A Beginning

Welcome to my blog. This is my first attempt at blogging, so I will see where it goes.
I plan to post about projects that I work on in my free time, as well as some general information about creating an online presence.

I have three general projects I am busy with at the moment. I will give a brief overview of each, but will provide more detail in future posts.

1) Setting up my home network.

I am not talking about just having internet (which is as easy as plugging a cable into a modem that your ISP provides), but something more advanced. A quick overview of the challenge that I am facing: currently I have three different networks that I need to connect to. The Internet, CTWUG (Cape Town Wireless User Group) and the Stellenbosch University network (which is reachable via a VPN or Virtual Private Network). This is all relatively easy to get working on a per device basis (by forcing IP's and dialling a VPN on each pc), but I want this all to work transparently. If I get a new computer or connect to the WiFi on any device, I want to be able to access all these networks without changing any settings or installing any software.

2) Series Renamer

I watch a lot of series. It gets irritating when the files have different naming conventions and as a result episodes are out of order in a list. I decided to write a script which looks at all  your series and renames them with a consistent naming scheme. The script also gets the name of each episode as well as a list of all the episodes that you are missing. The result is something in this form and directory structure:


Psych
└─ Psych S01
      ├─ Psych S01E01 - Pilot.avi
      ├─ Psych S01E02 - Spellingg Bee.avi
      └─ Psych S01E03 - Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Piece.avi

I am currently working on a GUI (Graphical User Interface) for the renamer and finally got it to remain stable while fetching the filelists. Normally the whole thing would just hang while fetching the filelists so I had to implement an additional thread, but this made everything unstable and it kept crashing until I implemented the thread handling correctly - which is a hard thing of you are new to it as I am.

3) The Web

While I do not have very much experience with coding websites, I have tinkered a bit. I can give an outline on how to get started and give some ideas. Some information on acquiring and using a host-name  how to set up a Drupal, WordPress or similar site. I am also running a VPS (Virtual Private Server) that I am renting from ThrustVPS and will give some more information on this as well.

tl;dr
This blog is about my projects, including networking, programming and the web.