RND(tech)

This has only a little to do with technology, but the power was out all weekend due to a bad storm we just had. So, I fired up the generator and played some Nintendo-style Uno. Apparently, it's a good time!

So I had completely forgot about my quest to relive the Final Fantasy sagas, again, finally. Over a year ago I had finished Final Fantasy I and II, gave up on III due to a technicality, and started Final Fantasy IV. Actually, it was just over a year ago to the day that I started, but somehow got lost in life work and other things. Anyway, I'm picking it back up again and apparently, I'm on the moon and close to the end. Blah.

Along the lines of my last post, I rediscovered some of my old stand-up comedy favorites on YouTube. That site is such a ridiculous waste of bandwidth sometimes, but there are some gems. This has little to nothing to do with technology, but it's one of my favorite Gallaghers. It's somewhat hard to find, but a classic of his take on school and the English language.

Sometime last Saturday (September 28) my cable provider, Cablevision, must have updated the software on my cablebox (Scientific Atlanta 4200HD). I use the firewire port for channel changes with the sa3250ch channel changer in the current MythTV SVN contrib directory. The commands being sent to the box were being received, but something happened in the new software that expected a slightly different command to properly change the channels. Anyway, here's some updated code to make it work. Change line 195 with the following diff:

195c195
< cmd[1] = CTL_CMD1 | (dig[0] << 16) | (dig[1] << | dig[2];
---
> cmd[1] = cmd[1] = CTL_CMD1 | (chn << 8);

I've also been toying with getting HD working with the Intel G33 integrated chipset that came in my new Dell Vostro 200 mini tower that I bought a few months ago. The CPU (Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E7200 @ 2.53GHz) seems to be OK handling pre-recorded HD from the Silicon Dust HDHomerun as well as h.264 content, so long as the bitrate isn't up there in the Blu-Ray range. I'm currently connected to a LCD HDTV with VGA, which is sufficient for my needs.

The latest Intel driver is here:

http://xorg.freedesktop.org/archive/individual/driver/xf86-video-intel-2.4.97.0.tar.bz2

By the way, you'll need to have at least xserver 1.3.0 to compile against, so make sure your system is updated! They say in the README you only need to specify Driver "intel" in your Device section of xorg.conf, but I've got a mess of options I'm playing with to get HDTV working nicely:

Section "Device"
BoardName "G33"
BusID "0:2:0"
Driver "intel"
Identifier "Device[0]"
Option "monitor-VGA" "Monitor[0]"
Screen 0
VendorName "Intel"
Option "UseEvents" "true"
Option "XvPreferOverlay" "true"
Option "DRI" "true"
Option "UseFBDev" "true"
Option "PageFlip" "true"
Option "TripleBuffer" "true"
Option "XAANoOffscreenPixmaps" "true"
Option "FramebufferCompression" "false"
# Enable offload of Motion Compensation (XvMC)
Option "LinearAlloc" "16384"
Option "XvMCSurfaces" "7"
Option "XvMC" "true"
Option "AccelMethod" "XAA" # The default is "EXA"
Option "CacheLines" "2048" # Allows the user to change the amount of graphics
# memory used for 2D acceleration and video when
# XAA acceleration is enabled.
# Decreasing leaves more for 3D textures. Increasing
# can improve 2D performance at the expense of 3D.
# can improve 2D performance at the expense of 3D.
# xxxx=8192/16384/32768 etc.
# Note AccelMethod XAA does not appear to work with Xvmc enabled. Testing required.
EndSection

You'll notice some lines in there for XVMC. Unfortunately this driver doesn't support 720p or 1080i/p frame sizes with XVMC, so for my purposes it's a bit pointless. I don't use XVMC under MythTV, but I have it in there anyway just for reference.

Finally, if you do compile the Intel video driver from source for MythTV, you may or may not notice that the driver chooses textured video as its default choice for rendering. I didn't have good performance with this, presumably because of weak 3D processing on this chip. I don't know for sure, but I have (and had) better results with overlay video. Another key setting for MythTV is to enable "extra audio buffering".

There's a long diff patch for the Intel video driver source, so it's attached here thanks to this MythTV-Users thread.

intel-prefer-hardware-overlay.diff

Have you tried the Google Chrome browser beta? Its only available to Windows XP and Vista users. The browser download weighs in at under 475K and is light-weight and lightning quick. Too bad I just don't trust what it might be sending back to the motherland in the background. Looks like it's time to break out the old packet-sniffer!

On a completely un-fun note, I recently applied the Windows Mobile 6.1 update to my AT&T tilt. It's practically the same thing as Windows Mobile 6.0, but with some tweaks to the WiFi interface and Internet Explorer Mobile now zooms. Oooh. Aaah. I can hardly contain my enthusiasm.

Microsoft recently release Office 2008 for Mac and since the original release, several updates have come out. They can be found here:

http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads.mspx

Office 2008 SP1 is 12.1.0, but updates 12.1.1 and 12.1.2 are also available now. Each of these three updates has given me problems from the actual installer, straight through to actually opening some applications. The most famous of which is that Word won't start and it keeps bouncing back to the "user experience" wizard and then straight Microsoft AutoUpdate checks. Ironic.

First off, if you've used a program like Monolingual to remove the PowerPC binaries, stop right here, remove your Office 2008 folder from Applications and reinstall. Also, make sure you're installing to the default /Applications folder. Don't rename the folder, don't try and modify the installation.

Next, have your CD key ready (you'll need it at the end):

- Reboot the computer

- find any pre-Office 2008 Normal templates. These are just called "Normal" and have no file extension.

- find the 2008 Normal template and delete it. It should be in your user folder under
~/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office/User Templates/

- Remove the following folders and files
~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Word Settings (10)
~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Word Settings (11)
~/Library/Preferences/com.Microsoft.Word.plist
~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Office 2008

- Reboot and attempt the 12.1.0 (SP1) Update

- Reboot and attempt the 12.1.1 Update

- Reboot and attempt the 12.1.2 Update

- Reboot and start Word. Office should now ask for your CD key and user information.

I HAD to reboot in between updates. If I didn't, the installer for each update said it couldn't find the existing software to update. I'm not sure what happens on reboots, but I'm almost sure it has to do with caches in OS X. Also, I downloaded each of the installers from the Microsoft website. I didn't use the AutoUpdate. I'm sure it'll work just fine now that I've cleared all of my preferences, but we'll see.

I can't believe that at this point Microsoft doesn't have the WPA2 support for Windows XP in the automatic updates. Apparently, they decided this needs to be downloaded separately. Woe is the person who actually needs to set one up on their primary wireless access point. Even with the release of Service Pack 3, this still is not included, even as a rolled in package.

Download it from here if you need it, or scale back to WPA if you want to have decent support for random visitors to your wireless network:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/917021

Sadly, I just found out Microsoft no longer includes HyperTerminal in Windows Vista. Actually, the never did, but it was part of Windows since many old years ago. Anyone who's anybody and configures switches, routers, etc, needs a serial port terminal. Unfortunately, serial ports are dying off on most computers. This isn't any late breaking news, especially not for Vista users.

Anyway, go get PuTTY. It's free and does serial terminal emulation, as well as SSH and TELNET. Oh yeah, the default Vista install doesn't include TELNET anymore, but if you need it, it's part of the additional components.

sigh

Speaking of HTTP errors... Firefox 3 was release about an hour and a half ago. Here's some direct download links for those of you having problems with the main Firefox page:

Windows:
http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.0&os=win&lang=en-US

Mac OS X:
http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.0&os=osx&lang=en-US

Linux:
http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.0&os=linux&lang=en-US

You can apparently also get it without issue/waiting/reloads/HTTP errors/busy servers at Softpedia...

I bought the Samsung LN37A330 37-inch 720p LCD HDTV
. Pretty good TV and I got it at an awesome price (just over $700).

However, as of about 1:30PM eastern, the site seems to be down. It's very unusual for a company/network like Amazon to be down this long and to even have that type of outage. At the very least, you'd get some clever 404 page that was really the company logo and an apology. I hope my order doesn't get screwed up...

I'm sure you don't care, but I still haven't replaced the broken LCD TV from my previous post. Here's the sick joke that I'm living with right now. Not really, because I just watch TV in another room on a slightly smaller LCD TV.

I was trying to fix a really random issue that makes my subwoofer go from good sound to a horribly loud constant hum this weekend. See this receiver?



It sits on a shelf just above my Olevia 37" LCD HDTV. Nothing fancy, nothing special, but gets the job done display:



I always just pull the receiver forward, tilt it down a little and disconnect whatever, as needed. Except this time, the receiver decided it wanted to lunge a little closer to the screen, resulting in this horrible mess:



and again:









By the way, this has nothing to do with tech or anything, but I was working outside and caught this big-ass spider crawling around:

Firefox 3 RC1 was just released and boy is it snazzy. So far, I can only see a small increase in page rendering times. Hopefully, after running it for a few more hours, it won't wreak havoc on my RAM and stay at a lean 79MB.

Anywho, it disabled my delicious bookmarks plugin, but you can get one that works with Firefox 3 here:

http://del.icio.us/extensions/firefox/delicious.xpi

I've been using MRTG for years to graph traffic on switch ports, but only recently started using it to graph other fun things.

Recently, I've started using it for latency.

/usr/local/bin/ping-host.sh:

#!/bin/sh
PING="/bin/ping"
ADDR="172.16.0.100"
DATA=`$PING -c10 -s500 $ADDR -q `
LOSS=`echo $DATA | awk '{print $18 }' | tr -d %`
echo $LOSS
if [ $LOSS = 100 ];
then echo 0
else
echo $DATA | awk -F/ '{print $5 }'
fi

Then in your mrtg.conf file:

Title[ping-host]: RTT to host
PageTop[ping-host]: <H1>Host Round Trip Time</H1>
Target[ping-host]: `/usr/local/bin/ping-host.sh`
MaxBytes[ping-host]: 2000
Options[ping-host]: growright,unknaszero,nopercent,gauge
LegendI[ping-host]: Pkt loss %
LegendO[ping-host]: Avg RTT
YLegend[ping-host]: RTT (ms)
ShortLegend[_]: p/s

You can also execute remote commands over SSH. I use that for load averages. You'll have to figure out how to set up authentication keys. Otherwise, the automated script will be prompted for a password on the console, which you won't be attached to. I might post later about setting up authentication keys for password-less login, but for now, here's my load average script, to be run on the remote host:

loadavg.sh:

#!/bin/bash
awk /proc/loadavg '{print (100*$1) "\n" (100*$2) }'

Then on your MRTG host do something like:

Target[Mail-LoadAvg]: `ssh -l mailnull mail.host.tld ./loadavg.sh`