the cole family blarg

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.

Here is Carys’ latest movie:

For some children, teething is nothing more than teeth coming through the gums. (How textbook!) For Carys, teething is razor blades coming through the gums. She just has a hard time with the pain of teething, that’s for sure. My patience wears thin with her being so grouchy, but I still love her to bits. What a pain that most of them are going to fall out someday too…Come on evolution, WORK WITH ME HERE!

April 21: Thoughts of spring and summer being just around the corner are supposed to be in the air. Instead,  thoughts of blowing snow, cold weather and all that other crap are in the air. Fantastic!

I hope it melts soon. Or, I hope it warms up soon so it can melt. Poor Carys wants to go out and play!

DO YOU HEAR ME!!!???

Didn’t think so.

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.