Technical Details

When upgrading machines it always handy to know what your options are. This is the best benchmark comparison tool I’ve seen, you can select two processes from an extensive list of CPUs. Of course you can find it at Tom’s Hardware: CPU Chart 2007

When it comes to the merits of many open source software systems I’m not the most generous guy (in terms of compliments), but in general open is always better then closed!

I had to release a new version of rTunes this weekend because of a wincom id change with iTunes 7.4.2.4. There was this nagging issue with rTunes and really slow web serving when I was using a remote computer, this was really irking me and since I was updating the source I thought I’d track this down. So off I went and started dropping in some profiling code, after the first test I had a pretty good idea of what was going on (and also why no one had complained about this issue yet.) Python’s BaseHTTPServer generates a log entry when you send a response, the problem as it turns out, the log entry wants to print the host name which means it does a DNS “fully qualified name lookup” and there’s the rub; I’m running DNS at home (and yes it’s not properly setup where Windows is concerned but it works for my purposes) but these name lookups were taking 4 secs on my network which is ridiculous performance, so it was simple to override the address_string to simply return the IP. If you’ve ever setup Apache you know they strongly recommend turning off name lookups, no kidding, so why this library has this as a default is kind of weird and a little bit dumb. After changing this behaviour performance improved by two orders of magnitude, woohoo.

The whole point of this story is that given the documentation of the BaseHTTPServer library and most other libraries of all sorts (free and commercial), without the source I would have spent significantly more time tracking down this issue with a closed source opaque library.

Vive la open source!

I’m happy to get this out the door along with a major fix for DNS Fully Qualified Name look ups, “use the IP Luke”.

The remote versions for windows will follow shortly.

Enjoy, and let me know if there are any new features you’d like to see.

Get rTunes here:  http://agwego.com/rtunes

I just got the first report in that iTunes 7.4.2.4 breaks rTunes, here we go again Apple, can’t you maintain a stable interface for crying out loud. The good news, is I have no problems connecting with the raw source, it’s only the compiled version that is having difficulties right now. If you’d like the instructions on installing python and the necessary packages to get rTunes working leave a comment and I’ll post them.

Update:

The release of 7.4.2.4 changed the com signature which means the hard-coded com signature in the binary package is out of sync, unfortunately there doesn’t  seem to be a better way at this time when it comes to py2exe.

I should have a new version out this evening, I just need to package and test, and I also found a very annoying “bug/design feature” in the http lib which was making rTunes very slow when DNS is being used on a local network, like my home network.