I used to run Knoppmyth on my home theater PC since it made the setting up and installation of MythTV a breeze, especially on my old VIA EPIA box. I recently retired that box and decided get everything set up on a AMD64 based shuttle pc. I wanted to go back to using a full blown distro since I use the box for a lot more than MythTV. I had good experience with Ubuntu in the past so grabbed the latest Dapper install iso and proceeded to get everything set up. I quickly ran into a complication - I wanted to reuse the mysql database from my previous installation so that my new box knew about what shows I had seen already and what I had recorded but had yet to watch. The version of KnoppMyth I was using was based on MythTV 19.0 but the only version in the Ubuntu repositories was 18.1 and the database schemas are not compatible. < sigh > Looking over the Ubuntu forums I was able to find someone who had packaged up 19 and proceed to get everything installed just fine. Or at least it appeared, turns out the version I’m using has a problem where MythTV occasionally forgets about upcoming recordings. Restarting the backend solves the problem but I don’t want to force restart the backend every 30 minutes since it would create annoying gaps if I restarted the backend while I was recording something. I thought about jumping through all the hoops required to rebuild MythTV from scratch myself but I didn’t feel like going through the trouble right now so I came up with a short term hack. I grabbed the latest version of mythweb and copied it into my apache2 root directory. Getting it working was as simple as creating a symlink to enable mod_rewrite and uncommenting a line in my PHP config to enable the mysql library. Once that was in place I wrote a simple script to wget the upcoming recordings, test to see if there was anything upcoming, and kick the backend if there wasn’t. I then hooked it into a cron job to run at 5 minutes before every half hour. Its a band aid that should hold me until they get 19 into the tree. #!/bin/bash wget -q -O- http://192.168.1.5/mythweb/tv/upcoming | grep -q list_separator if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then /etc/init.d/mythtv-backend restart fi

Yippie! Its been long rumored but now its official. Too bad we’ll have to wait until 2008 to find out if they can successfully pick up from where they left off but having the original staff should help…

I’ve been wanting a gamepad I can use on my Mac and my Linux box. I almost picked up a Xbox 360 wired controller since its has a standard USB interface and there is driver support on both platforms however, thanks partly to EB games being out I decided instead on plan B - reuse something I already owned.

I had a couple of Xbox S controllers lying around that I haven’t been using. I like the S controllers, they fit my hands nicely and have a good feel to them. I also have a ton of extra USB cables laying around. While browsing around the net I found some instructions on how to splice a USB cable together with the controller cable. In concept, its quite easy since the original Xbox cable is basically a USB cable with a funky connector. Its just a matter of stripping each cable and matching up like color to like color. I practice, the wires in my USB cable that I spliced in were so thin that it was a bit difficult (for me) to cleanly strip them at first without slicing into the wire itself.

A little solder and electrical table later I had a working cable. I had to download drivers for OS X to get it to work on my Mac but Dapper Drake recognized it without me having to do anything.

Ever since I came home from Japan there’s been this spider thats been hanging out right by the door to my condo. Waiting. Watching. I swear every time I see it, its a little bit bigger…

Now, I have a confession - if there is anything that has a high chance of making me scream like a little girl, its spiders. No, not little dinky spiders, not cute daddy long legs - I’m talking big, evil looking spiders. As it is, we are at a standoff. I wait, hoping he will go away, for he is already way to big for me to be comfortable with direct action. He waits, biding his time I’m sure till he’s just a little big bigger so he can accomplish whatever nefarious plot he’s been weaving.

Last day. I sleep in after staying out a bit too late the night before and work my way out to the airport by working my way to Shinjuku and hopping on the Narita Express. Everything take a bit longer than I expect, especially once I get to the airport so I get to my gate about 5 minutes before boarding starts.

A uneventful flight back, a quick taxi ride, and I’m home sweet home - and completely jet lagged.