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Where's My Dog? Thursday, November 15, 2007 20:06:02 Have you seen my dog? Apparently she's been kidnapped... by the neighbours. And she's only worth $39.26 which has to be the most random ransom ever. I think Cricket's worth it though so I guess we'll have to pay. Anyone know anyone who can help us with a sting operation?

Dell listens... slowly Tuesday, November 13, 2007 11:08:11 I was just flipping through the hourly Dell flyer they send me and I noticed something interesting. On page 3, they made a point of saying; Every VOSTRO comes complete with: No trial software. Customers said they hated trial software, so we took it away. VOSTRO PCs come without annoying trial software. You only get what you choose. Finally! You know there are actually programs out there to de-Dell your computer like PC De-Crapifier which only exist because this has been such a huge problem for years. Just Google remove dell software and you'll get 8.7 million matches. It amazes me that it's taken them this long to react to that much backlash to the crap, but I guess they must be flushing some serious kickbacks away. Norton and the like will have to flog their wares elsewhere I guess. Personally I'm of the opinion that anything you need to have on a computer you can get for free. For example... You need virus protection, so you get AVG Free from Grisoft. You need word processor, spreadsheet, etc.. so you get OpenOffice or use Google Docs & Spreadsheets online. You need email and a web browser, so pick up Thunderbird and Firefox or use Gmail with Firefox or now you can use Gmail with Thunderbird via IMAP. You already spent your cash on a fancy PC, view a little advertising and support the open source community for your ware.

This weekend was Legen... wait for it Monday, November 12, 2007 22:10:36 So I had a very nice weekend. You know how everyone's going on all the time about how they relax on the weekend and stuff. Well usually I do my best to do so too but I'll do things like clean or fly plane so I don't feel like I did nothing, I feel like I did something. This weekend was like those old camping weekends of yore. Adrienne's Phil invited me to come up to his uncle Bill's cottage with his fishing buddies Newfie Jamie, Scott and Steve. I packed my gear up and drove up here. Buckskin Lake So I caught my first rainbow trout right off the dock with a sinker and a worm. Pretty awesome idn't it? My Rainbow Trout Jamie also taught us the most brilliant trout frying method ever. Once you've cleaned the fishes, roll them in flour to absorb any excess slime. Start heating up a buncha butter in the frying pan and then pitch the fish in. Once they start to sizzle a little bit add some water to a little less than half way up the fish. This will keep them nice and moist. Keep a close eye on them and flip once you feel it's time. On the second side, you may want to cover the pan to keep the top warm and moist. Uncover and eat 'em up! Our cleaned catch Frying fishes ...dary!

Upgraded to Firefox 3.0 Alpha Tuesday, November 6, 2007 11:04:13 I've been having a weird problem with Firefox lately, I've been told it's some kind of memory leak which is causing it to chew up massive amounts of RAM and I wouldn't care except as the day goes on it's taking more and more time for me to open a new tab, which I do constantly. I read somewhere that someone worked around this by using Firefox 3.0 which is still in the alpha stage. I figured, worst-case scenario I have to re-install the old version. So I installed the new one from http://www.mozilla.org/projects/minefield/ and my problem was instantly solved. They've changed the database that stores the history and stuff to use SQLite so the list is populated a whole lot quicker when you start typing in a URL. One feature that I really like is that when you start typing something into the address bar, it shows you the most visited URL that matches the text you type. So I was accessing my private wiki at http://blah.blah.com/wiki and now I just go to the location bar and type in wiki and then press the down arrow and press enter to get there. It's pretty sweet. My dictionaries and plugins weren't working because they weren't designed for this version so I asked online so see if I could replace them or something and someone told me to go to about:config and then create two boolean values; extensions.checkCompatibility and extensions.checkUpdateSecurity and set them both to false. Once I'd done that, my Canadian English dictionary for spell checking and the Firebug plugin both worked after restarting Firefox. Here's hoping that living on the bleeding edge is all it's cracked up to be.

Seriously Wednesday, October 3, 2007 22:06:05 à la Daily WTF... Robin found this on the scissor lift he was operating... good advice.. I found it very confusing when shopping for a new blackberry plan... I also found this documentation quite useful... way better than those documentations on tape... I can feel my creative juices coming back to life. It's been a long summer.

Love for Gmail is not Immediate Thursday, March 22, 2007 12:48:36 I've been using Gmail exclusively for well over a year now and I have been promoting it since the first month of use. I think it's that first month that people need to get through before they're happy with it. I'm in the process of moving all of the email services that I've been managing for the last few years off of my server and into Google Applications for Domains services. It's a completely simple task and it makes a lot of sense for me because there's one less thing to manage at the drop of a hat. It's still going to be there, but now if it's down, it's not mission critical. Also, for those checking email from home, it takes no bandwidth from here, it's between you and your local Gmail server. Your computer could die, you could just be booted into a different operating system, but either way all of your data's stored outside of your computer and you become impermeable to system failure. No more waiting for the IT guy who is too busy to breathe to fix you up. People resist change, but once you're into Gmail, your life will be forever changed for the better. The problem is, getting to that point takes time. For most people it takes about a month. The problem with my current scenario at the office is that I'm forcing people to get in the Gmail spirit. Whether they like it or not. That's not an easy buy in, but some people are very accommodating, seeking the new knowledge, some people love to bitch and complain about it, which is not met by kind and loving ears by myself. You think I want this hassle? You think I'm doing this for fun? Fuck no! I'm doing it because this is better and it's happening because one day your computer will die or you'll be working from home and you'll want to check your mail to get that joke that your uncle Larry sent you at work, or you'll want to check your 50 calendars to confirm that you don't have any conflicts... then you'll get it and you'll regret being all pissy at me because I'm making you learn something. I could never be a teacher. I don't have the patience or the tolerance for people to teach. Some people say I'm a good teacher, but I guess those people see me on good days and don't ask questions that I haven't already answered. Oh, and for the record, I found a solution to a problem that I couldn't find earlier... To export an Outlook distribution list into a Gmail contact group is actually a quick and easy process. 1. Double click on the distribution list so it pops up in Outlook, click File -> Save As and save it as text. 2. Open your text file in Excel, and then change the top row to Name and Email Address for the first two fields. Delete the rows in between the top row and the first contact and then save the file over top of the other one. 3. Open Gmail, click Contacts, then Import in the top right. In the pop-up browse for the text file and then Import Contacts. Once imported open both your All Contacts list and in the background, your Excel with that same distribution list still open. 4. Scroll down your contact list, checking off all of the names which are to be on your Google Group using your Excel then in the drop down box at the top, add to new Group.

A Vista Tip Wednesday, March 14, 2007 15:34:45      So I've been using Windows Vista since the weekend and so far, I'm not all that impressed. It's still got quite a few bugs that should have been figured out before they released it. For example the Windows Sidebar is a CPU hog when those applications shouldn't be doing anything and today's miraculous discovery that the start menu runs incredibly slow unless you remove the check in the box for "Highlight newly installed programs". Fortunately for me, I know how to use Google so I've been able to track these issues down and fix them up. The main reason I wanted to try Vista is because of this ReadyBoost feature that I read about. Basically it allows you to throw any extra memory chip into your machine and use it as more RAM. When I'm running a bunch of memory pigs at once, it would be nice to have more RAM and $60 for 2GB of Secure Digital media to add to my 1GB of RAM sounds better than $3000 for 4GB of high-speed dual channel laptop RAM.      So psyched about St. Patrick's day! Our celebration was almost cancelled because Brianne's grandmother's birthday is on the 19th. (Un)fortunately, Brianne's uncle is under the weather and their house isn't ready to have guests in it yet so the birthday bash was bumped to the following week and our St. Patrick's day celebration is back on. We're going to have some people over and do that old partying thing.      Another one... All day long my computer's been running really slow online, so I looked it up, yet another Vista feature. I had to run "netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=disabled" from a command prompt running as Administrator to make TCP stack go away. It was running like I had an MTU issue where small sites would come through instantly but anything big would just time out. All fixed, back to the races.

MythTV Problem Solving Causes More Work Tuesday, February 20, 2007 08:50:12      Okay, this is the first techie note I'm writing on my site that will be syndicated to facebook. This happens every once in a while where I go through the process of doing something and want to record my steps for later. So for all of you facebook peoples who have clicked on this, I can assure you now that you'll have no interest in this, but happy Fat Tuesday!      And now on with the geekyness... I've been having a problem on my MythTV backends where it will record and then the ivtv driver which controls the encoder cards complains a lot that it has to drop MPEG data. Originally I chased down ivtv versions for newer ones which might fix this issue, but it appears that the whole thing is MythTV's problem. When a recording happens the database updates that need to be done are being done in the same thread as the recordings. Since my master backend isn't a $10,000 server, it takes time to return from those updates and while it's returning, it doesn't record the stream from the encoder and you end up with blocky and gross looking video for the first couple seconds of a show. (Typically you only catch the punch line of the joke before the credits, which is highly annoying.)      Fortunately a patch exists to fix all of the problems, unfortunately the MythTV developers don't think that this is a big problem so they won't roll that patch into the main distribution. That means that if you're suffering from this problem, you have to compile your own MythTV. Which sucks for those of us running more than one computer on the network because they all have to be the same version.      So, if you're hell bent on solving this issue here's the steps that worked for me. First, we update the dependencies from packages because it's quicker and easier than compiling everything... # yum update lame -y # yum install lame-devel qt-devel libXv-devel libXxf86vm-devel libXmu-devel -y Now that will bring your lame up to the latest and install the latest libraries so that you can compile against them. If you've followed Jarod Wilson's Fedora Howto you'll already have atrpms and freshrpms set up so this will just work for you. Now you need the mythtv sources and then you need to compile them which will take a while. You may find that you need to reboot after you've installed those packages. It seems the include path for qt isn't found on some systems during the mythtv compile unless I do. # cd /usr/src # svn co http://svn.mythtv.org/svn/trunk/mythtv mythtv # cd mythtv # wget -O asyncdb.12694.patch \ "http://svn.mythtv.org/trac/attachment/ticket/1660/asyncdb.12694.patch?format=raw" # patch -p0 < asyncdb.12694.patch # ./configure # make # make install Once that's all built and installed you'll have to remove the myth packages that you have installed and then run the new binaries that you've built. If these instructions are updated, they'll be available here. Sunday, February 25, 2007 09:19:34 Ian writes: Once mythtv's installed you may need to link the libraries so that everything works happily. I did that by creating /etc/ld.so.conf.d/mythtv-i386.conf and I put this in it: /usr/local/lib /usr/local/lib/mythtv/filters Then if you want mythbackend to start up automagically... # cp /usr/src/mythtv/contrib/etc.rc.d.init.d.mythbackend \ /etc/rc.d/init.d/mythbackend # cp /usr/src/mythtv/contrib/etc.sysconfig.mythbackend \ /etc/sysconfig/mythbackend # /sbin/chkconfig --add mythbackend # /sbin/chkconfig mythbackend on Sunday, February 25, 2007 10:17:39 Ian writes: Now, for mythplugins to work, you need to update some dependencies and install whatever else is missing: # yum update lirc lirc-devel lirc-lib-devel alsa-lib libgcrypt -y # yum install kdevelop libtiff-devel libmad-devel libid3tag-devel \ flac-devel libcdaudio-devel cdparanoia-devel -y Then download and compile it... # cd /usr/src # svn co http://svn.mythtv.org/svn/trunk/mythplugins mythplugins # cd mythplugins # ./configure # make # make install If you want to install the scripts so that the mythvideo metadata fetching works... # mkdir -p /usr/share/mythtv/mythvideo/scripts # rsync -av /usr/src/mythplugins/mythvideo/mythvideo/scripts/ /usr/share/mythtv/mythvideo/scripts/ Sunday, February 25, 2007 11:57:38 Ian writes: There's a problem with the video4linux kernel module for 2.6.19 and 2.6.18 and when you install the rpm from atrpms with yum it works immediately, but not on a reboot. Your PC will sit at "Starting udev: " and then after a while it will say something about going to runlevel 5 and then you'll be stuck at a login prompt which instead of saying your hostname will say "(None)". If you're already at that point, boot to your Fedora Core CD/DVD and type "linux rescue" at the prompt and then don't bring up your network interfaces. Once the system's loaded type "chroot /mnt/sysimage" as instructed and then "ifup eth0". Then you can follow the second and third steps below so that your system will boot properly again. If you weren't stuck with that already and you want to make your PVR-350 work with video out, you have to steal that saa7127 module which is missing. You could rebuild your kernel, but it's pretty quick to steal it from the atrpms package. So my work-around is as follows... Start by downloading the rpm normally, then taking all the file that we need from that archive and putting them in our kernel directory. Then we remove that package and reboot. # yum install video4linux-kmdl-`uname -r` -y # cp /lib/modules/2.6.19-1.2911.fc6/updates/drivers/media/video/saa7127.ko \ /lib/modules/2.6.19-1.2911.fc6/kernel/drivers/media/video/ # yum remove video4linux-kmdl-`uname -r` -y

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