Yeraze's Domain 3.0

So today my new hardware arrived for my MythTV rig. I had planned on spending about two hours moving the hardware over, and have it all running just in time for another run at Nip/Tuck tonight.

So first I cracked open the nMEDIA HTPC 400BA. It’s a beautiful case, sleek black with bright blue LED’s. On the front it’s got a huge power button that looks like a stereo volume knob. It also has 4 memory card readers, 2 USB ports, a firewire port, headphone and mic jacks, and a LCD readout of temperature and fan speed (if you hook it up to your fan). It also has a DVD drive cover to maintain the “Sleek” look of the system. Inside, it’s got plenty of room for either an ATX or micro-ATX motherboard, 2 3.5″ drives and a DVD drive.

Read on inside for my notes on setting it all up…
[tag:mythtv][tag:nmedia][tag:htpc][tag:computer][tag:hardware]

This week marks Week 30 for Laura. Most couples would think “Week 30″ and go “meh” and continue with their regular routines (As regular as routines can be during a pregnancy). For us, week 30 hold special significance because Week 30 is when Rhianna was born, 10 weeks premature. We went to see Matrix Reloaded on Opening Night (May 15th according to Wikipedia), and Laura went into labor and Rhianna was born just after midnight the next day. To this day, it’s still a mystery whether it was simply destiny that she was early, the Matrix scared Laura/Rhianna into an early delivery, or some mystic combination of the “Moon Goddess” and the Lunar Eclipse. We promise we didn’t know her name meant that until after she was born.

So what are we doing differently this time around? Well, as much as we want to go see Fearless, the Protector, and Crank, we aren’t. We can’t prove that The Matrix sent Laura into labor, but we’re not gonna push our luck. Also, just as I spent a few weekends ago painting, I’ve spent recent days assembling Chester Drawers, assembling basinets, and rearranging furniture. We’ve also reclaimed alot of Rhianna’s old baby gear from my mother-in-law’s house where it had been dutifully holding down the carpet in the spare room. Things like her old bouncy seat and swing, and Laura’s rocking chair. So the house is slowly starting to look more “babyfied”.

We’re also being much more selective about names. So far we’re sticking with “Ethan”, which means “Firm, Strong“. We figure he’s got a good chance of making it full-term with a name like that. Also, Laura’s got weekly visits with the doctor and taking something called Magonate which is supposed to prevent preterm labor. Hopefully with all the attention this time, things will go smoother.

Rhianna seems to be taking it well, too. She’s excited about taking care of her baby brother, and talks about it often. Rhianna has started a new school that uses color cards for discipline (Green card means they were good, Red Card means they were bad). She frequently points at Laura’s belly and asks “Baby Brother has a red card?” As much as she seems to be enjoying it now, I hear from alot of parents that things change drastically when the new baby comes home. Hopefully Rhianna will take it well.

Between all that, cops harassing us about parking on our grass in response to the new ridiculous city ordinances, fighting off a persistant possum who keeps sneaking into our yard late at night, my sister coming by for a few days to visit, playing with my MythTV, and general home maintenance… It’s been a busy couple of months…
[tag:family][tag:clinton][tag:baby]

So a few days have gone by and I’ve been able to use the MythTV for a few little things. The case I’m using is in pretty bad shape and the CPU fans aren’t working quite right, so I’m not able to leave it running 24/7 yet. Nonetheless, I have managed to get it to do a few neat things.

The first thing was the first night I had it working, Tuesday. I configured it, via the MythWeb interface, to record Eureka at 8 and Nip/Tuck at 9. I checked it a few times during the night and it seemed to be working just fine. It recorded Eureka just fine, and while it recorded Nip/Tuck it did Commercial Flagging on Eureka. Once Nip/Tuck was done, it moved on to flagging commercials in that. I now see why people say that you need a hefty CPU for that, as it was processing roughly 30fps on my system. So essentially a 1-hour recording takes 1-hour to flag. Luckily this is optional, so I’m not too concerned about it.

The next day I powered it back up and, again via the Web Interface, opened up MythBurn. I configured it to burn the two shows onto a DVD, with Animated Menus and Chapter Menus, and let it rip. The web interface is amazingly simple. You just select a background image, music for the menu, the type of border for the images, and click “Go”. It will transcode the recordings, eliminating commercials if they’ve been flagged, and place a Chapter Marker at the beginning of every commercial break. It will also requantize the movies to make them fit on the DVD. So my 2 MPEG files which came to 4.5G were trimmed by a factor of “1.07″ to make them fit on the DVD. It’s a useless number, and computed automatically (and invisibly unless you check the logs) for you. It took approximately 2 hours to transcode the 2 hours of shows, build the menus, and create the ISO & burn it to disk. Also, since this was all done via the Web Interface I was able to check it from work by simply configuring my router to allow that traffic.

Read on for the rest…

[tag:htpc][tag:mythtv][tag:hardware][tag:linux]

So I’m still working on this MythTV rig and finally had some good success to report.

Once I found out about the PCI2.2 vs 2.1 Issue (3.3V vs 5V) I was pretty bummed out. The BP6 motherboard I’m using doesn’t supply the 3.3V, and it seemed that Hauppauge didn’t make a PVR card to work on the 5V standard anymore. Well, I dug around the net and found one report of someone adding a “3.3V Regulator” to the system and making the card work. I talked to my dad, an Electrical Engineering guru if ever there was one, and he filled me in. After looking over the card very carefully you could see on the front edge where some components, voltage regulator-type components, used to be but were not installed. Once he tested it with his multimeter a bit, he discovered that that was what used to convert the 5V down to 3.3V, but now they’ve just removed it from the circuit and use the PCI bus’s 3.3V directly. He took it home and put the voltage regulator back in and shorted out the broken connections, and viola it worked.

So with my Mythdora install I was able to get video recording perfectly. The menu’s were a bit sluggish, but the big problem was that the sound didn’t work. I got sound on MP3’s and WAV files, but all the TV audio was missing. I, of course, thought that we got just enough 3.3 to the card to get the tuner & encoder working, but not enough for the audio paths. My dad wasn’t so quick to fault his craftsmanship and suggested I look a bit harder. I must admit that I had done alot of hand tweaking with Miguel’s card that probably hosed something up.

Well, I accidentally deleted my Mythdora ISO’s so I installed an older Knoppmyth (R5C7) iso. I am happy to report that, after a surprisingly long install, it works beautifully. I was able to watch a few minutes of Family Guy on TBS with full audio and no stuttering in the video. My full TV listings were downloaded from Zap2it with no problems, and even the menus and such are faster now. It’s a complete success all around.

So where to go from here?

• Get a PVR-500, with dual tuners & encoder pathways, and perform the same Voltage Regulator mod. Hopefully this time get some pictures of it for better documentation.
• Move the whole rig into a HTPC case.
• Go live!

So maybe I’m a little overly optimistic, but I’m just excited that it finally works! MythTV 0.20 just came out recently, too, which supposedly uses OpenGL for the menus, which should make them even faster! Finally, the future’s so bright I gotta wear shades B)..
[tag:mythtv][tag:htpc][tag:pvr][tag:linux][tag:hauppauge]

It’s a long-held belief that the folks at Microsoft really don’t have the slightest idea what people want from a Browser.  Issues like CSS incompatibility, javascript incompatibilities, DOM problems, and PNG behavior have been problems for as long as I can remember.  Microsoft has repeatedly said that “people don’t care about that stuff” and gone on to develop other features that people don’t want like VBScript and ActiveX.  Even IE7 suffers from most of those problems, but is getting better bit by bit.

In my day-to-day use, the one that most commonly bites me is the PNG Transparency problem.  Like GIF, PNG supports a transparency channel so that you can have regions of an image “see-through”.  Unlike GIF, however, PNG supports a full 8-bit transparency so that you can semi-transparent regions rather than just binary transparency.  This lets you do alot of really nice effects, as well as use Antialiasing and feathering to make your images smoother.  Unfortunately, IE doesn’t support this and always places PNG’s on a solid-color background.  This makes them pretty much useless for web use unless you’re designing exclusively for FireFox, Opera and Safari.

In some work this week, tho, I found an incredible little snippet of code that actually fixes PNG Transparency in IE. That’s right, it fixes it.  It seems that in IE5.5 they added a (custom, of course) stylesheet tag for “behaviors” where you can write code to change how things behave.  I think it was meant to allow a means of embed-ing code (via “htc” files) into CSS, so you can have code attached to CSS tags instead of HTML tags.  It’s a neat idea but I’ve never seen it in use, until today.  On the WebFX Website they have an example for PNG Behavior that re-enables the expected transparency with some clever code.  It’s a fantastic hack, just drop the blank.gif and pngbehavior.htc on the server and 1 line of CSS and viola, PNG’s work on that page.

It’s as simple as adding the following to every page:

<style type="text/css">img {   behavior: url("pngbehavior.htc");}</style>

I’m using it on the stuff I’m developing now, and it makes things so much easier. 
[tag:explorer][tag:ie][tag:png][tag:code][tag:html][tag:browser]

Almost a decade ago, back at Ideal Software, a co-worker turned me on to the beauty of the Logitech Trackball. The simple grace and beauty of that simple blue trackball was only surpassed by the beauty of the MarbleFX laser-based, 4-button trackball.

I still have that MarbleFX trackball, and still love it. Unfortunately, the buttons are starting to wear out and it’s pretty badly stained from the sweat and grime of everyday use. I would love to simply replace it, but Logitech has discontinued it. They discontinued it so long ago that even EBay, purveyor of all things unwanted or discontinued, doesn’t have them anymore.

So here begins my quest: To find a new trackball. The requirements:

1. Corded – I’ld like to get one of these at work, but security does not allow cordless peripherals (So no bluetooth)
2. No thumball – Drive it with the Index finger
3. Minimum of 3 buttons, but more is better
4. (Optional) Scroll Wheel

So far, the only thing that even comes close is the Logitech Marble Mouse, but I don’t like how the ball sits perched atop in the middle. I much prefer the ergonomics of the original MarbleFX, which the Logitech Cordless Optical Trackman approaches. But, like I said earlier, cordless isn’t really an option. Any suggestions?

I’m not “locked in” to Logitech, so any vendor will suffice. I just want something high-quality, comfortable, and usable.

Update 9/18/06:
Just checked Ebay again, and now they have some MarbleFX up.  However, one is at a bidding price of $91  and the other is at a “Buy it now” of $150.  Geez…..
[tag:logitech][tag:trackball][tag:peripheral][tag:mouse]

I just found this on MySpace. (I had to include the YouTube version since the MySpace version it seems doesn’t allow embed’ing. It’s lower quality, but good enough.. The music is the important part).

I always loved Wierd Al’s stuff, and it looks like Straight Outta Lynwood is no exception. The animation adds alot to this also, thanks to Bill Plympton.
[tag:wierdal][tag:riaa][tag:music][tag:cd]
Update 9/21/06
Found another one, his cover of Ridin’ Dirty called “White and Nerdy”.
 

For the last several weeks I’ve been having alot of trouble with my RoadRunner internet access. I’ve had 2 separate technicians come out and look at it, with varied results. The first time I lost my connection entirely after several days of slow speeds, and he found a line noise problem that got it working again. The second time I had been suffering from intermittent loss of connection and slow speeds, the guy noticed that my cablemodem (Motorola Surfboard SB4100) was peaked out because of a wiring glitch across the street. That got it working again.

But just a few days after he left I started noticing problem again. As I hadn’t touched anything this time, I was a bit wary of calling him again without some more information. After some digging and diagnostics, I noticed that my Vonage was working just fine with perfect signal quality. Even the bandwidth tests performed within reasonable limits, and I was able to play CounterStrike and Day of Defeat without any trouble. The only thing that really seemed slow was browsing the web.

Then it hit me: DNS. The DNS servers seemed to be extraordinarily slow at resolving hostnames into IP addresses. As Vonage & most of these games operate primarily on pure IP addresses, they weren’t impacted. It’s really no surprise, as it’s been known for quote some time that ISP’s stink at serving DNS. So I set out to find a substitute DNS server and stumbled across OpenDNS.

OpenDNS is a free service, with some great instructions on configuration for pretty much every router on the market, to replace your ISP’s DNS. They also have a few other nifty features like they’ll automatically block resolution of known phishing site addresses, and they’ll autocorrect some common typos (the example they keep using is they’ll redirect craigslist.og to craigslist.org for you). They make their money from redirecting invalid hosts to their own internal search engine, a technique recently attempted by Verisign in the name of SiteFinder. Like SiteFinder, this service can screw up certain anti-spam measures and such by making all hostnames resolve to an IP address, but unlike SiteFinder this is opt-in instead of global mandatory (Article on Differences between SiteFinder & OpenDNS).

I’ve only been using it for a few days, but so far it seems to have fixed my problems. Web sites pull up easily 5x faster than before and everything seems more responsive. As most of my surfing is done via links & bookmarks, I haven’t run into the search page yet, and I think the anti-phishing features will be useful (if nothing else, for a warm fuzzy feeling). I’ll let ya know if anything changes.

Update 3:21pm :
One of the guys at OpenDNS was kind enough to send me a link to their blog where they detail how they’ve managed to find a way to keep their typo-fixing service from messing up anti-spam measures.  Basically it now recognizes attempts to reverse-lookup email hosts and doesn’t try to fix them anymore.  That just makes OpenDNS that much kewler.  Add to that the fact that one of their guys managed to find my blog entry here and post a comment in under 3 hours, and I think they’ve done a great job of addressing the concerns of the community and their customers.. (Are we really “customers” if it’s free?  Maybe “users” is a better word.)
[tag:opendns][tag:dns][tag:internet][tag:web]

I’ve been a fan of VI (specifically VIM) for a long time now.  It’s hard to find an editor that is as flexible and as lean as VI.  Emacs definately has it on the Flexible front, but could use alot of work on the “lean” front.  Only Microsoft Word is more bloated.

So once I discovered VIM for Windows, it became a staple of every computer I’ve ever used.  I’ve been using it at home for a few years and haven’t bothered to upgrade it.  So when 6.4 was installed here at the office (I know, 7.0 is out now but this is the government afterall) I eagerly sat about editing everything with VIM.

Unfortunately, I found myself rather confused at some of the behavior.  By default, Ctrl-V no longer does Block Selection like I’m used to, it did a standard Windows “Paste”.  Lots of other keys were remapped as well, and (probably since I do not have admin on this machine) most of my settings seemed to be forgotten from one run to the next.  After some digging, I found some solutions.  To aid others out there with similar maladies, I shall share them here:

1. To restore standard VI keybindings: 
• Inside the “C:Documents And Settingsusername” directory, you can create a file called “_vimrc”.  This serves the same purpose as the Unix “~/.vimrc” file.  By simply creating this file, you will override VI’s standard vimrc and therefore remove all the stuff that’s overwriting your keybindings.
2. To fix diff in VIM:
• By default I got an error “E97″ when attempting to use VIM’s diff functionality (from TortoiseCVS’s Diff function specifically).
• In the newly created “_vimrc” file, simply add the following:
• set diffexpr=MyDiff()
  function MyDiff()
     let opt = “”
     if &diffopt =~ “icase”
       let opt = opt . “-i “
     endif
     if &diffopt =~ “iwhite”
       let opt = opt . “-b “
     endif
     silent execute ‘!”"C:Program Files (x86)Vimvim64diff”" -a ‘ . opt . v:fname_in . ‘ ‘ . v:fname_new . ‘ > ‘ . v:fname_out
  endfunction
  
• Be sure to replace the path to vim’s diff to match your install.

Everything beyond that can be specified in the _vimrc file.  I use it to specify my shiftwidth, colorscheme, and lots more.  Hope someone out there finds this useful
[tag:vi][tag:vim][tag:software][tag:editor]

Now this is kinda silly.. But it’s my alma mater, and it is incredibly geeky.. So I feel like if I didn’t post it then I’ld be trying to deny my heritage.
Evidently during last week’s stomping by South Carolina, the Maroon Band broke out into old-school NES glory with a half-time show consisting of songs from Halo, Super Mario Brothers, and Zelda, and formations of the original NES controller and a Triforce.

Unfortunately the audio quality is atrocious in the beginning, but it’s just barely recognizable and gets alot better toward the end. It does bring back warm fuzzies memories for both the school and the games. And stuff like this has to be good for MSU’s reputation amongst high-school grads.

[tag:msu][tag:maroon][tag:music][tag:marchingband]