Clueless Wonder

His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

So if you’re into military fiction and you like fantasy, you’ll probably like this book. It’s the first of a series involving a British Navy Captain who ends up becoming a dragon aviator after taking a Chinese dragon egg as a prize.Dragons? Napoleonic wars? Aerial combat? All are here. Might not be the best written book ever but very enjoyable.

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So my last post was a number of months ago about setting up iTunes streaming from home for work listening. Well it turns out that hasn’t been all that necessary. It’s been much more productive for me to be at my company’s office in order to work closely with our programmers instead of at the client site.

As a result of this, I’ve been using my MacBook Pro laptop for work. It’s allowed me to be far more productive. I still use Microsoft office for viewing most files. And I do have to still use windows in VMware Fusion to connect back to my Govt. Citrix connection as a VPN. There is a Mac client and it should work, but there are issues with CAC authentication still when it’s not just a website.

For database development, I’ve been using a trial of dbVisualizer. In my mind it’s far superior to SQL Management Studio and is actually cross-platform. I will be trying to move my company over to that for some of our users.

When I started taking classes at CWU right after I got out of the army, it was as a Computer Science major. I never completed my degree for various reasons but a big one was that I never really wanted to code full time. As it turns out a huge part of my career now is SQL coding. Hindsight is always 20/20 isn’t it?

So I’m going to be changing jobs next week. As part of the switch, part of my workweek I’m going to be in an environment where I won’t be able to have my iPhone or iPod with me. That is unfortunate as probably 50% or more of my day is spent listening to different podcasts while I work.

I found PulpTunes by searching on Google. It seemed to solve all of my problems! Then I realized that there are some features that won’t work for me, namely you cannot set the port to be less than 1080. That is a non-starter for me as my work has almost every non-standard port blocked. I needed a way to make it use port 80, which is the standard port for web pages.

After searching the forums, I found that the mod_proxy module for Apache would do internal port forwarding for me. For a quick and easy install of Apache on my Mac I turned to the free MAMP install. It’s far and away the quickest, cleanest way to get Apache running quickly on a Mac. After Apache was installed, I needed to ensure that the proxy modules were loaded by ensuring that the following lines were in my conf file:

LoadModule proxy_module modules/mod_proxy.so
LoadModule proxy_connect_module modules/mod_proxy_connect.so
LoadModule proxy_ftp_module modules/mod_proxy_ftp.so
LoadModule proxy_http_module modules/mod_proxy_http.so

I then needed to add the following lines at the end of my conf file to pick the port and alias to forward. In this case, the default port of 15000 for PulpTunes and using the same name for the folder alias.


ProxyRequests Off
ProxyPass /pulptunes http://localhost:15000
ProxyPassReverse /pulptunes http://localhost:15000


After this, I restarted Apache to invoke the new settings. Next up was ensuring that port 80 was being forwarded to the internal network ip address of the machine I was serving from. To also clean things up a bit, I used the free Dock Dodger program to remove PulpTunes from my dock, only showing in my taskbar.

Now I can access all my my music from just about any internet connected machine! There’s a user account feature in PulpTunes so that I don’t get just anybody using up my bandwidth, I can access my playlists, and even rate the songs. It’s a great solution and I suggest you try it.

Had a good time last night hosting a nice little poker game for some friends. We actually were able to generate enough interest to start off the game with 9 seats filled with the 10th coming in just a little bit later. We played a cash game instead of what seems to be the normal Sit-n-Go’s in this area. Blinds were just .05-.10 and the max buyin was $20 so it made for a nice game. At those stakes of course it’s still going to be a wild, loose, and friendly game but a $15 or $20 bet will at least make you think a bit more than if you bought into a tourney for $5.

I will need to get at least a few more chips if I can make this a monthly game as after a few people went busto and re-bought I was running low. Also need to ensure that I have more small bills available for the cashing out at the end of the night. I was fine this time since I was up a good amount and just rounded everyone else up a bit when cashing out.

My plan is to build a nice tabletop this winter but I will probably at least buy the speed felt for it sooner rather than later. Using our granite table in the dining room worked, but it was too slippery to use my good plastic COPAG card set. Overall it was a good time had by all I would say and next month we’re going to try and do it again. Can’t wait!