A situation.
I have gone downstairs, to talk to ccooke about ordering Pizza. This done, I remain downstairs, but realise that Winamp is still playing music upstairs. Rats. I don’t partiually want to go upstairs and turn it off, so I log into the telnetd server that’s on it (Which isn’t accessable outside the local network. Obviously.) and try to remember the command line switches to tell Winamp to shut up. I fail. They don’t seem to be working. I stay there, I research, I play, I think. There has to be some way of doing this. I give up and go upstairs, and don’t turn the music off. Instead I look for command line utilities for winamp. I find a couple, but they don’t seem to work properly.
After a little while, I get an idea. The little thing in the bar to the right (Listening To…) is powered by httpq, a http daemon for winamp that allows control though http requests. Basically, a perl script on my server asks winamp what it’s playing every few minutes, and uploads that info to the server. A little hacking later, and I’ve got tell-winamp, a system to send instructions to httpq. Whereupon I go back downstairs and turn the music off remotly.
The pizza never arrived.