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Monday, August 15. 2011Site Migration In Progress
Please brace for a slightly bumpy ride as I migrate my sites on to a linode. It's been fine thus far however there will no doubt be obscure things which don't work for a while.
Edit: I think that's all done. Please let me know if you see anything more broken than usual. Wednesday, June 2. 2010TwinHan Remote under Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.04
Years ago with one of my DVB TV tuner cards cards I unexpectedly also received a little USB IR receiver and remote. In common with almost all peripheral hardware, it was designed for Windows but can with a little effort be made to work with a linux machine, such as my MythTV machine.
I made it work by hand years ago, but then had no use for it for a while, and a few months ago wanted to make it work again. It turns out that Adam Pierce has a good set of instructions. But, like all other commenters on that blog post, my setup broke when upgrading to Ubuntu 10.04. Grrrr. I have finally found a working combination that hopefully will help others - the suggestions in the blog post were good enough to set me on the right track, but not good enough to make it actually work. Here's the items that I had to modify by hand over and above my (upgraded) Ubuntu 10.04 setup:
All that, and just in time for my Logitech Harmony remote to arrive and have to start again. Monday, May 31. 2010Lucid (Bad) Dreams
For years now I've loved linux. I've met and spoken with Linus Torvalds. I've even made a pilgrimage to where he wrote it. For servers, and many desktop uses, there's nothing quite like it.
The core linux system is a beautiful thing. Through uni studies, attending several linux.conf.au events over the years, and personal interest I've studied multiple parts of the code, and even fiddled under the hood myself at times. And yet every time it comes to upgrading my highly-customised home server, one or more things breaks horribly, requiring much of my time to fix. These days the distribution I run on the server is kubuntu - a legacy from when the system was also used as a desktop. This upgrade will hopefully be the last for years, as the latest 10.04 release "lucid" is a Long Term Support release, meaning it will be kept safe and stable for years to come. Good thing, given it's taken me a few weeks to get this far. Here's a log for those who are interested.
Linux is an amazing thing which is capable of complex setups well beyond that which most users would have, and all for free. That just doesn't mean that the complex stuff is easy when it breaks in new and creative ways. It would be a full-time job to keep up with the changes that have happened with this release. I've had to find this out after the fact and spend time patching it all up. I had hoped Canonical (maintainers of Ubuntu/Kubuntu) would be doing this for me, and on the vast majority of hardware-software combinations out there they do very well. I can just see as time becomes more and more precious in years to come that a service doing all this custom work for me would start to look very attractive. Especially when your setup looks like this:
Should be simple to upgrade, right? Tuesday, May 4. 2010Europe 2002-3 Blog Fixed
The link over to the left goes to the almost-daily blog and pictures we kept during our Europe 2002-3 trip. When I moved webhosts I neglected to quality check it and have only just fixed a few little issues which were stopping the blog from working.
Also, the "Time Machine" which provides a quick link to a certain number of years ago today is fixed so that we can re-live our trip each day, but in a much cheaper fashion. This is all custom code and today (or even when we went again for our Honeymoon in 2006) I'd do it quite differently, using flickr and/or one of the many online travel blogging services which did not exist in any form in 2002.
Posted by Alison Gould
in Blogging, Europe 2002-3, Site News
at
22:23
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Monday, April 26. 2010Insulated Twitter
Two tweets landed side-by-side in my Twitter feed the other day, highlighting the difference between our current government(s) and optimal reality:
Sunday, June 14. 2009Fully Sick
We're all feeling rather ill with cold-like symptoms (Liz is quick to point out they are not flu-like, and having dealt with suspected swine flue cases in quarrantine at her work I guess she'd know).
This has brought a return to the horrible nights of no Phoebe sleep, although worse because she screams for her mum who herself needs about a week of sleep. We're mostly through this, having had Phoebe sleep through from 7:30 until 4am today, which is a huge improvement so we aren't complaining (much). Unfortunately we've missed a few occasions due to not wanting to go anywhere to spread our nasties around - sorry those we had to cancel with. There are recent pictures added, with more coming soon (especially now that my new Macbook has a built in SD card slot, and I'm having a great deal of fun with the new 35mm 1.8 Nikkor lens ! ).
Posted by Alison Gould
in Computers, Family, Hardware, Photography
at
21:05
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Thursday, May 14. 2009Naked DSL Exposed
Naked DSL, for those who are not aware, is an impressive-sounding piece of technology that promises to free you of expensive phone bills.
In summary, since you can now run Voice-Over-IP (VOIP) phones which actually route your phone calls over the internet rather than the phone system, the next logical thing to look at is why have a "normal" phone at all? However, today you need a phone line to run your DSL connection over. So, you pay say $30 to Telstra to give you a phone line, then $30-60 to your DSL provider for bandwidth, and then run free phone calls over the top of that. See that $30 number at the start? It's paying for a phone line with the ability to make phone calls, which you now no longer need. Enter Naked DSL. It's just a raw phone line no longer capable of making phone calls, it is naked in the sense that all it can do is host a DSL session. Cost savings abound. This much information you can find out anywhere else online, such as most Naked DSL provider's websites. This far I had read before deciding to save the mother-in-law some money and set her up with a connection through iiNet - itself a nightmare but the root cause goes deeper than that. The core problem with Naked DSL in Australia is that Telstra techs don't understand it. Four times now she has been disconnected by Telstra (NOT iiNet) who, when probing around in either the local junction box or the exchange for free lines to connect other customers, find hers, and perform their standard check of whether a line is available - look for a dial tone. But, from the brief explanation above, you will probably summise that Naked DSL does not have a dialtone!. So, techs disconnect her, connect some other now-happy customer insted, and move on. Our poor heroine in this story is left with no DSL connection, a DSL provider who correctly insists that they have done nothing, and, for kicks, no phone to even call and complain. Once for this to happen is excessive - especially when iiNet insisted that the end-user had to change the modem, check all the cabling, find the non-existent MFD on site, etc. etc. This took a month and a half. The second time I was furious, but it only took them a week to get her reconnected. Each time now it takes a few days, but to get through to them takes a long mobile phone call or two, and then a report from iiNet to Telstra, which they act on lazily, in their own time, despite it being their techs and outdated practices which caused the ungodly mess in the first place. Despite the cost savings, I simply can't recommend Naked DSL today. I told this to a few friends who signed up anyway. Last I spoke to one of them, the exact same thing had just happened to him... Tuesday, April 28. 2009New Job!
Well, sorta.
A year or so ago when the team I originally started with in 2001 was transferred to Parramatta office, I used the excuse to stay in town with a different team and also move to a Technical Lead role for the experience. Now things have changed a little - the team in town got moved across the bridge along with everyone else from that office, and also we have moved out to Picton. The combined two hours each-way commute was bearable for the transition period, but something had to give. Coupled with this the old team at Parramatta had some internal re-organisiation, and the Team Leader role became vacant. I was asked to step up, and as of Monday, that's what I'm doing. So yes, I'm now a manager and have the Crackberry to prove it. I view it as a challenge, but figure I wouldn't have been asked if people thought I wasn't capable. I haven't even had time to unpack my boxes, it's been go-go-go since I walked in the door, so there will be precious little rest time it seems. As I type this I'm cruising along in the train to Parramatta (using the rare-as-hen's-teeth Cumberland line trains), and out the window I can see where I cycled yesterday. There's a "rail trail" from Liverpool to Parramatta which is pretty good, but could do with the signs being replaced so I don't waste 30 minutes next time following the wrong railway line. But I guess that's what GPS is for. Liverpool station is also a poorly-designed bottle neck for an "interchange" with a cycleway. I'm still balancing the train times to arrive at the appropriate work-life balance - this took me a little while at North Sydney and some experimentation appears to still be required.
Posted by Alison Gould
in Cycling, Mobile Devices, Sydney, Work
at
21:22
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Saturday, July 19. 2008iPhoto Libraries in mythgallery (mythtv)
Here's some information about a personal coding itch I scratched recently, on the off chance that it helps someone else out there. Certainly my Google skills didn't turn up anyone else who had solved the same problem.
Problem Description You have a Mac somewhere where you use Apple's excellent iPhoto to manage your huge digital photography collection. However, you don't have (and most likely don't want) a spiffy but locked-down and feature-light Apple TV to display them on your TV, instead preferring the excellent and far more versatile open-source mythtv. Mythtv has mythgallery which displays pictures from a normal filesystem reasonably well, but the poor thing has little to no understanding of the complexities of Apple's "iPhoto Library" on-disk layout. I'm talking Albums basically, plus an understanding of "Originals" versus "Modified". I just want it to be how it looks in iPhoto, but on my big LCD screen in front of the couch, controlled with my myth remote. Is that too much to ask??! Research/Analysis Can't find anyone else with this issue so figure "how hard can it be?". Not very, it turned out, at least to get something working, if ugly. The perl Mac::iPhoto looks like a good place to start, but since it hasn't been touched since 2003 it certainly doesn't do anything much useful on my current (7.1.3) iPhoto Library. It uses Mac::PropertyList to do the parsing of the xml file, which doesn't seem to work either. After much fiddling it looks like the AlbumData.xml file in the iPhoto Library actually is invalid - it doesn't have the proper header. First hack Mac::PropertyList to accept the dodgy header, but later decide to keep that standard and put the hack into my script instead. Design Decide to make a directory next to the iPhoto Library which is full of symlinks pointing into the actual library. Directories in this tree will correspond to Albums in iPhoto, and the links will be named such that the alphabetical order used by mythgallery corresponds to the order in iPhoto. Try and get this working on the linux box and also via Samba but in the end it's simplest to run the code and create the symlink tree on my mac and then rsync both the iPhoto Library and the symlink tree across to the linux box. Don't use samba, it stuffs up the annoying ":" that iPhoto uses in paths, at least for me. rsync handles it fine, it's not even that Mac-specific one to my knowledge, just whatever is on my Ubuntu box. Code You'll need Mac::iPhoto 0.1-timg, which is the modification of 0.1 available on cpan to work with iPhoto 7.1.3, and Mac::PropertyList 1.31 from cpan. I guess I should put my code on CPAN, but just wanted to get it all up here for now. Once that's available, you will of course need the actual iPhotoToDirectories script. It's all hard-coded - but you wouldn't have made it this far if you couldn't edit it to work in your situation :) Operation You'll need the same directory structure on both the mac and the linux box as the symlinks get created on the mac but are de-referenced on the linux box. Once it's all in place, run iPhotoToDirectories on your mac whenever you want. It takes a long time, so I wouldn't script it. Maybe an overnight cronjob if you keep your Mac on all night. I don't so I just run it when I remember. Then rsync both the iPhoto Library and the symlink tree to the linux box. Finally, chmod -R a+rx the linux directories if the uid on your mac is different from your myth user. And then, assuming mythgallery can navigate to that symlink directory, it should work and the browsing should be significantly more useful than it was before browsing the raw directory. Known issues
But hey it works! And with a full-time life that's enough for me right now.
Posted by Alison Gould
in Hardware, Linux, Open-Source, Photography, Projects, PVR, Software
at
09:19
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Tuesday, April 15. 2008Phoebe Tests Flickr Video
Posted by Alison Gould
in Family, Mobile Devices, Net, Photography, Technology
at
01:16
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Wednesday, January 9. 2008Mac-free
Since day one, the DVD drive on my macbook has been pretty flaky. Doesn't read commercial DVDs properly, nor burn reliably. This never really bothered me, as a I have an external (faster) burner, and a DVD player on the home theater.
However, for a few months it has also had a nasty fan sound - the type that persists for a while but you know will eventually lead to fan death. Between dealing with a new child, renovating and work I haven't found the mental space required to give up the precious device for the inevitable return to manufacturer for repair, since I use it for everything at work and everything at home. Sometimes it has been used every waking moment for several days. But now, the fan has died it's death, and some monitoring sensor or other has decided that this means running the CPU for any length of time (>10 minutes or so) is not a good idea, and as such, the machine turns itself off. So, it's off to meet it's maker, and hopefully be reincarnated better than it ever was. But, that means I'm Mac-less, so email, contact info, IM, photos, the lot are all on hold for a while. Perhaps ring my mobile if you really need me. Sunday, December 30. 2007Wii
So, despite not intending to get each other anything for Christmas, Liz and I ended up buying each other half of a Nintendo Wii.
This little gadget is an amazing amount of fun, advertised all over the TV and most people have heard of them by now so I won't blab on much except the controllers are great fun to use. So much so that we both have sore arms from frantic Tennis-ing and Mario-ing between screaming baby time. Even the older, non-gaming generation get in to it very easily, having a hit of tennis and understanding the instinctive control methods immediately. And nobody has yet commented that "the graphics aren't as good as the other current consoles." They're too busy having social fun instead. Funniest yet though goes to Meaghan and Dave boxing the proverbial out of each other. For your amusement: Saturday, December 15. 2007Will trade money for sleep
But I don't think you can do that.
Actually, to be honest, it's getting better. Partially because Liz isn't waking me up during the night, she's just doing baby things by herself. This is nice of her, but not really fair, and I'm trying to get her to involve me more, but at the end of the day, since there is no feeding schedule yet, it's highly likely that Phoebe will need a feed anyway, so Liz will be involved eventually. We had a bit of a scare last week with both of the girls going back to hospital for a couple of minor complications, but they seem to be mostly working themselves out. Our gut instinct that the local doctor's advice was rubbish proved well-founded after speaking to the hospital's top paediatrician. Still going well with the cloth nappies, especially so since we got our new washing machine. And dishwasher, and big TV. Yes, we aren't supposed to be able to afford such things with a new bub and me off work, but that's the magic of 12 months interest free, and some times you just have to get things at the right time. I've re-jigged Phoebe's homepage to point straight to the photos for now - less hassle for me to manage when we're between other things. Photos continue to appear there as we add them!
Posted by Alison Gould
in Family, Photography, Site News, Technology
at
21:33
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Friday, November 9. 2007I declare closed the investigation
Just received the letter below from Portugal, which Google Translate has helped me gather is to tell us that the inquiry into our car being broken into in Óbidos is now closed due to lack of evidence.
To add to the fun of reading the original Portuguese to type in to the translator, some of the words hadn't printed properly so I am left to make educated guesses about a language I know two words in. Announced themselves to V. Exa, as a Denunciante, which was delivered in the order of filing survey referenced above, resulted in a complaint lodged against DESCONHECIDOS, pursuant to art. 277 of Code of Criminal Procedure, with its reopening arise if new evidence which invalidem the pleas in that order-art. 279, paragraph 1, of the same diploma legality. Anyway, obrigado, Portuguese police! Or should that be "Due in low"? Thursday, October 25. 2007Things
Well, you can probably guess from the slackness in blogging I'm showing here that life has been busy. The most obvious reason is of course the baby who is showing all signs of being healthy, and arriving early December. The midwife thinks possibly earlier, but we'd rather it not because she is away until the end of November.
There's modern cloth nappies galore here now, and buckets for dirty ones, plus of course clothes, wraps, furniture, car seat, pram, you name it. I've heard it described as the biggest consumer spend a couple goes through (after housing), and it's truly scary what some companies tell you that you 'need' to have. We've been to birthing and parenting classes and spent countless hours reading stuff online so apparently we now know all, true experts in the field. Except it will of course have no bearing on the reality of actually having a child to look after 24 hours a day. It was interesting to compare out situation to others in the class though - we're much better off and more prepared than several others, so that gives us a bit of hope. Trying to organise a couple of short holidays before the due date too. Some other quick point-form news:
Posted by Alison Gould
in Cycling, Family, Honeymakers, Jersey Kerb, Net, Photography, Real Life, Travel
at
22:15
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