"Back in my day..."

Wile I have been stuck in bed I decided to finish up some hacking I started last week. I have basically completed my rewrite of eyeTV FTW. I am still trying to figure out exactly what I want this program to do. Currently it just downloads the .mpeg to the remote computer. That is nice, I am just not sure f I want it to do more.

I played around with the idea of then serving the file via Darwin Streaming Server. I have not completely thrown that idea out yet, but I did move on to other things.

I turned my on eyeCal.php, a PHP script that sllows you to view recorded and scheduled eyeTV recordings in iCal. Since I had done so much work with eyeTV FTW, it was not terribly difficult once I figured out some of the iCal file spec.

The hardes part of all of it has been working with time zones. PHP 5.2's timezone support is still in infancy, it seems. I finally got it working, though, and each file is now about a quarter as long as the original was.

As soon as I get the code completely cleaned up I definitely plan on releasing it to the world. I definitely plan on much bigger and better things from my eyeTV system. This is just the beginning.

Really, I kept meaning to write up an end-of-2006 wrap-up, and I just never got around to it.

So much changed during this past December-January, and so much of it stayed the same.

I am still alive and well in the Virgin Islands. I still work the same job I had in November.

A few things to remind people what I am normally like in this journal:

* First, and most importantly, Barack Obama. I say "most importantly" in regards to this person in a very dissimilar way to most people who are throwing his name around. I have major issues with Sen. Obama. The word "issues" is probably the most important word in that last sentence. For the life of me, I cannot find out where the Senator stands on almost any issue! Alright, so I know he is against the war in Iraq, and that is all nice and good. And he has always been opposed to the war in Iraq. That is very commendable of him. Where is he on almost any other issue?

Check out The Democratic Party's webpage, for example. There is a nice "Agenda" link with major issues, and their stances on them. Now go to Sen. Clinton's Senate webpage. Again, an "On the Issues" link that takes you to a page listing the Senator's views on a wide variety of issues.

Try the same on Sen. Obama's Presidential Exploratory Committee webpage. Or on his Senate webpage.

I find it extremely scary that this many people are willing to get behind a politician who seems to be going out of his way to hide his stance on a great number of topics. Suppose you learned that he voted against increasing funding for Amtrak, despite talking about how we need to reduce our reliance on foreign oil. Or that he voted in favor of continuing the USA PATRIOT Act? I mean, you all are the same people that were up in arms after watching "Fahrenheit 9/11", correct?

I am fine with people voting their beliefs, I just want people to do some research and make sure that Sen. Obama's stances, whatever they might be, match those of the people in his grassroots campaign.

* Next, we come to my future. I had set a "end of January" deadline for figuring out what I was going to be doing post-VI. Due to some things that were in the process of changing at the end of January, I was unable to meet that deadline, and therefore gave myself a two week extension to figure it all out. I am very close to a final decision, and I will let everyone know what it is when everything gets finalized. To give you a sneak-peek, it looks like I will be returning stateside, probably on 1 May 2007.

On a related note, my roommate might be staying on island after I leave. If you are interested in spending a few months in an apartment on St. Thomas, definitely get in touch with me.

* It looks at least probable that I will return to working at a Fruit Stand sometime this year. Location is definitely not set (see above), but we will see.

* Other things are going on in my life, and I might write a more private entry on those events. Things have been a bit rocky recently, but they seem to be working out well for now.

* I was pleased to see that Adium v1.0 was released yesterday. I installed it a few minutes ago, and while some of the new user interface is taking some getting used to, I am pleased with some of the advances. Being able to sort chat logs based on aliases is worth the upgrade alone. Yet another example of an outstanding GPL program.

* In other tech news, my eyeTV 200 recently blew itself up. I am in the process of mailing it off to el gato, and it looks like I will be getting an eyeTV 250 in exchange. I am really looking forward to getting a working one, since I recently found some software to help with the eyeTV software that looks really exciting. I anticipate playing around and hacking with that software. The software looks a little old, but I am really hoping I can get it working with the newer versions of eyeTV.

* It looks like I will be in the Atlanta area for my spring break (the first week of March) and would like to see people. Details forthcoming (as in "after I buy the plane ticket").

Hopefully I will get a couple more updates posted in the next couple of days, but I did want to get everyone caught up with what is going on.

This past Christmas marked a bit of an anniversary, and I completely forgot to celebrate it.

For Christmas in 1986, my family purchased an Apple //c

That is right - I have been using Apple computers for 20 years now. A few years after the purchase of the //c, my family bought me an Apple //gs for my own use. That computer got put in my bedroom in 1989 or so. A year or two after that I bought a 2400 baud modem, and that is when things got really interesting.

The progression of my main machine: Apple //gs, Macintosh Centris 610, Umax SuperMac S900/200DP, Quicksilver 2002/933MHz, 17" iMac G5 (iSight), 17" iMac Core Duo.

My secondary machines have included a PowerBook Duo 2300c, a 12" PowerBook/1 GHz, and an eMate, along with a few assorted PCs running anything from Windows 98 to Linux to NetBSD.

Speed has gone from 1MHz to 1.83GHz (x2). RAM in my machines has gone from 128KB to 1.5GB, and storage has gone from 0 in the first two machines (no hard drives, everything off of floppies) to almost 1TB connected to my main machine now.

1) From a petition to port Trillian to Mac OS X:

Adium—an open source messenger that, unlike Fire, actually seems to have a development community centred around it—unfortunately has stubborn developers who don't seem to want to do things to add extra functionality and are taking an incredibly long time to add necessary features such as file transfer status boxes!

Most everyone I have spoken to who has come to OS X and tried Adium has said that it is one of the better, if not the best, chat clients out there. File transfer does have a bit of work left on it, but I have no idea what they are talking about when they say " file transfer status boxes". While file transfers do not always work, a status bar pops up and indicates exactly what is going on with the transfer
Right now the program is also fairly feature-complete. Sure, there might be a few minor features here and there that a handful of people would like, but by and large any feature additions would probably fit into the category of "bloat". Video chatting is one of big features that could be added, but since Adium relies on libgaim, this is not exactly Adium's fault (the libgaim issue is also a reason for poor file-transfers)

2) Yesterday I was reading an article on the NYTimes website, and they have an ad for their travel section. Apparently they are having a series called "Where in the world is..." Yesterday's big question was "Where in the world is Jost Van Dyke?"

I knew the answer, and had seen Jost Van Dyke from a distance a few days before.

3) Christmas List: Get this toy and this camera Combine with this driver and this driver.

This is a recipe for a very fun Christmas day indeed.

Yesterday Qualcomm announced that their Eudora mail client would be going open source, combining with Thunderbird, the Mozilla mail client.

I suppose it should be expected that I give my input into this.

( My history with Eudora... )
So what do I think of the news? Well, I am very happy to hear that Eudora has a future. The Macintosh version has been sitting at 6.x for a very long time now, and development seemed to have stalled completely. A universal binary seemed to be a long while off. The program was also not able to take advantage of several Tiger technologies, including, most notably to me, Spotlight.

That said, I do have some reservations about the attempt to merge Eudora and Thunderbird. I have not used Thunderbird, but it seems that any attempt to merge the two should try to take the history of good that Eudora has under its belt, and combine that with some of the newer technologies Thunderbird can offer.

Eudora/Mac is written using Metroworks, however, and trying to move it over to xCode would be a pain. So most of the Eudora development done is going to be "from the ground up." From what I have read in the past couple of days, Thunderbird certainly has its fair share of problems. Hopefully this development will take the best of both worlds to create a very good mail client.

We will see, I suppose.

Nothing too eventful this weekend.

Friday I worked, and it was actually slow. This week had been a real pain at work, with tons of tedious, mind-numbing work to be done. Friday was a welcome break from this. Friday night found me going out with a friend to Harvard Square for dinner and a showing of "The DaVinci Code". I imagine there are a million and one reviews of the movie rolling around the Internet, so I will not bore you with one. To sum it up: WIthout having read the book, I found it an alright movie.

As far as the book goes, I would have to agree with a sentiment I saw a while back - "I have no need to read 'The DaVinci Code', I read the original work. It is called 'Foucault's Pendulum' and was written by Umberto Eco."

No sense in writing a book about a semiotics professor when, in fact, you are one...

Saturday found me back at work, and more tedious work to be done. Luckily I assigned a helper (Skeeter) so the day was not as bad as it could have been. Saturday night Skeeter and I watched "Magnolia" (my first time seeing the movie) and my somewhat chilly apartment.

Sunday morning Skeeter picked me up in her vehicle in time to get to the Fruit Stand at 8am for a 9am training session (yeah, yeah...) Donuts were consumed, a movie was made about Ponies, and all was good with the world.

Now it is Sunday afternoon. I had meant to do some gardening today in my new front yard, but three days of rain put a damper on that idea. A chilly Sunday afternoon, with nothing to do, and a nice warm bed?

NAPTIME!

So I napped for quite a while, and now I am trying to figure out what to do with my evening. Of course I have to be at work at 8am tomorrow, but...

In other news, I got the eMate talking to the iMac.

Things used:
1) A Belkin F5U103-MAC USB - Serial adaptor.
2) An OSS driver for said Belkin product
3) NewTen connection software.
4) Glass Onion Software's NewtSync (v0.3.3, not the commonly available, but broken under Tiger older version)

So right now I have the ability to install packages on the eMate, as well as the ability to sync both Address Book and iCal with the Newton software. The only slight annoyance (other than the general slowness of a serial connection) is that NewtSync will only sync one calendar from iCal. As a result I am currently using a program to combine together several calendars into one for placement onto the eMate.

The next plan, now that I have an install program working, is to get a wireless card for the eMate so I can get online (and sync via wireless!)

Other computer news:
I have my PowerBook hooked up to our television now, along with the eyeTV. The annoying part is that our apartment lost our cable a few days before I moved in, so the eyeTV is somewhat useless. I have a bunch of stuff recorded, but...

Today I got MediaCentral up and running, and it seems to be running a lot better than the last time I installed it. It brings the Mac+eyeTV about as close to a mythTV box as you are going to get for the moment, and I am pretty happy with it.

Imagine FrontRow with the ability to do things like... oh, watch live television, be able to access eyeTV recordings without exporting them, watch VIDEO_TS folders, and so on.

Just an update on some various subjects.

1) QMaster and xServe: I got QMaster up and running on several of the PowerMacs. We have not had a chance to do any actual load testing yet. That will probably be on Tuesday. We have figured out a spot to put the xServe, and have install discs for 10.4 Server. That will be later in the week.

2) The eMate: Has not been delivered yet. Did some research over the weekend to figure out what I will need. The next step is to purchase either an ethernet card or, preferably, a wireless card for it, and then just sync it via TCP/IP.

3) EyeTV 200: I have been lazy and have not done any AppleScripting on it. I just try to sit down for 20 minutes once a week or so and pick a few shows to record. I really like the device. The software is only a 6/10, but it is good enough to not bug me too much.

4) The fish: I am going to get a fish to keep in my corner at work. Thanks to Kat for the idea.

5) Next year: The plan is still on to leave the country in the late summer/early fall. Current locales include the Virgin Islands, Greece, and Austria.

6) This week: LinuxWorld Boston 2006

7) Tomorrow: Pancake breakfast, purchasing running shoes, haircut, and then a couple of runs.

8) Right now: Sleep.

I am almost done with the work project mentioned in my previous entry. I have a little code clean-up to do, and add some code to a few pages so they are aware of the added capabilities, but I am thinking that will take me a few hours, at most.

Saturday was very productive on the project. Things go much faster now that I am comfortable with writing in PHP, and writing something completely from scratch instead of hacking code onto a pre-existing project. I have told the store that we are going to alpha-test the modifications on Wednesday. In another two weeks I hope to have a package that we can easily distribute to other stores.

Now that I am done with that I think it is time to move onto a new project. This one will be for me.

A few days ago I found a great deal on a el Gato eyeTV 200, so I picked it up. Having once owned a TiVo, I can say that TiVo does not need to worry about any possible competition from el Gato. The software is so much crap as to be ridiculous. The inability to set up a "Season Pass" (where the software will record all episodes of a show on a certain channel) tops the list, but there are many other deficiencies.

Things I have found in a couple of hours of playing around with it, and with a little bit of research:

1) The lack of integration with Front Row.
2) The inability to view prerecorded content from the remote. (!!!)
3) The inability to edit out commercial breaks automatically.
4) Complete lack of tools to manage hard drive space (ability to say "Just record four of these", and so on)

So my next project is to get to work on some of these deficiencies. Based on some tentative research, it looks like this project is going to require some serious AppleScript action. Not my favorite to work with (in part because I have really never been able to accomplish ANYTHING with AppleScript), but it looks like the best bet to do what I want.

The basic plan of action (right now):
1) Set up titantv.com to email me alerts for certain shows.
2) AppleScript eyeTV so that it takes in the email and adds the program to the schedule, and to the correct playlist.
3) AppleScript, again, an easy export to strip some of the eyeTV file information, leaving the MPEG4 file.
4) Sending the resulting file through a program to strip commercials from it.
5) Moving that file to an appropriately named folder where Front Row will find it.
6) Deleting the original eyeTV file.

I would like it so that the program would ask me at the end of viewing if I wanted to delete it or hold on to it (TiVo-style), but that is way too much. I suppose I can deal with the Front Row movies manually.

I did also get an extra 160GB drive expressly for recording shows.

I will report back later on my progress.

This guy is a complete idiot.

Also - apparently someone came to visit me at work yesterday, but I was unable to come out and see them in time. The employee who spoke to my friend did not get his name, so if you stopped by, please let me know. Also know that I was not trying to slight you by not coming out to see you. They keep me chained up in the back, you see?

It is freezing in my apartment...

So Apple released new products yesterday. I will not bore you with the details, since you can find that information anywhere.

A few points, though:

1) The new iMac uses PCI Express, whereas the PowerMac still uses PCI-X and AGP. I think with the move to Intel you will see everything going over to PCI Express. I can only hope this will mean more video card choices in the PowerMacs. Of course, PCI was supposed to bring that years ago...

2) I had wanted an old 30 GB iPod photo, but now I think I will wait for a black 30 GB iPod. Very cool.

3) I really cannot see the market for video on an iPod. I suppose I am in the ideal market for iPods - I commute via public transportation, I fly several times a year, and I have disposable income that I like to spend on computer and media. I own over a hundred DVDs, and I have bought several hundred songs on the iTunes Music Store. That said, I can never see myself sitting on the bus and watching a television show on a one inch screen. *

4) Can I mention again how cool I think the black looks on the iPod?

5) Where in the hell is the television tuner for the iMac? Even Windows XP Media Center allows you to do that! Media center my ass!

6) No more U2 iPod! I had hoped there was going to be a new band edition iPod. It is a good idea, I think. The U2 was around *WAY* too long.

* ok, so the screen is 2.5" diagonal. My eyes are old, what can I say?