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Flinging Things into Dumpsters Friday, December 8, 2006 16:26:18 The power supply died in my asterisk box today, so after I replaced it, I took it upon myself to get rid of it... permanently. You can't see the dumptser in the video, but I got it in.

MythTV Frustrations Monday, November 27, 2006 17:03:30      I've figured out the method to the madness that is deleting recordings with MythTV with MythWeb when you have 800 of them. The trick is to open a "tail -f /var/log/mythtv/mythbackend.log" and have it running in the background. Then click Delete or Delete + Re-record and press OK. The important thing to do is to wait until the log shows the "Sheduled #### items in blah seconds... " once that's done, then you can delete the next one. If you try before then it all goes to crap.      Speaking of crap, I moved into my new office yesterday. I need a new wall and a desk and stuff, but I figured now is as good of a time as any. Yeah, now would be fine except the new girl who sits nearby has a radio tuned to that Toronto station that plays Christmas carols for two months before Christmas. I flexed my power and promptly got a new pair of headphones to get through the time without a sound dampening wall.      One major positive of the move is that they all leave at 16:00 over here, so I only have to wait until 4pm to crank it up.

Thursday, November 23, 2006 12:24:53      Have you watched any of this Planet Earth series by the BBC? It's full of the most amazing footage. CBC Newsworld ran the first five episodes near the end of the summer, and we thought that was it, but Greg was looking around online and found out that there's eleven in total. I shot off a quick email to the CBC and then got a prompt reply telling me that the full 11 episode series will be aired in 2007, starting January 18th on CBC Newsworld. Very cool. I'm sure if you really want to see it before then though, you could download one of the torrents as BBC is airing the whole series now.      In my own documentary making, I caught a mouse today. He's been hanging out under the receptionist's desk lately and as I walked in the door I was told. So, being the experienced mouse catcher that I am, I cornered him, and chased him into a box. I let him go outside in a field, where I'm sure he'll live happily ever after. Saturday, December 09, 2006 22:36:12 finnegan's dad writes: ...or make some fox, cat, or hawk a nice "happy" meal.

Tuesday, November 21, 2006 08:28:39 Error, ../../images/kramer.jpg not found     The media is all buzzing about Michael Richards and his racist ranting. Watch the video (due to the offencive nature of the clip, you'll need a YouTube account)      I think racism and religion have become the last real taboos. If he had attacked their sexuality like most comedians do to hecklers, no one would have said anything. I think the last show I was at a young woman who wouldn't shut her pie whole was called something along the lines of an "irritating twat" and no one booed and left the room because of that. Most people were just shocked and so was the young woman who proceeded to shut up and let the comedian perform.      That is one thing that I've learned over the years, if you're going to a comedy show; speak only when spoken to, and even then you may be the target of a few jokes. If you speak out of turn, the jokes turn ugly. In Michael Richards' case, I think he was a little too stressed that night and went down the wrong path with his attack.      I'm not sure if any studios would touch him now. Like one of the YouTube comments says, "I hope he has enough money to retire."

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...

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