Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time

October 31st, 2007

I don't like trick-or-treating

10/31/07 05:41 pm

Or more, I don't like giving candy out to kids.

I'm a naturally outgoing person. I have this shameless ability to just strike up a conversation with a complete stranger. If they don't want to talk, hey that's fine, I get a kick out of that, too. But you'd be surprised how many people are willing to talk when they know someone's listening, even if that person probably doesn't actually care. That's me.

But interacting with kids, especially these days, in an age of the corner rapist and teachers sleeping with students and on and on, I can't help but get wierded out a little bit. Who's watching me talk to this child? Am I going to say or do something that's going to be misconstrued by the parents waiting on the sidewalk?

What happened to the good 'ol days of Lehrer's friendly neighborhood dope peddler?

Current Mood: anti-predatory
Current Music: Iron & Wine - Shepherds Dog (Dan, you might dig this)

October 29th, 2007

Yaaay!

10/29/07 01:47 pm

It works!

Erm, well, kinda. For some reason, the receiver is only accepting every OTHER keypress. But that doesn't strike me as hardware as much as software, so there's got to be something quirky with how it recorded all of the buttons on the remote. I've got some hits off the mythtv mailing list as to what might be at issue. I'm feeling good about fighting that fight.

In other news, I remember, about two years ago, Dan had wondered if one of us had reached the combined 1TB of storage space mark in our respective homes. I've been meaning to lay down exactly what I'm running for my home multimedia. Or what I WILL be running, once I get all the creases worked out.

Main PVR (gribble):

AMD X2 4800 (that's a 2.5Ghz dual core)
2GB RAM
nVidia 7300LE 128MB vid card
(2) 250GB IDE drives
(4) 400GB SATA drives
PVR-500 dual-tuner tv card

The 250GB drives are mirrored using Linux's software RAID and contain the OS, home dirs, etc. The 400GB drives are using software RAID 5 and are where the Vault, audiobooks and TV recodings are stored. I thought long and hard about getting a hardware RAID card, but I think software RAID (along with LVM to help dole out the space) is the way to go.

It's not really much of a compromise. At one point, the processing load of all that checksumming and the technical drawbacks of IDE did suck. But processors are MUCH faster today and SATA puts each drive on its own bus. Not to mention reliability. If a hardware RAID card dies, you have to replace it with the EXACT same model of card, or kiss your data goodbye because the formatting of the drives is proprietary. With software RAID, I can migrate the drives (along with the precious config file in /etc) to any Linux box with 4 SATA ports. It's plenty FAST, too. I'm getting about 62MB/sec for sustained writes. And since the cache is the system RAM, shorter writes (less than 192MB) are more like 400MB/sec. Beautiful. And, as I've little need for 2GB of RAM, I could bump that cache size up further if needed. I shall not be I/O bound for any reasonable set of requests.

So, where I once had 1.5 TB arrayed across my house, counting laptop drives and external USB, I now have 1.5TB of failure-resistant storage in a single box. I'll show off the other machines (and bits of coolness on the network) as I get closer to deploying them.

Tags:
mythtv raid pvr lirc

October 28th, 2007

this is why I'm no EE

10/28/07 01:39 pm

If you don't want to hear about my random flailings in trying to get a remote control to work with a PC, you can skip reading this one.

There's nothing I seem to enjoy more than complicating an otherwise simple idea. Case in point:

We have a 42" plasma hanging on the family room wall. It's nice enough. I've even got the coax cable & power snaked through the wall so that there are no dangling wires. After that, I cut holes in the walls, installed in-wall speakers and removed the factory speakers that we had been jokingly referring to as "dumbo ears". I'm rather proud of that accomplishment, though I almost electrocuted myself (hey kids, make sure the walls are truely devoid of wires before you fire up that monster of a jigsaw!).

So, that should be good enough, right?

Nooooo. I have to have my PVR playback on this TV. Hrm. We can't have any devices sitting upstairs, so we have to install it all in my office, and run the wiring upstairs. For audio & video, this is going to be FAIRLY straight-forward. It's a little known fact that you can do without 7 of the 15 wires in a VGA connector, so I'm going to run the signal over the 8 wires of CAT 5e (you lose stuff like Plug n Play, but I can cope). For the distances and resolutions I'm after, it should have sufficient bandwidth & noise rejection. Audio will be even MORE simple. Just 4 wires for analog audio. I'll probably do CAT 5 for this, too since the wires are ubiquitous.

The biggest problem is going to be control of the system. Infrared repeaters are about $100. Doable in a pinch, but I don't need to repeat signals for "up to 8 devices". No, I just need to be able to use the PVR's remote upstairs, which means that'd be overkill and overly expensive. I have a Microsoft MCE remote, but the IR head is massive (little bigger than an altoids box), and you can only do USB over 12 feet or less. I think I'm going to need 15' or so. Why not, then, homebrew the IR like all those geeks before me?

Why not, indeed...

So I ordered up the parts to make an IR. Actually, I ordered up the parts to make 5 of them, mainly because I wanted a little saftey room in case I botched one or two, and there was a minumum order. All told, the bill was $21, after shipping. I can handle that. I also figured it was best to start with a test unit, something with a shorter cable I could test at my desk. When I know I'm on the right track, I'll wire up the long one to be hidden away upstairs, snake the cable, and solder the DB9 on the end.

So I found a spare serial cable in a box, cut 'er in half, and went about mapping out the wire colors to the pins. Next up, I cut up some perf-board I had laying around. Last night, at about 11:00, I got to the wiring & soldering. With the solder still cooling, I plugged it into the serial port on my laptop and began the inevitable struggle with lirc (the IR software). Eventually, I got it to run. However, when I tried using the little "irw" applet that comes with lirc, I was getting NO signals when I hit buttons on my remote.

Time to double-check my wiring. Hrm, maybe a couple of my solder traces are too close together. When I tried to clean them up a bit, I managed to end up making things worse. Crap. There goes attempt #1. Sure was glad that I had cut all the pieces of perfboard to make all five. Try again.

Still no luck on testing. But this time, I double-double checked my wiring, and noticed that I had, indeed, botched it up. Dammitall. Time for attempt #3. If this doesn't get me anywhere, I'm going to bed.

This time, I found an alternate schematic and laid out the components my own way, instead of using the "here's how you should lay them out to get them all to fit in a teeny space" diagram I was before using. Did everything carefully, made 1 small mistake, but it was easy to fix. Double-double check my wiring, try it out. Defeated again. By this time, it was 2:30 or so. I called it a night and decided to think about chalking the homebrew idea up as a loss.

Well, maybe I could get lucky with the MCE USB remote. So I plugged the USB cable into a USB extention cable to approximate the distance involved. Didn't work. Plugged it directly into the PVR. Still didn't work. Hey, I wasn't expecting THAT...

Turns out that that little "irw" tool won't show you anything unless a certain config file is populated. Dammitall. Populate the config, and it works. Put it back on the longer USB, and it works. Well, I wonder if that's why my homebrew wasn't working. So I plug my homebrew back into my laptop and try recording some IR signals. It sees a partial keypress and dies. Well, that's something. I'm close! Let's triple-check my double-checking. Everything is good. I'm no longer doubting my wiring. I even checked the data sheets on all of the components to make sure that the pinouts were correct. Yeap. What's left?

Well, I get around to reading the docs on lirc.org line by line and I find out that serial ports in laptops don't always send out the full 10V required for this circuit. Could that be my problem? I whipped out the multi-meter, and yeap. Only 6V on the supply wire. FRUGGEGIGDDDRRHAAAG! It's quite possibly my very first attempt was good. How about that.

Time to shut down the PVR and plug in the serial port on the motherboard. We'll see what happens, next.

Current Music: Flaming Lips - At War With the Mystics

October 25th, 2007

can't make up my mind

10/25/07 02:26 pm

I was posting this as a reply to Andy's post on the most excellent amount of swag he took home for a relatively small outlay. But it got bigger...

Anywhoo, I can't personally decide which format I should purchase: Blu-Ray or HD-DVD. I'm certain that throwing my support behind one of them will lead to its eventual fall. And both disc formats are still too expensive.

HD-DVD seems the slightly less expensive option, both in disc costs and in player costs. MUCH less expensive, if one goes the HD-DVD add-on route, though I've come to believe the 360 is a poor media playback device for my home theater--it's just too noisy. For gaming, I don't mind, and at our old place, I never noticed, but the noise floor in my basement is deliciously low. I'm also displeased by the fact that the 360 is NOT HDCP-capable. So if/when discs start flipping that magic "only 480p via component" bit (which is definitely there, but not yet employed by the studios), I'd be left feeling very underwhelmed. No, if I go with a format, it'll be a standalone player.

Meanwhile, most of my home theater and audiophilic contacts on the internets seem to have gone the way of Blu-Ray, and market share is all that matters in this struggle. IN the end, as with my purchase of a Game Cube, I imagine the decision will be one born of emotion:

Who's gonna have the $150 Lord of the Rings super-swanky boxed set? Initial googlings indicate that it will be available on BOTH formats. However, I could only find info for the theatrical release, which is of course also known as the "why bother" edition. So I'll have to wait for whatever comes after that. It still boggles the mind as to why this particular release is taking so damn long. The whole film was mastered in HD. Unless there's major work required to redo the soundtrack in TrueHD (7.1, 24-bit love), it ought not be that hard to just re-encode the thing in h264 and press.

S'ok. I'm also waiting (im)patiently for the day I can share the films with Tori. Got a few more years to go on that one. In the meantime, I'm turning my attentions towards getting the most out of my current DVD collection. There's evidently significant amounts of improvements and upscaling possible via the postprocessing filters in ffmpeg (or ffdshow for the XP crowd). But I'll post about my recent home multimedia trials and tribulations in a few more days.

Current Location: definitely not posting this at work
Current Music: Army of Anyone (Filter + STP)
Tags:
hd, home-theater, lotr

October 22nd, 2007

like, wow

10/22/07 03:20 pm

Interesting. I figured they would have closed down my LJ by now, what with my last post being in December.

I'm posting this using links, the first Javascript-capable, text-based web broser I've found. Evidently you need JS these days in order to log into LJ. Huh.

Anywhoo, I think I've talked to most all of you in person since last December, but just to reiterate for posterity's sake, I am not losing my job. In fact, I recently found out that I'm going to be transferring over to the hardcore IT side of things to become a Unix / Linux admin once again. While I'll no longer be doing cool VR stuff, it will still be cool; I haven't been able to officially flex those particular muscles since I worked at the .com in Boston. It'll be nice to have some daily routine. Further, I'll be the resident "subject matter expert", so I'll be able to say cryptic things to the plebians, like "did you flush the ARP cache before bringing this to my attention" or "try using a tar-pipe instead of rsync". Good times, good times.

I see that San Diego is burning. My memory is pretty rusty today, but that's where Rick is, right? If so, will Rick a "fire day" to match Andy's "hurrican day"? If I'm right about SD, I hope you and Amanda are well and upwind.

Also of note is that one of the converging wildfires is called the "Witch fire". Seriously? Using witches as a fire accelerant seems very 1692, if you ask me.

Current Music: fingertips!

December 12th, 2006

well...shit.

12/12/06 03:39 pm

I am officially losing my job.

First off, if you know where I work, don't mention their name, lest I get googled or something.

We're going through a "restructuring" and I wasn't tapped as one of the retained. I don't feel TOO bad about it, knowing some of the other class individuals who likewise didn't make the cut. And I can kinda understand why they didn't pick me. My skillset isn't really one that the company would like to foster (all kinds of isoteric linuxy stuff and whatnot), and going forward, IT is going to be very much about internal business knowledge, of which I have scant amounts.

And I'm not really bitter about it. Really, I feel pretty okay about it. A bit bummed, but this isn't like it's the first time I've lost a job. In a sense, it happens all the time to consultants and I've done plenty of that, not to mention that time in Boston where I got a pink slip with 2 weeks pay. And, since my "separation date" is Aug 1 (with severence and a "retention" bonus should I decide to stick it out that long), I've got time to figure out what happens next. I have a couple of decent job prospects already (provided I don't mind moving). BUT, we'll see what happens next.

Actually, I know what happens next. Dinner with the fam, then pool & beer. Then a bit more beer. Then maybe sleeping in and heading into the office late.

Current Location: Home
Current Mood: ambivalent
Current Music: NIN - Further Down The Spiral

December 4th, 2006

magic is stinky

12/4/06 05:56 pm

Ang is currently burning things in the dining room and carving on candles. I'm not entirely sure what's going on, but if this is the scent of success, I'd hate to smell the odor of failure.

Current Mood: nauseated

November 23rd, 2006

goodbye vinny...hello, um, whats your name?

11/23/06 03:27 pm

vinny is living with someone else these days. i hope he's happy.

however, someone else has moved in with us:

she's a nautical blue scion tC. still need to figure her name out, but its safe to say there's a lot of good chemistry so far. equipped with the 2.4l from the camry, and attached to a short ratio gearbox, there's a fair bit of scoot. not gonna win many drag races, but the engine is very torquey and makes delicious sounds. the suspension setup is about what you'd expect for a car aimed at the younger crowd (a tendency to understeer in most situations, thus erring on the side of caution). still, if you're hard in a corner and lift the throttle, the rear end rotates around nicely. it's a great profile to start with and some sport springs and a stiffer set of anti-sway bars will make for a formidable corner-carver. she comes with some (fairly) agressive rubber, too:

even with the 17" rims and low-profile tires, you can see that there's plenty of wheel-well for the lowering the sport springs will provide. ang said the car needed the rear spoiler, and the TYC led taillights:

some other goodies...let's see...full glass sliding moonroof, with a smaller glass moonroof for the back seat. the head unit does mp3s, has controls on the steering wheel and has an aux connector for my mp3 player (great for audiobooks i don't want to drop on cd-r). comfortable seats and pedals just right for heel-toe (at least to me, they are) so all in all, she and i are going to be quite happy together. my commutes already feel shorter.

October 24th, 2006

ketchup

10/24/06 09:18 pm

all hail dread cthulhu!

it is indeed, halloween. click the pic to go to my gallery. there's a pic there of the rest of our pumpkins. and no, i didn't do anything with the gimp to that photo aside from cropping.

i was considering doing something with shading, and had the hypnotoad (all glory to him) in mind. so i had a picture opened up in the gimp and i was going about dithering the image down to a minimum amount of colors, which would translate directly into the thickness of the pumpkin. anywhoo, tori walks by, sees the screen, and says "oh! the hypnotoad. wroarwroarwroar..."

Current Mood: feelin' fine
Current Music: tool - lateralis

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October 12th, 2006

oh yeah

10/12/06 06:42 pm

oh, and adding a "TPE2" tag fixed 99% of my vault tagging in mce. took a few hours for the script to do its thing, and aside from some unicode / utf-8 issues, it's fairly square. the biggest bitch was in fact convincing mce to reload the entire collection.

hiakus in math? how about math in metal?

10/12/06 06:34 pm

check this out:
the syllabic content of the lyrics from tool's song "lateralus" conform to the fibonnaci sequence. that's not just a clever arrangement by some overzealous numerologist. the breaks are actually rhythmically there.

          [1] black
          [1] then
          [2] white are
          [3] all I see
          [5] in my infancy
          [8] red and yellow then came to be
          [5] reaching out to me
          [3] lets me see
          [2] there is
          [1] so
          [1] much
          [2] more and
          [3] beckons me
          [5] to look through to these
          [8] infinite possibilities
          [13] as below so above and beyond I imagine
          [8] drawn outside the lines of reason
          [5] push the envelope
          [3] watch it bend

October 4th, 2006

ggggrrrrrrppptpththththththttt!

10/4/06 06:57 pm

microsoft, why doth thou hate me so? media center continues to ride an annoying line between "great" and "it could be great, but..."

mp3 files contain metadata tags, right? title, track, genre, album, etc. but why is it that media center looks for a tag called "album artist" instead of "artist"? which means that i can't narrow down searches by artist and that albums appear in one huge flat view all by someone called "unknown artist". might explain why the ui feels so kludgy and slow.

something tells me i need to find a way to script up the addition of that tag. at over 26,000 files, i'll be damned if i'm going to do them all by hand.

any suggestions?

Current Music: none, ignoring a conference call in my left ear

from the "where-the-hell-did-this-come-from" dept.

10/4/06 06:57 pm

not sure many of you listened to extreme back in the day. vanilla ice was big about that time and it really was the tail end of the hair-band era, so music like theirs was starting to decline. but, as a band, i still listen to them. the vocals are great, and the lead guitarist does things that, as far as i'm concerned, put him right up there with eddie vanhalen and kirk hammett as one of the best rock guitarists ever. each time i listen, i do what i can to follow individual aspects...maybe lyrical, maybe the bassline. and i always find something new.

extreme's big hit, as you may know, was the ballad more than words. it rocketed them from a "barely known" to the top of shaggy's "american top 40 countown". great for them. well, unless you're the drummer or bassist. the song is a vocal duet with a single acoustic guitar. i wonder how much it rankled the other two members of the band to know they really didn't have much of anything to do with the one fucking song out of four albums that anyone remembers. the irony isn't lost on me.

Current Mood: aardvark
Current Music: extreme - pornograffiti (listen to the guitar in this one)

August 10th, 2006

omfg i'm a shill

8/10/06 08:15 pm

rambing to follow. first off, i'm doing the ads thing to see if it really gives me anything i care about. i'm kinda interested in the image upload / management stuff. but then again, i thought i signed up for flikr, though i have no idea what my login was. i probably have 100mb of stuff sitting in the corner of some random disk. bah whatever.

second, i found this at the local distillate peddler's:

edit: dammit, didn't mean to hit the post button. missed slightly. see above pic for reason.

anywhoo, yes, i found a local ouzo. it's tasty, but mitilini? i'm not entirely sure, but i think that it iss to ouzo what phillips is to vodka. it even has that similar taste to a cheaper vodka (where the alcohol has a noticable...presence). i guess when my pop was in greece and he brought be back that first bottle it was the really good stuff. the quest for decent ouzo continues, but at least i found a distributor for something...ouzish?

hey, as ang said, camping was fun. since i'm in the mood, i'll post the 'untweaked' pics straight off the camera. just take a look at the lj gallery...

whealp. will post more about life in general. methinks its time to kvell and put down some gt4 laps. tune in... drop out.

Current Mood: (but not that drunk)
Current Music: sonic youth - the empty page

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July 16th, 2006

just for dan

7/16/06 11:19 pm

July 11th, 2006

one more time

7/11/06 03:23 am

the five minute rundown:

the family:
decent enough. ang is working herself to the bone, tori is busy getting over her first crush and brenna is getting over one of the most disurbing stomach bugs you'd ever want to witness. a child her size shouldn't make such smells.

the material:
finally quit best buy again, got my tv (yaay) and my pvr is torn apart yet. when revived, it will have just a tick under 1TB of storage. those of you waiting for vault access, that'll be back pretty fast.

the immaterial:
i've been readdressing the mental & spiritual. reading (er, listening to) lots of alan watts, which has been interesting, at the very least. i'm in orson scott card's xenocide, which is proving to be almost as deep as the watts lectures. still, very good.

there. okay, if you got through that in less than five minutes, go read it again to make sure you didn't miss anything.

July 10th, 2006

dripping with disappointment

7/10/06 10:21 pm

man, this is going to be sad.

instead of talking of important stuff with my triumphant return to my livejournal (such as the state and quality of my family or all the stuff i've been up to in the last 6 months), i instead feel the need to speak the eulogy of my late rogue, swordsman & ne'er-do-well: juan cornelius cortez-cortez. the third.

juan continued the long family tradition of dashing, daring and thin mustaches. he excelled with his rapier, and on more than one occasion used his commensurate wit to solve the days problems. he liked a good bar brawl almost as much as hitting on the elves in the party. juan lived a full life, right up to the point that dragon bit him in twain. by his death, others were saved. and those others became rich, splitting up all the cash juan had been hoarding away.

for a while, i wasn't "feeling" the character. oh, don't get me wrong, he was dripping with style. almost so much style to make him ineffective as a d&d character. and so i started to get the urge to retire him and maybe find something more maintainable long-term. but then juan finally picked up a few new feats, a better rapier, and i was starting to think that maybe i'd be keeping him.

and then he got plowed. bah.

anywhoo, yeah. next up, maybe a halfling wizard. hrum.

February 9th, 2006

bwaaaahhhahaaa

2/9/06 10:18 pm

You scored as Chewbacca. You are Chewbacca. Weird and hairy you are, but super cool too. You're not much of a talker, but more of a moaner...you are best friends with the coolest guy in the galaxy and are often under appreciated, but hey that's life as a wookie. :)

</td>

Chewbacca

75%

Anakin

63%

Obi-Wan

63%

Padme

50%

Yoda

50%

Darth Vader

50%

Luke Skywalker

25%

The emperor

13%

Princess Leia Organa

Which Star Wars character are you the most like???
created with QuizFarm.com

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February 7th, 2006

(no subject)

2/7/06 08:37 pm

caught the mouse. cat just sat there.

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February 6th, 2006

yaaaaarrrrggghhhh!

2/6/06 10:38 pm

we have a fucking mouse under our piano. we also have a highly ineffective cat named rusty. really.

of course, it's our fault for declawing her.