June 2005 – WiredAtom

MythTV — Part II — Giving KnoppMyth A Try

My battle continues with MythTV installation and configuration.

There’s no question in my mind as to why MythTV is MythTV. I just can’t get the stupid thing to run right.

Just earlier I wrote about my troubles with MythTV under Fedora Core 3. So I said I’d give KnoppMyth a shot. I couldn’t wait for a couple of days, so I forged on with the saga.

10PM, sitting there thinking this KnoppMyth should work. It’s an auto-install wonder.

Think again. Stupid KnoppMyth got stuck with trouble writing to the disks a few times. I had to use Fedora’s partition/format utility from the boot disc to reformat the disks before KnoppMyth would even run properly. So that took me about an hour to resolve.

To be fair, KnoppMyth installed and auto-dected a good majority of everything right away. And the install went relatively smoothly — everything from the OS, MySQL database, MythTV and almost everything else. ALMOST: PVR 150, audio card and ethernet cards got left out.

So before I invest more time on KnoppMyth, I decided I’ll try it on Kyung’s old Optiplex GX110. Maybe I’ll have better luck on his machine. If all else fails, I will go back to Fedora and deal with problems I already am familiar with.

Those guys at Systm definitely oversimplified KnoppMyth’s ability to solve everyday-man’s problems. But then again, I do have a pretty old system to boot (Dell Precision 410; circa 1999).

Better luck next time.

Not So Stupid Canon

Efficiency and willingness to admit fault are two good traits a company should have. Canon is now on my book of “good” companies.

This is what makes a company great: Willingness to admit fault, rectify it and all the while with great attitude and efficiency.

As previously posted, my camcorder unit was sent to Canon on June 17th. Four days later, on 21st, Canon sent an email acknowledging their receipt of my camcorder:

From: cafactoryservice@cusa.canon.com
To: shun.chu@*****.com
Date: Jun 21, 2005 12:13 PM
Subject: REPAIR ACKNOWLEDGMENT — LG092630

CANON U.S.A., INC.
Factory Service Center
15955 Alton Parkway
Irvine, CA 92618
TEL: 949-753-4200
FAX: 949-753-4239

Order Number: LG092630
Date: 6/21/2005

To Our Valued Customer:

We have received your equipment for evaluation and repair, as detailed below. Based on our initial examination, we will start the necessary repairs at no charge to you.

You can expect the repair to be completed and returned back to you within approximately 10 business days* from the date shown above. There is no need to respond to this notice.

Please note that in the unlikely event that any additional internal damage is found due to liquid/water, sand, corrosion, battery leakage or impact (such as dropping the unit), a revised estimate will be sent for your authorization, since these conditions are specifically excluded from warranty coverage.

Thank you for purchasing Canon products and for allowing us the opportunity to serve you.

Best Regards,

CANON U.S.A., INC.
Factory Service Center

*Actual times may vary. Seasonal volume or repairs requiring special parts may add more time.

Examination / Request Details
No image in Camera mode. Check all function to good working order.
*NO CHARGE THIS TIME AS COURTESY.

Service / Work Type
No Charge, Repair

Equipment Received
ZR70MC

Serial #
152703840***

P.O. #

Accessories Received
lens cap/strap/

Canon ON-LINE REPAIR TRACKING
NEED TO KNOW THE STATUS OF YOUR REPAIR?
VISIT OUR WEBSITE
IT’S QUICK & EASY — JUST START CLICKING
www.usa.canon.com/repair

Today, June 27th, 10 days after I initially sent the unit in, I finally received my unit back from Canon via FedEx. And it works just fine.

What’s unique about my camcorder was, when I called Canon, its warranty already expired. Recognizing my description of the problem was common (I am guessing), Canon offered to repair the problem free of charge. How nice of them.

I only have had to deal with Apple on my PowerBook last year. Apple’s turn around was much quicker (three days). But then again, I paid good money for Apple Care to get that kind of service.

Despite my belief that most big multinational corporates and their executives are soulless pricks (though one doesn’t need to be in that position to be so), they do get some things right sometimes. But I don’t believe those actions are due to serve their good conscience. Most of them do it out of fear of more costly consequences of inaction (both in publicity and finance).

Anyway, thank you Canon. You are now on my no-so-stupid good company list.

Animal Instincts

Even animals have feelings. Unfortunately I can’t say the same about some humans.

Last night I accidentally discovered a mother cat with two tiny kittens by our front door. Fearing that I might harm her babies, the mother instinctively hissed at me continuously and refused to abandon her kittens. I opened the door to take a closer look at the kittens (must be around 5 weeks old), one kitten followed the mother and dashed towards the garage (back of the house).

What happened to the other kitten?

I looked around the front lawn and found her hiding in a ditch used to collect the water hose. Thinking she’s trapped, I tried to grab her with my right hand, but of course, animals don’t need pathetic human’s help. At 5 weeks old, she leaped upwards, with her claws barely hanging on to the side of the relatively deep ditch, and helped herself out of the hole in a hurry (but unusually calm manner). As my eyes followed her “escape” towards the garage, I realized that her mother and sibling had not abandoned her after all. They were waiting anxiously for me to disappear so that they could return to find their kin.

Even animals, cats in this case, have the instinct to stay behind to make sure their troubled kin would be fine, I wonder why some humans run the opposite direction as soon as they smell trouble with their friends or relatives. Worse, Grace and I are disappointed there are those who would do all they can to STOP others from helping those in need.

What kind of sick human nature is that?

Stupid human beings.

Nosy Neighbors

Neighbors are moving in. Or so it seems.

Our house is getting ever more popular with all the cats in the neighborhood. Almost every other day, we find a new cat at our back porch, staring through the sliding screen into hour house. Obviously they are not interested in me or Grace — they want to know who their new catty neighbors are.

Our two cats are not too thrilled about the inquisitive neighbors though. Usually Baobao just hisses and walks away with puffy hair. Mesmerized, one black cat in particular, even tilts her head as she gazes at Baobao’s unprovoked irritation. The word’s out, there are two female cats with questionable personalities in the hood.

MythTV — Part I — Struggle Begins

My battle with MythTV installation and configuration.

In light of my newfound cable service, I decided to put one of my spare Dell boxes to work in doing a home-grown TiVo. So a few days ago, I ordered a Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 150 capture card to give it a shot. It’s a relatively new card with decent performance for the price (after a Buy.com 10% off coupon — roughly $85).

I spent most of the weekend tinkering with Mythtv running on Fedora (Core 3). I got most of the information from Jarod Wilson’s site (excellent documentation). But last night at 3AM, I finally gave in to Mythtv and called it a defeat (for now).

There are a few problems concerning my set up; one of them being that Fedora Core 3 is not particularly happy about the onboard Crystal sound card (it worked in Core 2 though). Topping that off, WinTV-PVR 150 seems a bit too new to get a stable driver. I spent a lot of time just getting the module to load into the Kernel during my first install. It turned out that the latest Linux Kernel doesn’t like the module. I had to roll back to the older 2.6.11-1.27FC3smp to get the damn thing to just load.

Then there’s the problem with the IR transmitter and receiver. Apparently lirc 0.7.0 doesn’t support PVR 150. Though I’d installed the new lirc 0.7.1 (which supposedly does support PVR 150), the receiver still did not produce any output despite hours of Googling and trying out new settings.

Frustrated, I finally completely erased the setup and started fresh again on Sunday. But this time, something happened to the partitions which Kernel 2.6.11-1.27FC3smp didn’t like and freaks out at boot. Does it have anything to do with the fact that I installed VMWare 4.5.2 (thanks, Kyung!) prior to the reboot? Speaking of VMWare, it runs beautifully smooth under Fedora Core 3 with Windows 2000 on it. Very very nice.

In the coming few days, I might give it a shot again. Last night just right after I gave up, I found a clip from Systm that demonstrated a clean install using KnoppMyth — a ONE disc install wonder. The only problem, again, is that its lirc driver is still at 0.7.0 and won’t like my PVR 150 card. But on KnoppMyth’s discussion forum, someone posted a patch that’s claimed to have made it work. Hopefully it’ll finally work so I can finall grow fat and old on Simpsons episodes.

Stupid MythTV… Stupid PVR 150 card… Stupid Fedora Core 3 and its new Kernel…

Landscape Photography Done Right

Now that everything has gone digital, it’s only a matter of time before someone records all the beauty that nature has to offer in large format digital photography. The tradition that Ansel Adams started as the first national park photography employed by the U.S. government continues digitally.

Now that everything has gone digital, it’s only a matter of time before someone records all the beauty that nature has to offer in large format digital photography. The tradition that Ansel Adams started as the first photographer for national parks employed by the U.S. government continues digitally.

Gigapxl Project is a project that that employs a panoramic camera to take pictures of landscapes. It takes pictures with FOUR BILLION pixels that produces uncompressed files about 24GB in size per image. Some laptops don’t even have hard drives that big!

Stay Young and Keep the Spirit

Startups often forget that’s what they are — new and energetic talents with great ideas. Many eventually were prematurely lured into thinking they are THE hotshots. Eventually, most lose their talents and majority of these startups just die poor and pathetic death.

I got this email from Flickr today regarding their move to a new facility in California after a corporate buy out by Yahoo.

The Flickr team has up and moved this week to Californ-i-a and has been singing Beach Boys songs non-stop since arrival. And you’re moving too!

We’re moving each and every pixel, bit, and byte, all your data, lock, stock, and barrel, from our humble server shack in Canada to our new server palace in the U.S. of A!

This process will begin during the week of June 28 and will result in speediness, stableness, and happiness. For more information, please visit the FAQ about the data center move.
http://www.flickr.com/help.gne#94

Thank you, Flickreebies, for making Flickr such a wonderful place to share, connect, and befriend. We love you! (In an entirely non-creepy way.)

– The Flickroobies

In a former life, I worked at a company that was small, fun and stayed a startup for a number of years. But towards the end (my end, that is), something got into its head and made it think that it was one of the fortune 100 big boys though it was nowhere to be found even with a microscope.

If there’s such thing as a company spirit, it makes me wonder if it can go bad like a bag of rotten fish. And what happens when the management passively ignores low employee morals and insists on marching in a tunnel of misguided perceptions and formulated ill-instructed actions? A company only stays young when great ideas are nurtured and dreams cradled. I hope companies like Flickr and Google stay young forever, just like Apple once did when it was at the top of its game.

How Search Engines Are Related

I have been noticing that search results were almost never too different from one search engine to another. But this chart pretty much clears up my suspicions once and for all. Published by Bruce Clay, Inc, an Internet business consultant, the chart maps out relations each search engine has with one another.

Is it me or is the Internet ruled by only two giants. Even Microsoft’s MSN receives results from someone else.

Search engine relation screenshot

Gahoo!Yoogle

A site that compares search results of Yahoo and Google side by side in two split windows.

I read about this a while ago but had no place to bookmark it (wasn’t worth the clutter of my already-messy bookmarks). So I am just going to blog it here and hopefully someday I will find it useful (or that someone else will).

GahooYoogle is a search engine that basically just plugs your keywords into both Google and Yahoo and returns the results side by side in a split window. It’s actually a pretty cool tool if you use both search engines frequently. But seriously, who uses Yahoo these days anyway?

My only complaint is, the name is just too damn confusing to be recalled easily…

Google Housing Map

This is an amazing housing map that combines Google Maps and Craigslist housing.

Google housing map screenshot If I were to give star ratings to all my best finds on the web, this one would be ranked way up there. HousingMaps is an ingenious idea that combines the power of Google Maps, arguably the most powerful free mapping system on the web, and Craigslist. It even takes on the characteristics of simplicity of both sites.

This is something waiting to be commercialized sooner or later. Damn it, it’s just so cool!

Steve Jobs NeXT Demo

DrunkenBlog posted this cool presentation Steve Jobs did years ago when he was still running NeXT. A cool presentation with some great technologies. But It’s still no Mac!

DrunkenBlog posted a video of Steve Jobs demoing NeXT.

Steve Jobs demoing NeXT

Click to download the video (50MB)

To be frank, NeXT was butt ugly. But some of its technologies and innovations were quite impressive its day. DrunkenBlog posted another article about striking similarities in some of the apps under OSX and NeXT. I guess when being good just wasn’t enough, you just gotta ride on the cool kid to bring out the edge.

Has anyone noticed what was wrong with the video? Somehow Steve just didn’t quite look himself in that grown-up-wannabe attire. Maybe that was why NeXT didn’t do too well — he tried too hard being someone he wasn’t. He’s meant to be a rebel.

Video courtesy of OpenStep.se.

Using Screen Saver as Desktop Image

Not sure if this kind of thing is available on Microsoft Windows. But damn this is a great gimmick to show your friends.

This “trick” puts whatever you have on your Screen Saver as the desktop image. While it’s not all that useful, it’s a pretty cool trick to show your geeky friends. Sorry, Mac OSX only.

1. Open “Terminal” (Applications –> Utilities –> Terminal)
2. Type in exactly (no spaces or new lines):

1
2
3
/System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/
Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/
ScreenSaverEngine -background

3. Press “Return”; watch the magic
4. To stop it, press: “ctrl” + “c” keys (in that order) within the Terminal

Cool huh?!

References from this Mac Dev Center article.

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