100% Nonsense

Meanwhile in totalitarian land the government has gone completely bonkers.

If Labor wants to boost it's chances of getting reelected it should dump the filter. If they can orchestrate a coup in a night, why can't they dump the stupid thing?!

g-Cpan is my shepherd

The electronic TV guide for MythTV sucks! At least for Australia. I got put onto a little perl program called Shepherd. Basically "Shepherd provides reliable, high-quality Australian TV guide data by employing a flock of independent data sources." This is the good stuff! I read on about how Shepherd works and I was impressed enough to try it. The install instructions were pretty easy to follow. I installed version 1.4.0 Your mileage may vary with another version. If you're a Gentoo user you'll need the following mandatory packages installed for shepherd:

• dev-lang/perl


• dev-perl/libwww-perl


• media-tv/xmltv


• perl-core/IO-Compress


• dev-perl/DateManip


• dev-perl/Algorithm-Diff


• dev-perl/Digest-SHA1


• dev-perl/File-Find-Rule

The optional dependencies are listed on the Installation page, under Non-Distribution Specific They correspond to the following Gentoo packages.

• dev-perl/Archive-Zip


• dev-perl/DateTime-Format-Strptime


• dev-perl/Crypt-SSLeay


• dev-perl/GD


• dev-perl/HTTP-Cache-Transparent


• dev-perl/HTML-Parser


• dev-perl/HTML-Tree


• dev-perl/IO-String


• dev-perl/XML-DOM


• dev-perl/XML-Simple


• perl-core/Digest-MD5


• perl-core/Storable

However a mandatory dependency, List::Compare doesn't have a portage ebuild. The Shepherd page linked to a tool I'd never heard of before, g-cpan. g-cpan sits on top of CPAN, but builds ebuilds in your overlay, and installs the perl module in a Gentoo-esque way. If no overlay is present in your /etc/make.conf, the overlay will go into /var/tmp/g-cpan. My overlay is set to /usr/local/portage because I don't like the thought of ebuilds ending up in a temp directory. Running

$ g-cpan -i List::Compare

installed the needed perl module. Very nice. I couldn't find an ebuild for the optional JavaScript.pm module, so I used g-cpan for that as well.

Note for the JavaScript.pm install make sure that you setup up spidermonkey in the right way, otherwise the module wont install properly.

$ emerge spidermonkey
$ mkdir /usr/lib/MozillaFirefox/
$ ln -s /usr/include/ /usr/lib/MozillaFirefox/

While running the Shepherd install, I encountered a few errors.

1. No mysql.txt Not sure how this file is created. I think it's a mythfrontend config file to specify how to connect to the backend. It's contents looks like:

   
   DBHostName=$HOSTNAME 
   DBUserName=$USERNAME
   DBPassword=$PASSWORD
   DBName=mythconverg
   DBPort=0

   My suspicion is that since I'm using XBMC, this never got created. I created one in ~/.mythtv for the user that I run XMBC (and shepherd) with, and reran shepherd.


2. Creation of the tv_grab_au symlink. If your user doesn't have sudo rights - which is a valid security situation, this will fail. Not hard to do yourself, but I wonder if Shepherd should assume sudo rights.


3. Addition of Shepherd cron job to crontab. Failed due to lack of sudo rights. To do yourself (as root)

   $ crontab -e
   [Add crontab entry and save file]

   If you didn't get the crontab output from Shepherd, I put

   56 * * * * nice /usr/bin/mythfilldatabase 
     --graboptions '--daily'

   into my file (all as one line).

If you ran shepherd without installing the optional modules, you can rerun the install process using:

$ ~/.shepherd/shepherd --configure

Shepherd hasn't run yet, (the --history flag tells me so), I'll wait for an hour or so. Overall I'm pretty impressed with Shepherd so far. It's well documented, the installation process is easy, and provides good information to make decisions. Keep up the good work Shepherd dev(s).

MythBox is the key - not Asia

Apologies to any readers who don't play Risk for the post title.

I'm up to the stage where I need to get the recording functionality working. That was the major selling point to my wife. So I bought an Aver Media DVB-T 777 second hand from eBay on the recommendation of a mate. The reason he has it, and that he suggested it to me, was that it plays nicely with Linux as the Phillips SAA7134 chipset is well supported in the Linux kernel. I'm currently using version 2.6.31-gentoo-r6, with this config

Device Drivers
  --> Multimedia Support
    <*> Video For Linux
    <*> DVB for Linux
    [*] Video capture adapters -->
      <*> Phillips SAA7134 support
      <*> Phillips SAA7134 DMA audio support
      <*> DVB/ATSC Support for saa7134 based TV cards

Compile, reboot, and done. TV card supported.

I emerged media-tv/mythtv-0.22_p23069 and followed the instructions on the MythTV wiki for configuring the backend.

When running mythtv-setup, if all you have is a keyboard, the left and right arrows allow you select options from combo boxes, the up and down arrows select combo boxes, buttons, text fields, etc and ENTER/RETURN selects whatever is highlighted. You'll get the hang of it.

When selecting your capture card, make sure that you select the DVB under the card type. In the case of my card, because I had multiple inputs (there's an S-Video adapter) I didn't change the card type, so I spent a lot of time figuring out what I couldn't scan for channels. The DVB "section" of your card is the antenna port.

Once you quit mythtv-setup and run mythfilldatabase, if you get an error about not being able to create a QObject/widget start your backend again. This is a weird error with not much information to go on, and took me a lot of googling to figure out. It's because the backend can't be connected to, so starting it solves the problem.

Once I got MythTV configured, it was time to check out how to integrate it with XBMC. The inbuilt stuff to connect to a MythTV backend is buggy, causes XBMC to lock up, and isn't very feature rich.

However MythBox is the saviour of this piece. Has everything the wife would want. So I'm testing the recording abilities now, and can watch live tv. Once I do some more tweaking I should have a decent PVR in the HTPC.

I really do need to get a new HD though.

I for one would like to welcome our new overlord

If you haven't heard, Australia has just replaced our Prime Minister, with a lady. Well done to Julia Gillard for becoming the first women PM in the country's history. Hopefully she has a better technology policy than her predecessor. Nothing would make me - a voter in the next election, happier than for Conroy to be fired and the whole censorship thing dropped.

UPDATE: Kate Lundy looks awesome for Conroy's role Thanks to @brucejcooper

UPDATE: Conroy stays on. Shame that.

Continuing saga of Google's WiFi collection

Another article on the investigation of Google's WiFi adventures. There are two paragraphs that brought me great joy.

The Privacy Commissioner, Karen Curtis, has embarrassed Communications Minister Stephen Conroy by playing down the seriousness of Google's Wi-Fi spying bungle.

...

Curtis rejected Senator Conroy's claims that banking transactions were captured, while also noting that Google did not collect personal information transmitted over encrypted Wi-Fi networks.

“Australian banks use secure internet connections and my Office is not aware of any instances where banking information has been collected,” she said.

Curtis (or someone on her staff) obviously got what Conroy didn't/doesn't.

The data may have been collected (who says you can't write encrypted data to a hard drive), but Curtis understands that it wouldn't be of much use to Google.

Good on her. Keep up the good work Curtis!

Restarting XBMC via remote

I have this problem where XBMC can chew up to ~30% of a CPU. So when I'm doing CPU intensive things (mainly remotely) I like to kill XBMC. However when my wife turns on the TV, there's no XBMC for her to use. Rather than have complaints directed my way, I came up with a simple script that allows XBMC to be restarted when the power button on the remote is pressed. As mentioned previously my HTPC autologins on startup. Now instead of starting X, it runs a script which contains:

while [ 1 ] ; do
  # starts X with required parameters
  startx

  # poll for button press
  irw | grep -q "Power mceusb" && killall irw
done

irw allows you to read off the socket that the remote is connected to. So the script greps for the string that indicates the power button is pressed, kills irw and restarts XBMC.

The nice bit is that this script uses ~0.2% of CPU :D.

Progress on Evergreen open source drivers

In my HTPC I'm using a Radeon 5450; but since the 5450 is based on the Evergreen chipset I've been using the propriety drivers (x11-drivers/ati-drivers). Not a fan.

However since the Linux Kernel 2.6.34 release, it appears that progress is really coming along on the open source drivers (see point 1.11 in the link). I look forward to ditching flgrx soon. :)