Planet TLLTS

At last year’s CES show Nvidia unveiled the Ion platform. Small form factor boxes powered by Intel Ion processors and Nvidia mobile graphics cards capable of full 1080p h264 video playback! The key is that you can offload the video playback to the graphics card’s GPU. I currently have a Popcorn Hour A110 that’s a nice multimedia playback device. While I can watch my MythTV recordings on the PH via an NFS shared drive you don’t get the full MythTV experience (commercial skipping, scheduling, plugins, etc.). So I’ve been waiting to build an Nvidia Ion box. Based on various reports the initial Nvidia Ion offerings were mixed at best. Recently the Zotac Ionitx AU motherboard was reported to work well as both a MythTV frontend and as Boxee and Xbmc boxes. As a result these motherboards have been in short supply because of the high demand. Newegg has the motherboard for $209 and in stock for the last week or so. While Amazon has it listed for $189 but it wasn’t in stock. Through the grapevine I heard that Amazon was getting them in stock by the end of this week. So I took a chance because I’m stingy and pre-ordered it at Amazon. Last night I got the notification that they were in stock and my order was processed. Yeah! With the extra $20 I saved I can pickup a little more extra RAM and maybe get a remote for the new box. I also ordered the following case for it:

This thing is going to be uber quiet, small and draw very little power. More than likely I’ll videotape the unboxing, build and MythTV configuration for an upcoming MythTVCast episode. This should be fun.

Everyone wants to know what kinds of crazy hardware a computer geek has kicking around his house. If you are actually reading this post, I know your curiosity will drive you to find out. Here is what this geek uses at home.

Nine more audio files from SELF have been uploaded to the internet archive. All but one of the talks are available for download now; the last audio file will be posted in a couple of days.

SELF audio stream

SELF presentation audio

You can also subscribe to a rss feed of the audio files in OGG format, and listen to them as soon as they are uploaded.

SELF OGG-cast feed

SELF OGG index

Video files will be made available during the month of August.

Task 1.8.0 is in stable over at taskwarrior.org. If you have not tried out task and dig command line applications I strongly recommend you do so. I use it every day on all my systems and keep them synced through rsync. Great stuff! I have become addicted to this application. Whoohoo!

I was reading a blog post from Caitlyn Martin about CentOS on her Netbook and noticed on her sidebar that she is also a ferret person. Of course I had to read about her ferrets too. You’d understand if you were a ferret person Anyhow, after reading about her ferrets I felt compelled and obliged to create a ferret page about my ferrets too. If you are interested in my critter collection, you can find them right here.

I took some vacation time last week and enjoyed some nice time with the family. We didn’t leave home but took some day trips and did some local activities. For the last couple of week I’ve been enjoying a new 21.5″ LCD. Besides my laptop this is my first LCD monitor. I absolutely love the thing. Everything is so clear and crisp and the display is so easy on the eyes. Now that I’m getting old saving my eyesight is a concern especially when I’m in front of a computer for 12 hours a day. My old 17″ CRT was about 13 years old and starting to get slightly blurred. I wound up getting an Asus monitor for $160 from newegg. Well worth the cash. On to my other topic. I’ve had LinHES installed on my Mythbox since February. While it’s still considered beta software it has run well for me. I wanted to get my Hauppauge PVR-1212 working with it so I planned to go to the testing branch. I noticed there were even SVN packages in the LinHES repo. Instead of doing a testing build on a separate hard drive I took the lazy route and installed on my main drive. Big mistake. Upgrading to the SVN packages was easy enough and the only noticeable negatives at first were the limited themes available. Some of the customized tweaks in LinHES were gone from this version. I was able to add my PVR-1212 as a tuner and record HD off my cable box’s component connection. All seemed fine for the first 24 hours. I left the system on overnight to record some shows and awoke to a mess. My Mythbox had a message saying the frontend could not connect to the backend database. I’m pretty familiar with poking around mysql databases from the commandline so I wasn’t initially concerned. I was unable to get into the database at all. It was if my database’s password had been changed even though I was skeptical that the system was compromised. I came to the conclusion that I could of fixed the issue given enough time but it was probably just easier to re-install my system. So I moved off a couple recordings I haven’t had a chance to watch and nuked the system. I decided to give Mythbuntu 9.04 a try and the install was pretty painless. The base system was up in less than hour. The one thing I DO miss from LinHES is the menu option to shutdown/reboot the box from the remote. This is a feature that the other Myth specific distros should incorporate in their versions. A very basic thing that brings a nice level of polish that makes life easier for everyone. More on my adventures later.

Today was national hotdog day! The excitement around the office built through out the week over the celebration happening across the street. Uncle Al’s Hot Dog joint had 5 hotdog varieties for a buck. Sweet deals and I was psyched. A lot of us were psyched.

I got in to work today and we were already deciding plans. Should we eat there, take it to the river side, call in orders, what? Josh, my co-worker wanted to hit up Starbucks. No I don’t care for coffee but I took the walk anyway. While there we ran into Andrew, our former lead who was excited about the meeting today. What meeting? I had forgotten, today was the first meeting of the php group. It was a lunch meeting. But today was hot dog day!

Well I went to the php group meeting that was a lunch meeting and we had Pizza. I had two slices, some salad and a coke. After the meeting I went back down to the office, hooked up with some more co-workers and went over to Uncle Al’s for some wieners. Yeah, there as no way I was going to pass up that deal. So three dogs, some fries, a Mr. Pibb gorge later I was bloated like a hog. Not my bestest moment. I had hot dog burps all day.

I knew I had to work some of this off so I went for my usual run. Now I have been getting a slight abrasive soreness at the top of my legs, right around the bottom of my bum cheeks, top of the thighs I guess. I don’t know. So I decided to take some petroleum jelly with me to ease the rubbing in that area and to stave off some nipple burn. Only we didn’t have petroleum jelly – vaseline. The closest thing we had was Vick’s Vapor Rub. Now I was saying to myself as I started off on the run, this cooling feeling on my nipples is not to bad, but down below the cooling also had a sharp tingle to it on my nether regions. I was not sure what I had done was a good idea recalling horror stories of friends messing around with bengay. Well, needless to say, it all worked out. There was no burning cool, just a soothing cool that did prevent any chafing. Good stuff, hooray.

Now a belly full of hotdogs and pizza did not make for a comforting run…

So Richard Querin has turned me on to a sweet little note/task application called task. Task is a command line tool for doing just that, keeping track of things to do. It offers categorizing, dating, an interactive interface, searching, hot keys and other goodness. Even more, it’s easy to make portable either via a usb key or rsyncing your data to a server.

Apparently the good folks over at taskwarrior.org have taken up this nice little application and extended it. I doubt many distros include their current stable version which is 1.7.1 as of this writing but compiling it is very simple. I did it with ease on debian, ubuntu and arch. You can too with a simple ./configure; make; sudo make install. You could probably just install it in your home directory if you like.

Once installed simply run task to populate the .taskrc with the defaults. Then you are good to go. Their website links to some great screencast on the basics and their wiki can fill in the rest.

Richard, I believe, said he uses his in conjunction with sshfs keeping the task data directory (which is .task by default) on a remote server. I thought about doing this but then figured I would get lazy about mounting the share before I ran task and decided to just go with rsync. Now I should remember to rsync before I run task and/or after I update. I could build this into a script or a cron job or something but that is for a later time.

What would probably make task more useful for me is if I had a sweet phone that ran a terminal, maybe a g1 or a palm pre that I could install this and keep synced with my server. Only time will tell though.

If you are a command line junkie definitely give task a whirl. Compile it from the taskwarrior sources for the best experience.

Thanks Richard! We are enemies no more .

I have been looking for note taking/sharing software for a while. Thus far I have settled with using hierarchical note book (ncurses based) and pmWiki. Recently I decided to try TomBoy.

TomBoy was easy to get running and works fine on Debian and Ubuntu under Fluxbox, my preferred window manager. What was important to me was that I be able to access my notes from any system I chose to use and TomBoy had this capability. Off the bat it favors support for webdav and since I do have a webdav enabled server to use I went that route. The requirements on the TomBoy were a bit of a pain to get installed in both Ubuntu and Debian since they required the use of fuse dav support, but not the standard fuse dav that was in the reposttories available to me. Never-the-less, some simple compiles and I was good to go. To be more specific, Tomboy does not use fusedav, it uses wdfs.

Anyway, after some configuration on my webdav server I was able to get the Ubuntu system working fine, but the Debian Tomboy was not liking the share for some reason. I kept reading though that there was support for sshfs and eventually I found that it was an included plugin and had to be enabled before it would be available. I promptly switched to sshfs over webdav.

I made some notes, stuff I do on a daily basis at work and was satisfied. I felt the tools and the format for generating these notes were just fine. I was pleased with my work and how Tomboy performed. But, I found myself preferring my original system using pmWiki.

I had since gotten used to accessing my notes via a web browser and going to that for my information before looking at Tomboy. Is this a failing of Tomboy? Not in the slightest. It’s just what I had become accustomed in my day to day work.

To that end, I think Tomboy is an excellent tool but I prefer pmWiki for my day to day note taking. How will Tomboy fare agains HNB for me? I am not sure. I shall see when that day comes. But for now I will continue to use pmWiki for my notes.

A few months ago I took a look at my feelings about software patents with regards to Mono. I had, then, been pretty against the use of Mono for it’s roots in MS technology. But, after some well developed points raised by the pro-mono side I found myself agreeing with them. I began to sympathize with them and think that maybe, just maybe there wasn’t a real issue here. Then Microsoft after some more veiled threats turned around and sued TomTom. That got my cackles up, raised some alarms.

A few weeks later, after the dust settled and the battle had ended and we all started to move on again, my thoughts on Mono were challenged after hearing the other side speak out about how we should not worry and that Mono is no more a threat than any other language, etc. So I figured, to hell with all this in fighting! Should there be concern, should their be patent violates let MS fire the first shot and let the patent wars begin. Let the truth as to whether Mono violates MS’s intellectual property or Linux in general be put to the test in courts.

Then Microsoft put some of their .net standards that Mono is based around under their community promise not to sue. I thought this was great, this is it, no more bickering. I figured that some would point out shortcomings with this promise as usual, and then we could eventually move on.

Well here I am another few weeks later after reading the shortcomings, listening to some more people and I am still in the dark. This whole issue is a miasma of confusion, political and ideological bantering, and a damning schism.

Which side is right? Again, we won’t until it’s put to the test. Will it be put to the test? I’m skeptical, why? Because I listened to the wonderful audio presentations from SELF, heard the tactics MS has used, listened to RMS, listened to the proponents of Mono, read the groklaw articles and thought some more for myself.

The cost of waging a war on patents is more than any one company wants to bear. We have the open innovation network to help out there, but consider the TomTom case. Notice that out of the 7 or 9 patents at stake, only three related to Linux. Is TomTom going to go to bat for those 3 patents if the other 4 or 6 infringe? No, they are going to have to find a settling point. Since right off the bat a company is facing 8 to 10 million US dollars to fight a patent suite, it makes more sense financially to settle, especially when there is the possibility that you may be found guilty. This does not mean that the Linux patents were legitimate, but sprinkle a few illegitimate patents in with more genuinely infringing patents and you’d be a fool to step up to the plate. Even more, TomTom was facing an injunction, which they could not suffer for the length a trial would take.

There is a big problem with the system. Microsoft is learning more and more everyday how to exploit the system to their ends. Sure, there are people, developers at Microsoft who are friendly towards the FOSS community, who I am sure truly want to interoperate and share ideas with. But on the other hand, there is a documented and significant population who will do whatever it takes to crush any threats to the company. Linux has been identified as threat number 1. Look at how they have behaved with their closed door deals and threats? Can we truly trust them.

I stand behind my assertions that the Mono team is truly talented and they want to enjoy and spread the technology they love, to excel in their craft. I do not for once think Miguel has anything but true love for development and seeing FOSS software improve. I think Mono applications are great. Tomboy, Banshee, GnomeDo are tops in their class.

But I for one cannot ignore the warning signs placed in front of me each time I start to sway from my original opinion. It’s a bittersweet decision to have to make and it is one each person should make for themselves: Whether they feel Mono is a threat or not. But it becomes more than that. Since the avenues to the technology we love come with decisions we may or may not like. To that end, follow the path you feel is right. That is the one thing that is nice about FOSS, you can choose what you want and what you don’t want. It may take some extra effort on your part, but that is one of the tenants behind FOSS. The choice to support and share what you support. We don’t have to share with a hammer, smashing that which we don’t. Instead, share with an open hand, and be kind to the other side. They feel just as passionate as you do. Only time will tell where all this will lead, but let us make it a fun and pleasant ride.