My Initial Musings on Node.js
Due to all of the buzz around Node.js lately I thought that I would take it for a test drive. I tend to be very skeptical about frameworks with such hype around them as they tend to just be a passing fad that can not really be used in production environments.
What really got my attention was the fact that you use javascript to write node applications. This to me really opens up server side development to a much wider audience, an audience that tends to understand what happens in the browser very well. This in my opinion can be a great thing. I think we will see some very interesting applications appearing in the future and the amount of available modules for common tasks seems to be growing at a good rate.
I have been looking specifically at node's support for developing REST API's using express. Developing a REST server is very straight forward using express. The fact that applications are written using Javascript a JSON payload is very simple and natural to work with but since Node is basically designed around building highly scalable network applications there are loads of other cool things that you could do with it.
With the popularity of mobile applications these days, which often need to chat back to a server, I think that node could be very well placed to develop standards based, highly scalable backends very quickly to complement your mobile app. If this is something that interests you I would recommend that you head over to Node Tuts for a peek at some of the great videos there.
ITunes 8.1.1, Buffalo Linkstation and Zyxel Prestige 660HW
I picked myself up a nice new unibody Macbook a couple of weeks ago and today thought I'd enable the itunes server feature on my Buffalo Linkstation Live so that I could stream my music from it instead of mounting a share as I usually do. After enabling the media server feature itunes still didn't pick up the nas as a shared library so I decided that I'd update the firmware on the Linkstation as there seemed to be some media server related fixes in the latest version. This all went fine but still no media server being picked up by itunes. I did the usual try and clean out the media server database cache to ensure no stale settings where left after the flash. Nope still nothing... After a bit of talking nicely to google it seemed I needed to enable multicasting on my router. So grand I enable that check box but still nothing. The problem did turn out to be related to multicasting but it was being caught by the packet filter on the Zyxel router. I telnetted into the router and managed to disable the rule from there as I couldn't find anything related to it in the web console. Then magically itunes auto discovers the Linkstation. Hopefully this might save someone a bit of time and a lot of hassle 
