Adventures in Computering

So I was pretty bored over break, and doing work would just be crazy, so I did a lot of playing around on my computer.

The first thing I did was work on improving my desktop to being a more functional media center. At first, I took a look at Boxee, the media center software recently made famous by its conflict with Hulu. It's quite impressive and boasts great online capability. I found its ability to index local media to be somewhat lacking. The indexing was very difficult to follow and it seemed tricky to customize well enough to fit my naming convention.

While reading up on Boxee, I found that another name mentioned a lot was XBMC, so I decided to give it a try. It doesn't have the out-of-the-box online capabilities of Boxee, but I liked the interface for indexing my video collection a lot better. Since then I've downloaded several scripts and plugins to give me some online streaming options.

Sometime during the whole media center event, I realized that these programs are designed to be controlled with a remote (Like a TV remote). There are remotes made that can connect to computers that you can buy, but instead I chose to use a remote I already had purchased - my Wii remote. The technology is very well developed, so getting it to work with my computer was just a matter of configuring my bluetooth adapter, installing a piece of software called CWiid, and editing a few configuration files. I played around with getting it to be a mouse, too, but I found that it doesn't work nearly as well as I'd like. My ability to aim a remote isn't good enough to handle small scale tasks like working a PC. But it works great with XBMC, so I'm very happy with that.

After I finished setting up my media center, I decided to try to setup a remote desktop service. This was also fairly simple; just a matter of installing some software, editing some configuration files,crying when it didn't work for the first few hours, and eventually solving the problem. So now I'm capable of putting my desktop's desktop on any computer in the world (that has the proper software). I was pretty impressed with that, and it makes it easier to do some remote editing tasks.

Once I finished that, I thought that the whole idea of connecting my desktop to the internets was pretty cool, so I wanted to take that success a little further. I found a piece of software that allows you to host a webcam online and set it up. Now I can watch what Elly is doing when I leave the apartment. If you are curious - she naps and whenever anyone walks by in the hallway, her head perks up and she stares at the door. I feel bad about leaving her at the apartment so much now. :( I've been batting around the idea of playing around with it some more and perhaps investing in a webcam that is controllable so I could put controls in to move the screen.

With all of these victories in hand, I decided to embark on another task - turning my desktop into a simple web server. Again thanks to the modern age of computing, setting this up and getting it to work properly was a mere several hours of frustration, but once you figure it out, it's really simple. Ubuntu makes it really simple to set up a LAMP server . Also, thanks to the people at DynDNS.com, I now have a free url that automagically points to my IP address and which automagically updates my IP address if it should ever change (which it does on a nearly daily basis).

My final excursion into the exciting world of web hosting was attempting to host some forums. I downloaded the open source software package phpbb and proceeded to install it. Since then I've successfully installed and configured the board, which is pretty cool.

And this ends my tale of what I did over spring break. I have no practical plans for any of these things, but it was fun to do and learn a little bit about the kinds of things that go on behind the scenes of web servers. If you want to see any of these things in action, let me know and I'll point you to my website. They're all pretty cool.