this journal entry will have to be a continuation of what i have been working on privately, but here goes.. my thoughts, in stream of consciousness
this is basically turning into an idea for a 'remote xmms' .. i want a machine that requires no hard drive (silence is golden..well except for the psu fan but i can deal) will run on a pentium 90, 16 megs ram.. barebones, basically, with just a nic stuck in it to stream the files. the key is standing alone. i need something that will run off a floppy and will automatically put up apache and ssh, mount a remote drive and load up a queue for mpg123. the remote drive (by nfs) should be specified in a config file, as well as usernames and passwords of users who are allowed to mess with the queue.
a webmin-like login is preferable, but that will have to wait till later. i have been looking into gronk and netjuke for ideas, but they are way beyond my scope right now. i'm hoping to just have a web interface to a bunch of bash scripts that will take care of business behind the scenes .. clunky, i know, but i only know c++ the best, and perl would be best suited for this type of work.. i still have a ways to go, i am very aware. anyway, enough about my shortcomings, this is going to work, tho. i was thinking that maybe php would be better in place of the bash scripts since soma told me that it was fairly easy to learn, and its not that hard picking up another language once you got a few under your belt already. besides, i found a fairly kick ass intro to php on webmonkey.com, and old favorite. in any case, i think that there might be another problem with the database.. i know mpg123 can read from a plaintext queue which can easily be generated with find -name *.mp3 > playlist.pls .. i dunno.. maybe i'm getting ahead of myself, but whether i need a database or not, i am itching to plunge into mysql. it looks like it has a lot of practical applications, by the fact that most of the mp3 queue programs i've looked at use that type of database.
webmin's written in perl .. i'm going to have to learn it sooner or later. can't really use c++ on the web now can ya.
it would be cool to integrate it with the campus network so it can stream files from people's hard drives and return a list of files to choose from. that gives me an idea.. make the same thing for video.. that would require more money ..
ok so yea, a summary..
standalone machine, can be controlled via web from anywhere, streams mp3s from a predetermined drive. the most important stuff is basically being able to queue, stop and start remotely. so yea, it's basically a remote winamp, like i said.
there's probably software out there just like this, but i'm a n00b desperate to break into coding seriously for once.
