Blog of Hamlesh

Pandora is a fantastic website and concept, a radio station that plays music based on the mood you are in. You start out by specifying a song or artist that you like, the system then finds something very similar to that song or artist and streams it straight through your browser. As it plays each song, theres a simple “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” system, hit “thumbs up” and it learns that you like that type of music and plays more of the same and similar. In the same way, hit “thumbs down” and it skips to the next track it finds suitable.

There is a MASSIVE amount of choice, and its a good way to find new music you haven’t listened to before. Accounts are free and you can create multiple stations, for example I have seeded a station using Craig Armstrong, and called the station “Chilled Work”. So when I am at the office, I have my little Pandora Player sitting on the desktop playing some nice mellowed out tracks.

Now, although Pandora is a web based service, I have thrown a VERY BASIC (I must stress at how basic it is!) application together. You will need to have the flash plugin installed - but if you’ve been using the web service you’ll already have that. If you don’t have the .NET 2.0 framework, the installer will grab what it needs and install those files too.

Once installed, the application sits in the middle of your screen, just leave it up behind your other windows, this way you don’t have to have a web browser open all the time. I know most of us actually have a browser open all the time, but this prevents you from accidentally leaving the pandora site, and thus stopping your music.

Get the install files from here. Its a tiny 259Kb in size. If you have any comments (other than “this is really basic” - I’ve already covered that) or would like me to add specific features to it, just post a comment
PS: Won’t work on 64bit OS, as Adobe don’t support 64bit Internet Explorer.

As some of you have noticed, and emailed me about (thanks), the RSS aggregator’s format changed slightly a few days ago.  The new layout should make it easier to read articles and news items.  The aggregator started out as a personal project, it allows me to keep up to speed with whats going on in the news (BBC/FT), IT Security Industry (various), IT Industry in general (thereg + others), and a few other things that interest me.  Since allowing google to spider http://rss.hamleshmotah.com, its started getting a lot of hits, 1000+ unique visitors a day, so obviously other people find it useful (thanks for all the emails :)).

Its been a long time since I was active on the Rosetta@Home folding project.  I thought I’d check my stats today and was quite amused to find that;

• I am currently ranked 13th in the UK (was 6th before I stopped).
• I am currently ranked 189th in the world (was 62nd before I stopped).

I stopped participating in April of 2006.

• Profile stats
• UK position

Maybe at some point I’ll get fired up an contribute again, who knows.

They arrived at the office today, and I’ve just finished putting them together. I’ve also just finished modifying my amplifers so that they work in a balanced way with the main AV amp. This ensures that while watching films, or listening to music the top and bottom frequency levels are “balanced” in terms of volume. Of course there will be many a time when I will just crank the sub amps right up

These will join the rest of the home cinema setup at some point (most probably over the weekend) when I am home during the day to do some loud testing.

PS: Yes, thats 3 amps, the Samson and Wharfedale work on powering my 3 subs - I like my bass

Before I turned all my focus to Berkeley IT, I speant a lot of my time on the internet talking to people on IRC, working on opensource projects, and keeping “up to speed” with penetration testing and IT security.

Well since then I blog irratically and post files and photos from time to time - today just seems to be a day for updating things.  I know people read this site as there are the odd comments from both people I know and people I dont.  I just looked at the site stats/traffic, I didnt expect to get “this many” visitors: 918 unique visitors last month - for a personal blog type site I dont think this is bad traffic.

 

Click for the full view.

In short this is a specifically designed distribution of Linux focused around security and pentesting.

Knoppix-STD is a customized distribution of the Knoppix Live Linux CD. Boot to the CD and you have Knoppix-STD. That would include Linux kernel 2.4.20, KDE 3.1, incredible hardware detection and hundreds of applications. Boot without the CD and you return to your original operating system. Aside from borrowing power, peripherals and some RAM, Knoppix-STD doesn’t touch the host computer.

Read more and download the ISO from here.

Rosetta@Home UK #6, and still climbing \o/

At this rate I am heading for the UK #4 spot, currently world #65 heading for #33.  I have a few more tricks up my sleeve, I should be able to get back on track for the UK #3 spot.

• My Stats

Its taken me the best part of two weeks on and off, but I finally have my media PC setup in just the way I’d like it. For the most part the machine plays music from my file server and displays its little visualisations. From time to time I will leave some form of TV episode playing on there (usually Top Gear or Invader Zim \o/). I know the eluminated keyboard is a little much, but it looks the business sitting on top of the amp.

Right now I can get back to focusing on business, and doing some revision.

 

Well this past week has been interesting on the Rosetta@Home distributed computing project front.  I originally setup 84 machines running the computing application, and had hoped to bring another 50 machines online earlier in the week.  Being somewhat busy with my business ventures prevented this from happening until yesterday afternoon.  I should now have roughly 130 machines running the computations.  I’ve fallen somewhat short of my UK number 3 position by the weekend though.

• UK position: 27th (stats)
• World position: 286th (stats)

Link to profile stats.

I encountered the wonders of distributed computing a long time ago, back when I used to assit with administration of the network at school. At the time I was teaching myself how to render three dimensional images using POVRAY. I installed a distributed computing client on all the machines in the school, this allowed me to render images at a fraction of the time. The platform allowed me to utilise the spare processing power of all the machines on the network.

Things have come a long way since then, with SETI having come and gone, now we have BOINC, I wont go into too much detail, but its a great platform for distributed computing.

Two days ago I setup BOINC on the Rosetta@Home project which aims to predict and design protein structures and protein-protein and protein-ligand interactions. This has already and will continue to aid scientists in developing new cures and medications in the future.

At the time of writting there are 49,754 users registered to the project, who are downloading work units, processing them and sending them back.

In two days of running on this project;

• I am ranked 2813th in the world.
• I have moved up 30,666 positions in the past day.
• I am ranked 214th in the UK.

You can view my live stats here.

My prediction is that by next weekend I will be in the top 5 of the UK rankings, however I doubt I will move higher than 4th in the UK as there are 3 others who process more units a day than I do.