7 Jan 2010 (Thursday) 

Happy new year. It's quite a quiet time right now. I've got a cold and a cough so I'm not feeling up to much right now.

It's A tad cold out. Our street in impassable pretty much. The offices across the way from us have had nobody in the last 2 days. Someone built a cool igloo across the road from us (although it collapsed this morning). I tried building a snowman, but my cough got the better of me and I had to go back inside .

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9 Jan 2010 (Saturday) 

I had a brief look at csa.networking for the laugh this morning. Someone was asking about whether there was a wireshark port for RISC OS (a while back). I was sure I remembered porting libpcap and tcpdump, as well as writing a simple pcap capture program in BASIC. Took me ages to find them though - I never remember where things are these days.

I see that one of the shampoo adverts is using They, from Finally Woken, by Jem, which is quite cool. Not that I watch adverts much, but I caught the end of one just before a programme.

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10 Jan 2010 (Sunday) 

I noticed that Wall-E didn't have a cover in my film collection, which seemed a little odd as it's a pretty well known film and you'd think that it would have an image - I source my data from IMDB via the IMDB::Film perl module. It turned out that it was a small bug in IMDB::Film which was difficult to spot. The names that were used for finding the image weren't being used in the same way between two pieces of code, so the search failed. It's only because there was a special 'mid-dot' in the canonical name that it failed, though, so it wouldn't have happened often.

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15 Jan 2010 (Friday) 

We had a power cut this morning. Which wasn't too bad - the power was back at about 2pm-ish, so we at least weren't too stuck. However, the KiSS DVD player has now died. It seems to make a nasty hum and the LCD flickers when it's powered. Which I think means that the transformer is dead. As I've not got the ability to fix it, I'm just going to have to say goodbye to it. Which is a pity.

Fortunately I've got the XBox and XBMC to replace it. Downside is that the XBox can't be turned on from bed by the remote. And I can't leave it playing. Whereas the KiSS DVD would happily keep playing videos one after another when you pressed play, XBMC won't. Which is frustrating as I tend to leave the player playing whilst I'm trying to sleep. Kinda works.

Sadly, KiSS got bought by Linksys, who promptly killed the entire product line. All they produce now are Media Extenders. Which is find, IF you use Windows. If you don't then they're about as useful for video as watching a doorstop.

What I'm wondering now, though, is ... what do people actually use for network media players these days ? The NMT systems seems to be quite common, although they're quite pricey. Upstairs, I've got xbmc on a PC, because it's nice - however it suffers from the same problems, obviously. I don't ask for much really:

• Able to play off a SMB mount, or via customisable linux software.
• Not require the indexing of files before you can play them.
• Able to be turned on from the remote.
• From on-to-menu in under 20 seconds (KiSS managed about 10 when controlled by the Harmony remote to step through its menus).
• Able to play files one after another (without playlists).

The KiSS player didn't support associated images - so film.jpg files weren't used, and neither were folder.jpg files for directories. And I'd modified the server (it didn't use SMB) so that 'large' directories appeared as initial letters (eg Films/L/ contained all the L-prefixed films, without actually changing the directory structure).

But I don't really know what people use - this is a bedroom system, so it doesn't really want to be 'big', but it does need to be simple enough to use when I'm half asleep.

There's a lot of UPnP-based things, it seems, but most of these seem focused on flat-structure. I'm not sure if that's how they're designed or whether people really expect to keep every single film in the same list - for me that's pretty silly. I have subdirectories for the well known films, and sequences, so that they don't clutter the main set, and it's still huge. Plus certain DVDs I've copied the extras off as well.

I asked what people used on the talker and Alex is still using MythVideo. Unless it's improved considerably since I tried it, it's a steaming pile of ... it's not very good.

One advantage of how I've set things up - part of the reason, really - is that for xbmc the 'indexing' is trivial. If I press 'Info' over a series, there's a tvseries.nfo file in the directory that it gets all the information from - it's all been pre-gathered. The reason for this is that there are multiple machines using XBMC and it's wasteful to re-download the information multiple times.

Alex tells me that they're re-making 'The A-Team'. I'm sure it'll be great. Maybe even as good as 'Knight Rider' .

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16 Jan 2010 (Saturday) 

Samba's been thrashing itself when there are open directories and the directory is being modified on the linux machine. This was happening whilst I had the TV encoded folder open and a file was being encoded. Wireshark showed a whole load of 'NT Notify' messages going on. Worse, if I clicked in TextPad to edit a file that was in that directory it hung until the writing to that file completed. This was... frustrating.

My solution ? Add 'change notify = no' to the smb.conf file and restart samba. This wasn't a problem on etch, but is on lenny, it seems. Hey-ho.

Also, and the main reason for upgrading, I've got MythTV 0.22 installed now. The idea was to get rid of the problems with 0.21 - it would crash quite regularly. This appeared to be (from reading messages on the mailing list) due to changes in QT3 that they were unable to get around and one reason why QT4 was required for the new version, IIRC. QT 4.4 (which it required) isn't supported by etch, so... upgrade to lenny required. Oh well.

Anyhow... 0.22 hung on me today. Stopped responding to any network input - no response to port 6544 and examining the process implied that it wasn't actually doing anything with any connections that were made. It kept recording though - until it was 2 hours after the programme had ended and I decided to kill it and restart. It hadn't started up any other user jobs in that time either. Somehow it had managed to get itself live-locked (it was still doing things on some processes according to strace -f).

Having restarted it, things are still working, but I'm less pleased that I've replaced a crash (which I can cope with by restarting the backend if it's not running) with a hang (which I can't tell much about - the machine might be busy, which would explain a hang, rather than it actually being dead). Anyhow... I'm unsure what to do now. I can't find anything about this happening to anyone else recently.

Watched most of Star Trek XI (the 'new' one) again today. There's good bits in it. It just doesn't feel Sci-fi-y really. Maybe I'm a bit picky, but the plot holes seemed a little more glaring than usual, too - I realise I said that when it came out, but... hey ho...

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24 Jan 2010 (Sunday) 

I had a horrid dream about drowning in a ship last night. The ship had been holed by someone from another ship drilling in to it - not entirely sure why. It was taking on water and we'd collected lots of kids on deck and tied them together with things that float so that they'd all be ok. I wanted to put little metal stamped nametags on everyone so that we'd know who was who, so I went down a deck to find some stamping equipment - we'd got some metal coin-type things, but nothing to stamp it with. Nothing on there, so I went another deck down with a couple of other people. We were in a large room with a big facing window looking out over the front of the ship when it began to tip backwards. As we turned we all tried to stay as close to the 'floor' as possible and then the water came rushing in.

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25 Jan 2010 (Monday) 

Dream last night had two parts I remember. One was that I was flying on a plane and we had to make a lot of stops and people were asking questions about the strange black box on my lap that had all the wires and lights - obviously it was my TV-recording box.

The other part, Caroline and I were looking for someone at a strip club - don't ask me why, because I don't know what she was looking for. I do know that the two guys and girl I was sitting with were nice to chat to, and they all had the same porridge as me - which was very nice and I would recommend it. If you happen to be passing through my subconscious and need something to eat, the porridge there is just great. So, having not had the greatest of times (except for the porridge), I took Caroline home and she collapsed on the chair, so I put her into bed and put a load of warm blankets over her. Her bed was really tiny for some reason. That's about all I can remember.

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26 Jan 2010 (Tuesday) 

Firefox crashes a lot for me on my work laptop. It appears that the Cisco VPN is implicated - certainly version 4. So I'm upgrading to version 5 in the hope that that allows me to actually do work without Firefox having to be restarted every few minutes.

However, a useful piece of information from this is that the crash information can be obtained in Firefox by doing 'about:crashes'. Which is kinda handy - and a quick look at the related information from that actually pointed to the problem very quickly. If I'd actually known that the VPN was implicated some time back I could have investigated further, but there was no indication that there was any other information likely to be forthcoming on the bugs, from the report it gave before shutting down.

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30 Jan 2010 (Saturday) 

Coo, I just recognised Phil the scientist from Better Off Ted, playing an icecream guy on Caroline In The City! Yay Me! Usually I'm not that good at spotting people .

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31 Jan 2010 (Sunday) 

Sundays are strange. Stranger when you're feeling ill and can't really tell when one day ends and another one begins. I've just not been so well these last few days. I thought this cough and cold were going but they seem to have had a quick go at trying to kill me. Yeah, I'm a wuss.

For a variety of reasons I've been incredibly irritable about certain things over the last year or so. Partly those have been work, which continues to irritate the hell out of me. This is despite the fact that it seems that most other people have taken this sort of thing in their stride. I'm not sure what to make of that. That I should just shut up and accept that things are sometimes crap? That they just accept things that I won't? That there's something else that I'm missing about things? I've always had a problem with weighting things, so I sometimes react disproportionately to things. Plus it's difficult to rationally look at yourself and the situation and say "Yes, you shouldn't be so bothered by that".

I watched the first episode of 'Supernatural' earlier today; it seems ok. Drobe recommended it to me, so I'll see what I think of it.

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