March « 2006 « codeblog

March 27, 2006

presenting at OSCon 2006

Filed under: Blogging,Multimedia — kees @ 6:43 pm

Woohoo! I got accepted to present at OSCon again! I’m really excited about this one, too — I get to present about something non-work-related. The title of my presentation is “DVR Happiness: Gluing MythTV and TiVo together with Galleon“. Here is my proposed outline:

Intro to DVRs

TiVo: have you been under a rock?
MythTV: learn all about video standards.

TiVo Gets You A Lot

Hacked TiVos can do great things

Is your TiVo a tool or a toy?

Stock TiVos can do cool stuff too

ToGo: move video from TiVo to PC

GoBack: move video from PC to TiVo

MP3s: streaming from anywhere

Image Galleries: beyond just snapshots

Galleon Gets You More

Implements the server-side of TiVo features
On-the-fly format conversion

MythTV Gets You The Most

Making Tivo recordings available to MythTV

Format conversion

Making MythTV recordings available to TiVo

Mounting a MythTV filesystem with FUSE

Making your MythTV remote make noises

Short-cuts with the Linux IR daemon

EDIT: WordPress pisses me off so very much when it comes to lists, indenting, and code snippets. Some day, I will switch to something that just lets me type in HTML and doesn’t try to “fix” it for me afterwards. *fume*

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March 23, 2006

amd64 is okay

Filed under: General — kees @ 8:36 pm

I’m fairly happy with my amd64 box, but it has some bothers. It reminds me of switching from 16bit to 32bit applications back in the day. Since the SATA drivers were busted on every distro I tried to install, I ended up with Debian Unstable — probably because I know how to dance around needing a more recent kernel.

Audio wasn’t working right away, but it looks like ALSA has resolved the issues finally. These fancy new 6-channel chips are silly. Maybe in 5 years I’ll actually have something other than stereo speakers on my computer. :)

Switching to 64bit has really shown me all the non-free software I use, since I can’t run these 32bit-compiles natively anymore:

acroread
various proprietary A/V codecs (DLLs via MPlayer)
Flash plugin
Wine
OpenOffice.org

Okay, so Wine and OpenOffice.org don’t run because of porting issues, but still. There have been two ways to solve these problems:

32bit versions of various libraries
chroot to a 32bit environment

Installing 32bit libs is nice, but Debian isn’t smart enough to let me install .i386.deb files along with my .amd64.deb files. There’s got to be a way, but I haven’t figured it out. So, I followed the Ubuntu instructions, and built a 32bit chroot environment. Any time I want to watch something in Flash, I run “bash32” and run Mozilla in there, which has the Flash plugin. Same for OOo, etc. With the mount bindings (e.g. “mount -o bind /home /chroot/sid/home”) it’s like I never left home. Audio even works. Pretty slick solution.

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March 22, 2006

debugging firefox extensions

Filed under: Web — kees @ 6:15 pm

After installing my amd64 machine and getting my desktop moved, I noticed that Firefox seemed to be running really slowly. Especially google maps. After Brian showed me the Firefox Hacks book, I decided to try and dig into the cause.

By setting the environment variable “NSPR_LOG_MODULES=all:5” you see damn near everything Firefox is doing while it does it. I noticed that it was stalling every time it processed a new cookie (since I don’t let Google set cookies). So I started removing each of my cookie extensions.

To get myself back to a sane state, I just backed up my Firefox profile:

cp -a ~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default ~/firefox-profile

Then removed one extension, restarted Firefox, etc, until I found the busted one. Turns out “Extended Cookie Manager” was my problem, so I replaced it with “Cookie Button in the status bar”.

Tedious, but, it worked. And for some reason, getting a list of all the Firefox environment variables proves to be very difficult.

Comments (3)

March 5, 2006

sci-fi crew

Filed under: Blogging — kees @ 8:30 am

You scored as Moya (Farscape). You are surrounded by muppets. But that is okay because they are your friends and have shown many times that they can be trusted. Now if only you could stop being bothered about wormholes.

Moya (Farscape)

88%

Babylon 5 (Babylon 5)

81%

Bebop (Cowboy Bebop)

75%

Millennium Falcon (Star Wars)

75%

Serenity (Firefly)

75%

SG-1 (Stargate)

75%

Deep Space Nine (Star Trek)

69%

Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix)

69%

FBI’s X-Files Division (The X-Files)

69%

Enterprise D (Star Trek)

63%

Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica)

56%

Andromeda Ascendant (Andromeda)

44%

Your Ultimate Sci-Fi Profile II: which sci-fi crew would you best fit in? (pics)
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