We've finally totally lost line-of-sight with our ISP, Digis. I'm not to sad that we're switching. The bandwidth throttling was getting totally out-of-hand. I am a bit annoyed that they won't deal fairly with our cancellation.

Typically, when you cancel an account like this, you either have your service terminated when your next billing cycle would start, or you have the unused time pro-rated and refunded. Digis does neither. They cancel your account immediately, and they don't refund you for the unused service.

We just got back from my 10 year reunion. All I can say is "ego boost". I'm glad to say that with few exceptions, I've kept in touch with everyone worth keeping in touch with. We got to see Kenny and that was cool. I also saw Megan Walks and Stephanie Crowfoot. No sign of Matt Enright though.

I know I'm a bit odd for thinking this, but my 1978 Yamaha Enduro DT250 is a thing of beauty. Over the past few months it's gone from mothballs in my friend's shed to nearly street legal. I haven't had to do much to it either. I had to clear out the old oil and clear a clog in the air intake for the oil tank yesterday. *shrug*

We went on a Disneyland and San Diego Zoo vacation for almost two weeks from June 9th to June 20th. The trip went something like this:

We went up to my brother Dan's place in Manila over the weekend. We went to the Dinosaur museum and the beach. Alice and Avery had fun at the beach. We built a giant sand castle with a moat that was about 5 feet in diameter. Kaiya liked the water but didn't like the sand. She doesn't like getting dirty.

When you're out browsing the web, you send an HTTP request for each file and the server returns an HTTP response for each request. Each request/response uses an independent connection.

HTTP 1.1 supports a thing called pipelining. Essentially, you send multiple requests over one connection and the server returns responses in the order they were requested. This allows you to recycle the same connection for consecutive requests.

Why would anyone want to do this? Well, if you're going to do a lot of HTTP requests, you'll quickly realize that connection overhead gets ugly. In fact, any time you make a lot of requests and open a lot of network sockets, you'll burn up more CPU on that than just about anything else. So let's say you're going to programatically download 10000 files from a server over HTTP; it's best to do it with a handful of connections rather than 10000 connections.

When you download a file or stream a media file from a web server, the good ones will allow you to request portions of the file at a time. This gives you the ability to scan forward and backward through your media file or pause/resume a file download. You can do the same thing streaming a file through a PHP script.

You're probably asking why I want to do this in the first place. Well... Let's say I want to build a jukebox on my web server. All my friends come and login. They browser the music, make their selection, and the site gives them an m3u playlist file. They open the file in WinAmp or VLC and rock out for hours to my excellent collection.

Sounds great, yeah? But I don't want to give the world access to my music. So I keep my music in a non-web-accessible directory on my web server (or NAS). To get my music from the server to the client, I'll write a script that will act as a middle man. My m3u files will contain URLs with file ids and tokens associated with your login. When you pass a file id and a token, I'll stream your file. If you exceed your quota or your token expires, I stream you a 404 mp3 asking you to renew your session. (I could allow the user to re-activate their token, or just require them to re-download an m3u file with a new token.)

The URLs in my m3u files will look something like this:
#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:232,Bob Marley And The Wailers - Is This Love
http://networkerror.org/play_that_funky_music.php?file_id=1&token=1234
#EXTINF:429,Bob Marley And The Wailers - No Woman No Cry (Live)
http://networkerror.org/play_that_funky_music.php?file_id=2&token=1234

With all that out of the way, let's talk about how to go about streaming these files through PHP.