Author: mikal

This author has written 1354 articles

MythNetTV release 7

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This release is smaller than the last one, but has some bug fixes which folk might find handy. New things in this release: Better testing: r232: Simple script to create the unit testing database New features: r210: Allow users to override the default bittorrent upload rate r212: Provide more sync information when running in verbose mode r216: Add the markunread command r218: Make only one download attempt for a given show per 24 hour period r220: Change download interval to one hour, update last attempt time more frequently r222: Add --oldestfirst and --newestfirst flags, which alter NextDownloads behavior r224: Add flag which forces downloads to run, even if they've failed recently r226: Don't mark a bittorrent download as complete just because the torrent file has been completely downloaded r234: Use reasonable defaults for mysql configuration if no config file can be found r236: Use reasonable defaults for mysql configuration if no config file can be found r238: Use reasonable defaults for mysql configuration if no config file can be found Bug fixes: r206: Make the output of "video.py length" more friendly r208: Release man pages as well r214: Fix a bug introduced in r210 which broke bittorrent downloads r228: Fix…

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MythTV Chapter Ready: Introduction

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The Introduction chapter of the online MythTV book is now ready. This chapter covers the definition of a personal video recorder (PVR), the components of such a system, the various alternatives that are available, why MythTV might be the right choice, and briefly explains the MythTV version number scheme. Thanks to Michael Carden for doing a review on this chapter.

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Introducing the online MythTV book

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When parts of the first edition of the MythTV book became out of date, I decided to take the book online and ask others to help me improve it and bring it up to date. There is a blog for announcements, at http://mythtvbook.com/blog and if you're interested in helping out, please visit the Help Wanted page. This book does not aim to be a complete reference to MythTV or a guide for how to develop plug-in modules for MythTV. Although we include a brief overview of the major features of MythTV, we explore only those parts of MythTV that are relevant to the projects in this book, which will include all the parts of MythTV that an average user will be interested in. It will also give you an excellent grounding for further projects with MythTV as well. This book is intended as a hobbyist's project guide, providing suggestions about what sort of projects you could take on and how we went about implementing our own versions of those projects. Instead of including exhaustive coverage of features that few people use, we'll provide pointers to how to find out about those features, and we'll cover the 80 percent of MythTV's…

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Travelling to Hobart today

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After some initial uncertainty because of the economy, I am travelling to Hobart today for linux.conf.au 2009. I'm speaking at the MythTV mini-conf about MythNetTV, as well as a new MythTV book I have been working on for a while. It will be good to get there, although I wont manage that until about 10pm tonight.

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The Compleat Bolo

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I read this book on flights. This book is a collection of several Bolo short stories, as well as two longer stories. This was a pretty common technique it seems with early science fiction, and it works ok here as long as you remember that the chapters are unlinked short stories. In fact, several of them are inconsistent with others in the collection, but I think that's a minor annoyance. Year Title Notes 1963 Night of the Trolls This story appears in Battlefields Beyond Tomorrow as well 1961 Courier This is a Retief (Laumer's other major series) story which includes a Bolo. This is my first encounter with Reteif, and it felt a little like a Stainless Steel Rat story, but where the hero isn't a criminal, and without the requirement to suspend disbelief as much as you need to for the Rat. 1966 The Last Command 1969 A Relic of War 1960 Combat Unit 1986 Rogue Bolo Book 1 1986 Rogue Bolo Book 2 No relation to the Rogue Bolo Book 1, despite Overall I enjoyed this book, and have now read it several times over the years.

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Battlefields Beyond Tomorrow

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I read this anthology as a child, but when I found a copy on ebay that was cheap I couldn't resist. This is a collection of short stories focusing on what war might be like in the future. It's a good read, although a couple of the stories are out of place compared with the others. Superiority (Arthur C Clarke) Single Combat (Joe Green) Committee of the Whole (Frank Herbert) Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card): a classic, and in some ways I prefer the short story. I've read the extended series of novels a few years ago, but they're probably worth revisiting at some point. Hero (Joe E. Haldeman), later became The Forever War. The Survivor (Walter F. Moudy): I have strong memories of this story from reading this anthology as a child. This is still a good story. The Last Objective (Paul Carter) What Do You Want Me to Do to Prove Im Human Stop (Fred Saberhagen): a Berserker story, also known as "Inhuman Error". Hangman (David Drake): this one is included in Volume 1 of the Complete Hammers Slammers. The Night of the Trolls (Keith Laumer): this was a really good story about Bolos -- good enough to…

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Calculating a SSH host key with paramiko

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I needed to compare a host key from something other than a known_hosts file with what paramiko reports as part of the SSH connection today. If you must know, the host keys for these machines are retrieved a XMLRPC API... It turned out to be a lot easier than I thought. Here's how I produced the host key entry as it appears in that API (as well as in the known_hosts file): #!/usr/bin/python # A host key calculation example for Paramiko. # Args: # 1: hostname import base64 import os import paramiko import socket import sys # Socket connection to remote host sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM) sock.connect((sys.argv[1], 22)) # Build a SSH transport t = paramiko.Transport(sock) t.start_client() key = t.get_remote_server_key() print '%s %s' %(key.get_name(), base64.encodestring(key.__str__()).replace('\n', '')) t.close() sock.close() Note that I could also have constructed a paramiko key object based on the output of the XMLRPC API and then compared those two objects, but I prefer the human readable strings.

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Bio of a Space Tyrant: Refugee

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I'm not really sure what I think about this book. Its well written, and very readable, but depressing. The book starts with a sexual assault, and then moves on to describe what its like to be the minimum wage labor in a space colony. The short answer -- its not much fun. Worse than that, when you try to escape your oppression, you end up being abused by both the authorities who have power to help, as well as assorted criminals. This is not a feel good book. [isbn: 0380841940]

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