newer news rants show previous 9 show next 10 news by date login

Wednesday, November 15, 2006 22:57:49 Oooh a photo-blog-esque-type-thing.... It'd be nice to win 6.49 billion. Too much emo for me... dude. Hotttt.

Tuesday, November 14, 2006 08:00:29      Boo yah! I've solved my problems. I added another computer to the mix last night. Now the master back end doesn't have any encoders on it and it's only job is to manage the database and serve out recordings. I'm going to build a synchronization script to open the database, rsync the files to the master back end and then update the database so that it knows what host they're on. I would use NFS but it works like crap for live recordings for some reason.      It was relatively simple to get that computer working last night, it just took a while. The Asus P4S800 motherboard needed to have acpi=off added to the kernel line to boot to Fedora Core 6 (2.6.18) and it took a while to track that bug down. Then installing the mythtv-suite went just fine but because the PVR-150 I have has a infra-red transmitter on it, I needed to install Mark's LIRC PVR150 version of LIRC and it wouldn't compile on the stock kernel. The solution was to download the latest kernel from kernel.org which I just assumed would match the kernel of my box, but probably isn't correct. Then I copied include/linux/config.h into my kernels/2.6.18.../include/linux/ directory so that it would find that file. I also used the following changes, but I did them first and I'm not sure I needed to, but it worked and it's changing channels happily so it might have helped.      I set up three recordings in a row to go at 11pm for an hour, 12am for an hour and 1am for an hour and none had that glitch in the first few second and there were no kernel messages. The other main benefit of this strategy is that the front ends won't fall down anymore because the back end will likely not go away very often anymore. If the database isn't there the front ends are pretty useless, but even without both recorders in this new layout, the master back end will still be able to serve out old recordings. diff -ru lirc-0.8.0-orig/drivers/kcompat.h lirc-0.8.0/drivers/kcompat.h --- lirc-0.8.0-orig/drivers/kcompat.h     2006-07-16 21:09:26.323828798 +0200 +++ lirc-0.8.0/drivers/kcompat.h     2006-07-16 21:09:45.441698751 +0200 @@ -15,8 +15,11 @@ #include +#if LINUX_VERSION_CODE < KERNEL_VERSION(2,6,18) #define LIRC_HAVE_DEVFS #define LIRC_HAVE_DEVFS_26 +#endif + #define LIRC_HAVE_SYSFS #if LINUX_VERSION_CODE < KERNEL_VERSION(2,6,13) diff -ru lirc-0.8.0-orig/drivers/lirc_dev/lirc_dev.c lirc-0.8.0/drivers/lirc_dev/lirc_dev.c --- lirc-0.8.0-orig/drivers/lirc_dev/lirc_dev.c     2006-07-16 21:09:26.327829190 +0200 +++ lirc-0.8.0/drivers/lirc_dev/lirc_dev.c     2006-07-16 21:09:45.441698751 +0200 @@ -49,16 +49,18 @@ #endif #define __KERNEL_SYSCALLS__ #include + +#include "drivers/kcompat.h" + /* DevFS header */ -#if LINUX_VERSION_CODE >= KERNEL_VERSION(2,4,0) +#if defined(LIRC_HAVE_DEVFS) #include #endif /* SysFS header */ -#if LINUX_VERSION_CODE >= KERNEL_VERSION(2,6,0) +#if defined(LIRC_HAVE_SYSFS) #include #endif -#include "drivers/kcompat.h" #include "drivers/lirc.h" #include "lirc_dev.h" diff -ru lirc-0.8.0-orig/drivers/lirc_imon/lirc_imon.c lirc-0.8.0/drivers/lirc_imon/lirc_imon.c --- lirc-0.8.0-orig/drivers/lirc_imon/lirc_imon.c     2006-07-16 21:09:26.327829190 +0200 +++ lirc-0.8.0/drivers/lirc_imon/lirc_imon.c     2006-07-16 21:11:14.542390676 +0200 @@ -58,10 +58,13 @@ #include #include #include +#include "drivers/kcompat.h" + +#if defined(LIRC_HAVE_DEVFS) #include +#endif #include "drivers/lirc.h" -#include "drivers/kcompat.h" #include "drivers/lirc_dev/lirc_dev.h" diff -ru lirc-0.8.0-orig/drivers/lirc_sasem/lirc_sasem.c lirc-0.8.0/drivers/lirc_sasem/lirc_sasem.c --- lirc-0.8.0-orig/drivers/lirc_sasem/lirc_sasem.c     2006-07-16 21:09:26.323828798 +0200 +++ lirc-0.8.0/drivers/lirc_sasem/lirc_sasem.c     2006-07-16 21:12:21.700919590 +0200 @@ -67,10 +67,13 @@ #include #include #include + +#include "drivers/kcompat.h" +#if defined(LIRC_HAVE_DEVFS) #include +#endif #include "drivers/lirc.h" -#include "drivers/kcompat.h" #include "drivers/lirc_dev/lirc_dev.h"

Friday, November 10, 2006 08:04:17      So many PVR problems, so little time.      There was once a time when I was very happy with my PVR. It had a couple of minor bugs but the only thing that it really needed from me was to clean out the hard drives every once in a while so that it didn't run out of space.      Now we have a master back end with 1.4TB of storage and a secondary back end next door and things are running like crap. The master back end crashes constantly, the secondary crashes constantly. Until recently the master back end's PVR-150 had an awful tinny audio issue. Currently I'm having a random no audio issue on the secondary back end. There's a problem where in the first 7(ish) seconds of video it stops and jitters and then you miss another 15(ish) seconds of video in the recording.      So, we need a strategy. I've been reading a whole lot trying to find out where to go to get this stuff working because I've invested far too much time to go back now. Basically it seems that there's one or two problems. The first is that the memory errors which are being logged to the console and sometimes result in the mythbackend process crashing could actually be because the video can't be written to the disk fast enough. I've seen this problem a few times on the secondary back end, and I know that system's system drive is making awful sounds, so I'm guessing that rebuilding that onto the bigger drive may just do the trick. Because the master back end is using Logical Volume Management to make all of those drives show up as one drive, there's a performance decrease there, so for the purposes of testing, put in a different drive to run as the storage drive to see if that has any effect. Then network-wise I'm not having any significant issues, but I'm wondering if putting all of the systems in one network with a reliable switch would help. Right now the front end at my house is on a different network than the back end at Sean's which works, but I'm wondering if the master back end is doing needless switching because of that, which should drop performance, but technically could. Another possibility is that the master back end system actually does need more than 512MB of RAM. Perhaps that's because the LVM uses ram to make things happen so when it needs that RAM to write the recording TV buffer, there just isn't enough of it 7 seconds into a video? If running with just one disk solves that problem, then that could have been the problem too.      The system really needs to get to a more stable point because I would really like to add a third back end, so that when two recordings are going simultaneously, we could watch that other live feed, or better yet have all of the programming that we want to watch for the night recorded by 10pm instead of re-arranging things so that it's all done by 4am and you have to watch it the next day.      I'm going to figure out a plan today and execute it tomorrow. Friday, November 10, 2006 12:26:31 finnegan's dad writes: 512 MB of RAM sounds small. I think the slowness of my database application went away at work with the new PC, not because of dual core or a slightly faster hard drive but because memory went from 512MB to 2GB. Disk drive cache memory might be an issue, too. Monday, November 13, 2006 06:26:59 Ian writes: I'll try pitching another 512 in there tonight. Now that I know I can reproduce the issue by having a second recording immediately follow the first, it will be easy to test to see if that solves it. Monday, November 13, 2006 08:19:54 Ian writes: The only problem I have with that theory is that the whole point of buying the PVR-150, PVR-250, PVR-350 and PVR-500 cards by Hauppauge is that they have their own encoder built-in so they should be handling all of the resources of the recording process and can supposedly run on 700MHz systems. Technically, they shouldn't be adding to the load of the box. I posted a message to the ivtv-users mailing list to see what they can make of my crash data from last night.

Thursday, November 9, 2006 08:30:20      I was going through my junk mail and found a phishy message, so I decided to click on it. Maybe because I thought eBay got my email address wrong, or maybe because I was actually worried that they suspended my account, but mostly because I wanted to see how this new Firefox feature handled it. Though it didn't let me get to the site, because the server was down or something, Firefox 2 did catch the address I was at as a phishing URL and told me so. I'm enjoying this new version. The built-in spell checker for web forms is great too. It would be cool if it could ignore HTML/code somehow though.

Wednesday, November 8, 2006 13:51:52      I'm too busy these days so I just installed Firefox 2. They've done a nice job of updating the software. I personally don't care about the close button on each tab now but, that's one complaint I got from someone who I subjected to Firefox, they couldn't figure out how to close a tab. Opening in a new tab instead of a new window by default is also cool and I can't wait to play around with this session thing. I was using the Google one on my desktop because my power is constantly tripped with my dead UPS which I'm using as a sugre protector, but I found it bothered me because I use too many expendable windows. The Google Suggest-like feature of the search is awesome, I think I'll stop automatically starting up that tab now when I open up my browser. Read the release notes.      I updated the Data Matters web site on Monday night and last night I fixed up the software a bit. Like when a slow machine is calculating a hash on a large file, the connection could disappear due to lack of activity (courtesy of Rogers in my test case) so I added a heartbeat thread to the service so that it keeps you connected. Very sweet.      On a completely un-technical note, check out halton.ca/SaveTheTree and donate a buck or two to save a 250 year old oak tree from becoming part of a road.

Monday, November 6, 2006 09:11:18 Whoa, I just did one of those balancing equation things to make: price = total - (total * (discount / 100)) become: discount = - ((price - total) / total) * 100 Now when those people around the office need to calculate the discount for my application they can do it quicly and easily. Much more efficient than that trial and error. My math teachers would be proud. Friday, November 10, 2006 12:21:00 finnegan's dad writes: "quicly"? Maybe not your English/spelling teachers though...

Thursday, October 26, 2006 12:01:43 Oh yeah, I've been driven nuts while using Fedora because the touchpad keeps going forwards and backwards in Firefox... Here's the proper fix from the Gentoo Wiki Horizontal Scroll Issues with Firefox I was looking for this information for a long time and couldn't find it. I finally found reference to this in a cached version of this (gentoo-wiki). So that firefox will not misinterpret the horizontal scroll as 'back' and 'foreward' For many like me this is irritating because you are reading a webpage and by moving the mouse you accidently go to another page. Some forums suggest disabling horizontal scroll (editing xorg.conf to: Option "HorizScrollDelta" "0"), but instead the correct way is to configure firefox so that it doesn't misinterpret the horizontal scroll. In firefox type in URL (address bar):      about:config and double-click on the line:      mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action to set it to 0. And then also set      mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.sysnumlines to true. To add fonts to Fedora from your... uh... true type font source... open Nautilus to fonts:/// and simply drag and drop them. (Firefox looks so much more normal when it has the fonts you're used to.) To make the CPU fan stop running constantly on your notebook, open up /etc/cpuspeed.conf and comment out the two OPTS lines to monitor temperature and battery power.

Thursday, October 26, 2006 11:17:03      Well, I got Fedora Core 6 all downloaded yesterday. The torrent was pretty slow and I ended up using ftp.telus.net and less.cogeco.net to get the ISO images. Today I did an upgrade of my laptop which was running an up to date FC5 install. So far so awesome. One big thing that I like is that they no longer have seperate kernels for SMP and non-SMP machines for i386 hardware. Why's that good for me? I can take a FC6 installation of whatever, pick up it's hard disk and throw it in any other system and it won't require kernel module changes. I suppose you could always go from plain kernel to a system with smp and not use it, but you couldn't go the other way around, it got all screwy. yum still isn't connecting to fedora for it's updates due to the massive amount of geeks updating to FC6 one would suppose.      Went to see The Prestige with Jayme, Sean and a friend of theirs from the lab at school Alma last night. Very awesome movie. I went in knowing absolutely nothing about it so I had no clue what it was about. As Jayme said on the way home; "It was nice to finally see a new plot line in a movie". It kept you guessing the entire way through it. On the way home, I had driven past Alma's place so I backed up down the road since no one was on the road and it was 0:40 in the morning. Just as I got going a cop turned around the corner and so I signalled and then backed into a driveway. Then waited for him to pass, but he was waiting for me. So, I signalled the other way, drove back to the corner by Alma's and she got out. The cop was sitting behind me and then I rolled down my window and waved for him to come up. He drove up and said "You're going the wrong way". So I explained that I was dropping a friend off and that we just passed her place. The cop said; "Fair enough." and drove away. I've heard a lot of stories of Guelph cops being power-trippy so I was worried that he was going to book me for something or giv e me a hard time, but this guy was really nice. I like nice surprises.      Oh, by the way, in the movie, David Bowie sounds scarily like Pierce Brosnan and is totally unrecognizable.

Tuesday, October 24, 2006 23:25:54      Hey, anyone noticed that the internet is damn slow tonight? Why? Fedora Core 6 was released today. Get your copy via torrents. The new default desktop looks purty. I'm downloading now. Hopefully I can upgrade my laptop tomorrow.      Sean's birthday today! Happy Seanday Birth!

Thursday, October 12, 2006 23:22:32      I'm playing around with using Linux as the primary OS on my laptop. Each time I've done this previously there's been a major stepping block that I couldn't get through, we'll see what happens this time. Not the point however, I stumbled upon something awesome. Lots of people probably already know this, but if you want Firefox to open a bunch of tabs on startup (Gmail, Google Calendar, and say Nasdaq FlashQuotes) open the tabs the way you want them and then go to the Edit -> Preferences or Tools -> Options window and then on the first tab, select use current pages and voila! Multiple tabs on Firefox startup. Dead sexy. Friday, October 13, 2006 08:23:55 Ian writes: Actually, Windows was easy to find. Fedora's default grub installer found it and called it Unknown. So I just needed to rename it in the /etc/grub.conf file. I do like the fact that a lot of the stupid tweaking is done automatically with these Fedora installations. Like the ZAxis thing on the mouse. All that stuff that geeks love to do hinders mass acceptance of their opertating systems. Monday, October 23, 2006 22:30:21 finnegan's dad writes: Lots of people probably already know this. ;-) I like having weather (forecastfox), 3 gmail accounts (gmail manager), gmail space and downloads (download statusbar) at the bottom. I don't need gmail in a tab. My other fav' extension is Adblock. And it's not just for ads as they say. My credit union has very annoying pictures of happy customers and slogans. I have zapped them all so I can just see my account information.

news
Sep 1 23:09
Aug 16 13:08
Aug 9 19:08
Jul 29 10:07
Jul 14 17:07
Jul 13 17:07
Jul 9 12:07
Jun 15 0:06
Jun 15 0:06
Mar 3 11:03
Feb 3 12:02
Oct 30 9:10
Aug 21 12:08
Jul 7 0:07
May 25 8:05
May 18 19:05
Apr 9 8:04
Dec 15 22:12
Nov 24 11:11
Oct 5 16:10
Oct 4 9:10
Oct 3 16:10
Sep 24 23:09
May 21 11:05
May 2 19:05
Mar 31 23:03
Mar 18 22:03
Mar 13 15:03
Feb 29 8:02
Feb 27 21:02
Feb 13 21:02
Dec 2 17:12
Nov 22 18:11
Nov 17 20:11
Nov 16 6:11
Nov 15 20:11
Nov 13 11:11
Nov 12 22:11
Nov 6 11:11
Oct 18 21:10
Oct 10 11:10
Oct 3 22:10
Mar 22 12:03
Mar 14 15:03
Feb 20 8:02
Feb 14 22:02
Feb 10 16:02
Feb 7 16:02
Feb 6 14:02
Feb 2 10:02
Jan 18 15:01
Jan 11 23:01
Jan 10 8:01
Jan 4 8:01
Jan 2 23:01
Dec 20 11:12
Dec 11 9:12
Dec 8 16:12
Nov 27 17:11
Nov 23 12:11
Nov 21 8:11
Nov 15 22:11
Nov 14 8:11
Nov 10 8:11
Nov 9 8:11
Nov 8 13:11
Nov 6 9:11
Oct 26 12:10
Oct 26 11:10
Oct 24 23:10
Oct 12 23:10
Sep 29 15:09
Sep 28 9:09
Sep 24 16:09
Sep 20 9:09
Sep 20 0:09
Sep 17 14:09
Sep 17 9:09
Sep 6 22:09
Sep 1 14:09
Aug 31 23:08
Aug 28 11:08
Aug 26 11:08
Aug 16 12:08
Jul 29 9:07
Jun 28 20:06
Jun 25 20:06
Jun 14 11:06
Jun 9 17:06
Jun 1 8:06
May 29 19:05
May 29 14:05
May 11 8:05
May 5 14:05
May 5 6:05
May 3 19:05
Apr 25 15:04
Apr 24 20:04
Apr 24 8:04
Apr 23 11:04