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Monday, August 15. 2011Site Migration In Progress
Please brace for a slightly bumpy ride as I migrate my sites on to a linode. It's been fine thus far however there will no doubt be obscure things which don't work for a while.
Edit: I think that's all done. Please let me know if you see anything more broken than usual. Wednesday, June 2. 2010TwinHan Remote under Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.04
Years ago with one of my DVB TV tuner cards cards I unexpectedly also received a little USB IR receiver and remote. In common with almost all peripheral hardware, it was designed for Windows but can with a little effort be made to work with a linux machine, such as my MythTV machine.
I made it work by hand years ago, but then had no use for it for a while, and a few months ago wanted to make it work again. It turns out that Adam Pierce has a good set of instructions. But, like all other commenters on that blog post, my setup broke when upgrading to Ubuntu 10.04. Grrrr. I have finally found a working combination that hopefully will help others - the suggestions in the blog post were good enough to set me on the right track, but not good enough to make it actually work. Here's the items that I had to modify by hand over and above my (upgraded) Ubuntu 10.04 setup:
All that, and just in time for my Logitech Harmony remote to arrive and have to start again. Monday, May 31. 2010Lucid (Bad) Dreams
For years now I've loved linux. I've met and spoken with Linus Torvalds. I've even made a pilgrimage to where he wrote it. For servers, and many desktop uses, there's nothing quite like it.
The core linux system is a beautiful thing. Through uni studies, attending several linux.conf.au events over the years, and personal interest I've studied multiple parts of the code, and even fiddled under the hood myself at times. And yet every time it comes to upgrading my highly-customised home server, one or more things breaks horribly, requiring much of my time to fix. These days the distribution I run on the server is kubuntu - a legacy from when the system was also used as a desktop. This upgrade will hopefully be the last for years, as the latest 10.04 release "lucid" is a Long Term Support release, meaning it will be kept safe and stable for years to come. Good thing, given it's taken me a few weeks to get this far. Here's a log for those who are interested.
Linux is an amazing thing which is capable of complex setups well beyond that which most users would have, and all for free. That just doesn't mean that the complex stuff is easy when it breaks in new and creative ways. It would be a full-time job to keep up with the changes that have happened with this release. I've had to find this out after the fact and spend time patching it all up. I had hoped Canonical (maintainers of Ubuntu/Kubuntu) would be doing this for me, and on the vast majority of hardware-software combinations out there they do very well. I can just see as time becomes more and more precious in years to come that a service doing all this custom work for me would start to look very attractive. Especially when your setup looks like this:
Should be simple to upgrade, right? Sunday, June 14. 2009Fully Sick
We're all feeling rather ill with cold-like symptoms (Liz is quick to point out they are not flu-like, and having dealt with suspected swine flue cases in quarrantine at her work I guess she'd know).
This has brought a return to the horrible nights of no Phoebe sleep, although worse because she screams for her mum who herself needs about a week of sleep. We're mostly through this, having had Phoebe sleep through from 7:30 until 4am today, which is a huge improvement so we aren't complaining (much). Unfortunately we've missed a few occasions due to not wanting to go anywhere to spread our nasties around - sorry those we had to cancel with. There are recent pictures added, with more coming soon (especially now that my new Macbook has a built in SD card slot, and I'm having a great deal of fun with the new 35mm 1.8 Nikkor lens ! ).
Posted by Alison Gould
in Computers, Family, Hardware, Photography
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21:05
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Saturday, July 19. 2008iPhoto Libraries in mythgallery (mythtv)
Here's some information about a personal coding itch I scratched recently, on the off chance that it helps someone else out there. Certainly my Google skills didn't turn up anyone else who had solved the same problem.
Problem Description You have a Mac somewhere where you use Apple's excellent iPhoto to manage your huge digital photography collection. However, you don't have (and most likely don't want) a spiffy but locked-down and feature-light Apple TV to display them on your TV, instead preferring the excellent and far more versatile open-source mythtv. Mythtv has mythgallery which displays pictures from a normal filesystem reasonably well, but the poor thing has little to no understanding of the complexities of Apple's "iPhoto Library" on-disk layout. I'm talking Albums basically, plus an understanding of "Originals" versus "Modified". I just want it to be how it looks in iPhoto, but on my big LCD screen in front of the couch, controlled with my myth remote. Is that too much to ask??! Research/Analysis Can't find anyone else with this issue so figure "how hard can it be?". Not very, it turned out, at least to get something working, if ugly. The perl Mac::iPhoto looks like a good place to start, but since it hasn't been touched since 2003 it certainly doesn't do anything much useful on my current (7.1.3) iPhoto Library. It uses Mac::PropertyList to do the parsing of the xml file, which doesn't seem to work either. After much fiddling it looks like the AlbumData.xml file in the iPhoto Library actually is invalid - it doesn't have the proper header. First hack Mac::PropertyList to accept the dodgy header, but later decide to keep that standard and put the hack into my script instead. Design Decide to make a directory next to the iPhoto Library which is full of symlinks pointing into the actual library. Directories in this tree will correspond to Albums in iPhoto, and the links will be named such that the alphabetical order used by mythgallery corresponds to the order in iPhoto. Try and get this working on the linux box and also via Samba but in the end it's simplest to run the code and create the symlink tree on my mac and then rsync both the iPhoto Library and the symlink tree across to the linux box. Don't use samba, it stuffs up the annoying ":" that iPhoto uses in paths, at least for me. rsync handles it fine, it's not even that Mac-specific one to my knowledge, just whatever is on my Ubuntu box. Code You'll need Mac::iPhoto 0.1-timg, which is the modification of 0.1 available on cpan to work with iPhoto 7.1.3, and Mac::PropertyList 1.31 from cpan. I guess I should put my code on CPAN, but just wanted to get it all up here for now. Once that's available, you will of course need the actual iPhotoToDirectories script. It's all hard-coded - but you wouldn't have made it this far if you couldn't edit it to work in your situation :) Operation You'll need the same directory structure on both the mac and the linux box as the symlinks get created on the mac but are de-referenced on the linux box. Once it's all in place, run iPhotoToDirectories on your mac whenever you want. It takes a long time, so I wouldn't script it. Maybe an overnight cronjob if you keep your Mac on all night. I don't so I just run it when I remember. Then rsync both the iPhoto Library and the symlink tree to the linux box. Finally, chmod -R a+rx the linux directories if the uid on your mac is different from your myth user. And then, assuming mythgallery can navigate to that symlink directory, it should work and the browsing should be significantly more useful than it was before browsing the raw directory. Known issues
But hey it works! And with a full-time life that's enough for me right now.
Posted by Alison Gould
in Hardware, Linux, Open-Source, Photography, Projects, PVR, Software
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09:19
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Tuesday, April 15. 2008Phoebe Tests Flickr Video
Posted by Alison Gould
in Family, Mobile Devices, Net, Photography, Technology
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01:16
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Wednesday, January 9. 2008Mac-free
Since day one, the DVD drive on my macbook has been pretty flaky. Doesn't read commercial DVDs properly, nor burn reliably. This never really bothered me, as a I have an external (faster) burner, and a DVD player on the home theater.
However, for a few months it has also had a nasty fan sound - the type that persists for a while but you know will eventually lead to fan death. Between dealing with a new child, renovating and work I haven't found the mental space required to give up the precious device for the inevitable return to manufacturer for repair, since I use it for everything at work and everything at home. Sometimes it has been used every waking moment for several days. But now, the fan has died it's death, and some monitoring sensor or other has decided that this means running the CPU for any length of time (>10 minutes or so) is not a good idea, and as such, the machine turns itself off. So, it's off to meet it's maker, and hopefully be reincarnated better than it ever was. But, that means I'm Mac-less, so email, contact info, IM, photos, the lot are all on hold for a while. Perhaps ring my mobile if you really need me. Sunday, December 30. 2007Wii
So, despite not intending to get each other anything for Christmas, Liz and I ended up buying each other half of a Nintendo Wii.
This little gadget is an amazing amount of fun, advertised all over the TV and most people have heard of them by now so I won't blab on much except the controllers are great fun to use. So much so that we both have sore arms from frantic Tennis-ing and Mario-ing between screaming baby time. Even the older, non-gaming generation get in to it very easily, having a hit of tennis and understanding the instinctive control methods immediately. And nobody has yet commented that "the graphics aren't as good as the other current consoles." They're too busy having social fun instead. Funniest yet though goes to Meaghan and Dave boxing the proverbial out of each other. For your amusement: Thursday, October 25. 2007Things
Well, you can probably guess from the slackness in blogging I'm showing here that life has been busy. The most obvious reason is of course the baby who is showing all signs of being healthy, and arriving early December. The midwife thinks possibly earlier, but we'd rather it not because she is away until the end of November.
There's modern cloth nappies galore here now, and buckets for dirty ones, plus of course clothes, wraps, furniture, car seat, pram, you name it. I've heard it described as the biggest consumer spend a couple goes through (after housing), and it's truly scary what some companies tell you that you 'need' to have. We've been to birthing and parenting classes and spent countless hours reading stuff online so apparently we now know all, true experts in the field. Except it will of course have no bearing on the reality of actually having a child to look after 24 hours a day. It was interesting to compare out situation to others in the class though - we're much better off and more prepared than several others, so that gives us a bit of hope. Trying to organise a couple of short holidays before the due date too. Some other quick point-form news:
Posted by Alison Gould
in Cycling, Family, Honeymakers, Jersey Kerb, Net, Photography, Real Life, Travel
at
22:15
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Monday, July 9. 2007iPhone!
The world has gone iPhone crazy, with a peak of four stories per day iPhone related on the Sydney Morning Herald. Note the Sydney part - you can't even buy an iPhone outside of the US! In fact, as a write this now, there's still four stories linked there!
Being well known as a lover of Apple technology, you might expect me to be salivating over the new shiny toy, and perhaps even flying over the US just to get one like some people have. No. Here's Why. I bought one of those instead. It's here, now, works on Aussie networks, and doesn't require a USD70 per month data plan at a minimum just to use it, locked in for two years. And, as the link says, it has a whole lot more features. But it isn't quite as shiny. I'll admit that. Tuesday, May 8. 2007Do Not Call Register
In case you haven't found it yet, Australian citizens are expected to opt-out of receiving telemarketing calls by going to this website and registering phone numbers that they don't want to receive such calls at.
How does the register work? I firmly believe that it should be the other way around (ie. register if you do want to receive such calls), but that would of course offend big business. As it stands, there's plenty of exceptions on there they can use to call you anyway. Still, better than nothing I guess. Sunday, April 22. 2007One-man bands
This story at SMH reminded me that I haven't posted anything about the conversion of the room off our kitchen from a "random storage of boxes" room. Into something far better. A music room.
Behold! I'm still working my way through most of the technology, but the guts are in place and it's now at the point where I can't blame lack of anything for my lack of musical output recently. Long-time readers (I've had a web presence since 1997 or so - guess I should have an anniversary or something but I don't know exact dates) may recall I used to have a music page available, with all sorts of information on bands I was in, MIDI files I'd created, my instruments and influences, fun stuff like that. Perhaps I'll get around to resurrecting that if my output increases, although it seems that all the cool kids are on MySpace these days.
Posted by Alison Gould
in Bands, Computers, Music, Technology
at
12:32
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Saturday, March 3. 2007Catchup Blogging
OK, News time. It's been a while.
I've uploaded some photos to my Flickr account which have titles showing a pictorial version of what we've been doing recently. There's some from Adelaide (1 2 3 4), some from our recent weekend back up to the Hunter Valley to celebrate our wedding anniversary (yep, it's been over a year now...) (1 2), and even an ugly product of our veggie patch. Margaret's house has been on the market for a while and is now sold, she's looking for a place to buy and has a few in mind. She may be moving in with us during the change-over period. So we've re-organised the house a bit. We've now got a separate (small) room devoted to music. It's good to have everything out and in the one place, and I've been inspired to do some recording, helped out with a computer audio interface I found cheap on eBay. Still trying to decide what software I want to use with it though. The junk that used to be in that room has now sort-of migrated to the spare room, but it could be consolidated to make room for Margaret should the need arise. Around the house, I've been cleaning out gutters and getting things organised in preparation for the arrival of our water tanks. The fact that it's been raining a lot recently has been annoying us, thinking of the wastage. It looks like we'd have to vote capital-L Liberal to get the government to do something about water recycling, so becoming as detached as possible from it all is appealing. Put some of the wine from our Hunter trip (came back with three cases!) under the house in a sort-of cellar arrangement. The conditions are good but it's hard to get to. Should be good for medium-long-term storage though. We headed off to the Whiskey Experience again a few days ago - a great fun evening which we figure is just to raise brand awareness. Not that many people around us were aware of things around themselves by the end of proceedings! One of Liz's birthday celebrations this year was a trip to the Löwenbräu Keller, something I haven't done for years and an evening we thoroughly enjoyed. The band there seems to do the same show every night, but it's very entertaining. Plus we get to drink great beer and practice our German. ... Which is good, because Sebastian Schnelle (whom we stayed with at least three times in Europe 2002-3 and caught up with again early last year) is back in the country to do his PhD in Brisbane. He and his girlfriend Jana flew into Sydney last week and we caught up a few times. She's still in learn-English mode, so we had a few conversations with me speaking German and her English, and my lack of skill there seemed to give her more confidence. Oh, and I buggered my knee badly about a month ago, which is the worst it's ever been. I've had plenty of days working from home and far less cycling. I have a specialist appointment next week, so hopefully I can get something done about it. Another Jersey Kerb gig happened last Friday - the first with Jono playing keyboards and me back on bass after Ed left for England. We played pretty well I thought, but the crowd was both thin and lacking energy. I think we have a job for our manager to get us sorted in a new venue or with some more aggressive advertising. Still great fun though. Surely that's enough topic-hopping for now. Congratulations if you made it this far!
Posted by Alison Gould
in Cycling, Deutschland, Europe 2002-3, Europe 2006, Hardware, Jersey Kerb, Music, Real Life, Software, Sydney
at
07:46
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Thursday, January 18. 2007linux.conf.au 2007
I'm out at New South Wales university this week for linux.conf.au, a tech-oriented conference. This is the fourth time I've been along to one of these (they run every year), and this year it's being held in Sydney, back where the first one was that I came to in 2001.
The free software culture is generating some amazing things - one of the highlights for me has been the talks on the One Laptop Per Child project - these guys are really thinking how to bring technology to huge numbers of people (their target market is one billion children in the world), which involves quite a lot of rethinking existing ways of doing things. One telling statistic is that 60% of the children in the world have no power at their place of residence, so requiring a device to be able to draw power off the grid just was never going to work. Plenty of talks more related to my work as well, the details of which I won't bore my mostly non-technical audience with! Suffice to say it's a nice break from work in the pleasant campus surroundings.
Posted by Alison Gould
in Computers, Linux, Open-Source, Work
at
02:42
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