shimweasel

… hm, that title is a bit ambiguous. To resolve any confusion: I went with Sean and Will to see a few power pop bands at the Mandarin Club last night. A bit disappointing, overall; The Russian Brides were good, and had some kind of Pixiesish vibe going (frontman had no hair, bass player was a girl (not as hot as Kim Deal, unfortunately), and boy howdy do they like their loud-soft-loud dynamic…) Still, a lot of fun. The Reservations were competent, but oh-so-wimpy, and The Rainbows (featuring an ex-member of Custard) were a bit of a yawn factory.

The night only devolved from there: once again, Will and I ended up with a bunch of humourless Germans and Mexicans who wanted to go to the Establishment. We left them there and grabbed a cab to Scubar, where Will insisted on throwing me at every girl in the place. Strange young man.

I also had the bad sense to cap the night with a kebab. Not sure why it always seems like such a good idea at about 3 in the morning.

I’ve set up a gigs mailing list at the request of a couple of people who got sick of me raving about bands I hadn’t invited them to. I’ll be announcing stuff I’m going to, but if you want to post about gigs in Sydney, that’d be awesome. (No London posts, should Ben be reading this - I’m jealous enough already.)

Claire and Tony came along to this one… it started a little slowly, but it all coalesced after a while. There’s something magical about hearing a band slowly fall into sync and really lock into a groove.

also: clothes shopping expedition today with Claire, my intrepid fashion consultant. Thanks to her expert ministrations, I am several hundred dollars poorer and many times sexier. Booyah.

If you get the chance to see a band called “Maladies”, jump at it. Very cool, very strange: the guy’s voice almost sounds like a woman’s, and they have this Nick Cave graveyard swing going on. They’re playing at the Hopetoun this Saturday, but I’ll be at Damo Suzuki + Pivot at the Mandarin club, with any luck. (The guy played in Can, there’s no way that’s missable.)

I’d also like to put in a hearty hell-yeah for popfrenzy. I’ve been along to quite a few of their gigs just on spec, and they’ve all been awesome. All hail Levins.

Thanks to PeteG for coming out to one of the silliest gigs I’ve ever attended. I only wish I’d made it to the first two sets as well, they were fun, in a deeply retarded Kenny-Rogers-on-angrypills kind of way. (Your trenchant social insights might have been lost on the girls in the cowboy hats, however.)

Extra special bonus: the crazy old guy who dances chicken-style at Jackie Orszaczky gigs was there too. Scary stuff.

Dancefloor interaction is still a little odd. I was dancing sort-of-with and sort-of-next-to a girl, and some guy came up to me, asked if I was interested, and told me she was a surgeon. I said something non-committal, assuming that I was being warned off and that his posse of angry friends were right outside (remember, you have gangs of pipe-hitting niggas, posses of shotgun-wielding rednecks, and whinges of blogwriting whiteboys. Aren’t collective nouns fun?) Anyway, he leant over to her, whispered something in her ear, and she laughed and moved to another section of the floor.

I’m still a little mystified. Is surgeon some kind of code word, or did I just pass up the opportunity to talk to a pretty girl with enough brains to be able to cut people open without killing them? I guess I’ll never know…

Yeah, I’ve been a bit quiet. I generally only post when something’s really annoying me, so it’s quite frequently something trivial but fiddly. I’ll try to post something a little more entertaining.

Anyway, I’ve split up with Madeleine, and moved into Tom and Gordon’s place. This has been pretty cool so far: in terms of live music, good food and running into friends serendipitously, newtown is a big step up from maroubra. Unfortunately, in terms of quiet working time and closeness to the beach, it’s a bit of a step back. I’m going to have to find some way of carving out some time to do work and be pretty defensive about it.

Just to see if anyone’s reading my blog: Spurs for Jesus are playing at the Hopetoun this Sunday. Find me there, mention this blog, and I’ll buy you a beer. (Uh, limited to the first five or something - I don’t want to become an extremely poor internet phenomenon.)

Getting gcc to cross-compile symbian code on the mac is not so easy, it seems. after a mountain of errors, I finally beat it into submission with this heinous, hamfisted effort:

find . -type d -exec cp /Users/mwotton/projects/symbian/newgcc/src/ltmain.sh {} \;

repeated for each file it couldn’t find. Rob Pike must be spinning in his grave. (Or cubicle, I don’t know what the Google offices are like.)

So with any luck, super-sekrit mobile phone geolocation effort can get started soon…

Apologies to anyone hoping for an interesting post, this is more or less public thinking aloud.

I want to be able to force one controller in a Rails project to accept connections only in https, and for attempts to connect with http to redirect to the https version. Dually, I’d like other controllers to redirect https connection attempts to the http page. Apache is set up to redirect to Rails in either event, so there shouldn’t be anything particularly tricky about it; I just need appropriate redirections. As I see it, I have two options:

1. before_filter in application.rb to redirect to http: before_filter in sensitive controllers to redirect to https.
2. fiddle with routes.rb to redirect at that level

Well, this is mildly annoying. If you try to forward a range of ports in the DSL 502-T ADSL modem from DLink, it seems to forward them all to the same port on the internal machine. It’s an embedded linux machine underneath, so I’m almost tempted to hack it to do the right thing, but it smells like a massive time sink, and I have enough of those already.

Also looking into traffic shaping for Linux… it’s a bit more complicated than the usual setup, as I only want to throttle connections to the outside world - no point throttling your LAN transfers. Still, tc looks like your typical swiss army chainsaw, so I’m sure it’s doable with a little skullsweat. (Why is this sort of fiddling so much more appealing than paying work? One day I’ll work it out.)

Edit: well, the subtle approach didn’t work. tc didn’t want to work on virtual devices, or I could have just created eth0:1 and run wondershaper on it. In the end, the simplest way was to brute force it - I chucked another network card in, assigned it another IP on the same network, and used route to make it the route to the router. Thus, I can run wondershaper on that interface without affecting my normal LAN traffic.

Still have to work out how to get that port forwarding working, though.

Edit: route to make it the route to the router? Lordy. I won’t be winning any English composition prizes for that little gem…

Like many carefree young programmers, I own a laptop (17” powerbook) which I think is approximately better than sex. At the same time, there are things to which it’s less than perfectly adapted, bittorrent downloads being one of them. To wit:

1. I take my laptop onsite occasionally. At the very least, this means that my downloads are interrupted: at worst, I gank my client’s network connection by accident. (Hasn’t happened yet, but it’d only be a matter of time.)
2. The Mac clients I’ve found seem rather resource hungry: on a single download with Tomato Torrent, my CPU usage hovers around 70%.
3. If I download to my laptop, I still have to transfer it to the shared drive. This may seem a trivial objection, but I’m a lazy man, and I have a desktop full of downloads to prove exactly how lazy.
4. It’s easier to set up throttling on my Linux box. Bittorrent being a greedy protocol, this is important.

So what’s a lazy programmer to do? Write a script, of course.