Jared’s Blog

April 14, 2010

MythTV Hacking

Filed under: Computers, HTPC, Linux — Jared Sutton @ 12:44 am

I’ve been hacking on MythTV recently. I’ve written a Python app that creates a folder of symlinks to your MythTV recordings so that XBMC or Boxee can index them more easily (without having to use UPnP or some other weird method of accessing the Myth recordings. I’m cleaning up that code now, and you’ll be able to download it from a Google Code project soon. I’ll post back here when that goes live.

I also was wondering today if I could find a way to see if there were any HD versions of movies that I had already recorded in SD coming up in the listings. I think this MySQL query should do the trick…

SELECT DISTINCT program.title FROM recordedprogram LEFT JOIN program ON program.title = recordedprogram.title WHERE program.videoprop LIKE '%HDTV%' AND recordedprogram.videoprop NOT LIKE '%HDTV%' AND recordedprogram.programid LIKE 'MV%';

That’s a good start, I think. The next step is to wrap that in a Python app that will automatically schedule that HD version of the movie to be re-recorded, and set it up in a cron job that runs on a daily basis. I was thinking about joining the program and recordedprogram tables on programid, but I wasn’t sure if the HD and SD versions of the same movie would have the same programid, and I figured the title should be a sufficient match most of the time (e.g. of the less likely scenario, Ocean’s Eleven is the name of two different movies).

October 21, 2008

My longtime blog hiatus is over

Filed under: Computers, Linux — Jared Sutton @ 12:02 am

Yes, friends: I’m back. It’s been too long. A lot has happened since January 11th. I’ve graduated from college and taken on a job. So, with all those details out of the way, I’d like to give you my thoughts Kubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex):

I decided to install Intrepid when it hit alpha stage. It had just been too long since I had gotten any significant software updates, and I was getting itchy (and not just because I tried growing a beard…which didn’t turn out very well). I decided to give Intrepid all of the credit it deserves, and I wiped my desktop system, after cleaning up and uploading my home directory to my local NAS. I hadn’t been doing much reading on Intrepid, so I was slightly surprised to see that KDE 4.1 is the default desktop in Kubuntu now. I was slightly worried after my KDE 4.0.0 experience.

So, after installing the system, I booted it up for the first time to find a not-so-speedy desktop in front of me. Now, folks, I’m not trying to brag here, but I’m running quite a capable system. It’s an Athlon 64 X2 4000+, 4 GB DDR2-800, GeForce 8600 GTS w/ 256MB. Windows, menus, and dialogs shouldn’t lag when requested, but yet, here we are at KDE 4.1.2….lagging. Now, I’ve heard that there has been or are problems with the nVidia driver and KDE 4, so I’m going to also try it out on my T61 which has Intel’s 965 chipset (one of the best-supported video chipsets in the Linux world). So, for the time being, I’ll lay aside my issues with the desktop being laggy.

On the whole, I’m impressed with the number of annoyances that have been fixed in the months between KDE 4.0 and 4.1.2. The panel is now resizeable (though only by the mouse, not by a specific pixel height); the desktop doesn’t move if you click-and-drag in the wrong spots; I can change the window decoration back to Plastik without KDE 4 crashing; running xtermcontrol doesn’t crash Konsole (I reported a bug on that :) ). I’m sure I’m missing a few things that don’t bother me anymore, but those are the ones that are coming to my mind quickly.

And now, comes the part that would make most KDE developers cry (if any of them actually read my blog). I’m going to give my top 10 list of KDE 4.1 annoyances (as of 4.1.2):

  1. You can’t change the font or time format (24-hour vs 12-hour + AM/PM) in the digital clock that’s on the panel.
  2. Some KDE applications don’t respect my chosen widget theme (Plastik). This could be some strange Kubuntu packaging issue, but I somehow doubt it.
  3. There’s no “Run” option in the classic K menu (nor does there seem to be any way to customize it).
  4. There are now two “theme-able” engines in KDE 4: Plasma and Qt. Call me a traditionalist, but I like my desktop to look somewhat consistent, and that’s hard to do when some things on the desktop follow one theme, and the others follow another. Blessings on the person that created the “Plain” Plasma theme that’s on kde-look.org, as it matches my Plastik Qt theme pretty well.
  5. I’m all for desktop widgets, but I don’t want my ENTIRE DESKTOP to be built from widgets. Let’s take an example of how the widget-built desktop concept could be annoying (at least in it’s current implementation). The KDE 4 panel is a plasma widget, as are all of the items on the panel (the K menu, the task list, the system tray, the digital clock, etc.). Now, let’s say I want to “lock” the items that are currently on the dock, and I want to get rid of the annoying “cashew” that’s on the far right of my dock. I right-click the dock, and choose “Lock Widgets.” Does it lock my dock? Yes. But, it also locks all the other widgets that I happen to have on my desktop. Bad.
  6. I like desktop icons. The desktop is a place that I can stick things that I’m working on currently without having to dig around in an endless hierarchy of folders to get to. If you take away my desktop icons, you reduce my ability to work efficiently. The folderview Plasmoid is a nice, quick fix to the lack of working desktop icons from the KDE 4.0 release, but it’s not a perfect solution. From what I read, KDE 4.2 will allow you to fill your whole desktop with a folderview widget, but you’ll lose the ability to place other widgets on your desktop. That doesn’t sound good either. KDE Developers: it’s time to re-think (not throw away) this widget strategy before you drive away your entire user base.
  7. When you try to resize plasmoids, they stretch and skew very slowly and painfully. Just moving them around can be a chore.
  8. Dolphin is getting better as a file manager, but it’s still missing some things that I like from Konqueror; perhaps others feel the same way. However, there’s no intuitive way to change my default filemanager back to konqueror.
  9. Things just don’t seem to render smoothly. When I see windows and menus appear, I see fragments of things that were on the screen previously for a split-second, and then the item that I requested renders. I’ll see if this is nvidia+kde4 related when I install Kubuntu 8.10 on my Thinkpad.
  10. There are obvious user options missing all over the place. I detailed a few missing options earlier, but this is more of a general annoyance, as it affects the way I work all the time. For example, do I want to group similar tasks in the panel’s task list? Maybe, or maybe not, but I should have an option to turn it on and off. I could go on all night about missing user preference things, but I think you get the point.

So, there it is. My most up-to-date list of grievance. Now, I know there’ll probably be a KDE developer out there that reads this and says: “if you don’t like it, fix it and submit a patch.” People in the open source community like to think that it’s easy for anyone to get involved in an open source project, and for some projects that’s true. However, in the case of KDE, the community has been neglected as of late, and I’m starting to wonder if it’s really a community effort anymore. Maybe that’s a separate topic for another post, and maybe I’m just bitter over the path that KDE 4 has taken over the last several years, but I think many of the things I’ve chronicled in this blog post have some value, if only to help me gague how KDE 4 is improving.

April 20, 2007

Giving Back

Filed under: Computers, Linux — Jared Sutton @ 9:44 pm

My love of Linux began many years ago when a cousin of mine brought down a copy of Debian for me. Later that year, he sent me a package for Christmas that had several network cards, a 5 port hub, and a book on Linux. Since then, I’ve been doing all I can do learn of this great OS. I’ve been on a search across the spectrum to find the easiest, yet the most flexible distribution. That search led me across (in order) Debian (no X11), Red Hat (pre-Fedora), Mandrake (pre-Mandriva), Lindows (pre-Linspire), Debian (Woody - this time I had more packages with a full X server), Fedora, and finally K/Ubuntu.

There were some shorter experiments in there too. I gave Gentoo a try twice. The first time, I was not able to get the system installed. I tried again about a year later, and I was able to get a system installed this time, but I wasn’t happy with the portage system. I know that sounds like blasphemy to those that swear by Gentoo, but it just wasn’t for me.

I eventually settled on K/Ubuntu for my preferred distro. I like it because I don’t have to go all over creation to get certain things working correctly (e.g., Intel wireless drivers), but I still have the power through APT to control exactly what’s installed on my system. Add to that the 18,000+ packages available in the various Ubuntu repositories, and I have everything I need.

Up to this point, it has been hard to give back to the community that I have gotten so much from. Sure, I filed or commented-on the occasional bug report, but I was never able to give back anything tangible. But then I realized one of the things that probably is very hard for Canonical (the corporate presence behind Ubuntu) is shelling out money for download bandwidth. If you think about the thousands, possible millions, of people that download Ubuntu with each release, that could be a significant chunk of change to support.

So, I’ve decided that this time when downloading the latest install ISO, I would use the Bit Torrent method, and I would make sure to leave my Torrent client open to upload at least 150% of what I downloaded. This act is something any user can do to help Canonical defray the cost of providing what I think is the best mix of power with easy-of-use features in a Linux-based OS. In fact, I came home tonight and found that I’d already uploaded 170%, and I’ve decided to just leave my client uploading for at least a few more days to make sure there are enough seeds for those that still want to get ISOs in this manner.

January 7, 2006

XTerm Colors

Filed under: Computers, Linux — Jared Sutton @ 2:19 am

So, I’ve been trying to figure out recently how to change the default color scheme in an xterm window (background and text colors). This may seem like a trivial matter, but when you code at 2 in the morning, color matters to your eyes. :) For a few days, I actually switched to pterm (as it had the default color scheme I wanted), but it had issues interpreting some of the character values right with some programs (specifically, iptraf). So, here it is. In order to make changes to your color preferences in Xterm, you need to create a .Xresources file in your home directory (’touch ~/.Xresources’ should work). Next, open that file in your favorite text editor (mine is pico, but you may prefer vi, or even emacs). Now, add these two lines:

XTerm*Foreground:[your color of choice]
XTerm*Background:[your other color of choice]

Now, save that file, and issue this command:

xrdb ~/.Xresources

Now, you can restart your xterm window to have your new color settings. :) On a side note, my particular color scheme is ‘grey90′ for the foreground and ‘black’ for the background. ;)

December 19, 2005

Gaim 2.0 Beta 1 - Ubuntu package

Filed under: Computers, Linux — Jared Sutton @ 1:28 am

If you want it, I just compiled it (with all the gaim-vv features that they included so far) and made a debian package (suitable for installation on debian/ubuntu). It installs the program in /opt/gaim, so if you already have another, perhaps more stable version of gaim installed, you can safely install this along side of it. Just be sure to back up your .gaim directory first. You can download that here. :)

If you’re looking for RPMs instead, the Gaim developers are looking out for you, as you can download them here.

Wow, two posts in one day; I’m on fire!

December 17, 2005

Banner ads be gone!

Filed under: Computers — Jared Sutton @ 7:50 pm

Very soon after my conversion to Firefox from the old Mozilla Suite, I found my favorite extension: Adblock. Firefox, itself, already blocks most unwanted pop-ups, but, it didn’t have a built-in way of blocking banner ads that are embedded directly in the page. So, some wise person created Adblock, which allows one to create custom rules for blocking banner ads in web pages. Sadly, at the time Firefox 1.5 was released, Adblock had some strange bugs that prevented it from working correctly. I was devistated: how I read the many stories that I read every day, with banner ads constantly attempting to sway my attention?

Adblock Plus, a fork of the Adblock code, seems to be taking up the slack. They have created a version of Adblock that works even better than the original. So, over the last year or so, I’ve created quite a list of rules, and I’d like everyone reading this to have the opportunity to download this list and be able to browse like I do.

I’ll be uploading new lists as I add more rules to it. Very shortly after this post, you should be able to download my list at http://jaredsutton.com/adblocked. :)

November 20, 2005

Machine Down!

Filed under: Computers, General, School — Jared Sutton @ 4:56 pm

Well, I got up this morning and found that my Window$ box had died. The power LED was on, but the rest of the machine was non-responsive. I think that the motherboard fried on the machine, as I’ve swapped out all the other suspect components, and found that they haven’t remedied the the problem (power supply, memory, CPU). So, I checked, and the motherboard (ASUS A7V8X) has a 3 year warranty (with almost a year left). I contacted ASUS tech support, and they said to get the board repaired/replaced, I needed to call the RMA department (different number). However, they are only open weekdays. So, I’ll have to wait and get the ball rolling on Monday. But, that’s alright; I still have three Linux boxes and a Mac to pick up the slack. :)

In other news, my site (and BJU Bloggers) will be moving to a new hosting solution in the next few days, but we’re not anticipating much, if any, down time. We’re hoping that move will increase the overall security of the sites that we’re hosting, as recently, we’ve had a few security breaches that have not settled well with us.

On the acacdemic front, I’ve managed (with the help of God) to bring up my grades in most of my classes to an acceptable level, without sacrificing too much of my non-existant social life :D

October 10, 2005

What am I doing wrong?

Filed under: Computers, Linux, Stupidity — Jared Sutton @ 8:32 pm

OK folks, if you don’t do any computer programming, then don’t bother reading the rest of this post…you have been warned. :)

I’ve been working on a program in preparation for an upcomming programming contest I’ll be participating in. In so doing, I’ve been learning a little more about C, as up until now, I’ve been using either C++ or Java (with a little PHP to top it off). I haven’t been completely clueless about C, since if you don’t know at least a little C, you won’t be that good at C++. So, for the past day or so, I’ve been translating a program from C++ to C. This program accepts any number of INTs on stdin, and prints out the prime factors of that int. It seems to work fine in C++, however, I wanted to see if there would be any performance advantage to doing it in C. So, I have it completely translated, and it even compiles…the problem is, however, that it will not link after compilation. I get the following message from ld:

/tmp/ccepGEcX.o: In function `main':
test.c:(.text+0x46): undefined reference to `sqrt'
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status

I even tried to do the following simple test program to make sure it wasn’t something else in my program that was messing up:

#include "stdio.h"
#include "math.h"

int main () {
double test = 5;
double test2 = sqrt(test);
printf("%f", test2);
return 0;
}

By the way, those include lines are using brackets, not quotes, when I try to compile it: stupid HTML. So, my question, to all those C experts, is, WHAT AM I DOING WRONG?!?!

October 8, 2005

Same Card…Better Price

Filed under: Computers — Jared Sutton @ 2:04 pm

Well, my Dad asked me to get him a wireless network card so that he could check his email while he was away on trips. So, I started looking around, and realized that most of the cards out there stick out an inch or more from your computer. Why someone had the bright idea to do that, I’m not sure, but I did know of a card that didn’t: the Netgear MA521. I have a card just like this, and I use it with my older IBM Thinkpad T20 (which is running Ubuntu Linux right now). It works wonderfully, however when I went to Froogle to see what my price options were, I was suprised to find that all the trustworthy internet retailers had it for $30 or more. Now, if this had been an 802.11g card, I would understand, but this card is only an 802.11b card that is more than 2 years old!

So, I was about to give up on that card, when I remembered that a co-worker of mine had a wireless card that looked almost identical to the MA521, but it was made by a company called TRENDnet. So, I went hunting around to see if I could find this card. To my suprise, I found it on newegg.com, my favorite online retailer. :) It’s the TRENDnet TEW-226PC, and as you can see, it is virtually identical to the Netgear MA521 (save the Netgear logo). I did a little investigating, just to make sure that it used the same chipset, and a quick look in the comments section on Newegg showed that it used the Realtek 8180L chipset, the same as the MA521. So, I ordered it, and saved over $10, just because it is a less-well-known brand.

And, who knows, maybe Netgear just contracted TRENDnet to build the card, and slap their logo on it. ;)

October 7, 2005

Free ISO Burner

Filed under: Computers — Jared Sutton @ 4:25 pm

This little gem made my day (several days ago). It’s an application called ImgBurn (from the author of the now defunct DVD Decrypter) that burns CD/DVD ISO images. You can find it here. It’s not Open Source, however it is free as in Pepsi (if you don’t know what I’m referring to, don’t worry; I just meant that it is a free program). I mean, just last week, I needed to burn an ISO image on a computer at work, and it had just been re-imaged, but no CD burning software installed. So, I was forced to find a laptop in the back room that happened to have a CD-RW drive, and the necissary software installed. Definitely more trouble than it was worth, but I finally got what I needed. I I had known about this little app, I could have saved myself a lot of work. Lesson learned.

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