My little corner of this place called the World Wide Web
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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 […]
arfore.com
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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 […]
Technology, Television
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For those of you who are in the iPhone developer community or just are just geeky enough to pay for the developer program in order to get a sneak peek on your friends, I thought I would let you in on some information I received from Pandora concerning problems with the Pandora Radio application and […]
Technology, iPhone
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I just got finished reading Stealing MySpace by Julia Angwin. In it there was this great conversation about the firing of Ross Levinshohn by Peter Chernin, the soon-to-be former COO of News Corps. Here it is: “You’re not happy, are you?” Chernin said. “No, I’m not,” Levinsohn agreed. “This isn’t working out, is it?” Chernin said.
“No, it’s not,” […]
Miscellaneous
So, a friend of mine was setting up a Linksys WRE54G Range Extender on her wireless network to eliminate a dead spot in her house.
She had issues with the Windows-based setup utility because it hardcodes the TCP/IP settings on the computer due to the fact it assumes that your network won’t be setup to work with the device out of the box. After that failed, and spending a while on the phone with a hapless Linksys tech support person, we finally got it configured via the web interface.
So everything is going fine until she notices that the MAC filter that was configured on the WRT54G was no longer effective.
It turns out that when you setup the WRE54G to work it invalidates the purpose of your MAC filtering. All traffic sent through the range extender is automatically flagged as OK.
From a Linksys forum post:
As a result, Wireless MAC Filtering on the main wireless router or access point will have no effect on clients connecting through a WRE54G Range Expander.
You have to wonder who makes the decisions on options with stuff like this. The Linksys tech I was chatting with online about this said that the best solution would be to enable WPA security, but their user guide for device specifically recommends doing MAC address filtering in addition to the encryption, except for the fact that you can’t.
Good game Linksys.
Goal: 5,000 pages of politics, technology, business, sociology, or other non-fiction.
col·o·phon – An inscription placed usually at the end of a book, giving facts about its publication. From Dictionary.com
This site lives on a server running Debian Linux with the Apache web server, like many other sites out there. It also has PHP and Perl, both MySQL and PostgreSQL, and other goodies like that. The server itself is a grid-server hosted by MediaTemple. If you need a great place to host your site, you should check them out.
Currently I am running on WordPress under the Magazine Basic theme. Here’s the goods on what is under the hood:
At work we run the WebCT Vista course management system by Blackboard.
Recently I was requested to figure out how to import the security certificate from the command line so that we could add this to the login script used for our campus computers. The main reason behind this was to eliminate the need for the user to have to manually agree to the security certificate when browsing to the CMS.
Normally when you want to create a Java keystore, you would use the keytool program located in $JAVA_HOME/bin. If you run this program to import a certificate without specifying a location for the keystore it tries to create one named .keystore in the user profile home directory.
However, when the JRE actually imports a certificate it doesn’t put it in this file. After some investigation, it turns out that the JRE imports certificates into a file named trusted.certs which is located in the following directory
C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Sun\Java\Deployment\security\
In order to import a certificate into a keystore you need to vital pieces of information:
The problem here is that this keystore is being automatically created by the JRE. It turns out that this keystore has a password that is an empty string. What this means is that when you import a certificate you have to specify the password by using the storepass parameter with a value “”.
For example if the certificate that you want to import has a name and path of
c:\Blackboard.cer
the command to import the certificate for the user jdoe would be
keytool.exe -import -noprompt -keystore C:\Documents and Settings\jdoe\Application Data\Sun\Java\Deployment\security\trusted.certs -storepass "" -file c:\Blackboard.cer
Update 2008-04-09:
I have also found how to do this on Mac OS X. According to the developer documents, the JVM on Mac OS X uses the user’s default keychain to store this type of certificate instead of using a file-based keystore like the other OS.
In order to store the certificate in the user’s login keychain you can import it via the command line tool certtool that is installed on the OS.
The command to import this certificate from the command line is
certtool i path/to/cert/file k=~/Library/Keychains/login.keychain
If you want to have this happen at login for each user who might login, then you could implement this via a login hook. For more on this, take a gander at the article 301446 in the Apple knowledgebase.
Like many people, I went out into the great choas known as Black Friday after a deal.
In my case I was focused on obtaining an Olevia 237T 37″ LCD television being sold at Target for the low, low price of $549.00.
After getting it home and plugging it all into my MythTV system, I ran into problems. First of all, since the tv had a vga input, I used the vga output of my video card instead of the svideo output. Initially I got no video, but then I realized I needed to undo some of my xorg.conf changes since I had changed the output.
After fixing the xorg.conf problem to not use the svideo port (thank you SSH!), I ran into other small problems.
Getting the resolution output right
The 237T has a native resolution of 1366×768, which according to an article at CNET.com is the most common resolution, yielding an output of 768p.
It turns out that I needed a particular video modeline in order to make the tv work properly. This required a great deal of research since manually calculating a modeline is not something that I really wanted to undertake. After finding a few online calculators, I found that I could not use them since the Dot Clock Frequency was not something that was included in the manual for the tv. So I diligently searched on the Internet to see if I could run across someone else who had this model tv (or the slightly improved 537 series) that had solved the problem. On the MythTV wiki, I ran across two entries for the 537h. I tried them both, but unfortunately the source display on the tv still reported a resolution of 1024×768. After trolling the xorg.conf logs, this turned out to be due to a failure of either modeline to be validated.
Digging ever deeper into the realms of HDTV screen resolutions and the xorg.conf options, I found that the binary, proprietary Nvidia drivers give you something that can help out a lot here, Appendix J. Programming Modes. This enables one to specify a series of validated modes and the driver will automatically validate them and use the correct output settings for the first mode that is found to be valid.
Here is what I ended up using in my xorg.conf file:
Section "Screen" Identifier "Screen0" Device "Videocard0" Monitor "OleviaHDTV" DefaultDepth 24 SubSection "Display" Viewport 0 0 Depth 24 Modes "1360x768_60" "1280x720_60" EndSubSection EndSection
Getting the right TV output
The next hurdle was to make sure that I got the right output of each of the MythTV applications.
Xine
In the configuration of the DVD player or the Video player, make sure that you launch xine with the following command:
xine -pfhq -D -r anamorphic
In theory xine should automatically display the video output exactly as is on the media, but using the command above will ensure that your get a fullscreen display. (Thanks to a posting in the Freevo-users list by John Molohan for this)
Mplayer
In the DVD or Video playback configuration you can use the following command to launch mplayer to use the correct aspect ratio (Thanks to Jarod Wilson for this tip):
mplayer -fs -zoom -quiet -monitoraspect 16:9 -vo xv %sYou can also set these same configuration options in your mplayer configuration file (~/.mplayer/config):
## Audio Output ao="alsa"
ac="hwac3,"
## Verbosity
really-quiet="1"
## Video Out
vo="xv"
## Scaling fs="yes" zoom="yes" monitoraspect="4:3"
double="yes"
## Misc
nojoystick="yes"Internal DVD player
The MythTV built-in dvd player should display the video correctly by default.
Live TV output
When watching live television, you have a few options:
Each of these has it’s own drawbacks, but I have gotten the best results using 16:9. This setting is in the Playback options of the TV section of the MythTV setup.
References
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.
One of the annoyances I have discovered with MythTV and Fedora Core is the inability to eject the optical drive in a default install of MythTV.
Apparently the function EJECT that is called in the menu file for the Optical Disk doesn’t work in Fedora Core.
To fix this, edit the file optical_menu.xml. Look for the line:
EJECT
Remove the text EJECT and replace it with:
EXEC eject -T
This will tell the system to send the optical drive a close tray command if the tray is open and a open tray command if the tray is closed.
After recently upgrading my MythTV system, I set to editing the metadata for my video collection.
Everything worked fine when editing through the regular interface, but when attempting to edit the data through the MythWeb interface, I noticed that entries where the title started with double-quotes, the field in the edit screen was empty.
The data would be stored in the database, if entered in quotes, yet the edit screen would not retrieve it.
The solution is to add the usage of PHP function htmlentities in the edit.php file of the video module of MythWeb.
The problem is in line 102 where the value attribute contains the following snippet of PHP code:
The corrected version would look like this:
This is built off the latest version of the stable MythWeb module. Download the corrected version.