October 2007 Archives

She's home at last!
Isn't she pretty?

Now really Microsoft?
I thought my PC was my PC, not yours. Surely I have a say in what gets installed on it?

Oh, wait, thats not what you seem to think?

So now every PC running Windows with Automatic Updates, is going to end up installing Windows Desktop Search. Then its going to start indexing. Everything.
Every drive (local and network) is going to be scanned, file by file.

Thats going to slow down the user's PC, and possibly put a very large load on their fileservers.

Nice!

Looks like the Authorities have been busy.

TechCrunch say that Oink is down, Tv-links is down, but Demonoid is back up again.

People are going to extreme measures to get what they want. Surely the Movie, TV and Music industries should start to realise that their old marketing models are just not working any more?

I'd rather open up iTunes and buy a track online, than hop in my car to head down to the nearest Music store and buy it there, from some rude teenager who only works there because his parents want him to.

Then, once I've got the track from iTunes, I can listen to it on my PC, my iPod, and burn it to CD for my car.
The whole DRM/no-DRM debate is bound to pop-up, in which case, I'm on the no-DRM side. (Trusted computing? What ever happened to letting the consumer have some choice?)

Which would you rather do?
I'm willing to pay for convenience and flexibility...

I've been quite busy this week... And this is why.

Yup, we finally bought a car.
After almost a year and a half worth of using public transport, we decided that standing in the rain after work for an hour wasn't the best way to spend our free time.

I received this today.
I'm speechless

Grandad, maybe you can enterpret this one for me.
Or perhaps you'd like to stock up on your missile stash?

I can only begin to imagine what the SPAMmer is trying to acheive with this one...

I'm about to submit my MythTV for its WAF rating, before being put into full use in the house.
So to make things nice and easy to use, and to also assist in finding all the favourite episodes for recording, I've put every NTL Analogue channel into the channel database, with mythfilldatabase working 100% fetching all the scheduling information.

So for everyone that has been trying to get this working, I'll dump all the necessary configs here, so you can get yours going too.

In my last 2 MythTV posts, I explained how to get mythbackend running on boot, and how to get mythfrontend started automatically when you start X.

Now I'm going to explain how to get X to startup and login on boot.
This essentially makes your MythTV setup completely operational from powerup, without user intervention.
Definate WAF in that...

This is how I did it on my Debian machine.

I've ranted about Banking in Ireland, I think its only fair that I rant a bit about banking in South Africa.

Now that they've introduced this new tax act, or whatever, things have become really painful.

I used to be able to transfer money into my South African account fairly easily. If it was less than R50000 (which it always was... alot less), then you didn't have to fill in any paperwork and the South African Tax man was more than happy to let that slip under the radar.
Now, you have to fill in miles of paperwork for everything. Even a R1 transfer needs paperwork.

Then you have to call your bank, and let them know that all is good, and that they can go ahead and clear it.

After the first few months of calling my branch, being put on hold, being promised return calls, sending faxes, shouting at useless people (Tony, I mean you, you useless little half-wit), I eventually got the contact details of Robyn. She was great. I'd just pop off an email to her with the forms all filled in, and within minutes the funds would pop into my account, all good to go.

Now I find out that dear Robyn no longer works in the Forex department, so I've had to try find out who will help me.
Its been the most frustrating day so far.
The FNB email server blocks Excel attachments, so I cant even send my forms to anyone there.
Their Fax machine "must be broken, because we haven't got any faxes all day".
Their phones don't even ring, just straight to Busy.

Help.. anyone?

UPDATE:
Turns out, they've been doing "load shedding" on the power grid in Bedfordview for a few days.
That means, 2 hours on, 2 hours off.
Which explains why I can only get through for a while, and then the phone goes dead.

Anyways, all sorted now. Thanks :)

Blog action day is on the 15th of October.

Now that I've covered starting mythbackend on boot, I'm going to explain how to get mythfrontend running as soon as you start X.

Its pretty simple, as its just a few lines in your .xinitrc

I'm using fluxbox, so thats the example I'll be using.

I'm also assuming that you have your X working properly, and have tested it properly

In part of my quest to automate the startup of my MythTV, and in my quest for WAF (Wife approval factor), I've identified a few small issues that don't seem terribly well documented anywhere.

I'm going to document them here, as clearly as I can.

This Howto contains a very simple startup script for automatically starting mythbackend on boot.

There are a number of little things I've come to notice over the last year.
Some things are just so much easier in South Africa.

Everything in Ireland has a website, which is great when it comes to getting information thats already on the site. The problem is, most of these places think that having a website means they don't need anyone on the phones to answer queries.
I've had the extreme displeasure of having to deal with a number of companies that simply refuse to list their phone numbers, anywhere.

And now, I shall delve into the depths of Banking in Ireland.
*WARNING* This may be incoherant and rantish, mostly out of frustration.

Since Splashy is no longer part of the package tree for Debian, I decided to give usplash a go.
Its the same splash loaded that Ubuntu use, and it works quite nicely on my Ubuntu desktop machine at work.
I run Debian testing (its not THAT bad.. sheesh)

I needed it for my MythTV, for WAF (Wife approval factor).
If anyone has a nice MythTV style boot image, please do send it on.

So here's what I've got so far...

And after all of that, they apologised.

It shouldn't have happened in the first place, and Monster shouldn't have let it grow to the point that it got to.
But they've apologised, and all is forgiven. I don't think anyone will be forgetting about it any time soon though.

And, Grandad has his say too.

Okay, I wasn't going to blog about this, as I thought there was enough coverage on it already.
But Grandad just came up with this gem, which is well worth sharing.

A basic summary of events, and links after the jump.