Computers: November 2005 Archives

In the mood for inflicting pain on myself, I decided to upgrade my perfectly functioning MythTV machine, which was running Ubuntu 5.04 (Hoary), and upgrade it to Ubuntu 5.10, the Breezy Badger. I didn't have any really good reason to attempt this upgrade, except for a morbid curiosity as to how it would work. Or not work, as the case may be. After performing the upgrade, it seems like apt decided to wipe out all of the MythTV packages, instead of upgrading them to the newest version.

After re-installing these packages, I found:

1. The mythbackend process could no longer login to the MySQL database,
2. The ivtv drivers for my Hauppauge PVR-250 TV capture card were not included in the new 2.6.12 kernel,
3. The IR drivers for the remote control of the PVR-250 were not included in the new kernel, and
4. The "mythtv-themes" package doesn't appear to be in any of the official Ubuntu repositories, rendering the mythtv-setup and mythfrontend programs un-runnable.

So, as it turns out, I spent about 20 minutes doing the upgrading, and about two hours hacking my way through the aftermath, getting the machine to a state comparable with where it was when I started. And it was all finished in time to record the NBC Nightly News, as it does at 5:30 every day.

Fun!

-Andy.

So, ever since I bought my new iMac, this has brought "computer buying frenzy" to Sunnyvale. Kevin has upped the ante by purchasing two machines -- an iMac (for GarageBand), and a Sony of his owny (for Linux, Apache, and MythTV). The iMac hasn't arrived from Apple yet, so Kevin scooped up the Sony VGC-RC110G today, to start playing with that first:

In the Reitz family tradition, I made him take the machine apart before anything else happened with it. One of the reasons why Kevin chose this particular machine is because it is supposedly very quiet. Taking a look inside, this could certainly be the case. The 400W power supply has quite a large fan in it, which hopefully will spin at a lower RPM. The video card doesn't has only a heat sink (no fan), and the CPU has a heat pipe (potentially water cooled) combined with the biggest heatsink that I have ever seen (and I've seen the inside of the PowerMac G5). Sitting beside the heatsink is an even larger fan that what is in the power supply.

So, there is every possibility that this could be one quiet machine. I don't think it will be quieter than my iMac, but it will certainly be quieter than my Dell Precision Workstation 420 (which has at least one fan that is in some stage of going bad, so has been making quite an annoying racket for months now. But not annoying enough for me to fix it!).

Anyways, hardware-wise the Sony PC consists of an Intel 945P chipset (on an Intel-made motherboard), a Pentium D 830 (dual core Pentium 4 running at 3.0Ghz), 1Gb of RAM, and a 250Gb SATA disk. The machine also includes an ATI X300 PCI-Express video card (which can probably be made to work in Linux), and a Sony "Giga Pocket" video capture card. This card doesn't appear to be supported under Linux, but I found that it has a Conexant CX23416-22 chip on it, so getting it to work under Linux might just be a possibility. I am encouraging Kevin to work with the folks behind the ivtv project to see if this can be made a reality. I think it would be a nice story to take a piece of hardware that initially only worked with Sony's proprietary TV capture software, and now has been expanded to work with Windows Media Center Edition, work in Linux.

Expect more updates on that, and Kevin's general progress with this machine, in the coming months. For now, there is a gallery of photos available for your enjoyment.

-Andy.

Technorati Tags: Linux, Sony, VGC-RC110G, Giga Pocket, MythTV

Late last week, I saw a link called "digg vs. slashdot" posted to O'Reilly Radar. Curious, I skimmed the article, and then checked out digg. At first glance, it didn't really grab me -- but then I read the "about" blurb, and found that is like Slashdot + Wiki, and got intrigued.

O'Reilly has also come through with a link to a BusinessWeek article about digg, and I'm sold. I have been pretty unhappy with Slashdot for awhile now -- duplicate postings, low signal-to-noise ratio in the comments, etc. I have never even bothered to get a Slashdot user account, because I just don't see the point. I have never bothered to add the site to my RSS reader, and I have gotten down to checking it only a few times a week.

But all along, the basic problem with Slashdot hasn't been the site itself -- but rather it's editorial approach. And it is really looking like digg is fixing that, in a social software, "let's harness the collective intelligence of everyone", sort of way.

Which I really like. So, check out digg!

-Andy.

Technorati Tags: Slashdot, digg

I read a fantastic article over at Ars Technica about the MPAA's latest attempt to add insane DRM to all of our lives. Basically, the giant content conglomerates are so afraid that people might see or hear their content without actually paying for it (gasp!), that they are going to great lengths to coerce government to coerce hardware manufactures to make devices that coerce consumers into playing by the rules. And of course, the rules are going to be written by the content conglomerates, so they will be more restrictive and draconian than ever.

Whenever I read an article like this, I find it to be really distressing. I think that if the MPAA were to succeed in all of their goals -- trying to consume content would become not only expensive, but annoying as well. I think that the more the content conglomerates try to crack down, the more people are either going to either:

1. Turn the TV off,
2. Turn to piracy (because as we all know, these restrictions won't stop the pirates), or
3. Turn to small content producers, who are thrilled when anybody consumes their stuff.

I know that personally, I would probably do some sort of combination of the three. But I would much rather buy content, for a reasonable price, that lets me use it in the way that I want. So far, Apple has been doing a pretty reasonable job in this effort (although FairPlay certainly isn't perfect, not by any stretch of the imagination).

The optimist in me hopes that we'll have this sort of cheap and fair-use friendly content in the future, but currently, my inner pessimist is winning out.

-Andy.

A few weeks ago, one of the high priced Tibco consultants that we had in the office mentioned that it was possible to obtain an SSH client for my Nokia 6600 phone. At the time, I didn't do anything about it. But I had some free time tonight, so I decided to do some research. And in fact, he was right -- some crazy folks have ported PuTTY to the Symbian OS, which is what my phone runs.

Behold!

Because I am buying the all-you-can-eat GPRS Internet plan from T-Mobile, I was able to SSH directly from my phone, through T-Mobile's network, through the Internet, to my FreeBSD machine that was about 20 feet away. That's sweet!

The screen and keyboard (specifically, the lack thereof) make this whole thing rather impractical. But I was able to run top, and even my most-favorite of all text editors, joe.

So, I think I have definitely scored myself a little geek toy that I can show off in the appropriate settings.

-Andy.