Ampache is basically a webservice that will remotely serve up the media on your mediacenter. This is a fundamental component of my long-term plans for world domination (or rather world subterfugation). You can play your music (yes, ALL of your music) through a browser once you have ampache set up. It’s a typical LAMP setup and takes about 10 seconds if you’re familiar with LAMP.

The “nice” linux client is supposed to be Amarok. Now, I am grateful that a nice client exists. And Ampache is the best thing since the best thing since sliced bread. But when developers don’t follow the Good Rules and intentionally create difficult installation situations for everyone, it really pisses me off. Here’s a quick cheatsheet to get you (me) through the bullshit:

• Edit [/etc/mysql/my.cnf]

# Comment out this line so that mysql allows connections other than from localhost (ie so you can connect from your LAN).
# I DO NOT appreciate having to do this and you should make sure you follow up with solid firewall rules.
# But Amarok wants direct access to your LAN's db server, so there you have it.
#bind-address				= 127.0.0.1

• Set up a mysql amarok user and database in standard mysql fashion.  Make sure the user has full remote access (not just from localhost).
• Now run ampache. This is just weird, but just do it. Ampache starts off fine for web acccess but to allow clients like Amarok to connect you have to add some ACL bullshit – it starts off totally locked down and disabled. Ampache->log in as admin->Admin tab->Show ACL’s->Add API/RPC Host->Add an entry. Use any name you want, make sure you pick RPC + ALL, and put in a start/end that matches your LAN IP range. Click Create ACL and three weird entries will be created for you. WHATEVER.
• Start amarok for the first time. It will fail because you don’t have a database set up yet. Settings->Configure Amarok->Database->Fill it out! It should work now that you opened up mysql in the first step. Then you’ll have to shut it down and restart.
• With a little luck you’ll finally be able to play some music.

Drowning in scattered torrents and files? Get yourself organized! Here is a torrent management system for linux users that will give you…

* automatic download of torrent contents for all downloaded .torrent files
* automatic download of new .torrent files from RSS feeds
* automatic organization of content once it finishes downloading
* continuous seeding of contents during this process
* simple control of seeding of all previously downloaded content

My Forms for Portals project is a simple collection of forms to help you quickly access google, dictionary, wikipedia, imdb, maps, yellow pages, etc. from your own web pages. I’ve mentioned my portal before, hopefully the new article makes it all easily digestible (and yummy!). It’s a reaaally oldskool approach, yet still pretty useful IMHO.

And just so I’m eating my own dog food…

0.5.11 was reviewed and approved, which makes it public. This is great for two reasons:

• Users can install the addon without logging in to mozilla.org
• Users will get live updates to the latest approved version

This is VERY good stuff. To put it in perspective, I had a couple hundred downloads this morning, and I’ve been watching that number jump by 100 every hour or two – it’s currently over 600. Exciting times for my little addon!

I released 0.5.12 by request to address more international google URLS (eg, google.fr). The nice guy that requested it even donated $10 afterwards. A good day all around. :>

Google updated their results page today, Google Results Walker has been updated to match.

It was a simple change of the footer, from using an ID of ‘footer’ to using a className of ‘clr’ (?), but it was enough to break walker. I updated the code do more checking of assumptions, so next time the placement may get thrown off but it won’t break.

Have fun with it!