The final version of the MythTV tutorial homework is online. I promise no more changes now (unless they're minor bug fixes), mainly because I get on a plane in 9 hours to come to Australia. Note that the bottom of the homework gives the details for a VMWare image if you're too lazy to do the homework. See y'all at LCA!
I spent the afternoon updating the linux.conf.au MythTV tutorial homework. I did all the homework on a VMWare virtual machine, and it took me about four hours to complete, given that compilation was slow for me in the virtual machine, but downloading was fast. Next steps are adding ffmpeg setup to the homework, and putting the finished virtual machine online so that lazy people can just download the crazily large file.
One of these things in every room at every open source conference. Get on that please.
Stewart and I are just now putting the finishing touches on our MythTV tutorial for linux.conf.au. Because it's a tutorial and is therefore meant to be hands one we want people to come along with a machine which is configured so it can take part in a bunch of the demos. To that end we have set homework! Note that it's currently a draft, because I'm pretty sure there will be some stuff in there about ffmpeg, but I wanted to get it out so that people can get an idea of what we want to cover, and get a start on the homework. One other option is for me to make a VMWare image of a machine once all the homework is done available. Would people find that useful? It would be pretty big.
I had one of those moments tonight, and accidentally dropped the mythconverg database on my production MythTV instance, not the development one. This made me sad. Luckily I had a backup which was only a week old (although I am now running night backups of that database). Recovery wasn't too bad once I wrote some code. The steps: Restore from backup Don't run mythfilldatabase (it will clear out old guide data, and we need it) Apply my funky patch to myth.rebuilddatabase.pl Run myth.rebuilddatabase.pl Run mythfilldatabase And all is well again. The patch uses the guide data from the database to make an educated guess about the title, subtitle and description of the recordings which are missing from the database. Here's the patch: Index: myth.rebuilddatabase.pl =================================================================== --- myth.rebuilddatabase.pl (revision 11681) +++ myth.rebuilddatabase.pl (working copy) @@ -185,6 +185,7 @@ 'norename'=>\$norename ); +print "db = dbi:mysql:database=$database:host=$dbhost user = $user pass = $pass\n"; my $dbh = DBI->connect("dbi:mysql:database=$database:host=$dbhost", "$user","$pass") or die "Cannot connect to database ($!)\n"; @@ -314,6 +315,7 @@ # have enough to look for an past recording? if ($ssecond) { + print "Checking for a recording...\n"; $starttime = "$syear$smonth$sday$shour$sminute$ssecond"; my $guess = "select title, subtitle, description from oldrecorded where chanid=(?) and starttime=(?)"; @@…
I've been playing with downloading videos and treating them as recordings in MythTV because the MythTV player is nicer than Xine, and because it works well as a demo for the linux.conf.au tutorial I am working on at the moment. I wont document it here because it's not quite ready, but it's actually quite easy and works really well. For the impatient, a good starting point is this tip is a good starting point, the additional stuff I had to do was around setting up a channel row in the otherwise empty channel table.
It only just occurred to me the other day, but I now know why Ikea is so crowded on the weekends. Sure, the cheap furniture is attractive, but I think it's also go something to do with: Free child care Free nappies and baby change facilities! Bathrooms which are actually designed to be the right height for kids Cheap food Even cheaper food for kids Basically it's just such a pleasure taking the kids there, and they have suck a good time, that I keep finding excuses to take them there. This time it was $6 worth of plastic buckets that I could just as easily got from Target down the road. Now, if only someone would open a similarly kid friendly cinema. I'm sure such a thing would make a killing too.
I was walking down Mountain View's Castro Street this afternoon, and noticed that meebo is advertising for developers and system admins. Interestingly, they seem to match the design pattern used by pretty much every web 2.0 company I have seen around here (except MySpace): linux, MySQL, and Ajax. So, there you go.
The HDHomeRun seems to be a pretty useful device. There are a bunch of people on the MythTV mailing lists trying these things out at the moment. It's a networked dual tuner HD set top box. Kinda cool. Now, if only someone would come up with a digital cable card which works with MythTV...
Trends for "return gift": . Who would have thought that people only return gifts at Christmas?