The Blog of Harald

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…

So I bought the “PVR-250”:http://www.hauppauge.com/html/wintvpvr250_datasheet.htm (on sale at “Best Buy”:http://www.bestbuy.ca/” :-), and slapped it into my P933 to play. The install was easy, and the hardware looks nicely designed. But the software that comes with the card sucks. I don’t know how hardware guys manage so consistently to ship their products with truly crappy software. Simple stuff like you can’t tab between fields, if you set a record time before you change the date the time quietly resets itself (because you can’t record in the past, I guess), and so on. It’s very _pretty_ though; if they had put all that skinning effort into usability…

Anyway, that’s not important, since I also downloaded “KnoppMyth”:http://www.mysettopbox.tv/knoppmyth.html in order to try out “MythTV”:http://www.mythtv.org/. I picked KnoppMyth figuring that I could find out if it worked and I liked the system, and then I could build from scratch if necessary later on. I’m glad I did; building a MythTV system from scratch is not for the faint of heart (and this from me, who likes tinkering with Linux :-).

First problem was getting the “TV-Out on my Matrox G400 to work properly”:http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/dev/2993#2993. After several tries with various different X drivers and configurations, I finally discovered the real problem: the KnoppMyth kernel comes with the vesafb framebuffer driver compiled in, so my Matrox G400 modules were never getting loaded. One kernel rebuild (and several hours) later, I had TV out.

The next problem was the network. My on-the-motherboard, Intel-based network interface (from the 82801 chipset?) kept “freezing”, with a timeout: “eth0: wait_for_cmd_done timeout!”. Lots of googling revealed that this is a known problem that apparently still hasn’t been fixed. Fortunately, There is an “Intel provided e100 driver”:http://downloadfinder.intel.com/scripts-df/Detail_Desc.asp?ProductID=61&DwnldID=2896 that supports this chipset, and _that_ one works. Download, build the module, and install.

Next was sound. After every reboot, the audio out would be muted, and I would have to login remotely and use alsamixer to manually unmute the Headphone audio out and then pump the volume up. Again, it turns out that this a known problem, and that the usual fix (alsactl save/alsactl restore) doesn’t work, because the ALSA software doesn’t save information about the Headphone output? Strange, but one again I found a workaround. Running

/usr/bin/amixer sset Headphone unmute 100

would unmute the Headphone output and set the volume to max; I stuck this in /etc/init.d/local so that it would run on every reboot.

Finally, the machine kept crashing with out-of-memory errors. I never did figure this one out, because I made two changes at the same time. I downloaded and installed the “latest ivtv drivers”:http://67.18.1.101/~ckennedy/ivtv/, and I also discovered that the MythTV cache file I had configured was larger than the cache filesystem (this would cause mmap() based access to fail with the aforementioned out of memory errors :-). I’m not sure which fixed the problem, but the box has been up and recording for a week now with no problems.

Now to figure out all of this transcoding stuff…

(Oh ya, and Richard Dean Anderson was very young when MacGyver was produced :-)

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?

I’ve been trying to merge a series of changes from the mainline to the bugs branch all week. But every time I get into the flow, some critical interrupts would arrive. Even working from home didn’t help; the phone rang off the hook all day. (I’ve got two children in school nearby, so I can’t just turn off the ringers, alas). I’ve had to drop and restart the task so many times that it got completely befuddled, to the point where I realized this afternoon that I had to start over. On the plus side, I know what I need to do now, so it won’t take me another entire week… unless more interrupts show up!

I’m glad I’ve got two other team members now; at least _they_ are working on long-term projects, and are able to concentrate on one thing at a time. Without that, I don’t think we’d be making any progress at all…

I remember being skeptical a few years ago when I heard about the technology, but it sure has taken off!

I missed the season premiere of “Joan of Arcadia”:http://www.tvtome.com/JoanofArcadia/. I fumbled the VCR programming and taped from 7:59 until 8:01. (Note to self: build “MythTV”:http://www.mythtv.org/ based Media PC ;-).

Prompted by a “recent entry”:http://rae.tnir.org/archives/000671.html on “Reid’s blog”:http://rae.tnir.org/, I “seached the web”:http://www.google.com/search?q=arcadia+bittorrent, “found a torrent”:http://torrent.youceff.com/download.php?cat=107&ref=0&subref=4, downloaded “Azureus”:http://azureus.sourceforge.net/, and about 2 hours later had a copy of the episode on my disk. In testing, I found that I had to find a copy of a “XviD binary”:http://www.xvid.org/, which was also straightforward (thanks to Google :-). We plan to watch the episode after the kids go to bed tonight.

There are days when I say “I hate computers”, but today has been a good day for technology!

There was a “major accident on the 401”:http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national/2004/09/29/hwy_crash040929.html this morning. Two trucks collided, and one caught fire. The cleanup closed the express lanes in both direction through Yonge Street during the morning rush hour; traffic was backed up all over the city as a result. (The westbound collectors are under construction through that section, so the highway went from 5 lanes to only 1 through that stretch, if I remember correctly). Worse, the fire damaged the roadbed in the westbound lanes, which means it’ll be a while before they can re-open them. I suppose it’s possible that the fire damaged the underlying bridge structure, in which case we’re completely hosed…

Anyway, I don’t drive the 401 (although I cross over it every day; that was a bizarre sight). However, there was a huge traffic backup across the bottom of the city this morning too; the Gardiner Expressway / DVP were stop and go from about Gerrard all the way across to _Islington_. Apparently our traffic network is so overloaded that a 401 closure causes backups on the other side of the city…

My son has a homework assignment. He has to read, for at least 20 minutes a day, with an adult supervising him. Which means that I get to read for the same amount of time! Yay; I’m finally starting to catch up on a way-too-tall pile of unread books…

I’m down to only 54 unread items in SharpReader…

Explanation: I leave things “unread” until I have a chance to do something with them; add to del.icio.us or bookmark4u; blog; e-mail to friends; read in depth; whatever’s required. Things tend to come in faster than I can deal with them at times, so I’ve been discarding stuff in the “interesting, but I’ll never have time to read it” category…

I’ve been paying a lot more attention to Hurricanes all of a sudden. I could claim it’s because of the upcoming Kitefest (we were worried about getting rained out, but it seems Ivan is going to stall in the Appalachians and leave us alone), but I think it’s simple fascination.

But for some reason, I’ve got a Tragically Hip song stuck in my head…

My son has spent 5 hours in the last two nights doing about an hour’s worth of homework. It’s not because he’s struggling with the material, it’s because it seems he can’t pay attention to it for more than 5 seconds at a time. Argh!

I hope the whole year isn’t going to be like this…

Back to school, although today was just a two hour “meet the teachers” session. Both kids and adults had lots of fun reacquainting after the summer break.

Lots of people we talked to had hurricane experiences, either Frances or Charlie. We got off easy compared to some :).

Mission Space was a much better ride than Frances …

That’s the first time _ever_ I’ve had to remove my belt to get through the airport security checkpoint. My wife had to take her shoes off!

Keep in mind, when reading this, that I have travelled in Europe during their anti-terrorism crackdowns; there’s no comparison. The United States is more interested in the appearance of security. For example, I watched two separate TSA agents walk into the bathroom, look at an “abandoned” suitcase sitting there, and walk out again…

Anyway, we’re home, safe and sound. It’s too bad we didn’t get to see the VAB _before_ Frances punched great big holes in it…

The north eyewall (what’s left of it) is less than 40 miles south of us, according to Channel 13’s spiffy doppler radar. The storm has lost quite a bit of strength; it’s impressive out there, but no flying alligators yet!

The big hassle with this storm is its size; we’ve been under it for over 18 hours now, and it’ll be at least another 18 before it calms down enough for emergency crews to start opening everything up again. Fortunately we have power, and Footloose is on VH1 right now :-)

So I’m staring out the window at rain falling at 45° and the trees starting to lean over… Part of me wishes Frances would just _get_ here already; the suspense is wearing. It was supposed to arrive Friday, then Saturday, now Sunday early morning.

Our hotel is open, and packed with people who have fled their homes, both from Orlando and farther east. We still have power; we’ll see how long it lasts, as they’re predicting that most of Florida will be darkened by this storm. The hotel is currently planning a curfew at 10PM tonight, until at least 10AM tomorrow. But the storm has stalled, so I’m not sure if they’ll change those times.

On the plus side, the storm track has moved; we’re no longer centered in her sights :). The hurricane is predicted to move across Florida and keep going west. That means that there is _some_ chance that our airplane will actually leave Toronto on Monday, so that we can go home again!

I haven’t even gone on vacation yet, and I already have almost 1000 unread items in my RSS reader. This feels just like the early days of the death of Usenet, when there was simply too much to read (and the signal to noise ratio was dropping with every new message, but that’s another rant).

I just dropped about a dozen feeds; mainly mainstream stuff like Engadget and Gizmodo and a few news sources. They were interesting, but ultimately too much work to read. (Since when did reading blogs become _work_, anyway?). The _really_ interesting stuff gets forwarded to me by other people, or referenced in other weblogs, so I usually see it anyway.

That takes me down to 500 unreads… maybe I’ll drop the cesspool that is /. while I’m at it :-)

So after looking at “the mail I accidentally misfiled”:http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/archives/2004/08/16/oops/ there were, in fact, about 150 spam (almost 50%).

pobox.com has completely revamped their spam filtering service since I last looked; I can now monitor rejections, forward messages to myself, and add whitelist entries, all through a fairly simple interface. I’ve switched it on; so far one spam has gotten through, with no false positives…

Very strange.

I just came back from a weekend of camping to find one new message in my inbox, and zero messages in my spam and spamMaybe boxes.

I’ve checked all the logs, and everything _seems_ to be working properly…

It is very easy to setup a self-contained network, with a Domain Controller, using Active Directory. Too easy, in fact; I’m on my third attempt :-).

I’m using cloned hard disk images under Microsoft Virtual PC, which caused my latest problem; Active Directory let me register a computer in the domain with the same name as the domain controller. Needless to say, _nothing_ worked after that. The reason this happened was because I tried to rename the image _and_ join the domain at the same time; Windows 2000 apparently joins the domain _first_, then attempts to rename the computer. This surprised me :-)

Fortunately, I had a master disk image, so it was trivial to restart from a fresh install and rebuild the domain controller (which, thanks to Microsoft’s wizards, is easy). But then I had to rebuild the two child domain controllers, since they refused to “demote” themselves when the domain master was unavailable.

Sadly, all of this is _time consuming_, even when the host is a P4 2.8 with 1Gb of memory and oodles of disk bandwidth…

I derive a certain perverse pleasure from watching the weather forecast for eastern Ontario changing every 12 hours. Apparently nobody can predict where those two hurricanes are going to go next :-)