Collin’s Technical Blog

Hi all, a few weeks ago i started using the Banshee Remote for Android by Nikitas Stamatopoulos to control my music over my network via wifi. I downloaded the source code for the project and noticed it used a very insecure stateless server so i wrote a program to control my roommates banshee remote server. I have been fixing bugs on a local copy of the banshee remote server (stopping mostly crashes) which i will post in a while. Here is the code to control anyones banshee remote server

#!/usr/bin/env python

import os, sys, socket, getopt

def usage():
    print("""usage: python bansheeserver-controller.py ip:port command\nCommands:
\tplayPause: Toggle pause/play
\tnext: Play next song
\tprev: Play previous song
\tmute: Mute volume\n""".format())

def commandBanshee((ip, port), command):
    osock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
    osock.connect((ip, port))

    if command == 'playPause' or command == 'mute' or command == 'next' or command == 'prev':
        try:
            osock.send(command + '/')
        except IOError:
            print("Error sending data...")
            osock.close()
            return 1
    else:
        print("Command not understood!")
        usage()
    osock.close()
    return 0

def main():
    # parse command line options
    try:
        (opts, args) = getopt.getopt(sys.argv[1:], '')
    except getopt.GetoptError, err:
        print (str(err))
        usage()
        return 1

    if len(args) == 2:
        try:
            (ip, port) = args[0].split(':')
            command = args[1]
        except:
            print("Invalid arguments!")
            usage()
            return 1
        return commandBanshee((ip, int(port)), command)
    else:
        usage()
        return 1

if __name__ == '__main__':
    sys.exit(main())

I also am planning on re-writing the server as a seamless server that requires authentication (so its secure) and integrate it into banshee using C#. Anyways i have to go study (its exam time soon :S).. Enjoy the code…

Hi all, as of late i have been quite busy with school; unfortunately in my grade 12 math courses matrices are not gone over for more then one class or so, thus leaving one with little knowledge about their power and the immense amount of fun they are. So on my spare time i decided i would use good ol’ wikipedia to cure my craving for knowledge. After about 5 hours of straight reading learning and solving i decided that my matrices knowledge was pretty good…o and of course i was quite hungry. The time flew by while i was learning…i started working and the next time i looked at the clock it was 5 hours later …anyways i thought i would just show some cool things about what i learned:

Given: x + y + z = 6, 3x + 2y + z = 10, x + 3y +2z = 13
Which can for the following Matrix:
---------------
1 1 1 | 6
3 2 1 | 10
1 3 2 | 13
---------------
Now, by using some elementary row operations we can simplify the matrix above to row echelon form by using Gaussian elimination, after which the matrix would look like the following:
------------------
1 1 1 | 6
0 1 1/2 | 7/2
0 0 3/2 | 9/2
-----------------
After which, we simplify to reduced row echelon form which will look like the following:
---------------
1 0 0 | 1
0 1 0 | 2
0 0 1 | 3
---------------
Therefore we know our answers are: z = 3, y = 2, x = 1

Pretty neat eh There are many more ways to solve linear equations any more methods of doing so. For more info see this.