Hello World!

Update: Everything in this post is outdated.  pyPianobar is discontinued, and the Feral Druid’s rotation is both wrong, and no longer maintained.

I know I’ve been missing lately; I have gotten myself pretty busy between WoW, setting up an HA/LB (High Availability/Load Balancing) web and database server(s) for a client and just time with the family.

If you haven’t seen it before, Ultra Monkey is quite a simple and nice set of tools to manage an HA/LB configuration – and it has several good example configurations to get you started.

If you have read my previous articles you may have seen that I have an N810 internet tablet.  There is a new device out now that is the successor to that, the N900 cell phone.  I have written a small PyQt4 application for the N900 called pyPianobar.  Because this is PyQt4, if you grab the deb and extract it on your Linux Desktop (such as Ubuntu), you can actually use it there too! (You’ll need to install pianobar first)  This gives you Pandora Radio on your desktop, or your N900 :).

I’m currently trying to save up for an N900 so I can do some more tinkering, but also been waiting to see what will come of the new MeeGo (what a horrible name) that spawned as the result of an Intel (Moblin)/Nokia (Maemo) drunken one-night stand.

I’ve setup and been using Moblin on my Acer Aspire One – and it’s not too bad.  It’s childish, but so is everything now days (ever seen an iPhone? Ugh.)  Once I see for sure that the community will get a decent MeeGo port over to the N900 that is likely to be my next phone, even if it is $500+.  Yes, I’m saying it’s worth it :).

I don’t want the next Nokia device because they’ve already said it will be a capacitive touch screen like the Android and iPhone mess and capacitive is just not as accurate as resistive.  I also like using a Stylus when I want to be particular.  As an example, watch this – specifically the very last 30 seconds of the video or so.  It shows a very nice Avatar drawing done with the default Sketch app on the phone.  I just don’t think something like that is possible on capacitive.. and I don’t need multi-touch.

On the WoW front, I’ve written a small addon for Feral Druid’s that uses the Faceroller mod.  It will show a decent kitty rotation for high-DPS making it quite a bit simpler to keep track of everything.  The next update, which hopefully will be soon, will include a minor prediction system and a bear rotation for tanking.

As you can see, I keep myself entertained :).  I never can just “do” something, I have to toy with it – code something for it, tinker with it… eventually break it :D.  I still haven’t gotten the hang of the whole Blogging scene though and as such my blog tends to fall by the way-side.  There’s already so many out there on any given topic that it’s usually just a waste for me to add yet another reference or complaint for XYZ in yet another blog.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed the update – check out the N900, WoW and Ultra Monkey someday :).