I'm a little slow at posting this, because I've been really busy. Google had the video of the MythTV talk online a day after the talk, which was nice. I haven't watched it myself, but hopefully it turned out ok. The talk got a little exciting when I had to reboot one of the machines mid talk because it wasn't seated in its dock properly. Such is life I suppose. Here are the slides for the talk. Hopefully they'll help someone.
I just noticed that the ImageMagick book appears in Google book search. I'm pleased.
I'm giving a MythTV talk at Google in the next week (although I can't find it on the events calendar at the moment, I'll update this post when I do) so I've been playing with MythTV 0.21 a little more than I have in the past. Its pretty cool. I'm still writing the talk, so I don't know 100% what it will cover, but I'm thinking it would be good to include some of the stuff from 0.21 as a teaser. Storage groups, the flash player in MythWeb, and the tweaks to the theme system seem like good things to include. Does anyone have other things they think are really cool in 0.21? Oh, and I'll have to cover guide data for the US, so it might be time to catch up with my MythTV email backlog once again. Hopefully in you live near Silicon Valley you can come along to the talk and we can chat afterwards. Update: I found a Google blog post with the details. To quote the most important information: Like all sessions of the Open Source Developers @ Google Speaker Series, Michael's presentation will be open to the public. Doors open at 6:30 PM at…
Here is a nice video explaining the MediaMVP. I've been looking for silent ways to park MythTV front ends in the kids bedrooms for a while, and this might end up being the way to go. The xbox that Matthew uses at the moment is simply too loud for most use. I am left wondering if ad skipping works on the device though. I guess there is only one way to find out...
I'm killing time at my mother in law's at the moment, before bussing it back to Sydney (on the way back to the US) tomorrow, and I figured I'd visit Damn Interesting again. Some of the gems from this trip: An article on the use of deliberately introduced infections to treat tumours. How about a research who uses evolution to improve his FGPA code? In the end, he can't even fully explain why the circuit works, but it does... Freezing hamsters and then reanimating them! How about a fellow who can't remember anything since he was 15?
Apart from sniping the queries, is there any other way to reduce the amount of time that a query will wait before giving up on getting access to a locked table?
Uncontrollably awesome: Via Boing Boing -> Poetv.
I just got back from a lovely four days in Tasmania, and am just now catching up with the resulting email backlog. There are some new alerts about reviews of the MythTV book in there which are worth pointing out: I'm surprised and disappointed that the installation of MythTV through pre-built packages or a CD distributions like KnoppMyth or MythDora were not covered deeper than a sentence or two in passing. This is likely to be a turn off for readers who were hoping for a quick and simple method of getting MythTV up and going. ... On the whole I consider this a good book that is excellent for the new to intermediate MythTV user, although advanced users may pick a few good pieces of information out of it as well. It was well written and covered most items at just about the right introductory (yes -- practical) level. Once it has taught you the basics, you can then go and look up more details online for features you want to get more information about. http://www.mythpvr.com/mythtv/books/Practical_MythTV.html Linked at: http://smart-home-blog.com/archives/670 Linked at: http://mythtvnews.com/2007/06/29/more-practical-mythtv-book-reviews/ I think the comments about installation technique are fair, although the method described in the book is…
I've been silent on the Zap2IT shutdown issue for a week or so now, mainly because of travel, and also because I was waiting for something useful to happen. I've ready literally hundreds of emails of the users mailing list -- many proposing architectures for distribution of data, or placing various demands about how much someone would be willing to pay for the data. I am yet to see someone actually sit down and write some code though. So hence this update. There isn't any useful news yet, except for a general reassurance that the developers promise that they are still working on a solution. So, keep on waiting is the plan for now...
I figured it was time for another release of MythNetTV, especially since I've fixed some bugs recently and rolled in code generously provided by George Nassas. New things in this release: Initial work on transcoding smaller files to something else Better error checking for MySQL configuration and accessibility Fixed bug where MythNetTV was unhappy if there were no channels configured in the MySQL database Found, and hopefully fixed, a bug where program dates were not always being tracked correctly. Also added a check to make sure this doesn't happen again Added --markread, which lets you mark old shows as already downloaded The code has seen a fair bit of use now, so it should be fairly stable. Let me know if you find any problems... $ ./mythnettv --statistics Programs tracked: 735 Google EngEdu: 350 Scoble Show: 85 linux.conf.au 2007: 74 Mobuzz TV: 82 dl.tv: 32 Net Cafe: 2 Foo: 1 ABC News: 2 Australia: 1 Play School: 1 Diggnation: 72 Programs still to download: 50 Google EngEdu: 49 Diggnation: 1 Data transferred: 103 gb (111017264341 bytes) Get it here if you care: http://www.stillhq.com/mythtv/mythnettv/