Breaking: Zap2IT turning off guide data for the US?

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MythTVnews.com is reporting that Tribune Media Services (TMS), the providers of the Zap2IT guide data used by MythTV in the US, will turn that guide data off on 1 September 2007. I haven't had a lot of time to look into this further, mainly because I am giving a talk this morning. I'll have a better look at lunch time (PDT) and write some more about this. I think there's no need for panic, as a new guide data source will be found, but this is unexpected.

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Implementing parental filters with MythTV

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The other morning I walked out to my five year old watching Robot Chicken. This isn't what I would call the highlight of my parenting career, but it did leave me with an immediate need to come up with a solution to stopping the kids from watching inappropriate things now that they're big enough to work their way through the MythTV user interface without our assistance. Its now quite common for me to wake up in the morning and discover that the kids have turned the monitor on in the living room, have found one of their shows, and are happily watching. (I guess it says something about the ease of use of the MythTV user interface that my four and five year olds have no trouble navigating it without assistance. Specifically, the video thumbnail of the various recordings is a killer feature because it helps kids who can't read yet find the shows they want.) The animated thumbnail of the recording appears in the bottom right of this example image. Back to my need to filter recordings. Unfortunately this isn't covered in the MythTV book (Amazon), mainly because it didn't seem to me to be a killer feature at…

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How to transcode video for the Nokia N800

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I have a Nokia N800 that I haven't had much time to play with, but I am about to go away on a trip which will involve a lot of time commuting on buses, so I figure I should start thinking about it again. Luckily for me, this page has pretty good instructions of what settings to use with mencoder to make it all look good on the N800. I haven't tried them yet, but I will report back when I do.

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Building a symlink tree for MythTV recordings

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I wanted to build a directory of symlinks that pointed to my MythTV recordings, so I wrote a little python script to do it for me. I figure someone else might find this useful too... #!/usr/bin/python # Copyright (C) Michael Still (mikal@stillhq.com) 2007 # Released under the terms of the GNU GPL import MySQLdb import os import re from socket import gethostname # Connect to the MythTV database based on the MythTV config config_values = {} home = os.environ.get('HOME') config = open(home + '/.mythtv/mysql.txt') for line in config.readlines(): if not line.startswith('#') and len(line) > 5: (key, value) = line.rstrip('\n').split('=') config_values[key] = value db_connection = MySQLdb.connect(host = config_values['DBHostName'], user = config_values['DBUserName'], passwd = config_values['DBPassword'], db = config_values['DBName']) cursor = db_connection.cursor(MySQLdb.cursors.DictCursor) # Regexp for what is allowed in the symlink name unsafe = re.compile('[^a-zA-Z0-9\-\:_]+') # Find the recordings directory -- this assumes you haven't used an # identifier string for this machine... cursor.execute('select * from settings where value="RecordFilePrefix" and ' 'hostname="%s";' % gethostname()) row = cursor.fetchone() basedir = row['data'] # Now find all the recordings we have at the moment cursor.execute('select title, subtitle, starttime, basename from recorded;') for i in range(cursor.rowcount): row = cursor.fetchone() title = row['title'] subtitle = row['subtitle'] if subtitle…

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How do you spot the Australian kids in an American playground?

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They're the ones wearing hats. Despite it being noon, the various American kids at the playground all lacked sun protection. In fact, they pretty much all lacked practical clothing, it was all way too dressy. Americans don't seem to have figured out skin cancer at all in fact, every weekend there are bikini clad young ladies sunning themselves around the pool, the schools don't require kids to wear sun protection, and it's pretty common to see outside workers not wearing any sun protection either. How odd.

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Review

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"If you're interested in setting up a PVR, then this is definitely a book to check out. Apress sells the paper version for $30, and offers an eBook for $15. Amazon offers it for $19.79, but I doubt that price will last long. I definitely give this book a 5 out of 5..." http://www.yeraze.com/article.php/20070603160650701

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Is there any way to access the match text in MySQL rlike selects?

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Hi. I am doing a select like this in MySQL 5: select * from foo where bar rlike '(.*),(.*)'; The specific example here is made up. Anyway, I'd like to be able to get to the matched text from bar, like I can with various languages regexp libraries. Is this functionality exposed at all in MySQL? I've looked at the docs and can't see any indication that it is, so this might just be wishful thinking.

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On Virgin Atlantic premium economy

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Welcome to Mikal's badly organised travel tips. On the trip to Dublin I flew Virgin Atlantic premium economy. That's kind of like anyone else's business class, given the classes on Virgin are economy, premium economy, and upper class. It's much cheaper than anyone else's business class fare to Heathrow though. I thought that premium economy was pretty good... The seats are old and both of the ones I sat in were subtly broken, but the seat spacing is excellent, the seat is wider than normal, and reclines just that little extra. The extra money was worth it given I got off the plane and walked straight into a meeting in Dublin, and on the return flight I got a heap of work done. Premium economy even offers power for laptops, although my corporate-issue iGo doesn't work with the new Lenovo x60, and Virgin didn't have a tip for the x60 in their collection. That's a pretty common compliant with the newer Intel Core2 laptops though -- they draw too much power for older universal power supplies. I got around the power problem with two "eight hour" batteries for the x60. The quotes are because I actually get more like four…

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Dublin trip

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I occasionally wonder to myself why I don't blog more these days, and I think the answer is that I'm not convinced that other people would be interested in what happens to me from day to day. For example, when writing the books, all that is really involved is a massive amount of time in front of a computer. The finished product is cool, but the process of producing it is actually quite boring. (Although I feel that I will one day write up my universal theory of project management... The short summary is something like: "project management is about removing obstacles to delivery of the project -- not deadlines, hassling, gantt charts, or general futzing". Or something like that.) The Dublin trip is similar. I had a good time, although am very tired. I flew Virgin Atlantic premium economy from San Francisco to Heathrow, and then BMI to Dublin. Virgin is great, BMI suck even more than I could have imagined. For example -- they advertise that they have the best on time record of any LHR flying airline, but they were late every time on my trip. Oh, and one of the planes had a power generation engine…

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