Pablo Averbuj

Myth-buster

Leigha went home for over a week which left me with a lot of time on my hands (although it didn’t feel like much). I had big plans for my time alone. I was going to set up asterisk, set up MythTV, work on a new website project. Alas it’s Sunday, fully 9 days since Leigha left and I only accomplished setting up MythTV. I used KnoppMyth for the installation, and most of the problems I had were hardware problems that weren’t KnoppMyth fault. Others were understanding what exactly MythTV was trying to do as it flailed about. In all I probably reinstalled MythTV about 4 times on the box before all was said and done.
The three hardware issues I had:

• Bad harddrive caused PAINFULLY slow install – much time wasted this way
• Crashing due to bizarre SMP/SCSI driver problem – I wasn’t using a SCSI drive so disabling the controller was good enough
• Swapping video cards – Once I was sure it would work, I had to install a video card that had TV-out

I spent a lot of time trying to get the TV display to look right (nvtv, nvidia-settings, X modelines, the works) with no satisfactory resolution. I finally gave up because I temporarily connected it to the bedroom TV, if all goes well, it would more likely live in the living room.

I’m fairly impressed with it. Somethings work better than others, that’s for sure, but so far the core functionality looks really good. I haven’t had much luck with the commercial detection/skipping. And I had some problems with guide data during the 3rd install. One feature I like (or will like, once the screen is large enough to read) is the NetFlix integration. That is really smart and not something I would have thought of on my own.

Here are some additional things I’d like try if MythTV works out:

• Adding additional tuners to MythTV
• Putting the backend in the basement, building thinner/quieter frontends for the viewing areas
• Taping over-the-air content in the hopes of ditching cable entirely
• iTunes integration like I have with TiVo

Converted!

Historically I’ve never been a very big fan of PHP (granted, I haven’t looked at PHP5 yet). This is not a hastily formed opinion based on superficial experience. The website you are now reading was (and continues to be) PHP based. I had a good mind to rewrite it in Mason (or heck, even Ruby) just to move away from it. But when I was setting up Anna’s site I decided to try WordPress and they’ve managed to build a very nice platform on top of a steaming pile of poo; so my hat is off to them.

I liked it enough that I decided to move Leigha’s site to WordPress (from MoveableType *ptoo*). I even liked it enough to move my own site from being somewhat-blogger based to WordPress and here we find the impetus for this entry.

WordPress has done an impressive job of easing migration of the content. I had to migrate the template painstakingly by hand. And I had to back-fill my pre-Blogger entries (flat HTML files) into the system. They didn’t have titles at the time, so if you look at any entries from 2003 and earlier they probably have Smallvile-style one-word titles. I have to say it was interesting travelling back in time to make those entries. I had forgotten many of those events.

So we find ourselves here. Gleefully in WordPress land. Candy for everyone!

mdns proxying

One thing I didn’t mention in previous posts is the absolute FUN I had getting multicast-DNS (mdns/rendezvous) to propogate across the VPN tunnel to the living room. This is necessary for TiVo to discover the Galleon server running on my desktop.

I played with various solutions – after the mildly tedious process of getting the toolchain set up. I played with various programs called things like mdnsproxy or mdnsresponder. Not much luck with either of those two. What did work was something I wouldn’t have thought to search for: xboxproxy. It was originally designed to proxy xbox broadcasts messages but it does all kinds of broadcast messages really well. I set one process running on the main wrt54g listening on the LAN, and relaying to the livingroom. The livingroom instance listens on its LAN, and relays to the main wrt54g. They both repeat anything the counterpart received. It works absolutely beautifully.

Real Alternative

I don’t know a single person who has any fondness for Real Media/Player, and that’s putting it pretty kindly. Unfortunately, NPR still does a great deal with Real, especially old shows before they saw the light. I was very pleased to find a program called “Real Alternative” which is an independent player to play Real music/video files. I used it to listen to an episode of Diane Rehm and it worked perfectly.

My life up to Anna

I won’t trouble you with sentimental gushing over my daughter. Similar sentiments have been expressed elsewhere and with flair with which I cannot compete. Suffice it to say that life has been good to me. But that is not what I’m writing about.

In the past 10 days or so it occurred to me how much of everything I’ve done has come together on this occasion. Projects that many people considered a frivolous or idiotic use of time or money. Don’t get me wrong, these are not all essential skills, per se, but nevertheless in a way I feel that life has been leading up to this. It’s difficult to enumerate but I’ll give it a shot:

• Nocturnal habits
• Photography skills honed in camera club
• Video editing/publishing
• The 1TB NAS storage device holding all the video/pictures I’ve captured since her birth
• Bulk mailings (snail mail)

Ok, you called my bluff. I don’t really have an idea what I’m talking about but there is definately a disquieting sensation that life has reached an apex (in a good way).

Anna Caroline Averbuj

Anna Caroline Averbuj – 9.02 pm – 8 lbs 4.5 oz – 20.5 inches. Leigha was incredible. Mom and baby are great.
Update (3/2): I uploaded pictures to Leigha’s Gallery.
Update (3/6): There’s now a Meet Anna video (~10 minutes/24mb) available for watching.
Update (3/12): Anna’s website is now online!.

Yahoo UI Libraries

I’ve been a little reluctant to jump onto this newfangled DHTML/Ajax bandwagon. Sure it sounds fancy and looks nice, but you can’t fool me. I used to write web applications and making things look the same in IE and Netscape was hellish. After playing with the Yahoo UI Libraries, I have an update. The bad news: It’s almost but not entirely like before, it can still be painful. The good news: The UI libraries are very good, and they help a bit.

By this point, I’ve probably spent somewhere around 20 hours playing with the Yahoo stuff. I’ve had a lot of problems with making things happy in both IE and Mozilla/Firefox, none of which are Yahoo’s fault. I was able to make a fancy floating navigation bar that can be dragged to either the left or the right side of the screen; it can be hidden (and hides differently depending on which side); the user can pick between two levels of opacity; it remembers what side you left it on, whether you left it showing, and what zipcode you entered into the weather search. All this required me to write about 300 lines of javascript, and spend much more time with IE than I am accustomed.

Here are the bugs that consumed the greatest amount of my time:
1: the way that YAHOO.util.Dom.getClientWidth() works, IE returns a width that includes the vertical scrollbar, this making my navbar appear about 20px too far to the right (and making the horizontal scroll bar appear). Solution: I added document.body.clientWidth to the set of attributes explored.

2: Mozilla/Firefox has a bug with opacity = 1 that makes the element blink. Solution: I set my maximum opacity to 0.98 instead of 1. This is really an absurd bug.

There were more CSS incompatibilities that drove me really nuts. The state of browser compatibility is *better* but not entirely resolved. The Yahoo UI libraries and design patterns are excellent, I highly recommend them.

More WRT54G fun

The last entry before this website went on hiatus was about the WRT54g I had just gotten. Since then, a friend let me borrow one of his spare WRT54g (thanks sungo), which allowed me to start playing with OpenWRT. I have to say I’m much happier with OpenWRT than I was with sveasoft’s firmwares. The versions I’m running haven’t provided a web UI, to which I had no attachment. Instead I manage everything via SSH/CLI. It boots with a pretty small foot print. Then I can install packages similar to how I would on a Debian box. This gives me a lot more flexibility and much more manageable.

Once I got the borrowed one running OpenWRT in a suitable configuation, I turned the second access point into a client. This solved my isolated living room issue. The main wrt54g has unrestricted wireless association, but it won’t route any traffic. It runs a VPN server for such a purpose. The second linksys sits in the living room and acts as a wireless client. It associates to the wireless lan, then VPN’s onto the network, then acts routes the local living room traffic (xbox, tivo) over the VPN. Really works beautifully.

An Ubuntu Experiment

Despite my best efforts, lethargy gets the best of me. This website hasn’t been updated in far too long, mostly because I’ve been really busy planning for our baby that is due in March. But that is neither here nor there.

For Christmas, Leigha wanted to give her dad a computer. Leigha’s dad has never used a computer, of any kind. I thought this was a fairly rare opportunity to see how well a user could get by with Linux as their first OS. I took an old P3-500 that was laying about, and I chose Ubuntu 5.10. I had quite a lot of trouble with the ubuntu installation process, but it appears to have been media / cdrom related. Next I chose Netscape ISP because it’s cheap and it helps my employer. This was another trouble spot. Netscape sales folks were completely unhelpful in determining whether it would work on Linux (they even said Mac’s aren’t supported).

Ubuntu dial-up support had an bug that worked to my benefit. The way that dial-up was configured, the computer would start to dial up to the internet when it went through the network setup phase. This turned out to be a feature I wouldn’t have thought of on my own. Since he only needed the computer to send email, it meant that by the time XWindows finished loading, the computer was already dialed up.

So the experience is actually pretty positive, when you think about it. He turns the computer on, it starts dialing while booting, XWindows starts and it’s already connected. Firefox auto-launches with GMail as the home page (with automatic login already set up). When he’s done, all he has to do is shut down. This seems to beat the Windows experience of boot, wait, login, wait, dial-up wait, browse, wait, shutdown.

We also bookmarked a few sites to get him started, CNN and Leigha’s website. It didn’t take him long to find the gallery on her website and leave some comments on pictures. So far, I think the experiment was pretty successful. I’ll be really curious to see what happens when he meets a Windows computer.

Finally a WRT54G

I finally got a new toy, the LInksys WRT54G. As usual, I find myself trying to make it dance a jig it was never taught. My goal with the router is to eliminate my linux box as the entry point, and use the WRT54G in a few ways.
1: I want it to have my 2 public IPs and proxy the appropriate services
2: I want it to run PPTPD for the WLAN

This way, as long as there is some sort of power, I can be sure I can access the home network, and the SPOF for the network moves from the complicated linux boxes to the simple WRT54G.

I’m not sure how easy it is going to be.