If I find myself in New York, New York I should try and see the stilty building of doom, a sky scraper which stands on nine story high stilts so that it could use a site occupied by a church. I can't work out how to deep link to Flickr images, so click these instead! http://www.flickr.com/photos/geneko/253774855/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/musiclover-uk/272615715/
While I love my wife and kids to distraction, the distraction bit is real. Then again, I'm sure they have a counter argument that I tend to end up deep in thought, and which point you could probably push me off my chair and I wouldn't notice. Anyway, that's mostly beside the point. What is relevant is for the first time in nearly a year (since 18 November 2005 to be exact, but who is counting?) I'm alone. All alone. So, apart from watching the West Wing (which I haven't seen before, and is fantastic), sleeping in, and going to a party tonight, I am coding. What I'm writing is a follow on from my night hacking the other day, which was getting PyXMPP working with Google Talk. What I want is a bot which will take IM messages, and execute them using the MythTV front end. Oh, and it will display text using the on screen display if you ask nicely. So, does anyone have any thoughts on if that sort of thing is useful to them? I think it sounds useful to me, but perhaps I'm odd. Back to hacking.
Hypothetically speaking, if you needed to write a four hour long presentation (probably around 200 slides), shared with another speaker, and wanted to keep the style consistent and conforming with your approved corporate style, how would you do it? I'm thinking of some sort of intermediate language, which can then be used to generate slides from a template? Is there anything like that out there?
I gave a talk on how Google deploys software configuration to machines at AUUG 2006, and this reminded me to put the slide deck and paper online. So, here they are: slides in PowerPoint and PDF, as well as the conference paper. Update: Now with URLs that are correct! Sorry for the cut and paste error...
So, I guess the cat is out of the bag then... Stewart and I are working on the finishing stages of a book on MythTV. Amazon now has it listed for pre-order. [btags:]
So now I am in Sydney, with Grant and Lindsay (old friends from Canberra). Newtown seems nice, in fact the house itself is very nice. However, the streets are pretty Victorian and built up, which is a bit oppressive. Then again, I am told there are a bunch of parks I haven't seen yet, so I'll delay any further comment until then. It appears it's only about 15 minutes on the train from here to work, which will be nice during the week. More news later...
Heh, he cancelled my hire car booking without my knowledge or permission. Then when it was fixed, the car company tried to bill me $100 for cancelling. It took a while to sort out...
So, you're creating a native archive with MythArchive. You've never run it before, so you just give it a go. It can't write data files to the place the videos are at, so what is it's failure mode? Well, how about trying to change permissions on every file on the machine? Lovely. 2006-10-13 22:32:23.025 Options - createiso: 0, doburn: 1, mediatype: 3, erasedvdrw: 0 2006-10-13 22:32:23.026 savedirectory: / 2006-10-13 22:32:23.026 Saving files to : / 2006-10-13 22:32:23.077 Archiving Christmas (/share/Movies/dvd/Christmas.avi), do delete: 1 2006-10-13 22:32:23.108 Creating xml file for Christmas 2006-10-13 22:32:23.170 Created videometadata element for Christmas 2006-10-13 22:32:23.204 MythNativeWizard: Failed to open file for writing - /Christmas/Christmas.avi.xml 2006-10-13 22:32:23.204 Archiving Easter (/share/Movies/dvd/Easter.avi), do delete: 1 2006-10-13 22:32:23.204 Creating xml file for Easter 2006-10-13 22:32:23.205 Created videometadata element for Easter 2006-10-13 22:32:23.206 MythNativeWizard: Failed to open file for writing - /Easter/Easter.avi.xml 2006-10-13 22:32:23.206 Archiving Thanksgiving (/share/Movies/dvd/Thanksgiving.avi), do delete: 1 2006-10-13 22:32:23.207 Creating xml file for Thanksgiving 2006-10-13 22:32:23.207 Created videometadata element for Thanksgiving 2006-10-13 22:32:23.208 MythNativeWizard: Failed to open file for writing - /Thanksgiving/Thanksgiving.avi.xml chmod: changing permissions of `/': Operation not permitted chmod: changing permissions of `/lost+found': Operation not permitted chmod: changing permissions of `/var': Operation not permitted chmod: changing…
I just gave my Linksys NSLU2 hacking talk at AUUG 2006 in Melbourne, Australia. You can find the slides online (powerpoint and PDF) as well as the paper (PDF).