Geeking

I saw Matrix Reloaded today. It was pretty good, I guess I’d score it a 4 out of 5. Not like the original Matrix, which was an 11 out of 5! I remember leaving the theater after the first Matrix thinking, “Wow, that movie has changed the playing field of Sci-Fi movies forever.” And it turned out I was right. This time I left the theater thinking, “That was a good movie, and I’m glad I went to it.” Which, compared to some of the crap that you see in the theaters, is a pretty huge compliment. ...

I am working on a mysterious bug at work, and absent of any other promising theories, I decided to compare the firmware revision of all the hard drives involved to see if that correlated with the pattern of problems. If you aren’t a sysadmin, that will either not make any sense at all, or will give you some insight into what our lives are like. So I figured it can’t be too hard, right? Getting this info from a SCSI disk turns out to be easy, as long as you have Veritas NetBackup server installed, and are on a Sparc. You run “sgscan”, which uses the SCSI Generic driver to scan the buses. Fine, but I was on Solaris x86, and though I did have the NetBackup client package available to me, sgscan is only available in the server install. ...

nella.org dropped off the net because of some nameserver difficulties. I took the chance to also change registrars, which added to the downtime. I am back now, so if you sent mail and it bounced and you want me to see it, please send it again.

So, it appears that too aggressive caching in TiVo.pm is the culprit. Even after I changed which services it was supposed to be advertising to the TiVo, it still sent down the old stuff it had cached in files in /tmp. Removing everything in /tmp owned by apache solved the problem. Not graceful, but it worked. Hello, TiVo? Is there someone there I can report these bugs to?

I made a new version of tivo-beacon, with the length bytes included that TiVo seems to send on TCP connections. That makes it quite a bit happier. Now I just need to figure out why TiVo.pm is sending down messages about services (“Music” in my case) that are commented out of example.cgi.

Tonite I set out to make my Tivo use my remotely-hosted Linux webserver as my MP3 server. The eventual goal is to teach WinAmp to play from the same collection of files, so that I can have one copy of my mp3’s in the “cloud” and still get access to them easily on each device. The first step was to investigate the TiVo Developers info. There I found a tar.gz file with some stuff in it that implemented the funky XML messages TiVo needs to know what’s in the directory tree. I fetched it put it in a directory on my webserver. ...

You heard it here first folks. And it appears MySQL AB’s intends to make version 5 the one that really puts the hurt on Oracle and MS SQL Server. Note to Larry: Sell short.

This weblog post, and the last one, brought to you courtesy of the owner of adsl-34-22-231.mia.bellsouth.net. Whoever you are, thanks for making it possible for me to sit in the shade on a Fort Lauderdale street and use the net. If you are ever on Arch St. in Redwood City, I’ll happily return the favor.

There’s a new technology to learn about… TDMoIP. VoIP (Voice over IP) has been a big disaster. Lots of engineering effort in, little success out. I had a Vonage phone line for a while, and the call quality (mostly due to latency) was terrible. I was using my Vonage endpoint under significantly less than ideal circumstances, so it might not have even been their fault. But I’ve seen VoIP stuff take up lots of time and deliver very little value at work too. ...

Check out this snippet from the “Having trouble connecting” help screen for AOL Instant Messenger: You might not be able to sign on if: Your Internet connection is only 16-bit. AIM needs a 32-bit connection. Contact your ISP if you are not sure. snip… 16-bit Internet? What they hell are these guys smoking?