For Christmas I would like…
One of these things in every room at every open source conference. Get on that please.
First cut of the tutorial homework is ready
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.
Recovering lost MythTV recordings
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=(?)"; @@…
Importing downloaded videos as recordings into MythTV
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.
There is a reason Ikea is crowded on the weekends
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.
They all use MySQL…
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.
Want HDTV but only for US free to air?
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...
As pointed out by a friend at work
Trends for "return gift": . Who would have thought that people only return gifts at Christmas?
Reactive economies?
The other day while in Costco (for the foreigners, think Bunnings or some other hardware warehouse, but for food), I was graced with this conversation at the checkout, between two Costco employees: e1: Where the hell is e3? e2: Oh, we didn't meet our sales target yesterday, so they cut hours today. e1: So he's not coming in at all? e2: Nup Apparently Costco works out their staffing based on a "budget for the day" which takes into account todays sales target, expected customer load, and whatever they have to "make up" from previous missed targets. While there is nothing wrong with that, it must suck to be an employee in that environment. I can't imagine not knowing how much work I would have day to day. I used to be a casual, but our rosters were fairly static and worked out weeks in advance. I guess that Australia is headed down this path with the new industrial relations laws as well. That's not why I finally got around to writing this though. It occurred to me this morning that being able to lay off people instantly based on a micro assessment of the economy must also lead to very…
Bloomberg: How to handle those annoyingly poor relatives at Christmas
Resist the urge to impress family members with your purchasing power and instead give them only what they can afford to give you. Avoid luxury goods, for example, or other items redolent of leisure. Choose, instead, gifts that encourage productive labour. Hand tools, say, or cookbooks. Obviously your gift needs to say, ``I love you,'' but it also needs to say, ``The income gap within the family isn't going to be shrinking from my end.'' A funny look at how to handle poor relatives at Christmas. Or at least I hope it's meant as humour.