Patrick’s weblog, featuring posts dating back to 2002 on topics including technology, open source, networking, and various technical adventures.
After much frustration I’ve decided that no matter how many bells and whistles the MSI K8N-Neo4 Platinum has, it still can’t make up for the fact that I get some crazy bad electormagnetic interference when the system is under heavy load. At first I thought…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…