Day: January 10, 2014

Let me preface this post by saying that satellite radio is a great service.  You get access to a whole lot of content that you might not otherwise be able to access.  When I got my new 2012 Ford F150 XLT SuperCrew, I got a trial subscription for the first six (6) months to a subset of the SiriusXM stations.  I thoroughly enjoyed listening to the selections on the Electronic and Dance stations, the BBC content, stations from Canada, and a wide variety of news outlets, not too mention the comedy channels.

On September 3rd, my trial subscription expired.  I knew that it was going to expire.  In fact, I put a reminder in my personal calendar to warn me that the trial expiration date was arriving.  I liked the service enough that I was going to subscribe so that I could continue enjoying the service.

However when the renewal date approached, I determined that it was not financially smart to sign myself up for yet one more monthly payment at this time.  No big deal, I would just use Pandora, Spotify, Google Music and standard terrestrial radio until I was where I could pay for the subscription.

That’s where it all gets painful.  When the SiriusXM customer service representative called me to make sure that I knew my trial expiration was coming up I explained that I was not currently interested in signing up to pay for it.  When he helpfully (at least in his mind it was helpful) informed me that the monthly payment was only $16 a month, I ensured him that I had actually read the mailing they sent out and knew what the prices were and I just didn’t want to continue.

Now despite the belligerent tone of voice he continued to use to try and bully me into a subscription, I finally managed to get off the call without losing my temper (which was a major feat, let me tell you).  In a logical universe, they would mark my account as having declined service and to try again in a few months (but hopefully never since I did mention that I didn’t want them to call me again) and that would end the matter.

This is where SiriusXM has failed to gain a customer.  Almost every day so far this month I have received at least one call from the SiriusXM folks (866-903-7474) trying to suck me back into the fold.  This constant bombardment is a real pain in the rear.  I can understand one or two attempts, but at some point you have to realize that continued calls are not going to get the customer.

So here’s the email I sent to the SiriusXM Customer Service folks today after yet one more call:

I realize that my trial subscription has expired. In fact I even talked to your customer representatives at least once concerning this prior to the expiration.

I happily informed the customer service representative that I knew my subscription was going to expire and that I was not interested in converting my trial at that time due to the cost, and yes that I knew it wasn’t a lot each month if I subscribed for a year. After he kept trying to get me to convert, rather insistently to the point of belligerence, I finally was able to get him to hang up.

Recently I have been receiving calls from your company (866-903-7474) at least once a day (sometimes twice).

I realize that you would like to retain customers and to gain new ones, however when a current/former customer informs you that they no longer wish to continue the subscription, it doesn’t engender good customer relations to bombard them on a daily basis with calls.

For this reason it is unlikely that I or anyone in my household will ever subscribe to your services at any point in the future. I appreciate that you have made it even easier for me to embrace the free and/or ad-supported streaming services like Pandora Radio, Spotify, Live365, Google Music, and Amazon Music.

Thanks,
Andy Fore

So instead of caring about subscribing to SiriusXM, I will just use my mobile data plan to get the most out of Internet-based streaming services that I can.  I would rather give my money to my mobile provider for data usage than to SiriusXM, since Verizon doesn’t deem it necessary to spam me with phone calls about their services.

So the other night when I got home I found a sad situation.  My LCD television wouldn’t display a picture. The backlight would come on when the power button was pressed (on the tv or the remote), but nothing else was happening.

The first fix I tried was what some forums were calling an EEPROM reset. To do this follow these steps:

1. Turn on the tv (blue led should go off)
2. Unplug the tv from the main power
3. Leave unplugged for 5-10 minutes (varies on exact model)
4. Turn off the main power supply switch (located next to the power port)
5. Plug the tv back in to main power
6. Turn the main switch back on

In my case this procedure elicited no change to the problem, so I continued looking for other answers.  In one forum I found a reference to replacing the backlight, mainboard, or power supply. In my case the backlight was working fine and the power supply was as well.  After looking in the service manual for the 237-T11, I did find that the mainboard was fairly accessible, so if I had to get a new board it wouldn’t be that difficult to replace it.

Before taking the hardware fix route I decided to see if my problem could be resolved by a firmware update.  Olevia helpfully included a USB port on the back panel of the unit to allow for a firmware upgrade.  Since my purchase of the unit in November of 2007 at Target’s Black Friday sale, I had not applied any of the firmware updates.

Unfortunately in 2008, Syntax-Brillian, the manufacturer of the Olevia brand, filed for bankruptcy.  This made getting my hands on the firmware files, update software and instructions a little difficult.  After some diligent research I found a thread on AVSForum that had the files I needed.

The driver files didn’t work properly for my Windows 7 laptop, however they are easily obtained from the Prolific USA website (there are also drivers for Linux and MacOS X).

After following the instructions for updating I powered off the unit, waited a minute or two then powered it back on.  Success!  I was greeted with the familiar white and blue Olevia logo screen.

As an additional backup for the benefit of any other user’s, here are links to the necessary files:

Last week I posted on how to setup NRPE on Mac OS X Server.  Here is what you need to do to make it start up at system boot.

On a Linux or Solaris machine you can just include the call to the daemon in an init script like rc.local and it will be started when the OS boots.  Unfortunately, Apple has made this a little more difficult on Mac OS X with Tiger and Leopard.  The standard startup processes (cron, inetd, xinetd, etc.) have been rolled into a single process known as launchd.

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One of the current hot topics in many technology circles concerns the cloud-computing model.  Wikipedia has the following definition for cloud computing:

a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet.

One of the biggest criticisms and concerns with this approach is the ownership, integrity, and security of the data.  At work we are struggling with this concept as well.  We are investigating moving our student e-mail into either Microsoft’s or Google’s online mail model.  From an economic approach it seems very cut-and-dried.  If we move the data for our users into the cloud then we cut down on our data storage, server and basic infrastructure costs.  However, the legal ramifications of this are interesting.

Faculty and staff data are to be kept inside the enterprise due to concerns over the possibility that their mail would contain confidential or sensitive data, such as grade information, student id numbers, etc.  What is interesting is that if a student is the recipient of an e-mail from a faculty or staff member that contains this information then the confidential or sensitive data has been placed in the cloud whether or not the faculty or staff member wanted it that way.

I have been dealing with this in a small way myself while trying to decide if I should move all of my personal mail into Google (which already hosts my mail accounts using the Google Apps services).  Do I rely on the large scale backup and storage of Google?  At first I was concerned that I might loose connectivity during a rare outage of the GMail system.  But I realized that I only check my mail using a full client on my machine at home.  Everywhere else I rely on an imap connection or the web interface.  So I have made the leap!

Now to work on making my GPG signature stuff work with GMail’s web interface.

While surfing around today for some new wallpaper for my computer desktop at work it occurred to me to wonder when a piece of artwork might be considered sexual harrassment.

Given that the only other person that works in my office with me on a daily basis (Hi, Ashley!) is a open-minded art major and tends to appreciate a wide variety of artwork I am not worried about whether she will be offended by my choices in artwork, however the same cannot be said for every individual that comes into my office.

Federal law defines sexual harassment as:

1. Unwelcome sexual advances
2. Requests for sexual favors
3. Other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature when: submission to such conduct is made explicitly or implicitly a term or condition of an individual’s employment or academic success or; submission to or rejection of such conduct by an individual is used as the basis for employment or academic decisions affecting such individuals or; the conduct has the purpose or effect of unreasonably interfering with an individual’s work or academic performance or creating an intimidating, hostile, or sexually offensive working environment.

Since Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 protects students from unlawful sexual harassment in all school programs and activities, and I work in an educational institution that receives federal funds, then this means that I need to cognizant of the environment I create in my office.

Of course, even if I am within the law, I also should have an environment that is friendly (for the most part), if for no other reason than it is the right thing to do.

What sort of criteria should one apply to determining whether or not a piece of desktop art (or just art hanging on the wall) constitutes sexual harassment?  How do you determine this in your own workplace?

In order to get the updates for Ubuntu to take MythTV to 0.20.2 you need to add the following to your /etc/apt/sources.list file:

deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ edgy-proposed main restricted universe multiverse

deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ edgy-proposed main restricted universe multiverse

After doing this run the following commands:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

In addition to the MythTV updates a few other things should be available. I went ahead and just got everything and have suffered no ill effects.

After updating, make sure to shutdown the backend before running mythtv-setup to change the data provider.

sudo /etc/init.d/mythtv-backend stop

After running mythtv-setup, make sure that you start the backend back up, then run mythfilldatabase.

For those who don’t know, Zap2It Labs stopped offering free channel data for the community.

A paid for solution Schedules Direct has stepped up to the plate with a fairly inexpensive solution. In order to use it you need to update your MythTV installation.

The 0.20.2 release of MythTV supports SD.

Gentlemen, start your updates, because at 12:00 a.m., 08-01-07 Zap2It Labs goes dark.

So it seems that L. Frank Baum’s Oz book series is going to at last come to the silverscreen as a whole.

According to an article on sliceofscifi.com, Warner Bros. has purchased the film rights to all of the original 14 Oz novels, plus a fifteenth book by Ruth Plumly Thompson.

Apparently it is going to be a combined effort between Todd McFarlane and Josh Olson.

One can only hope that McFarlane will restrain his tendencies a little and not produce a product that is as out-of-touch with the original concepts of the books in the way that his Twisted Land of Oz action figures are.

I think that it is great that he wants to update the series and make it “more 2007,” but please don’t warp the childhood of millions by turning Dorothy into a dominatrix.

So this morning, during a momentary lull in my workday, I was perusing my huge and unorganized list of bookmarks when I ran across a bookmark to the Burma Shave section of The Fifties Web.

For those of you, like myself actually, who are to young to have witnessed them yourself, Burma Shave used to put advertising slogans on signs up and down the roads in the US. For more on this, you can check out the article at Wikipedia.

Here’s you a good one:

The wife Who keeps on Being kissed Always heads Her shopping list

Burma-Shave

It’s always nice to see that the Internet is being used to keep alive parts of our culture that might otherwise go by the wayside of progress.

Yesterday walking back to the office after lunch, I was following a girl who was chattering away on her cellular phone using her wireless headset.

It occurred to me that for years on of the signs people looked for when evaluating your sanity was whether or not you talked to yourself in a conversational way, or appeared to be talking to an invisible companion.

Since the advent of the bluetooth headset and it’s popularity, this has become less and less of a tell.  How are you to know that the person standing next to you in the convenience store looking for a soda is really talking to an invisible companion, themselves, you, or someone on the phone?

Welcome to the world where talking to yourself for no apparent reason may cease to be thought of as mental instability!

In my previous post in this series, I laid out my reasons for dropping my monthly cable subscription and my initial choice of the AppleTV as the instrument for maintaining a reasonable method for my viewing entertainment.

One of the main reasons behind the choice of the AppleTV was the fact that it supported 5.1 digital surround sound through the HDMI cable output. This made it a snap to connect the device to my Sony STR-DG820 receiver which was connected to my LCD television and 5.1 speaker setup. Another compelling reason for this choice was the simplicity with which I would be able to connect my iTunes library containing rips of all of my cd and dvd collection to my home entertainment system. Continue reading

A little over a year ago I joined a growing group of people that are eschewing the cable monopoly for their viewing entertainment. After many years of being a faithful, if sometimes unwilling, cable subscriber, I realized that there was no financial sense to subscribe to a channel lineup consisting of roughly 80 stations simply to enable my self to obtain the content from 8-10 of those stations.

Over the years I had slowly upgraded one piece at a time so that I had gone from a simple cable box to a home-built MythTV setup to a Tivo HD.  Yet after all of these upgrades, I still felt that it was silly to be paying so much money to my local cable provider for so many stations that I never watched.
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Today while perusing the forums on the Plex website, I noticed someone inquiring as to how they would go about changing the file paths in Plex for one of the video sources without removing the source and adding it back from the new location.

The reason for wanting to do this is to ensure that your database entry tweaks, fanart settings, etc., are not lost, which is what would happen if you removed the source and it’s library entries.

One of the more interesting parts of the Plex project at the moment is the complete re-build of the database structure and how you work with it.  The existing database structure is fairly poor in it’s design.  There are a lot of cryptic field names, and it is easily corruptible.  The current library system is a hold-over from the old XBMC code base.
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So several months ago I was in Atlanta visiting some friends (Hi, Justin!) and got hooked on his hackintosh Plex box.  Now, I wanted to run it on a Mac Mini, instead of a hackintosh, but the application was great.  Since then I have purchased the Mini and had a blast getting Plex working and tweaked to do what I want.

If any of you out there running Plex have noticed that there seems to be quite a few instances of Python running when you have Plex up, here’s why: each plugin that you have runs under it’s own instance of Python.  Here’s what the development docs have to say:

Each media server plug-in runs in its’ own process, in a separate Python instance. This ensures that plug-ins can’t interfere with each other, or with the operation of the server.

So there you have it.  Essentially, each plug-in is sandboxed from each other as well as PMS.

If you want to see this in action, just shell into (or open up Terminal) when running Plex and execute the following command:

ps -ef | grep Python | grep -v grep | grep "Plug-ins"

You should see one entry for each of the plug-ins that you have installed.

This weekend I spent a large chunk of time setting up Plex Media Center for OS X on my shiny new Mac Mini.  When I left for work this morning, after two weeks off, I expected to get to the office and fire up iTunes to listen to my music from home using Simplify Media like normal.

Everything was working fine, if a bit slower than I expected, for the first hour or so, then unexpectedly Simplify Media simply quit working.  Restarting the application didn’t help.  Restarting iTunes didn’t help.  Restarting the computer didn’t help.  No matter what I did Simplify Media decided to be stuck in the initializing mode.

After toying with somethings on my iMac at home after work, I realized what was different in the setup than before Christmas break.  The difference was that I am now running the Plex Media Server (PMS) component of Plex on the iMac to server the iTunes library up to the media center Mac Mini in the living room.  After stopping PMS and restarting Simplify Media everything worked fine.  With Simplify Media stopped and PMS restarted Plex was working fine.

After looking into the preferences of Simplify Media, I noticed the ability to turn off Simplify Media for the local network.  After checking that box and restarting both PMS and Simplify Media everything is green again in the Simplify Media land.

I am not quite sure why they are conflicting.  A comment in a post on elan’s Plex blog clued me into checking the Plex UPnP code to make sure it was disabled.  I looked into that and I definitely have it disabled.

Update (2010-1-6) – According to the Simplify Media blog page, they are having network problems in their data center.

When doing system administration it is often more convenient to connect to a server through some sort of remote connection setup rather than having to sit at a console in a datacenter.  The comfort of one’s office (or living-room) is often far superior in terms of noise and temperature than the environs of the datacenter itself.

When setting up the RHEL5 server this week here at VSU, I was forced to use the Sun iLOM connection to do the initial install of the server.  While I generally use command-line only tools, the ease of use one gains from the GUI tools can often make some tasks much simpler.  Towards this end I decided to setup the server and my client to allow XDMCP sessions so that I could have full access to the GUI when necessary.

On the server there are a couple of things that you need to configure in order to make this workFirew:

1. Firewall ports
2. GDM configuration options

On the client you will need to configure the OS X firewall, as well as use the correct Xephyr connection syntax.
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One of the standard methods of configuring Mac OS X in the enterprise has become known as the magic triangle or golden triangle. This is generally described as a setup involving Active Directory (AD) for authentication of the clients and services and Open Directory (OD) for managing the client preferences.  The triangle comes from the fact that you have the Mac clients talking to AD, the clients also talking to OD, and the Mac server talking to AD. (Apple officially calls this the magic triangle setup in the Snow Leopard Server Open Directory Administration documentation.)

One of the issues I ran into was granting a non-admin in AD the ability to perform administrative functions on the clients bound to AD.  The way this is handled with the Windows clients is for the particular AD user to be a member of a group that grants local administrator privileges.

Unfortunately there is no simple equivalent on the OD side of the equation to allow this for the technicians working on the Mac OS X clients.  If you add an AD user to the system level group Open Directory Administrators using Workgroup Manager (WGM) this has no effect on whether a user is granted local administrator privileges to a connected client machine.

The solution to this involves:

1. creating a group in OD to hold the members of AD that should have local administrative privileges,
2. adding this OD group to the requisite local workstation groups to mimic the standard administrative privileges, and
3. adding the OD group to the sudoers file

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While re-loading the OS and apps on my iMac at work, I ran into major issues whilst updating MS Office 2008.  When running the first update, Office 2008 SP1 (12.1.0) I had no problems, however none of the other updates would run.  I kept getting the error “You cannot install Office 2008 Updates on this volume. A version of the software required to install this update was not found on this volume.”

At first I thought that this might be due to some permissions shenanigans revolving around my AD/OD setup, since the logged in user was not a local admin, but had been granted administrator privileges through a nested group trick.

After more searching I ran across a post on the forums MacRumors.com pointing out problems when running updates on an Office 2008 install that had been altered by using Monolingual or XSlimmer.

Both of these programs were developed to slim down the sizes of binary applications on OS X.  Monolingual strips the “additional languages” from OS X programs and operating system files, while XSlimmer is designed to remove both the extra language information and the unused binary code in a fat binary.  I have never used either of these programs, since I was not concerned about the amount of disk space they utilize.

After more searching, I ran across a post in the Entourage Help Pages discussing troubleshooting Office 2008 installations.  While this page also mentioned issues with installations being altered by Monolingual and XSlimmer, it also pointed out an issue with a workaround created to handle a bug in how Safari deals with the docx file extension.  While the automator workflow mentioned does not appear to actually affect anything other than the names of files, it did jog my memory about something else Safari related that occured when installing Adobe CS 4 earlier the same day.

While installing CS 4 and the available updates, I was prompted to not only quit Safari, but also to quit XMarks for Safari.  For those that don’t know, XMarks is a great service for synchronizing your browser bookmarks between multiple machines, platforms, and browsers.

On a hunch I quit XMarks for Safari, as well as the browser itself.  No dice, I still got the error.  Knowing how easy it would be to reinstall the helper application, I uninstalled XMarks.  Eureka!  The Office updaters now ran without a hitch.  So, if you are having this problem, try deactivating or removing anything plugins that effect the default nature of Safari.

Lately I have noticed that when browsing the web my external hard drive would spin up when there seemed no need.  I had just given into the mysterious and not concerned myself with this until yesterday.

After a few searches, I turned up a post on Apple’s discussion boards entitled Safari pauses & spins up ext HDs with ATS Autoactivation errors.  While I have not found the errors in my logs refered to by the OP, I have noticed the exact same symptoms.

Using the symptoms and discoveries by W. Raideer and strangebirds as a guideline, I found a solution to the issue.  While this may in fact be a bug, it turns out that if you disable Spotlight on the external drive this activity ceases, at least in my case.

To quote the Help documentation for Font Book on the Automatic Activation feature:

Note that if you turn off Spotlight searching for any folder or disk connected to your computer, Font Book can’t find and enable fonts in those locations.

After listing my external drive in the Spotlight preference pane section labeled Privacy, I have ceased to have this particular issue.  While this may not be advisable or desirable, depending on the content of the external drive, I have noticed no detrimental effect by disabling Spotlight on the drive.

So there is a nice report on cnet about an human denial of service attack on the Apple Retail Store Genius Bars.

According to this story, and the FSF site DefectiveByDesign, the goal is to book as many 10-minute time slots as possible over a two-day period at the Apple Store in a lame attempt to bring more attention to what the FSF sees as the defective nature of the iPhone 3G.

Richard Stallman, the founder of the FSF, has stated:

The motive for DRM schemes is to increase profits for those who impose them, but their profit is a side issue when millions of people’s freedom is at stake; desire for profit, though not wrong in itself, cannot justify denying the public control over its technology. Defending freedom means thwarting DRM.

He also describes DRM as Digital Restrictions Management:

However, since its purpose is to restrict you the user, it is more accurate to describe DRM as Digital Restrictions Management.

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This is the first post using the WordPress app for the iPhone.

It’s a pretty nice application, but it would be better if it supported the rotation feature to get the horizontal keyboard.

I do like the fact that you can add photos.

So apparently, the category logic, or lack thereof, of the App Store extends to the rest of the iTunes Store as well.

On the iTunes Store if you look at the category of music labeled Albums Under $7 you will find the Maroon 5 album The B-Side Collection.  However, if you look at the category of music labeled Albums Under $9, you will not find the Maroon 5 album.

If an album is under $7 it would seem to me that it is also under $9.

This so doesn’t make any sense.

As I keep browsing the App Store to find more interesting applications, I find my self wondering exactly what criteria Apple is using to place the various applications in each category.

It’s not the actual application category or sub-category that I find strange, but the generic categories:

1. All iPhone Applications
2. All iPod Touch Applications
3. All Free Applications
4. New

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I found this really cool moon photo at the AstroMeeting.

I love all the detail that he goes into about taking the photo.

This next week the Senate is expected to vote on legislation to delay the transition of broadcast television in the United States from analog signals to digital signals.

The initial deadline was to have been February 17, 2009, however some in Congress as well as President Obama claim that more time is needed due to the fact that evidence has shown that consumers are not prepared. The new legislation sets a deadline for the switch to June 12, 2009, however broadcasters can switch over to digital prior to that deadline if they so choose.

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