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.

January 11, 2008

KDE 4.0.0 — A Disappointment

Filed under: Linux — Jared Sutton @ 11:30 pm

KDE is known for it’s high level of customizability (Gnome users/developers hate this, for whatever reason). However, with the 4.0.0 release of KDE, I found a desktop that was neither usable in it’s default configuration, nor was it otherwise customizable (not even close to the level of KDE 3.5). This “release” is not feature-complete (not even close), and I won’t be moving from KDE 3.5.8 any time soon. Some people need to re-focus on what release cycles are supposed to be like…

  • Alpha Release -> Not feature complete; a taste of what the final product has in store; perhaps (very) buggy
  • Beta Release -> Feature complete, but still needs polish (and bug-fixing); stable enough for normal users to test (but not use in production)
  • Release Candidate -> Feature complete with all (known) major bugs fixed. This could be a final release, if no one finds any major problems
  • Final Release -> Everything that the users have been salivating over, and MORE!

I hate to say it, but KDE 4.0.0 seems to fit in what we’ve traditionally classified as an “alpha” release. I’m not saying that because it’s unstable; KDE 4.0.0 is stable for the most part (still can’t get Konsole to start up without crashing). The reason I’d call it “alpha” is that it’s not feature complete.

For example, the first time I logged into KDE 4.0.0, I noticed the panel…OK, well who couldn’t notice the panel? It’s rather large with a massive digital clock on the right side. I mean, a blind man with two missing fingers would notice the panel right off the bat. So, since I don’t like my panel to be so monstrous, I right-clicked the panel and chose “Task Manager Settings.” A configuration dialog popped up with (wait for it)…ONE OPTION!! The one option was weather I wanted tool-tips or not! So, I thought maybe the panel will size down automatically if I reduce the font size of the digital clock. So, I right-click the clock and chose “Digital Clock Settings.” In that dialog I saw options for choosing a font, weather it should be bold or italic, the clock color, weather or not to show the timezone/year/day-of-the-week, and weather to show in 24-hour format, but NO FONT SIZE OPTION!!!

You might say: “Well, Jared, perhaps the people working on the panel just were having a bad year or two…why not give the rest of the release a chance?” Oh, my friend, I have indeed given the rest of the desktop a chance. I set aside my experience with the panel so that I could give the rest of the Desktop my full, undistracted attention. Next, I turned my attention to the icons I saw on the desktop. These icons were the ones that I had there while running KDE 3.5 (the contents of the “Desktop” folder in my home directory). The first thing I noticed was that they weren’t lined up nicely; they were kind of there in no particular order, at least none that I could determine. Odd perhaps, but something I could once again overlook.

Each icon had a translucent backdrop with rounded edges: “A nice touch” I thought to myself. One thing that troubled me, however, was that the icons were on the other monitor from the panel. I have gotten used to having both on the same monitor, so I tried to move them. I tried to select multiple icons and drag them to the other monitor. Much to my surprise, I could only move ONE icon at a time. So, I resigned my self to just move them one-by-one. After trying to move the first icon, I found that once the icon left the screen that it was on, it became invisible on the other monitor. After playing around with it a bit, I suspect that the desktop background on the second monitor was being rendered over top of the icon. But this isn’t the worst of this part of the story: after trying to move the icon back THE ENTIRE DESKTOP STARTED TO MOVE!!!!11111one!

Now that I’ve given you a good horror story of KDE 4.0.0, let’s get back to the topic that I started with. Aaron Seigo, who seems to be the voice of the KDE team these days, has been on the war path of KDE 4.0.0 these days. He has been saying that people aren’t expecting the right thing when they expect KDE 4.0 to be a full replacement for KDE 3.5. They shouldn’t expect that until later releases of KDE 4. He says that people are used to the “closed source” method of software releases. He says that Open Source has generally worked different than closed source software. I agree with Aaron, but only to the point that open source projects are _usually_ a LOT more careful about what they label as a final/stable release. They release early and/or often, sure, but they usually do so with labels like “alpha” or “beta” so that would-be users know that it’s not what they might expect from a final/stable release.

I think that KDE 4.0.0 was released so that the KDE developers could get back into heavy development without users constantly clamoring about when KDE 4 was coming out. It was a bone to those of us in the community who have been waiting for years (literally) for KDE 4. Well, I must say, I’m not impressed with 4.0.0. It has potential, but potential never won any awards, and it certainly isn’t what should constitute a final/stable release of a major Linux Desktop contender.

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!

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?!?!

September 3, 2005

DVD Jon Does it again

Filed under: Computers, Linux — Jared Sutton @ 9:28 am

As is reported by this article at the Register, DVD Jon has once again bypassed a barrier to user choice. He has now made it possible for any open source media player to play Windows Media NSC streams. There is already a developer working on getting the code included into VideoLAN.org’s VLC Media Player. This action will allow people to watch NSC multicasts on any platform that they choose (VLC already supports Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X, as well as several embedded systems).

DVD Jon (real name: Jon Lech Johansen) received his title from authoring the venerable DeCSS program that allows people to play commercial DVDs on their computers running Linux. He later added to his fame by writing a client for Apple’s iTunes Music service that allowed people to download their purchased songs without having the DRM portion of the file added. All I can say is, keep it up Jon!

August 13, 2005

One Little Setting…

Filed under: Computers, Linux — Jared Sutton @ 12:29 am

…can make a big difference. I’d been wondered why Firefox looked so much better when running in Fedora rather than Debian/Ubuntu. It came down to something very simple: the GTK theme. It struck me tonight when I was working on Ubuntu and I opened up Firefox (exhibit 1, below). I had never really thought about GTK themes before; I mean, I knew they existed, but the only time I had ever even been exposed to changing them was when I installed Gaim on Windows. So, anyway, I started looking around for a utility to change the GTK theme to something more stomachable. I did just a moment of Googling before I found this utility. After finding it, I immediately searched my Ubuntu Apt repository to see if it was there, and to my dismay, it was not. So, I grabbed the RPM that he had, and used alien to convert it to a DEB, so I could install that on Ubuntu. The conversion and installation was painless, as was the new ‘Human’ theme (exhibit 2, below) that I chose to replace the default. I can die happy now. ;)

Exhibit 1:
Ugly default GTK Theme

Exhibit 2:
Nice looking 'Human' GTK theme

July 24, 2005

GNU Source Installer

Filed under: Computers, Linux — Jared Sutton @ 2:06 pm

I found this nice little utility for automating the installation/uninstallation of packages that you download as the source code. It’s called the GNU Source Installer. It even provides a GUI: an ugly TK interface, but still a GUI. Basically it just does the things that one normally would do to compile and install a program from source, but it also keeps track of what files were copied where. So, you can simply hit the uninstall button, and it will remove those file from your system.

Now, someone just needs to write one that will automate the process of building binary packages like Debs or RPMs. I would love that. ;)

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