the cole family blarg

I found that my iMac was really loud after I replaced the hard drive with a 1TB Western Digital Black drive (go figure).

I finally found a solution for adjusting the acoustic properties of the drive -

• Boot your mac with Ubuntu 9.10 (or whatever LiveCD you like)
• Open Terminal
• run: sudo hdparm -M 128 /dev/sda (replace /dev/sda as needed)

Your computer will be quieter, and only slightly slower from now on!

I was encountering a problem trying to publish Windows Updates to our new Windows 7 workstations. The awesome error 0×8007000d is so verbose and helpful that it really helps masquerade the true problem — you need to update to WSUS 3.0 SP2.

If anyone out there finds this helpful, let me know!

I would just like to remind everyone that sharepoint as it currently exists is a really sucky technology. Maybe it is good if you are some nerdy microsoft company that has lots of generic .net developers on staff that can convince sharepoint to do useful things, but certainly out of the box it is quite a useless thing. Why does it suck?:

- bloat! It needs a whole server an even then it is damn slow.
- you need an it department to even have a chance with getting permissions correct
- user interface is horrible! Everything seems to be designed with right clicks in mind. Doesn’t work so smoothly in the web.
- security. When I put sharepoint on the Internet - I have all my accounts locked out because some phreaker is bruteforcing all our account passwords via the SQL server.

I should have made a wiki instead.

The mythfrontend machine which is hooked up to the plasma tv died of old age (leaking capacitors). Indeed I can’t live with no pvr, and so I sacrificed my windows machine (windows server 2003 64-bit) who’s role has been reduced to pc games (a very unhealthy scene).

So here’s the current line up:
- ubuntu Linux dual xeon server;
- iMac 24″ home office machine and tuxpaint workhorse;
- Ammanda’s white macbook;
- my AHFMR macbook pro;
- the hackintosh driving the tv.

No more crappy windows!

I bought myself an apple iPhone a few weeks ago from which I am posting this blog post from now. It is truly an excellent device that will bring some serious competition to the blackberry, and laughs evilly at windows mobile devices.

The large touch screen is clearly an excellent choice as it provides an extra large canvas for information and video. The high resolution display makes reading email easy, and having a decent web browser doesn’t hurt either.

The only part that takes some getting used to is the touch keyboard. It is indeed inferior to having a blackberry style mini keypad, but I do think the ease of use outweighs the difference in typing speed. I think I probably type about 25 wpm on the iPhone vs 35 of so on my blackberry pearl.

Another caveat is IM clients. Since the iPhone does not allow backgroud daemons, any chat client you use disconnects when you switch programs. This hopefully will be fixed with some new functions in September.

Overall though it gets a 9.5/10!

I have been playing around with one of the new ASUS eee pc computers which is a very small laptop containing no hard drive and runs Linux. The default OS was rather limiting in what you could do with it, and so I replaced it with Ubuntu 8.04. Now it is a very very small and powerful (enough) machine.

In my attempt to get that last 2% of my MythTV issues fixed I am attempting the following:

• replacing my firewire card with one that uses an agere fw323 (rev06) chipset - as recommended by other MythTV HD users. Sadly, I couldn’t find a card that uses the agere fw323 (rev61) chipset that is the actual recommendation, but I think I will have more luck than I have had with my NEC, SB Audigy firewire ports. FYI - the Dynex IEEE1394 card at Future Shop/Best Buy is where I found mine. Also note that Agere has now merged with LSI, so the chip is labeled LSI!
  
• implementing a mythbackend “babysitter” that will restart mythbackend if it crashes (it polls every 5s!) as seen here;
• keeping the mysql database in memory to make the program guide run super fast.
• reimplementing a power button script that allows mythfrontend to be killed/restarted using the remote control.

Update:

It turns out that the Dynex IEEE1394 card I purchased does not fit into my server, as it is a 5V PCI card. The server has the “new” 3.3V PCI slots, and does not have backwards support for 5V cards. Fortunately I was able to locate a different card (Pinnacle systems) that has the very same chip with a 3.3V slot, and uses an auxilliary floppy power connector in order to provide the 5V line. Things seem to be working good so far. I’ll postback in a week or so with the results.

Update 2:

While it appears to have improved the overall stability of the firewire connection. The setup is still not 100% right. Going to keep working on it.

Update 3:

I found some unknown firewire card in an old HP workstation I had lying around. This one seems to be the most stable so far! Also the server is now running CentOS 5.1. For those of you who care - it is an Agere FW323 Rev05 chipset on a 3.3V card.

After being sufficiently annoyed with my Fedora Core based MythTV implementation that I have been running for about 2.5 years, I felt it was time to pretend I was one of the cool kids and switch up to Ubuntu. With the release of 8.04 LTS, it really felt like a good time to switch up!

I absolutely love the package managment with Ubuntu. So much for my old school philosophy of “package the boring stuff, compile the stuff you care about”! The entire package tree is well maintained and seems to contain a package for just about every imaginable app.

A few uncategorized notes of my experience thus far:

• compiz fusion setup by default is awesome.
• restricted drivers (i.e. closed source nvidia drivers) and restricted filters (i.e. mp3) are a nice way of prodding you to be totally open source without strong arming you into it.
• sysvconfig is a great package for the redhat crowd! It puts the old “service” command into Ubuntu (I am just too lazy to do /etc/init.d/service_name start|stop|restart every time!).
• if you turn on Remote Desktop (a la VNC) on Linux, you can use the cool “share screen” button from your Mac when browsing to the Linux machine.
• even lirc isn’t that hard to setup if you don’t try to configure it the old crappy way (compile your own kernel module - ugh!). You still get the fun job of using irrecord to build your own lircd.conf file though. Don’t forget to make your own .lircrc file to link the lircd.conf file to named commands, and a ~/.mythtv/lirc file to map the named commands to actual commands in your application.

As I am designing a complicated PDF form, I am faced with a problem that shows up when entering information into the form:

Thank you Adobe for being so helpful.

We have been looking for some time to purchase a second flatscreen TV. I struggled to come up with an ideal setup that would integrate into our already well developed MythTV infrastructure (digital HDTV recordings already working well via firewire [w/commercial flagging] on the backend)

I had a few options to choose from:

• $1100 - Motorola DCT 6200+ 30″ LCD TV - The most basic setup. Requires no integration into anything. Kind of expensive, no ability to watch recordings that have been so carefully setup.
• $700 - Mac Mini + 30″ LCD TV - I have an old Mac Mini (1.4GHz PPC) lying around that could be used as a underpowered frontend for watching TV. The machine is way too slow to watch HD on however. Requires a very ugly ethernet cable strung around the place to hook into the network due to lack of wireless.
• $1800 - iMac 24″ - By far the most expensive option, this has a number of great benefits. A beautiful 1920×1200 display that can playback HD recordings from MythTV. No external box required. Add in a bluetooth keyboard and mouse and the only cable remaining is the power and amplified speakers.

After a lot of thinking, we went with the iMac. After a week of using it, I am very glad I went that route. This thing is a great computer and a great TV. The Apple Remote even works in MythTV! The setup is very elegant and free of clutter. The computer itself has quickly become the most popular machine in the house!

It took a bit of tweaking to get the HD playback working at 1900×1080p - there are a lot more settings in MythTV 0.21 than with 0.20, and I had to do a lot of experimentation to find a filter that would playback the stream in realtime. (I ended up with opengl + Kernel HW in my setup)

In other news, my Windows machine has been banished to the basement. Any correlation?