The Blog of Harald

I’ve been a big fan of computer automation for as long as I’ve been computing. Computers are partcularly well suited for repetitive, mundane tasks. I used to have a system set up at Alias, based on track, that would automatically keep all of the system software and configuration files up-to-date, long before HP Software bought Radia :-). My PVR is probably my current ultimate example; it automatically downloads TV listings from the source, searches those listings for my favourite shows, resolves conflicts, etc.; all without my input!

Anyway, it always surprises me when I power on an infrastructure server, and the LDAP server or Perforce server or whatever isn’t configured to start automatically! I mean really; who runs around manually starting essential services after a power outage? I thought we stopped doing that in the 1970s…

(We had to power down our labs over the weekend, because the A/C cooling tower on the roof was being refurbished. It took me all day today to get everything running properly again…)

For posterity, the resolutions and bitrates I’m now using for recording shows with the PVR-250 on my MythTV box. The “Low Quality” setting is definitely degraded, but watchable; probably because of the reduced resolution more than the reduced bitrate. The “High Quality” setting looks to be good enough for DVD transfers. “Default” produces files that are about 1.5G/hour (my old settings were producing 2.2G/hour, so this will let me record more stuff). I may change them some more, of course…

I’ve read that the audio settings don’t make any difference with the PVR-250, only the “master” bitrate. Whatever :)

zap2it decided to get out of the free TV listings business (and I’d like to thank them for maintaining free listings for as long as they did!). There’s a replacement, subscription-based service called for MythTV users Schedules Direct, but converting to it requires some database changes, which essentially meant “upgrade!”. So I did; to KnoppMyth R5F1.

This was a major upgrade; kernel 2.4 to 2.6, and MythTV from 0.16 to 0.20, so I was expecting trouble. I made a complete disk2disk copy of my PVRs harddrive, and then ran the KnoppMyth backup utilities also.

As it turns out, KnoppMyth is suprisingly easy to upgrade. All of my important settings were copied over intact, and the box did sort of work after the reboots. However, I had to do a number of things manually:

• convert my tv listings source from zap2it to schedulesdirect. Unfortunately, this required re-building MythTV from source, which took all day.
• Recompile the kernel without the vesafb driver (which I remembered thanks to my old posting: PVR 250 and MythTV)
• get my Matrox G400 tv-out working, which was basically copy over my old scripts that would sync the framebuffers and adjust the video output
• fix the audio volumes, again
• rebuild the lirc modules, since the kernel source I grabbed from mysettopbox.tv didn’t have these modules already

That was about it. It dig take all day (kernel and myth rebuilds are slow on a PIII-933), but the box seems to be working ok; playback of TV and DivX works, I can record TV shows, and (the reason for the upgrade!) I have TV listings again…

One issue: the console is totally useless until X starts; something is setting the framebuffer to a very strange mode. That’s a problem for another day…

The house of the future: complete computer control.

The House of the Future: Complete Computer Control

As Don Sheppard punches his special code into the electronic keypad at the entryway, a monotone computer voice says, “Welcome-home-Don-come-rightin.’ The front door then glides open.

This is from a 1983 issue of Creative Computing. It amuses me that the “House of the Future” articles haven’t changed all that much since then. The technology has improved (Insteon by SmartLabs is pretty cool) but it’s still to expensive (and too geeky) for the average home buyer. Because retrofits are so hard (and labour intensive == expensive), this stuff is best installed by the homebuilders, but there’s no demand…

From BPS RESEARCH DIGEST: Do young children understand irony?

Some children as young as six already understand the idea that people make sarcastic remarks, saying one thing but meaning another, according to psychologists Penny Pexman and Melanie Glenwright.

The children found ironic criticisms – such as “that was great play” – easier to understand than ironic compliments. A grasp of the speaker’s true belief emerged first, then an understanding of the speaker’s attitude and intention to tease tended to emerge together, usually in the older children.

My kids are already experimenting with dishing out sarcasm…

you have nothing to lose but your germs!

‘Waving’ Goodbye to a Kitchen Hazard

A team of University of Florida Engineering researchers have come to the conclusion that microwaving plastic scrubbers and kitchen sponges on full power can destroy practically 100% of the bacteria and viruses, parasites or spores collected on them.

(via diane duane)

The map itself is cool, but so is the method used to create it; check it out!

xkcd – map of the internet

EO Newsroom: New Images – United States Population Density

This image also has Canadian population density information on it. It’s a very cool looking visualization; check it out.

Apparently it will be 12 years, 74 days until we have a functioning Space Elevator. Once it’s economical to get to earth orbit, any number of things are possible!

Since I mentioned it last week, I should also mention documentation for child restraint use. The news page references a recent paper proving that child booster seats are 59% safer than seatbelts alone…

Keeping kids safe during car crashes: every child a safe ride | Partners for Child Passenger Safety – Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

I guess as a parent the bottom line is: for $80, why take chances?

So it may not be as cut and dried as everyone thinks; car seats (over age 2) may not actually make any difference. Good luck finding a politician who is against car seat and booster seat legislation, though; that would be political suicide. Proving once again that government often doesn’t work in our best interests? (There have been other examples of dumb gov’t safety laws recently, based on zero real deaths or injuries; I’ll see if I can dig some of them out of my memory).

The Seat-Belt Solution – New York Times

Perhaps the single most compelling statistic about car seats in the NHTSA manual was this one: ‘‘They are 54 percent effective in reducing deaths for children ages 1 to 4 in passenger cars.’‘

But 54 percent effective compared with what? The answer, it turns out, is this: Compared with a child’s riding completely unrestrained. There is another mode of restraint, meanwhile, that doesn’t cost $200 or require a four-day course to master: seat belts.

Even a quick look at the FARS data reveals a striking result: among children 2 and older, the death rate is no lower for those traveling in any kind of car seat than for those wearing seat belts. There are many reasons, of course, that this raw data might be misleading. Perhaps kids in car seats are, on average, in worse wrecks. Or maybe their parents drive smaller cars, which might provide less protection.

But no matter what you control for in the FARS data, the results don’t change. In recent crashes and old ones, in big vehicles and small, in one-car crashes and multiple-vehicle crashes, there is no evidence that car seats do a better job than seat belts in saving the lives of children older than 2. (In certain kinds of crashes — rear-enders, for instance — car seats actually perform worse.) The real answer to why child auto fatalities have been falling seems to be that more and more children are restrained in some way. Many of them happen to be restrained in car seats, since that is what the government mandates, but if the government instead mandated proper seat-belt use for children, they would likely do just as well / without the layers of expense, regulation and anxiety associated with car seats.

Followup material can be found at Freakonomics

Apparently, American Pizza Boxes are Teflon coated

The Straight Dope: Why does the shower curtain blow up and in instead of down and out?

I always thought it was convection; hot air rising out the top of the shower stall sucks the curtain in. But it turns out that cold showers do the same thing, thanks to the Coanda effect.

You learn something new every day :-)

Ubuntu is cool; a Debian-based linux distribution that is more up-to-date than debian-stable (which is getting quite long in the tooth), but not as cutting edge as debian-unstable. I upgraded my hybrid stable / backports.org box earlier this week; the upgrade was completely painless, other than some confusion over which modules needed to be loaded at startup. Even my bizarre printer setup (I have a USB- based HP photosmart printer) survived the upgrade!

The new box is current enough to run Azureus without having to jump through hoops to upgrade the graphics libraries to the minumum required by SWT.

I was about to throw in the towel and go back to the RedHat (well, Fedora Core) distribution. I’m glad I didn’t have to :-)

chk@mythtv:~ $ uptime
20:46:42 up 22 days, 11:29, 2 users, load average: 0.69, 0.71, 0.75

I’m very happy with the box so far. It’s nice not having to change VCR tapes all the time; it’s really nice being able to watch one program while taping another. The P933 in combination with the PCR-250 is more than enough horsepower, except when I want to convert a file to XviD for archival purposes, and I can just leave that running overnight…

Our refurbished computer outlet has some nicely configured 1GHz mini-tower PCs for cheap; I think I’ll pick one of those up to build the permanent MythTV box, so that I can have my Windows desktop back. After Andrew’s party, though; I don’t have time before then :-)

(update) I was just over at a friends weblog, and saw a mention of Chef!, a Lenny Henry sitcom from the early ’90s. A couple of clicks later, and I’m recording upcoming episodes!

At this rate, I’m going to need a larger harddrive…

For the Star Trek Geeks in the crowd:

Gizmodo : Bluetooth Star Trek Communicator

Best Buy is having a sale on TV-in cards this week, so I stepped up my PVR research. In the process, I discovered that my old Baltimore Dell box has a TV-out capable video card (a G400), and I even have the magic breakout cable! A quick hardware swap and a test, and I’m left with one fewer item to purchase. Of course I still need a large drive, but they’re cheap. And LG DVD burners are on sale, so I should probably pick one up too. And I don’t really want to string network cable, so add a wireless network card. And while I’m at it, I should probably put the DVD burner in an external USB box, so that I can attach it to other machines. And in the meantime, I need a new desktop to replace the one I’m stealing for the PVR…

Technology. Ain’t it fun?

Scientists find coffee really is addictive

Don’t be surprised if missing that cup of morning coffee gives you a headache or makes it difficult to concentrate at work. It’s all part of caffeine withdrawal, say Johns Hopkins University researchers who released a study that could result in the official classification of the condition as a mental disorder.

This isn’t news; everyone I know already knows about caffeine withdrawl headaches, and I know of several hospitals that now give patients caffeine either right before or right after surgery, to prevent withdrawl symptoms from interfering with their post-op recovery…

These days it is stories like these that keep me awake at night.

• China – An Energy Timebomb?
• Basic Choices and Constraints on Long−Term Energy Supplies

Basically: We’ll run out of oil in my lifetime; long before that, it will be expensive, and then rationed. Alternative sources simply can’t fill the gap; we do not have the capability to replace just our electricity needs with renewable energy, never mind our other energy needs. Even if North America switched to nuclear power, we’d run out of fuel in 35-58 years, a mere band-aid for the problem.

Meanwhile, SUVs are the fastest growing market segment in China, and GM is actively marketing them.

I haven’t the faintest idea what we’re going to do about this looming crisis; I do know that our current technique (hiding our heads in the sand) isn’t going to cut it.

Yuck!

Yahoo! News – Kids Plus Rocks Equals 120,000 Angry Bees

Reminds me of watching The Swarm when I was a kid. Not so amusing is that African “killer” bees are slowly moving north across the USA, and interbreeding with our European honey bees…