Software
After the amazingly successful omnisync, it is once again time to present you of another creation of the inimitable Poromenos Studios.
This time, it's Dead Man's Switch. As you're probably aware, everyone carries valuable information in their heads. It might be about their work, financial information, etc. If anything were to happen to them, this information would be lost, unfortunately.
This is where Dead Man's Switch comes in.
It is once again time to shake the world from its very foundations with my latest creation. I present to you... omnisync.
omnisync is a file synchroniser (something like rsync), only it's not built to synchronise just files, but also anything else. It's extensible through a simple plugin architecture, and you can have it synchronise anything to anything within a few hours.
I just encoded my Futurama DVDs to put on my iPod, but it's a real hassle adding tags to every single file separely, so I created a script to do it for me. I had actually written this before, but I forgot it at home, so I had no option but to rewrite it.
The script (written in Python) will search the filenames for "sXXeXX" and look up the episode name on IMDB, and then will rename the file as "Show name - SXXEXX - Episode name.extension".
Lately I've been looking for a good way to explain OpenID to people, since they need to know what it is to sign on Moneygement, which uses it. I haven't been able to find a good guide, so I decided to write one, and here it is.
These last few days I have been trying to get my new pet project (Moneygement, it's going to be a free budget/finances management web app) going. So far I have implemented the OpenID signins (yay for OpenID, I love it, I hope everything that is, was and ever will be uses it) and I have gathered some ideas on the functionality.
Today I read an article on reddit about vi and vim, and it got me thinking. This editor is almost as old as mankind itself, paintings of the vi UI were found in caves along with the cryptic writing ":wq". People have been using it for as long as anyone can remember. Wars have been waged for it (mostly with the church of Emacs, what with the crusades and all). One of the most influential editors of all time, and I don't know how to use it. This is unacceptable.
Fans of Gmail Checker, rejoice. Your favorite Gmail notifier is back with a vengeance. The slew of changes I made in the last hour is a veritable deluge, but I will attempt to describe them in a few short sentences.
If you know me, you'll know that I like to waste my time on playing in my favorite MUD. If you don't know what MUDs are, you have been born after 1970. MUDs are online multiplayer games (think WoW) but without all the graphics and fanciness. It's purely text-based, so it takes a while to get used to, but the writing on good MUDs is great (and I mean novel-level, and not anything like the DaVinci Code or Men Are From Mars, Women Are Not) and their worlds are typically much much larger than graphical MMORPGs'.
So yeah, I particularly like MUDs because you can make bots that do anything, from fighting for you to running a casino (and you know that people are suckers for gambling), so I spend my time writing bots for MUSHclient, an excellent MUD client.
Since I'm no good at prologues, I will get right to the subject. I guess that was a prologue, though. Turns out I am a bit good at them. It wasn't particularly good, but oh well, it serves its purpose. So, without further ado, I present to you... Hamachi!
Hamachi is "a zero-configuration virtual private networking application with an open security architecture and NAT-to-NAT traversal capabilities." That's basically computer talk for "LAN over the internet". It's great for making resources on your PCs available over the internet without having them open to everyone (or just playing games that only support LAN with your friends).
Have you ever wondered what the joke answer to every Linux-related question ("rm -rf /") actually does? You know it deletes everything, but have you ever seen it? Well, for your viewing pleasure, I have trashed my Ubuntu system. It wasn't really what I expected it to be, nothing blew up. I won't spoil it for you though, I'll let you see for yourself. If the video runs a bit fast it's because I've skipped the redundant frames (there was a lot of doing nothing, about 2 minutes of the terminal deleting with no output).
You can download the video (it's encoded in Xvid) by clicking on its link.
