November 2006

just peachy today

Having SO much fun setting things up... (not)

Ok, so first off I'm dealing with a new modem/router system which requires me to set up the firewall to let my server apps through but not to the extent that I can get attacked. I tried dmz mode for the server and promptly got worms. Joy. So after spending the day cleaning the server I'm trying instead to get the firewall to just let things through. This is a challenge requiring much setup, including trying to get ftp working. Hence this post. This will be a testing post to see if this crazy ftp server will let me in. So far my client hasn't gotten in but maybe thingamablog can do it.
Sooo, turns out that the attempt to put in a permission caused it to block everything. Why the server did that is beyond me but removing the ip permission has fixed things.

The kitchen dictation

I am going to attempt to dictate this entire blog using speech input. Speech recognition is an interesting emerging technology. It is not perfect, however it's getting pretty damn good. Now what I need is a wireless headset that I can use for dictation so I do not have to have a wire plugged into my computer. The Speech recognition I'm using right now is from Microsoft, it comes preinstalled on the Windows XP Tablet PCs. It is still imperfect enough that I have to modify it with the pen. However, it is a lot less typing than before. I say "however" entirely too often.
Today we spent a lot of time sitting in a junkyard full of old vehicles in the cab of a truck that had just been put there, removing parts we never did use. We do to get the part that needed but we were hoping to get more only to realize that the technology in the truck we were ripping apart and would require far too much disassembly to get set up in our truck. Our truck has manual heater controls and truck we were working on had digitally controls. I thought it should be possible to convert a truck to the digital and it would be kind of nifty but by the time we get halfway through it was clear that we would've had to remove the entire dash and then just wasn't up to it and it was getting late and we were both very cold. It's kind of funny we're at the junkyard and we couldn't find a truck close enough to what we drive to be able to use and just about ready to leave when the tractor rolls by with an ideal truck on the forks fresh and ready to go. "Fresh meat," I said with excitement. We followed the tractor until he reached the parking spot for the new arrival and waited eagerly. As soon as the tractor drove away we were on that thing like buzzards on a carcass.

Oh YES, cool!

I finally found a way to play shoutcast streams on the PDA! YAhhhhoooOOOOOO! It is called the GSplayer and it does music of a variety of sorts including shoutcast and other types of music streams. If I could, I'd delete media player now but I don't think it's removable on the ipaq. I think it's factory installed on the ROM. This is pretty sweet. Now I can get my own shoutcast stream any time I get to wifi. Wifi is still seriously spare in this city but I do expect it to improve dramatically over the next year or two. There's just so many enabled devices that business has to figure it out that even crappy wifi will draw customers. Food courts in malls, cafes and restaurants and even bars can all benefit. How exciting it is to finally solve a problem that has bugged me for longer than you'd realize! Yaaaayyyyyyy!