed a blurb about some instructions for compiling the MythTV Frontend on MacOS X. I had a hard time loading the page (I tried all day -- it was posted to some wiki that was overloaded), but finally managed to get a peek late this evening. I found the instructions for compiling it up, but that looked like a bunch of, well, work. Luckily, I also found a pre-compiled binary, and so I was off to the hacking races. I had to do some mysql hacking, and poke some holes in my DMZ firewall, but even after all of that, I was having issues.

It seems like MythTV stores information about the backend servers in the MySQL database. This information includes the IP address of the server. So, my mythfrontend on MacOS X was connecting to the mysql database on my myth box, and then trying to connect to the mythtv server ports (6543 and 6544) on the backend server. Unfortunately, when I configured mythtv, I was thinking only of the single-box case, and so it appears as if the backend server IP address that I configured is 127.0.0.1, not the real IP of the box. This means that mythfrontend running on my PowerBook was trying to connect to 127.0.0.1 in order to watch TV.

I don't really know how to fix this, but it probably involves changing some data in the database. Not something that I want to do on my PVR, while it is recording Badly Drawn Boy on Last Call with Carson Daly. So, what did I do? Why, I whipped up an SSH tunnel of course. But that's not the amazing part -- the amazing part is that it actually worked! I was able to stream an tonight's episode of The Daily Show, through SSH, over my 802.11g wireless, and watch it in realtime on my PowerBook.

This is really awesome. It means that I now have a wireless TV in my apartment (and it didn't cost me an arm and a leg!). Of course, I don't really need such a thing in my current one bedroom apartment -- but I can envision several uses when I'm back living with a roommate again.

-Andy.