PMotUKoGBaNI

I defy anybody to listen to the Presidents of the United State of America and stay in a bad mood. Talk about feel-good music, it was the perfect response to the angst-infected grunge scene that was ’90s Seattle where the band formed.

Just think: to play in a PotUSA tribute band, immersed in that vibe every single day, you’d never feel down! Who’s in? We can call ourselves (of course) the Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland…

iTunes to Firefly (mt-daapd) over SSH

This is a note to anyone who’s attempting to stream music from the Firefly media server (formerly ‘mt-daapd’) to iTunes across the ether with a little help from Rendezvous Proxy and an SSH tunnel. Many a fine HOW-TO article has been written on setting up the server for your platform, configuring the proxy on the client machine, and managing the SSH tunnel for the connection, so I won’t bang on about any of that here.

However, if you have followed those instructions to the letter but still find that iTunes fails to connect to the server, check your SSH tunnel configuration and ensure the tunnel’s remote host is specified by IP address 127.0.0.1, not the hostname ‘localhost’.

For example: if you’re creating the tunnel on the command line like this:

ssh -YNf -l username -L 3689:localhost:3689 daapd.example.com

try changing it to this:

ssh -YNf -l username -L 3689:127.0.0.1:3689 daapd.example.com

I have no idea why this distinction should even be apparent to the application (iTunes) that is unwittingly using the tunnel, but—for me at least—it made the difference between connection failures and sweet streaming music. YMMV.

First Post!

Right, day one in the blogosphere, and my first WordPress post with Ecto; let’s start with the basics…

OK, so text and images are as easy as you’d expect, and floating the image is a doddle.

Clearing the float, however, is less obvious, and appears to be impossible without recourse to the raw HTML.

Inserting a break, <br clear="all"/>, would do the trick, but for WordPress stripping the crucial clear attribute when the post is published. Grrr!

What does work is to add some inline CSS in the form of a style="clear:both;" attribute to the HTML element that follows (i.e. this this paragraph).