Pobice’s Computer Stuff

Unfortunately there appears be a lack in applications that use some of the best features of DVB in the uk. What I want from a TV application is:

1. Ability to record digital TV as it is broadcasted without any additional compression
2. Ability to record more than one channel at once (preferably more than 2 some times)
3. Ability to overlap program recording where needed
4. Ability to Record radio stations
5. Backend front end system where by I can schedule/view/control the system from another computer
6. Ability to record one, two or more channels on any mux using one TV card (there’s no point having to use two TV cards to record channels on the same frequency.
7. Do this all in the background on a Debian Sarge (+ selected extra apt-get sources) System
8. A TV like interface I could fire up. I don’t mind if I can schedule or tune from this interface, but I’d like to see now and next info, change channel, pause live TV, hit record etc. I don’t need the ability to play games nor watch DVDs etc from it. I just want to channel surf sometimes or fire it up to watch something at the spur of a moment.
9. Scheduling would be nice, but as long as there some easy to use interface, I could plug in my current scheduling system

I currently use DVB Daemon + webdvbd (with some changes to give me a webinterface I can hook my scheduling program up to) + DigiGuide (via wine).

Its a bit of a bodge but gives me the most important features and is relatively stable (I do occasionally have scheduling issues even with two cards) and about >1% of the time I get a duff recording (picture drops out before the end or picture is too scrambled to watch), but this may be a driver issue.

What the current system lacks is clash detection (I can tell if I’m paying attention - but only for manually one time only added programs - they won’t appear if there’s a schedule problem). It also lacks a GUI and TV live interface. I can watch TV live but its not easy to do (I have to use dvbstream and mplayer - so can’t change channels using my remote). If I had more time, and more experience in this I may be tempted into making and interface, but I suspect MythTV will finally put up with the pain of breaking things and written in decent dvb support first.

Sunday - woke up with a minor hangover, but a shower and breakfast sorted this out. This time I got chance to have some toast and coffee. Got down to the SU in plenty of time.

On sunday I listened to the following talks:

1. John Leach - Everyone Loves Eric Raymond
   Another one of the talks I’d knew would be quite funny. Pretty informative too
2. Matthew Garrett - Linux and Laptops
   I have a laptop and linux, so hey might and well listen to this one. Turned out to be one of the funiest talks of the weekend too. By the way don’t buy an Acer……
3. Richard Moore (IBM) - IBM and Open Source
   We have quite a lot of IBM stuff at work, so I thought I might pop along. It would appear IBM and Microsoft have defiently switched place, IBM is the company that is listening and doing lots of interesting things while Microsoft is the company telling customers what they want and how they should do things.
4. The Hour of Power — short demos of cool stuf
   Basically interesting stuff to look at.
5. Mike Hearn - Packaging and Autopackage
   I liked the sound of this to start with, but the more I herd the more I disagreed. Yes we do need to make things easier to install in linux, but not without loosing all the advantages. Nearly all the improvements auto packager offers could easily be implemented in the likes of apt.
6. The LugRadio team - Thankyou and goodbye

The end of the show. Left wanting more as everything good thing should.

At the end we went back to the hotel, wasted a few hours then went down to the bar. Started outside, but then grew too big and moved inside when the Lug Radio presenters joined the rest of the people at the Quality Chin. A good night of drinking, talking and the odd glass of champagene. Another late night and off to bed tired and drunk again, once the last of the presenters had gone, and nearly everyone else had called it a night.

Ghostscript in etch produces dodgy pdf files (at least on the 3 or 4 I’ve made). Current version is 8.15.1. PDF files work fine in Linux but not using acrobat reader on windows.

However sarge seems fine. Ghost script version in sarge is 7.07.1

Hmm wondering if its a fault with GS 8, will have to keep an eye on this.

Saturday was the first day of the “Official” event. I eventually got up from simply lying down in the bed for a while (I did get some sleep, but the heat of the room woke me up quite early), went for a shower and then for some breakfast. Sward wanting to get there early so I rushed and just had some cereal and orange juice. Then spent about 30min sitting around waiting for some other people who wanted to go down. Could have had a proper breakfast

Anyway when we did get down there we where waiting in a small queue and then into the venue. It was a reasonably sized student union, although as its actually part of the rest of the uni building and not a separate building it was hard to gauge it size. The bar was open and plasma screen where displaying some pictures and a now and next off what was to come. A small intro from the Lug Radio team and the event kicked off.

There where 5 room - The main room and bar, with the 2 BOF points and lan gaming off to the sides, and exhibition room which forms the rest of the bar (if it was open), The Chin and Beard rooms (for smaller talks) and the third and last bof point. The talks I attendants on Saturday where

1. Gervase Markham - How to Destroy the Free Software Movement
   An entertaining talk on well how a fictional company was working on Destroying to free software movement
2. Matthew Somerville - MySociety and Pledgebank
   I did try and see Ewen Spences talk, but he never turned up so I went to see the MySociety talk. It was quiet interesting - especially as I’d already used part of the site and not realised
3. Stephen Lamb (Microsoft) - Microsoft and Security
   Should have really gone to another talk to be honest - felt a bit lectured to and bored during this one
4. Lunch - Unfortunately we turned up on mass to a very busy and understaffed Varsity and missed the mass debate, but it was decent enough food at least
5. Des Burley (Mills & Reeve) - A lawyer on open source
   Interesting talk on the problems facing open source law wise
6. Matthew Bloch (Bytemark) - Virtualisation
   An interesting talk on a technology I’d like to play with but haven’t found a reason (The stuff we could use virtulisation for at work unfortunately is all done on Microsoft stuff)
7. Ian Lynch - The OpenDocument Fellowship
   Some details on the way the OpenDocument Fellowship is working. Would be nice to switch to an Open format at work - but need to wait for Microsoft to get their word pluggins sorted first. Assuming they do one for all the version of office we use.
8. Bruno Bord - This Talk May Contain Swearing
   AKA LugRadio Live and Unleashed warm up talk An excellent talk, especially given English isn’t the speakers first language.
9. LugRadio Live and Unleashed

All in all a great day. The Bar was well used, the aircon was a little ineffective but it wasn’t too warm. Its colder than my office at work anyway.

After the main event we all got very wet walking back to the hotel, stayed wet while a few of us got a KFC. Showered changed then off to the party.

Party - Was better than I was expecting, attendance was down from the main event of course, but still pretty well attended. Unfortunately the bar eventually ran out of Guinness, Cider and Grolsch so I ended up having to have a pint of Stella at one point, but at least been a Student union it was cheap. The DJ wasn’t bad - but given he was a club DJ was lacking in the wide range of Music demanded by the crowd, so the dance floor remained fairly empty most of the time. His rock selection was worst of all having to resort to repeating a few tracks. Next year I’ll pay attention and bring a cd with a few decent tracks (No Rammstein I promise - unless anyone else wants some played). The SU tried to kick us out early, but Jono sorted that out and we stayed till just before 2 and headed back to the hotel for a quick chat with a few people then off to bed for the night.

Last Weekend I went down to Lug Radio Live in Wolverhampton.

A great weekend it was too.

I got down there about 5ish Friday, then waiting about 30min for Junior ’s (sward) train to arrive (he missed the one he was meant to be on). As it was the first time either of us had been to Wolverhampton we took a taxi to the Quality Hotel (via the wrong one thanks to a taxi driver who miss-heard sward). We both checked in and went to unpack. I got into my room and bloody hell it was hot. I found out later they had heating problems and the heating was jammed on full which given the weather really didn’t help. The room was pretty good, especially at the cheap rate Jono from Lug Radio had secured for everyone.

Predictably we headed off the bar for a drink, and ended up drinking a fairly warm pint of Murphy’s - main due to that fact that was the only thing worth drinking, plus given the heating issues everything was generally warm. We hung around for a while and eventually bumped into a few other people who where down for lugradio. At about 8 we set off in a big group walking into Wolverhampton, through the grubby subway system a few times. We arrived at the Hogshead and had another drink, and then went out for something to eat. The eating party soon split up into 2, one lots went for a curry and the group I was in when for a Chinese all you can eat. It was pretty good and much needed - I always get very Hungary after a long journey. We went back to the party at Hogshead for another few, but after the filling Chinese and the fact I needed sleep we headed off back to the hotel - getting a bit lost on the way back. Took the wrong initial subway, ended up in the right second lot anyway, but then went up the wrong side off the exit and headed up the wrong road. We eventually got back to the hotel after realising what we had done and backtracking. Spent the next hour talking to some people outside the hotel who where here for lugradio and then headed off to bed (well into the oven).

After hearing about Network Manager on LugRadio at Guadec I decided to give it a go.

A bit of messing around - including installing the version from Testing I found out I need a new kernel for WPA.

Of I went and got 2.6.17 and compiled it.

Things of Note:
I had to use the ieee80211 module and the ipw2200 module from the kernel - but they appear to work so now problems.

After that network manager poped up - it found my wireless network. Selected it, a setup box appeared in which I put my WPA pass-phrase in and off it went and connected - all working a lot more reliable that just wpa supplicant on its own. Could be down to the new kernel mind. However it is very easy to use, and well I impressed. It’ll make using my laptop as a laptop a lot easier.

Update
Wow - after all this work and finally wireless is the most stable I’ve ever had it on Linux. In fact its not gone wrong once since this. Even in windows I was having a few problems now and again. Speed is good, stability and great and it just works. I enter a password in at the start and it goes off, picks the right network and passpharse and just sets it up for me.

Just added another plug-in to cacti over the last couple of weeks - weathermap.

Basically allows you to draw diagrams of you’re network, and it takes data from the rrd files and displays different coloured arrows show the percentage of the link used.

Basically allowing you to see whats going on, on your network and where all the traffic is going/coming from

I’ve stopped reading the digg RSS feed. Why? I’m pissed off and having to constantly sign into it. Its bad enough having to logon to something just to read, but then the auto logon feature doesn’t seem to work, nor does it redirect you to where you wanted to be after logging in- then that’s if I’m off.

I’m getting dam fed up of websites that have pages and pages of text but don’t have anyway to print them out. There are two types

1) Bad Layout sites where if you press print you end up using about 4 pages worth of paper for 1 page worth on content. - Tip for you use a css style sheet to hide all the crap from the printing - or make a separate print option like many sites do these days

2) Multiple page articles. Can I really cope with reading 30 odd pages worth of text on screen without my eyes giving up on me? Probably not. Can I print it out? Nope - they haven’t made a special print page, so I have to slowly read through the article, usually getting bored of the skipping else where every page etc and don’t end up reading it all.

The NHS as a whole doesn’t seem to use any open source, nor does it look like any will be coming (unless the likes of Java get GPL’ed)

However at work we have started to look into Open Source.

We currently have an every-growing Cati Install. Cacti is a great bit of software - at its most basic it creates graphs from SNMP data. It makes it very easy to add new hosts and created and managed display them. This is a good thing in our network - we are currently monitoring 116 devices with it, and this is growing every week as I get around to adding more devices.

With a number of addons (see http://cactiusers.org/) Cacti can also do a lot more. Currently the system:
1) Graphs various data from servers, switches, UPS’s and everything else we feel like monitoring with SNMP
2) With a few Perl scripts it even monitors various data from the likes of Exchange, ISS and Citrix (Using nsclient which can pull data available in WMI to Linux)
3) Monitor servers for restarts (via checking uptime). Emails us when every a server restarts
4) Threshold Monitoring - the system can email use when ever a value has gone bellow or above a value for a certain amount of times (mainly used to warn about UPS usage and disk space)
5) Reporting - Can build reports from the rrd files to find out top talkers etc

We are adding more and more features to the system all the time. Its very helpful to have a system which sits there and monitors everything we throw at it so we don’t have to keep a close eye on things.

The next open source system was are looking at using is good old Squid. We are getting a number of 100mb net connections at various sites and we need to replace of aging ISA boxes. Given that we have loads of old hardware available we’re going down the squid box. If we find ones is performing slowly just build another one to help out. Currently in testing and working out what rule and routing needs setting up still.