September 2007 Archives

Just for fun, a couple of poems written in the throws of tech support hell around 1997.

The Lusers My Life

The lusers, my life
their questions so dumb.
Their babbling I'd stop,
if I only had a gun.

My work is so sad,
and never gets done.
I live in a dungeon,
and never see the sun.

Alt-Q! Ctrl-Enter!
these keys the must remember.
Yet they call and they call,
brains the size of an ember.

The phone rings again,
I answer, in strife.
I wish they'd all die,
the lusers, the lusers, my life.

And a Haiku...

Ode to the Phone Embedded in My Ear

Glued, to my pained ear
it's the source of all my strife
the phone, I hate it

Hope you enjoy my pain of years past.... The sad thing is my insanity hasn't changed all that much. Hmm...

Well, it's 10:30pm and my morning project took about 12 hours to do, but it's done now. It started out with "why don't I just throw a spare hard drive into my MythTV system and install the latest version to see how well it works?" That part went fine, but as soon as I did that (and did some blowing out of dust and grime), the system refused to stay on for more than a few seconds. Going through the BIOS was fine, as was running memtest86, but as soon as the MythBuntu CD started booting, power turned off. Very weird.

Eventually I pulled yet-another system out of the basement (if anyone remembers or cares, the current mythbox was cobbled together from spare system bits a few months ago) and installed the Ubuntu version called MythBuntu. This went fine, the install was great, my PVR350 was nicely supported.... almost. I could get TV output to the screen very easily, but it turns out the ivtv-fb driver that is needed for output to the screen only works with kernel 2.6.18-2.6.21. MythBuntu only has kernel 2.6.22 and 2.6.15 available. Bah.

So next step was to download KnoppMyth, which is what is installed on the current system. It had grown very stagnant though, and was way out of date (hence the weekend project to update it).

I have to say, KnoppMyth rocks. Basically it was boot, hit enter a few times, follow the prompts and voila. It supports the TV out for the PVR-350 out of the box (a big PITA historically for the PVR350), and a bunch of stuff is fixed. IE:

• Sound is now properly looped through the audio card, so I don't have to swap audio cables when I move from watching recorded TV to playing videos.
  
• Video playing now puts the video window in the foreground properly (before I would have to stop / start videos a few times (or hit 'f' to go from fullscreen to un-fullscreen and back) as the video would start playing "behind" the black background).
  
• No configuration was needed for the remote.
  

None of these were show stoppers, but they were a bit of a PITA.

A few other nice things I found:

• Network remote (usable from a webpage)
  
• Some nice redesigns in the MythWeb page
  
• An iPod transcoding system right out of the box
  
• Did I mention that everything just worked?
  

The only minor tweaks I found I had to do were:

• To play divx 5 encoded AVIs I had to change the mplayer command line to be "-vo x11" instead of "-vo xv" to not have a weird ghosting color thing
  
• Disable using the hardware decoder in the PVR350 in the mythtv setup (eh?) to get hardware accelerated performance playing videos.
  

So massive kudos to the KnoppMyth folks. Also kudos to Brian who stopped by and helped out, and also took some of my old hardware off of my hands (to build his own mythtv box after I showed him how cool this one was).

So now I have a fully working system, I have an Schedules Direct account (and will be paying the $20 for a year subscription when my 7 day trial is up and will have no problem doing so) so I have my listings back! Now to get another tuner card so I don't have to decide between show A and show B :)

... and her name is iPhone. After two days I'm still pretty jazzed about my new iPod Nano, and was showing it's tininess and sexy screen to a couple of guys as I was heading out of the office. After a couple of minutes a guy wanders over and says "I couldn't help overhearing you guys, but...." and he shows us his iPhone (bought in San Francisco, and a legit AT&T customer FYI, so non-unlocked).

I have literally been thinking about it since I saw it. It is tiny. Seeing all the iPod Touch and iPhone comparisons I had the impression the iPhone was big and bulky, obviously still small, but still "big". So not the case. The thing fits sweetly in the hand and can easily hide in your jeans pocket (assuming you don't wear the skintight variety of course).

The screen is as gorgeous as the ads show, and as crisp and clean as you can imagine. Operation is as slick and sexy as you can imagine. I still get shivers thinking about it.

This of course all brings up a conundrum. Firefly is actually going down to San Francisco at the end of the month, so in theory, I could get her to pick me up one. Some of the sexy new features that was only on the iPod Touch appear to be coming to the iPhone (wifi store and starbucks thing). Neither of those features is a show stopper for me, but it's nice to know that the two will have the same features. Also, the one big advantage of the iPod Touch (16G storage) is countered a bit by it's crippled-ness.

Also the fact that the iPhone isn't actually available up here for phone service is sucky. Yes it's been hacked, no, you don't know if it'll stop working the next time you update it. Also there's a lot of "wait for version 2" talk, for both the iPod Touch and iPhone. Who knows.

Did I say how absolutely sexy the iPhone was by the way? Wow. Really, there's a reason why Apple products have the reputation they have. Sure, people will mumble about not having a GPS, or "smartphone" features, or being expensive, or blah, or blah, or blah, but I really honestly think that when you get it into your hands you'll want one, plain and simple.

Seeeeeeeeexxxxxxy.....

As I said I just got an iPod, so now I have to deal with managing the music for it in my particular situation. I have the following going on at home right now:

• A fileserver with approximately 140G of mp3s all nicely tagged via MusicBrainz's tools and organized nicely into directories (ie: music player independant). All music is stored there.
  
• Laptop from work. "Daily" music is stored here, podcasts are downloaded for playing at work, and when I download my radio show during the day at work, I load it onto my mp3 player from here.
  
• Windows workstation with headphones. Minimal music management is done here, this is a gaming and accounting box.
  
• Linux workstation, hooked up to speakers. Music playing is done here, music management (basically rating songs and creating playlists) is done in Rhythmbox. No podcasts here.
  

I've never had a decent mp3 player before, the one I have now has 256mb of space, so not a lot of daily changes are made.

Anyway, music management on the iPod is supposed to be done through iTunes which is a nice application, however it has a few downfalls.

You can only sync your iPod on one computer.

Bah. Unless there's a trick around it, when you sync an iPod to a computer, and then take it to another one and try to sync it, it tells you the device is new and anything on it will be nuked off. Say if I were to sync music for the gym on it at home, then try to put the radio show or something new on it at work. No fun at all.

Except that the new iPods don't work under Linux thanks to Apple encrypting stuff. It's already been broken, but hasn't made it's way into any released products.

What I was hoping to do was to sync things like my radio show and podcasts via the laptop, and load up the music under Linux. Looks like that won't work, at least for now :(

My solution in the meantime....

I'm copying 141G of music onto my work laptop, in the theory that it moves from work to home and back. Inconvenient however as I don't want to have to pull out the laptop each time I add some new music. Of course, the laptop doesn't have that big a hard drive, so I'm mounting it on the laptop and adding all the music in it to the iTunes library. So in theory it'll just show up as "can't find file" when I'm not at home.

This will let me get everything I need, for now. I'm hoping that I can, in theory, manage songs via Linux when I get there.

Anyone have better ideas? It comes down to:

• Can't sync an iPod on more than one computer with iTunes.
  
• iTunes doesn't run (well) on Linux (last time I checked) and isn't what I want to use under Linux anyway.
  
• Can't manage an iPod from Linux
  

Anyone have anything similar? Any better ideas?

So after talking, lusting, dreaming, and waiting, I am finally an iPod owner. Today after work I picked up a new silver iPod Nano after deciding to Just Do It and stop my bitching. Yes, I should have waited for the iPod Touch, and yes, I will get one when they are available (money to burn!).

Tiny little package, tiny little device, huge screen. A few thoughts next entry...

I saw over the weekend that Canadian Tire has the Roomba Discovery (link to CT page on for $100 off of it's regular price of $399, putting it at $299. Is that a good price (Canadian) for a Roomba?

It doesn't look like this model is around anymore, and is now eclipsed by the Roomba 500, and the only mention on the website of the "Discovery" model is the announcement in 2004. Is this old dirt dog too old to get, should I wait for the next version? Is it a silly toy and not worth the money to keep the cat hair off my floor? Comments appreciated.

Seriously, their humorous little skits in between who-cares awards could really use some work.... I've never seen people like John Stewart be so completely un-funny. However, I did find a very funny picture of a mom bird feeding a baby bird to make me feel better.

Speaking of TV and movies.

• Shoot 'Em Up (trailer) - Saw this last night with Dana.... very funny, completely un-serious, full of shooting (go figure) and blood and gore and as much action as you can shake a stick at, luckily it only had a paper-thin plot to interrupt all the action.
  
• The Lost Room - This was the sci-fi series a couple of years ago I finally got around to watching. A bit long, but a really well written story with lots of twists and turns.
  

Just read the PCMag iPod Touch review and am really wondering if I should just plop down the credit card at the Apple Store. There is no current ETA for the iPod Touch to appear in Canada, and the official ETA for the states is another two weeks... and and this way I'd be able to get a custom engraving.

Decisions, decisions.

First of all, I have to give kudos to Henry Wong from Arena-MaxTronic, Inc. for putting up with me asking a bunch of really stupid questions and walking me through reconfiguring the MaxTronic Arena RAID box (similar to this one but an older version).

I had been watching this box at work sitting beside the desktop support guys desk for a while, and finally asked about it. Turns out it was a leftover acquisition and they'd never gotten it to work. It's a 6 disk box filled with 8G drives (oooh... ahhh...). It is external and converts the PATA drives in it into an external SCSI connection that connects up to whatever system you have a SCSI connector in. Pretty cool.

So took it home, and other than the minor issue of the system not recognizing the 40 G hard drives I put in it, it works fine.

Now the next step is to max it out with as many drives as possible to expand my fileserver storage (or move it). Atic.ca is selling 320G drives for about $84 each, which means for just over $500 I can get 1.6 terabytes, or if I go for the 500G for $135, I get 2.5 terabytes.

That'd last me for at least another six months :)

Finally decided to upgrade the 'ol blog to the latest and greatest and broke all my templates. Grr.... I'll fix it up tomorrow morning. I wish that Movable Type had a "bring in all default templates for this version" option. I can use the 'refresh templates' button, but that only works if you have something to select to refresh. So basically tomorrow I'll be going to the MT4 demo site, grabbing a template, copy, refresh, repeat.

Weeee.....

Update: OK, I think I have it all going now. Please throw me an email to let me know if you see something busted.

Just so my bitching isn't restricted to Microsoft, today a fair chunk of time fixing the Arcterex.net webserver after the latest version of Apache that is in the Gentoo repository. Version 2.0 has been installed and working fine for a while, but the config layout seemed to change and a bunch of things moved. Generally I try to not change config files that don't need to be replaced if I can avoid it, less chance of messing up an existing config. However, it seems that the new install didn't like that, and it was only after lots of mucking around (and many times thinking "man, I should downgrade to 2.0") I finally realized that I basically had to blow away all the old configs (the new default server layout had changed) and leave only my own virtual host settings before it would finally work. Bleah. I keep on wanting to switch to Ubuntu (still) but just can't bring myself to undo all the tweaking and setup I've done. However, when the server is upgraded with gobs of more disk space (1TB drives are getting cheaper all the time) I will move over to something a little less volatile :)

So I went out with my Brother-In-Law Sunday to get him a new laptop. His requirements aren't all that high, basically surfing and checking email, so we picked up a half decent deal at Future Shop, a little HP dual core system.

When I started setting it up for him I remembered why I hate buying computers that I don't put together myself. I took literally 4 hours or more Sunday afternoon to do all the needed tasks:

• Apply all the upddates, reboot, apply more updates, reboot, repeat
  
• Remove the gobs of third party software
  
• Install some reasonable software to use for other tasks (an office suite, iTunes (which he's more used to than WMP), DivX codec, etc)
  

The gobs of software I really hate. I understand that HP (and others) are going to install their own stuff. IE: You pop in a DVD and te HP easy-play (or something like that) pops up. Put in a DVD to burn and some other third party app is used. I can understand that, sometimes Windows doesn't come with great default bits of software, so you brand it as your own. What does piss me off is the lack of user-friendlyness with the third-party installs.

It's not like you are just using a crippled / lame version of some software, but half the software seemed to pop up nag screens the second it starts. For example, the system came with MS Office home/student/trial or something like that. That's fine, but as soon as Word opens it pops up a screen asking for a serial number. Nothing more, just a text field and an OK button. If there was a 'not now', or 'continue trial' or something lik that I'd be OK with it, but basically you hit OK, it tells you that's an invalid serial number, you hit OK again and thn it gives you the option to re-enter or cancel.

Now I'm not sure about you, but if my grandmother were to open that up she'd pack the thing up and send it back. I'm not trying to rag on MS here, the Office was just one example, don't get me started on the video on demand player that's started by default and what's involved getting rid of that.

I'm all OK with companies making their hardware cheaper by putting third party apps on there, and with third party apps trying to overtake the big boys by making their apps the defaults for new users, but geez, you have to make it so the experience doesn't piss off the user so much!

All the more reason to download drives from the net, use an OEM disk to do the install (as the vendor solution these day is to not give any disks, but give a 'restore partition' instead, which installs all the same crap you want to get rid of) and then doing the install from scratch. I find the default set of apps in windows perfectly adequate as far as not pissing me of, and you just need to do the 'install my own preferred applications' part of the setup.

Speaking of being pissed off.... ugh, Vista on a laptop. Like I said I spent the afternoon and evening setting things up, loading it up with stuff. In that time the wireless worked fine. When I had first started up the computer it found my network, asked me for my passphrase, and happily did exactly as expected through restarts, reboots, and software install/uninstall. Exactly what I wanted.

However, this evening I got home and Firefly has the laptop up and it's got firefox and a 'server not found' page. Not only did a reboot of the laptop, a reboot of the router and many, many network repairs (and the various other ways that Vista has of fixing things) not work, but it seemed to suddenly require me to disable the wireless (via the hardware switch) and then re-enable and repair it before it'd get onto my network again. It then required it again after putting the thing to sleep by closing the lid. Gah. Anyone else have odd intermittent problems like that?

'Nuff bitching, Batman Begins is on :)

Finally, Apple has created the iPod Touch for me. This is the version of the iPod that I've been waiting for for the last couple of years, and I haven't gotten myself an iPod yet.

Fullscreen video, the same touch system as the iPhone.... beauty. The only thing that I'm disappointed about is it doesn't have the same 160G disk that the iPod Classic (previously just iPod) has. Heck, even a 64G flash drive would be nice. Ah well, I think I'm going to go for it, 16G would work for me... I just am going to wait for it to actually arrive in stores so I can play with it :) I also hope that the connector interface is compatible with what's out there now, so the connector I have for my car stereo works.

Just for shits and giggles I may think about getting an iPod nano as well, for the gym, I'd really hate to drop such a beautiful thing off the treadmill or something.

While in Edmonton one of the things that I did was wander through West Edmonton Mall and checked out one of the art stores. A few artists I made note of to look at further and/or spend a few hundred thousand dollars on to decorate my house (assuming a fair bit more disposable income than I have now of course :)

• Manuel Nunez - (gallery, other gallery). I saw Nunez for the first time ages ago and absolutely fell in love with The Good Fight. There's a The Good Fight II now (the image doesn't give the actual painting justice).
  
• Len Krenzler - (gallery) - fantastic WWII aircraft paintings.
  
• Michael Godard - (gallery). First saw this guy while on the cruise in January, he has a very distinctive style and subject matter, olives, martini glasses, money, and dice. Check out the link for a couple of examples. Perfect for the poker room :)
  

Sadly I have champagne taste but light generic beer budget for art :(

Wandered up to North Van yesterday and Oneiros took me to the Capilano Fish Farm, just down from the suspension bridge (and free). Took a few pics which I present to you here. More after the click.

Looking upriver toward the dam.