I’ve been writing a nice tutorial on setting up MythTV on Ubuntu x86_64 over the course of the past few weeks. Please feel free to browse it and give feedback. It still is a work in progress and I could certainly use some help in some spots. I should clarify this by explaining that I’ve got my system more or less working, with the exception of static on my pcHDTV which I understand is an electro-magnetic interference issue that I can’t do anything about.
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So in my quest to actually get MythTV working well I’ve been doing a decent amount of system profiling to check where the bottle neck in my system is. One tool that I’fe found really helpful is dstat. This is basically a replacement/clone of vmstat, iostat, netstat and other helpful tools. Really nifty if you want to to help debug issues.
I wrote a patch for MythTV that fixes some of the issues with a DCT 6200 being on a system where node 1 is not established. This is useful for folks like me have multiple firewire ports on their PCs. I feel ownership in MythTV now. Woot.
It kills me how I’m so close I can feel it, but it’s completely out of my power to reach a 100% working system right now. The reason? I’m experiencing digital noise on my HDTV tuner card. This REALLY blows. When the system is at low load, I have no problem recording HDTV programs, however, as the load increases, I see lots of noise show up on my system. Apparently, I’m not the only one having these problems, as this thread from the MythTV users list shows.
While not entirely true, that’s the gist of what happened. Last Sunday, October 30th, the machine was hanging a lot. After lots of cussing, I decided just to shut the machine off and banish it to the corner for a while. When I got back the machine wouldn’t post and was making a funky smell. I’m still not sure if it’s the motherboard, processor, or power supply. I hope it’s just the power supply.
I gave another presentation this morning on the Broadcast Flag to the EPP tech policy group. It wasn’t my best, perhaps a bit too soft. I should have spent more time talking about some of the economic analysis of the issues. Anyway, the slides are available for download.
I did find out one VERY cool thing during this talk. Another of the students in my department has a much cooler MythTV setup than I do.
The slides from my October 15 WPLUG talk on Blogs, XML, and lots of Acronyms are now available for download. Feel free to mirror them. It doesn’t say in the slides, but they’re under a Creative Commons By license.
Back at IIT I started an IPRO on pervasive computing under the direction of Dr. Xian-He Sun. The project started out as pervasive solutions for classroom use, but eventually morphed into a cool project called HawkTour. It was pretty hard to leave this work because it was a lot of fun and we were creating interesting new uses of technology. Well, after I left, they continued in the vision that was laid out with some of my ideas and lots of AMAZING work by Tyler Butler and created a cool pervasive computing application that lets you know what is going on in your area while taking a campus tour.
I’ve made some pretty good progress on Priblog lately, the biggest change is that I discovered the magic of SQLObject. SQLObject makes it pretty transparent to access database tables without writing a single line of SQL. It’s not that I don’t like writing SQL, it’s just that when you start writing custom SQL statements, you inevitibly end up breaking cross platform compatability. For example, PostgreSQL has sequences that are used to automatically increment id counters while MySQL has the auto increment row attribute.
On Thursday morning I finally managed to get through to Congressman Mike Doyle’s office on the issue of the broadcast flag. For once I was even able to speak to his technical aide on the issue. The basic gist that I got was that representative Doyle favors the need to protect copyrighted work from unauthorized distribution on the internet. Not all that surprising given his stance on internet decency and censorship.