Halloween

Posted by stephen on Monday, 31st October, 2005 @ 20:43

What's happened this year? Ever since I left home, over five years ago now, I've never had a trick or treater knock on my door. And now, in my third Halloween in this house, I get three lots in one evening!

As I'm trying to be healthy at the moment, I had no sweets or anything around to give them. And I sure as hell won't be giving the little sods any money. What have they done to deserve it except extorted their parents out of the money for a tacky plastic costume?

Also, doesn't it seem a little worrying that we continually, with good reason, encourage children not to accept sweets from strangers, indeed, not even to talk to them. Yet on this night, small children are encouraged to actively seek out strangers and take sweets from them!

I'm just really not getting the spirit of this particular festival. I'm just glad I live in Britain, I can imagine how much worse this would be in the US.

Shepards' Delight

Posted by stephen on Sunday, 30th October, 2005 @ 16:54

This Week's Fad

Posted by stephen on Saturday, 29th October, 2005 @ 02:43

Our exalted leader works in a church in Canning Town. He gets on the Internet by connecting his switch to a long wire that runs from the church to a now empty building just down the road.

In the now empty building the wire connects into a wireless access point, dating back to 1998, when wifi was referred to as microwave and 802.11b hadn't been ratified and the equipment used the draft, 802.11 TGb.

From the access point, a coax cable runs out through the wall to a panel antenna on the outside of the building, pointing out and up towards a tower block over in Stratford.

The signal is received by another antenna on the top of the tower block, comes into the building to another access point, connects with ethernet across to the other side of the roof space into a big switch. The switch connects with fibre to the ground and on to the council's fibre ring, our network and the Internet.

This stopped working on Wednesday. And a few trips up to a 22 storey tower to block roof later...

...where there was some rather scary, old, hot and smelly lift-related equipment...

...and two knackered power supplies and one spare access point later... and we've still not fixed it. On Monday we'll be playing around in more detail.

Anyway, it's gonna me all excited about long distance point-to-point wifi. This site has helped pique my interest, especially in the waveguide cantenna, especially when used to replace the LNB on a satellite dish. I feel a small expenditure and some experiments coming on. Watch this space.

Qubic Root

Posted by stephen on Friday, 28th October, 2005 @ 17:41

Well, the Qube has found new life as my router/firewall/proxy. It's rather cute actually...

Selling out at home

Posted by stephen on Monday, 24th October, 2005 @ 23:42

After an uneventful and this time only slightly delayed flight I'm back home. And the first thing I noticed was it's cold and damp! But that's OK. It's been nice putting the heating on early today and feeling all snug. It's been nice having the sun set early and being at home with a purring kitty on my lap.

I'm still one kitty short of a full collection. Eric disappeared a little more couple of weeks ago, no idea where he's got to, or if he's OK. But I'm going to content myself with the knowledge that he's chipped and I'd have heard from a vet/RSPCA by now if something had happened. So he's probably just getting feeding and attention somewhere else for now.

Has it been windy here recently? I've now got a fence panel half down in my garden, and bugger it, I think this one is my responsibility, time to consult my documentation, wherever that may be.

Back down to London to work tomorrow, which will no doubt inspire lots more geekery to populate my site with. All this non-geek chitchat must be boring you all by now!

My Webalizer stats are getting much more interesting this month, I've had my highest number of visits and unique sites so far, which is nice. Lots of hits from search engines, mostly relating to the geeky stuff. It seems my VLS HOWTO has been discovered, which is great, I'm glad it can be useful to someone other than me.

So I've decided to sell out and try out Google's AdSense. I think it's fairly non-invasive and who knows, maybe some of those people finding my site looking for geeky stuff might find something useful advertised that can benefit them and me at the same time. If no one does, then I guess I'll get rid of it. We shall see.

Star Wrek: A Review

Posted by stephen on Monday, 24th October, 2005 @ 17:10

So many of my search engine hits this month have been as a result of my previous mentions of the Finnish sci-fi spoof, Star Wrek: In The Pirkinning. At the time I mentioned I said I'd write a little about it after seeing it, which I've yet to do, so I'm going to take the opportunity now.

First off, this film is available free to everyone. Go to their site and you can download the whole thing, or preferably a torrent file and you'll have it in no time. Lots of my hits have been people looking for the torrent, I guess thinking they want to download a hooky copy. This isn't necessary, it's free, just go to the producer's site linked above and get it!

On to my thoughts about the film itself. I think the thing I most noticed and was impressed by was the CGI. It's incredibly well done and looks 100% authentic compared to Star Trek (ST) and Babylon 5 (B5). In fact, technology has moved on since the B5 days, so this probably looks better than the real thing. The only giveaway in the CGI that this isn't a big budget Hollywood film is that it conbines the B5 and ST franchises, somehow I doubt this would ever happen in a US feature film.

You're definitely going to get more from this film if you're a fan of both ST and B5, the many references to these shows are the basis for a lot of the humour, and I think someone who's not seen either would struggle a little.

Apparently all the scenes set onboard the various ships are shot in the director's living room, one actor at a time and composited together. The bluescreening is occasionally obvious, but the quality of the acting and editing compensates very well.

The film has a definite B-movie feel to it, which I assume is entirely intentional. Sometimes it's hard to tell if the acting is a little wooden or if the cultural and language barriers are an issue. Overall though, the film translates very well, barring the occasional oddity in the English subtitles!

I felt the introduction was a little awkward and hard going, but once the film is up and running it's a hilarious ride through two colliding sci-fi universes.

I'm not going to get into the storyline here. If you're into ST and/or B5 go see it and find out for yourself, it won't cost you anything and you'll have a fun 90 minutes. It's certainly on a par with other sci-fi spoofs such as Galaxy Quest.

All in all, I have to give lots of credit to the guys behind this film. They've produced an excellent product given the budget and circumstances of it's production. Giving it away free is a bold move, but one that will get it great exposure and I hope it pays off for them and will encourage other talented people to have a go at movie production.

The tools are becoming ever more accessible, and there are more and more ways to get your stuff out there. The democratisation of media continues apace!

?Hola de Espa?a!

Posted by stephen on Friday, 21st October, 2005 @ 13:02

Well, after a much delayed flight Steve and myself arrived in Spain around 2pm local time on Monday. We arrived to stereotypical weather. Stereotypical for Britain that is, and it was pretty similar for Tuesday too, apparently their first real rain in five months.

Come Wednesday though and we've had glorious and continuous sunshine, though apparently the locals are feeling rather cold at the moment. The swimming pool certainly hasn't benefited much from the sun. Memories of PE lessons at Somerleyton and Lothingland come back to me, with their outdoor swimming pools that were always rather shocking on entry.

I'm having a really great time out here, though have managed to fall into my usual geeky habbits, reinstalling our lovely hosts' PC and rejigging their network. They have broadband here, woohoo! So I can upload the very few pictures I've taken, like this one...

There are very few pictures because I'm sticking to my original plan of doing very little except sleeping, eating and drinking. And I have to admit, I'm not really a fan of the Spanish countryside. The weather is great for October, but it takes it's toll on the area, and it just doesn't seem so lush and green here as good ol' Britain, especially looking at my Wales pics again.

Anyway, I think it's time for a swim now. I hope everyone is well back in Blighty and no doubt my next post will be made in that green and pleasant land I call home.

We're all off to Sunny Spain

Posted by stephen on Sunday, 16th October, 2005 @ 23:43

Well, it's half eleven and I need to be up again at 4am, to get myself and Steve through the shower and ready to leave here at 5 to make the 5.30am check in at Luton airport. And I haven't even packed yet!

At least I found my passport, after lots of hunting around for it, I temporarily gave up, brushed my teeth and had a flash of inspiration that when I last went away I put it in the pocket of my rucksack, and sure enough, it was there!

Quick geek update, have decided to embark on TurboGears for a little project and see how I get on, no doubt I'll keep you filled in here.

Chances are things will be pretty quiet this week though, don't think I'll have an Internet connection, and not sure that I actually want one!

In the mean time, my boss Richard wanted me to inform you all that his site can keep you entertained in the meantime, you can catch the latest blog entries on the right of this page, or visit the site directly at smashingbloke.co.uk.

Interesting Day

Posted by stephen on Thursday, 13th October, 2005 @ 23:29

My current task at work is working with my boss Richard to redevelop Carpenters Connect, which was the original prototype for the Wired-up Communities project. Carpenters Connects runs on 13 different operating systems, including all sorts of proprietary, expensive systems. The idea of the RegenTV project is to replace this with an easy to deploy and easy to manage open source solution.

Well, that's the idea, it's been rather hard work so far, with all kinds of issue, even with IBMs help. I'm not allowed to speak my true opinion on all the issues, but the important thing is Richard and I have actually managed to get the system to a point where it's working pretty well on our alpha site.

And so now it's time upgrade Carpenters Connect to RegenTV. Which is what I've been doing this week and what I'll be doing for the next month or so, except for next week, when I'll be on holiday in Spain, so there may not been any website updates from Monday until I get back on Sunday.

I can't wait to get away and relax a bit. Especially as I got my car clamped in the work car park today as I forgot to put my permit in the windscreen. Annoyingly the clampers were closed when I rang them at 5.40pm, so I'm staying in London tonight, thanks to Richard for putting up with me.

Anyway, holidays. I loved my break in Wales last month, but there was loads of driving. It'll be nice to spend a week in the sun, sitting next to the pool, eating in a restaurant and drinking sangria in the evenings, with absolutely nothing to do. Talking of Wales, I've finally uploaded the last of my Wales pictures in the images section.

Now, back to work. We're lacking somewhat in documentation at the moment, so while we rebuild Carpenters both of us will be using our web sites to document the process where possible. Most of mine will be in the docs section and Richard has started a techie blog. The idea of RegenTV is that anyone should be able to come along, read our documentation and build a system. Obviously we'd prefer you give us a pile of cash and we'll give you the benefit of our years of experience and the bits we didn't write down ;)

In the mean time, on my site you'll find our todo list and the start of my LDAP server documentation. It's incredibly useful technology, if not as supported as it should be in the basic network services packages (DHCP and BIND spring to mind).

So you can look forward to all kinds of incredibly exciting (to me) documents about our experiences of setting things up from scratch. Today we've setup our Cisco PIX firewall, mostly, and created an LDAP directory, mostly.

Wednesday... expanded

Posted by stephen on Thursday, 13th October, 2005 @ 00:56

I thought I probably should follow up on my earlier brain dump posting with a little more detail about what I'm up to right now.

Following on from moving around my living room over the weekend, I took advantage of having Monday to work at home and made a little trip to Argos and picked myself up a nice coffee table and a couple of bookshelves. I assembled the coffee table immediately and it's fitting in rather nicely. The bookshelves will wait until Saturday when the lovely James will assist me in their construction. And then there'll be pictures of the new layout here.

I then realised there's something I forgot to pick up in Argos, a SCART splitter. I wanted a manual one as most of my kit will be on at the time and an automatic one would get very confused. So I went and purchased one. And I now have TiVo, Aminet110 and output of my PC STB feeding into the TV's SCART socket, along with VGA from PC STB and DVI from the G5. The only thing not connected now is my DSL4000, which I'll be tempted to do soon as I'll be developing for them again shortly as I'll mention in a bit.

I'm continuing to be excited about the possibilities of an x86-based set top box. A low-power, mid-speed AMD Geode or VIA processor would do nicely, coupled with a LinuxBIOS, onboard 128Mb flash, MPEG2/4.10 hardware decoder and TV-encoder such as the SAA7127 on the Hauppauge PVR-350 I've been talking about so much recently. All the standard PC stuff otherwise could be removed, the VGA port (though DVI might be useful for HD later), the IDE headers, sound card, etc. And with a custom BIOS it'd be useless as a generic PC, which is very important in my line of work, the STB has to have no resale value!

I was buoyed by chatting to David over lunch when he brought up the possibility of having a prototype developed at a reasonable cost, thanks to his experiences at Empeg. Then chatting to Richard and discussing how a more powerful STB will definitely be needed for a project we'll hopefully be working on next year makes the whole thing seem like it could actually happen.

The biggest barrier I see right now is the relative lack of MPEG4 part 10 (H264) hardware decoders on the market. They're still quite expensive, and not all of them are backward compatible with MPEG2 which will be essential to carry on supporting Freeview over our service. Interestingly, Pace now do their IP215 STB which is H264 ready, but it manages that by having two 500Mhz ARM cores, one for general purpose use and one dedicated as an H264 decoder. Doesn't feel ideal. The other possibility I've found is a software stack, but it only manages H264 upto 1Mbit and in CIF resolution. A bit crap really.

The other barrier is the case. It needs to be reasonably small. It's made the Amino Aminet 110 we've been deploying lately very acceptable to our users. It's not another big Sky/NTL like box, it's a cute little thing we like to call a 'pod'. Not riding anyone else's wave there ;)

I think we can get it pretty small though, somewhere between the DSL4000 (just like a NTL or Sky box) and the Aminet 110 (about 50% bigger than the original iPod). The biggest expense is producing the case if we can't find an off the shelf solution. Plastic moulding is VERY expensive!

If you're wondering why I'm so dedicated to this cause, it's because I've found nothing out there that really suits us. Most of them are pretty closed systems, even when they run Linux. Rarely do they offer MPEG4, often they are tied to a single vendor's middleware and there's very little x86 stuff. Why do I want x86? Two reasons...

Firstly, it makes development really really easy! I can just use the stuff I'm using now, no fiddly cross compiler setup, etc. Secondly, I want a powerful local web browser, such as Firefox, and I want it to have RealPlayer and the latest Flash support. That's much easier to do with x86 as everything is there already.

Right, enough for one post, I'll talk about web development frameworks and what I'm up to at work right now in a future posting.

Web Dev & House Stuff

Posted by stephen on Wednesday, 12th October, 2005 @ 15:01

Sorry, have to get this stuff out of my head now so I can write about it later, I could just save without publishing, but why not let everyone see into my head? Oh dear.

House: New coffee table, bookcases, managed switch, FMM STB.

Webdev: Which to use? Rails (bad: Ruby, good: unit testing), Django (good: almost stable, dynamic admin interface, bad: completely written from scratch, maybe unnecessarily, not liking templating style) or TurboGears (bad: moving target api wise, good: standard components (SQLObject, CherryPy), nice exception methods, AJAX integration, TAL-like templating). Overall feeling of guilt for looking to move away from Plone. Oooh, and Zope 3 (big, scary).

Wow

Posted by stephen on Monday, 10th October, 2005 @ 12:12

The web developer in me is positively tingling at the moment! I've just read this post over at Slashdot and am watching the Ruby on Rails video, it's incredible! If you do any kind of database backed web development, you should go take a look!

I'm going to watch the Python demo soon and see what that's like. Hopefully it's just as good as I'm fairly experienced in Python, but have never done a line of Ruby.

I also keep meaning to investigate Django more fully. It certainly sounds very promising. And there's still work to be done exploring Plone 2.1.

To anyone who reads this site who doesn't happen to be a bit geeky, I'm really sorry, it must have been really boring lately!

Good & Bad Ideas

Posted by stephen on Monday, 10th October, 2005 @ 10:35

Things continue to progress nicely with my little PC-cum-STB. When I realised that the version of VDR Debian ships with is 1.2 and not 1.3 I downloaded the older version of the pvr350 plugin, compiled it successfully, started VDR and wondered how the hell I was going to configure it.

But something rather good happened. I noticed my TV (plugged into the output of the PVR card) had some text on it! It wanted me to assign keys for the various interface functions (menu, up, down, select, etc). So I thought I'd push my luck and grabbed hold of the Hauppauge remote and press the up arrow, as requested.

Woo hoo! It asked me to press down, and then menu, and a whole host of other buttons. It just worked! Well, it just worked meaning VDR did with my hardware, after hours of poking, compiling, and setting up said hardware.

I installed lots of cool VDR plugins; games, the weather, teletext (doesn't work in the UK), signal information, etc. And I learned my newly plumbed in roof aerial is only marginally better than my tiny portable one, and only if the booster is plugged in. Hmm, am I bothered enough to fix it? Or is the fun over with now it works and I'll just keep using TiVo? Probably the latter.

At least it spurred me on to finally get around to swapping around my living room, the sofa and the TV are now on opposite sides for anyone who knows what my living room looks like. It works well, even if it does feel a little odd, having had it the other way for over 2 years now.

All that's left is to swap around the G5 and the sub, as I don't think they're on the right sides at the moment, then off to Argos to purchase a couple of bookshelves, one for each side, as the room is looking a little empty around the TV at the moment and it'd mean my DVDs finally had somewhere to go other than floor piles.

So lots of good ideas, on to the bad... I was playing with the site yesterday and installed a couple of new Zope/Plone products, CMFContentPanels and CMFSin. The intention with both was to get RSS feeds into the site pages. As you might guess from my bosses blog now being included on the right, I got it sorted. Eventually.

Here's a couple of tips though... never unintentionally delete the Python install that's running your Zope instance. It'll keep running, until you want to stop and restart it to register a new product. Then you'll get a really odd error message that says nothing about Python not being available.

And finally, never remove CMFSin after installing it on your site, just because it doesn't support ATOM feeds. When you do remove it, your site will be completely, 100% broken and you'll have to reinstall through the ZMI.

Lessons learned.

Project Progress

Posted by stephen on Saturday, 08th October, 2005 @ 16:03

I've spent what feels like far too many hours this week playing with a Hauppauge PVR-350 MPEG encoder card. Mostly because I discovered the MPEG decoder chip has a framebuffer driver with alpha channeling. My plans of a PC set top box move a little closer to becoming reality.

I found the necessary source packages for the IVTV modules, along with utils packages for Debian Unstable. Personally I prefer stable, so I've created some binary packages of the drivers and utilities for Debian Sarge which you can get from my software section if you're interested.

It's pretty much been research up until now, along with packaging things up nicely. One of my aims when researching this stuff is to make it quickly reproducible. The mini-ITX system I've got hosting the PVR card also has a DVB-T card installed, and twice now I've reinstalled and made it into a streaming Freeview server in about 15 mins by following my guide. The first time highlighted a couple of bugs in my instructions, so they're fixed now.

Having rebuilt some Debian packages for the PVR card has got me thinking I should build a Debian package to replace most of my DVB streaming how to. Watch this space!

Anywhere, here's where I am now:

• Capturing from the PVR card works.
• Playback through the PVR card works.
• X runs on the PVR cards framebuffer.
• Alpha channeling the framebuffer works.
• The output from the SAA7127 chip onboard the PVR-350 is beautiful, this is definitely something to consider should the opportunity arise one day to create an embedded x86 STB.
• Freevo runs on the framebuffer, looks great.
• LIRC lets me use the Hauppauge remote to control Freevo, sort of. The signals are perfect, just too many of them.
• Using dvbstream I can pull News 24 off the DVB-T card and poke it straight into the PVR-350 decoder just by piping it into the device. I love Unix.
• MythTV also runs on the framebuffer X and apparently can use MPEG decoder on PVR-350, yet to prove though. MythBrowser is a gorgeous implementation of Konqueror in the Myth interface. Need to find Freevo equivalents. Myth has the advantage of being written with Qt, but Freevo is easier to build for as is in Python.
• Can move and resize video display within output area, cool!
• Can pipe videos ripped from the TiVo straight into the decoder, interesting thoughts about leveraging existing technology into a single interface.

And here's where I need to go:

• Get VLS streaming video from the PVR card's encoder. Should be fairly straightforward. Will keep my boss happy.
• Deploy above on other mini-ITX system on it's compact flash install, should be straightforward as mostly things are packaged now.
• Customise Freevo or parts thereof to create an effective STB interface.
• Integrate pvr250player or ivtvplay code with Freevo so video playback is handled by MPEG decoder chip.
• Once I can do both of the above, alpha blend a nice interface with video, make EPG.
• Get Freevo talking with DVB card, ideally with listings from the DVB signal. VDR can do this, investigate further.
• Fix IR remote control codes for Freevo interface.
• Get an image on the PVR-350 framebuffer ASAP during boot up.
• Reduce overall boot time by hardcoding modules and disabling hardware detection.
• Lots of other stuff I can't think of right now.
• Pipe stuff live from the TiVo into the decoder, currently using previously downloaded and de-TiVo'd files.

No doubt I'll be updating you soon with my progress and hopefully I'll have a few more packages and guides to show for it too.

The Future of the Internet

Posted by stephen on Thursday, 06th October, 2005 @ 18:53

It's been an interesting, if slightly concerning couple of days lately in regards to the Internet. Questions over political control and some of the networks in this ultimate network left unable to talk to each other because of corporate disagreements.

Meanwhile, is Google creating it's own replacement to the Internet?

These are interesting times indeed. I'm not sure where I stand on the issues. I might one day be on this thing called the GoogleNet, checking my Gmail, buying my goods and reading the news through Googlezon. But rather worryingly, I'm not in the least bit scared by that.

I suppose that's just the kind of guy I am. I really don't mind that Tesco and Amazon know the kind of things I like. I love that they're able to offer me things that I probably will like because they know so much.

Bits & Pieces

Posted by stephen on Wednesday, 05th October, 2005 @ 14:09

I've got lots to blog about today, and I've been indecisive about the best way to do it. Should I make one big long post and risk you being bored and not reading the whole thing? Or should I make a few shorter posts, but then you might miss the earlier ones. I think I'm going to go with the latter approach and hope no one misses anything they find interesting. That's giving myself way too much credit for writing interesting things, I know.

First off, I was having a poke around my stats today and found to interesting to know what people were searching for when they stumbled across my site. So far this month it's looking like this:

I found my response to this quite interesting. I feel a little bit guilty that whoever has done these searches will have only found references in my blog to me talking about playing with these things. I feel like I should actually write up some of my experiences so that these people will actually find something useful here!

To that end, I've started to populates the documents section with a few items. I've not had time to actually write everything up, so there are just a few useful links in some of the articles. Today I'm writing up fully my guide to DVB Streaming with VLS, you'll find it completed a little later on hopefully.

Anyway, my search string quest led me to see how Google's index of my site is doing. And there I spotted the home page is currently 101k of text! So I've just reduced the post count that appears on the homepage from 20 to 10. Hopefully it'll load a little quicker for you now. The archives will always be there, so nothing is lost.

It's annoying me that your comments aren't appearing in context to the posts you're replying to. Hopefully that'll be sorted when I upgrade to the latest Plone and Quills versions. So I'm going to quickly acknowledge Australia's Number 1 Steve Newey, that I'm far to geeky to stick todo lists to my fridge and thanks to Dave Nash for his sagely advice regarding my PowerBook keyboard that meant I (mostly) fixed it and decided not to send it away for a week's holiday with Apple's Hardware Support people.

I think that'll do for this post, later I want to talk about streaming from an MPEG encoder card, moving to Plone 2.1, moving around my living room to get access to the aerial in my loft and my experience of the BBC Internet Media Player (someone else's first impressions and screenshots are here).

Happy & Sad

Posted by stephen on Monday, 03rd October, 2005 @ 11:23

Well, I'll start with the sad news. Thor, my PowerBook, has developed a rather odd spacebar key. It's all a bit squishy on the edges and only works if I strike it in the dead centre. So, technically it still works, but it means I have a habitoftypingthingslikethis, and then having to go fix 'em after. I think that counts as unusable. I've had the key off and it all seems clean, etc underneath, so don't really know what's up.

Fortunately I managed to convince people on several different continents (as I got passed around Apple's tech support phone service) that resetting the PRAM wasn't really going to help. Unfortunately they can't send me a replacement keyboard (having an iBook would have qualified me for that, but I'm incapable of removing the four keys necessary to get at the screws apparently), so they've sent me a box and Thor's been nicely backed up, formatted and installed with a default Tiger install, not that I'm paranoid or anything. I'm more afraid for my keychain than I am for my web browsing habits!

Anyway, it's been in it's security sealed box since Thursday night, and apparently UPS will be around today to pick it up, hence I'm working at home. So I'll be without mobility for a few more days yet. Fortunately I'm coping with Linux quite nicely. It's really moved on lately and Ubuntu is fantastic.

On to the happy stuff. Well, I hadn't noticed, but the second series of Lost has begun in the US as of a couple of weeks ago, so I've acquired and watched them, and I have to say, they are fantastic! For anyone who hasn't been watching the first series on Channel 4, what are you thinking?! Fortunately the third ep is on Wednesday night, so don't have to wait too long to get my fix. I obtained the last series in one go, so was able to watch the whole thing over about 3 days. I'm going to have to be more patient this time. Oh well.

I've covered it before, but I feel like I should cover it again, Star Wreck: In The Pirkinning is now available for download. And downloading it I am. The BitTorrent is coming in at the full speed my cable modem will allow, so only 15 mins to go! But I'll watch it later, after I've done some meaningful work today. And no doubt I'll have something to say about it when I've seen it.