The Mothership

I also finally got the replacement video card I had been waiting for, and now I can say that the PVR is truly complete. The TV-Out works fine, with no colour problems, and there was even an unexpected performance boost. The old card didn’t support the XvMC library for the Nvidia drivers but this one does, and CPU usage during playback dropped from 80-90% down to 45-60%, making playback smooth even with other stuff going on in the background.

Now at last I can just sit back in the easy chair with the remote and treat it like just another appliance, and not just a tacked-on feature of the computer. Even if it really is…

I think I’ve finally got a complete workflow for burning recorded programs to DVDs now:
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The new iPods are out and…I don’t particularly care. I don’t really feel the need to carry a ton of photos around, and although the black look of the U2 edition *sounded* intriguing, the red click wheel is just too horribly ugly to me.

This now makes me even more tempted to pick up one of the regular 4G iPods though, now that I know it’s not likely to be imminently obsoleted by something vastly better. It’s down to either that or the iRiver hard drive player, and although the iRiver has a couple more features, it’s still slightly more expensive and the iPod/iTunes integration is a big plus and iTMS will be coming to Canada soon…

Yay, my DVD burner drive arrived today. Except that I don’t have any videos properly DVD formatted for burning yet. Or any discs to burn them to. Or any software to burn them with, since it’s an OEM drive… I think I was expecting to do my burning in Linux, like I did with all my CD burning, but then I wiped the system and didn’t reinstall Linux…

Oh well, it’ll get sorted out in time, and I needed a new CD drive anyway. My old HP 9900ci was getting flaky — it couldn’t even reinstall Battlefield 1942 without randomly failing partway through, so I had to mount the discs on the Linux server, copy the files over, and install them all straight from the hard drive.

I wound up getting a dual-layer-burning drive anyway, even though I wasn’t specifically holding out for one. The dual-layer media’s still expensive right now but should hopefully drop, this drive got great reviews, and it was still dirt cheap at just over $100 CDN, so what the hell.

And I don’t even have enough space for my existing DVD collection… :-P

I seem to be falling behind a bit in my TV-watching. Which is okay; the whole point of having the PVR is to let me watch things when I have the opportunity and not by a fixed schedule, after all. Except that I’m already running out of disk space…
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Blah blah Sinclair Broadcasting blah blah blah election blah blah unfair blah blah blah boycott advertisers blah blah blah… Whatever. All I really care about is that it resulted in these. Hee hee.

When I went to upgrade my server to the 2.6.9 kernel (which it turns out I can’t use at the moment anyway for other reasons), I discovered that I still had some debugging options enabled in my current kernel config, from a problem I had over a year ago. OOPS.

I wouldn’t have expected it to make *that* much of a difference, but after recompiling 2.6.7 without them set I can now play back recordings in MythTV at full speed, using around 80% CPU. It still stutters slightly whenever something else kicks in, like a web server hit, but it’s still a vast improvement.

Now I just have to solve the frigging B&W video problem. Hopefully a new-but-cheap GeForce 4 that’s on the way will fix that…

“In order to set her straight, I had to let her know that the reason she’d never heard of me was because I was famous.”

An interesting interview with Neal Stephenson. I’m working my way through Cryptonomicon, and although it’s slow going, it’s still pretty interesting. It’s not really so much about cryptography itself (there are no silly “oh no, he’s only 13 bits away from breaking the asymmetric vault key on the RS/6000!” scenes) as it is about scenarios where it’s a subtle influencing factor, in wartime and business, and the kinds of people (proto-geeks, if you will) you might find involved.

Now that I have a more-or-less working PVR, what have I discovered about TV?

Damn, there’s an awful lot of Star Trek on…
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Although my earlier attempt at quietening my gaming system failed miserably, it’s finally now one tenth as noisy as it was before. It’s still not exactly complete silence, but it’s like an empty library in comparison to what it used to be.

How did I do it? It was rather simple, actually — I just ripped two of the three hard drives out. One of them had been acting up lately, going through bursts where it would suddenly power down and back up again. No data had been lost, but I don’t really trust it anymore. The other one was an ancient 12G drive, and the only reason it was even still in there was because it was the boot drive and removing it would have required reinstalling all of the OSes, which is moot now.

Plus, removing the drives removed the need for a couple power splitters and one IDE cable, so the cabling isn’t quite so chaotic inside. I also discovered that I was using a 40-pin cable on the remaining drive, so switching in an 80-pin cable should get it up to full speed. The video card doesn’t have to split its power with a drive anymore, which will hopefully help with some strange video driver crashes. And without the other drives, there will be less heat generated. Ripping out all this stuff has made the system the quietest, coolest, and most stable it’s been in years. Damn, I should have done this a long time ago…

Of course, now I have to reinstall everything and I’m about 40G shorter on space (with 100 left), but I can live with that. I just won’t reinstall Linux on it, which hadn’t been getting much use anyway. I also won’t both reinstalling Win98SE, since pretty much everything I have works under XP now, and the few that didn’t (Pod, Daggerfall) aren’t too important anymore.

There is actually one other reason I wanted to move the SBLive into the server. I hate to leave a project unfinished, and so, the battle for computerized TV is on again…

The one major missing piece when I last left off was the TV tuner card, and a quick trip solved that. So, does it work? Well, sort of…
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Out of all of my systems, one of the components that I’ve upgraded the *least* over the last 11 years is the sound card. I first got an SB16 way back in the mid-’90s and continued to use it alone until a couple years ago, when the lack of ISA slots in a new motherboard forced an upgrade to an SBLive. Even then, the SB16 continued to live on in my server box. The sound card is just one of those parts that I never really felt an urgent need to upgrade. It produces sound…what more do I need? Whereas the clarity of a new video card’s higher resolutions or the speed of a new processor are easy to appreciate, the subtleties of a different sound are harder to quantify to a tone-deaf musical ignoramus like me.

Nonetheless, upgrade time has come again and a shiny new Audigy 2 ZS has kicked the SBLive out and down the hand-me-down chain into the server box. The reasons are somewhat more practical than audible, though: the old SB16 in the server box was simply annoying the hell out of me.
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InstallShield rears its ugly head once again. There’s a new version of one of our products, so of course I have to go back and update all the version numbers, filenames, etc…

That’s easy enough, except that when I went to save all the changes and export them back to text files for source control, I got the dreaded “87: Error in exporting tables” message. I had run into this error on Server 2003, but everything had been fine when I did changes under XP. Except that apparently XP SP2 broke InstallShield 8. Sigh…

Fortunately there’s a workaround using a tool called ORCA from Microsoft. All I had to do was load the InstallShield project in ORCA, delete a table that’s causing the problem, and resave the project. Except that when I tried to select the table, ORCA crashed…

AAAAAAUGGGHHH.

So instead of catching up on my reading, cleaning, socializing, or developing any other hobbies, what do I do all weekend? Play games, of course. Pseudo-reviews ahoy:
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Out of curiosity, I tried to break down all of the hits this site has ever received (except a couple months where I lost the client and referrer data) and see what kinds of categories they fell in to. Out of 132,046 hits:

Spamusement!

(Thanks to Corii for the link.)

Ugh, I’m starting to get spam in my e-mail at the office now. I’m not sure how this account was discovered since it’s only used within a fairly small circle of people: coworkers, and a very small handful of vendors and customers. Spyware or viruses grabbing address books off of infected systems, perhaps…

Unfortunately since it’s Lotus Notes I can’t install a filter myself, and we turned over control of the e-mail system to the head office, so hopefully they’ll do something about it…

During a lunchtime chat, a coworker mentioned that he’d managed to get his own homebuilt PVR set up, and it got me wondering…
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I was at one of the local malls yesterday, and on the way to the washrooms by the food court I noticed a little video screen just outside the entrance. It was showing advertising, of course, and I guess it makes sense to locate them there since it’s such a high-traffic area.

What I *wasn’t* expecting was the whole row of smaller LCD screens located just above the urinals… Advertising there isn’t all that new either, but the mechanics of this method work out just slightly differently. There’s a certain amount of electronics, framing, and mounting needed to put that LCD screen there, of course, and the end result is that the screen sticks out far enough that it winds up being about two inches away from your face.

At least none of the ads were of scantily-clad women…