Converted!

April 30, 2006 | Comments Off

Historically I’ve never been a very big fan of PHP (granted, I haven’t looked at PHP5 yet). This is not a hastily formed opinion based on superficial experience. The website you are now reading was (and continues to be) PHP based. I had a good mind to rewrite it in Mason (or heck, even Ruby) just to move away from it. But when I was setting up Anna’s site I decided to try WordPress and they’ve managed to build a very nice platform on top of a steaming pile of poo; so my hat is off to them.

I liked it enough that I decided to move Leigha’s site to WordPress (from MoveableType *ptoo*). I even liked it enough to move my own site from being somewhat-blogger based to WordPress and here we find the impetus for this entry.

WordPress has done an impressive job of easing migration of the content. I had to migrate the template painstakingly by hand. And I had to back-fill my pre-Blogger entries (flat HTML files) into the system. They didn’t have titles at the time, so if you look at any entries from 2003 and earlier they probably have Smallvile-style one-word titles. I have to say it was interesting travelling back in time to make those entries. I had forgotten many of those events.

So we find ourselves here. Gleefully in WordPress land. Candy for everyone!

mdns proxying

April 17, 2006 | 2 Comments

One thing I didn’t mention in previous posts is the absolute FUN I had getting multicast-DNS (mdns/rendezvous) to propogate across the VPN tunnel to the living room. This is necessary for TiVo to discover the Galleon server running on my desktop.

I played with various solutions – after the mildly tedious process of getting the toolchain set up. I played with various programs called things like mdnsproxy or mdnsresponder. Not much luck with either of those two. What did work was something I wouldn’t have thought to search for: xboxproxy. It was originally designed to proxy xbox broadcasts messages but it does all kinds of broadcast messages really well. I set one process running on the main wrt54g listening on the LAN, and relaying to the livingroom. The livingroom instance listens on its LAN, and relays to the main wrt54g. They both repeat anything the counterpart received. It works absolutely beautifully.