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I enjoy pens, or more appropriately, I enjoy the search for the perfect pen. Weird, but whatever. It’s a cheap hobby for me I guess. Right now, I am enjoying the Pentel EnerGel® Liquid Gel-Ink Pen (Model BLN15-A) available at any office supply superstore. It’s available in bulk from Staples of course. Don’t want to run out of these puppies.

Moving back to this journal…

I have created what I affectionately call GiVo. I didn’t come up with the name GiVo, but I’m going to run with it anyway. It’s a PC whose sole purpose is to perform at or above the TiVo level of performance in PVR terms.

It’s a standard PC with a PVR-250 video tuner card. It is hardware based, so recording is not dependent on the CPU. Since the processing of the video feed is performed at the tuner card level, the video stream is not choppy at all. We’ve managed to almost fill 80G within the first two weeks. The OS is a Linux distribution with the sole purpose of being a PVR. Basically, the distribution includes MythTV as the backend system. Being a standard Linux OS, all sorts of cool stuff can be done with it. SSH, Apache, MySQL, all the expected stuff works. The MythTV software includes a PHP based TV guide accessible over the web. How cool is that? I actually find it much easier to use than the guide on the TV.

My setup includes the incoming cable feed first goes through the digitcal cable box. From there, the cable goes to the TV tuner card. An S-video cable is connected to the TV-out port on the PC video card. From there the S-video cable is converted to component, then connected to the TV. I don’t have an available S-video port on my TV. For sound, the sound out is passed through a cable and converted to component. From there, it is connected to the receiver to go through the big speakers. Also, the tuner included with the card is only able to deal with 180 channels. I connected a straight-through serial cable from the PC to the digital cable box. The MythTV software can be configured to change the the channel on the cable box, thus allowing me to watch all digital cable channels. Instead of the meager 180 channels, I have access to ALL digital channels, that is awesome.

As far as comparing the performance of the GiVo to a TiVo goes, the TiVo is a better performer in terms of picture quality. However, in terms of flexibility, user interface, and storage capacity, the GiVo is the winner. The GiVo is able to pause live TV for up to an hour, that’s REALLY a nice feature. Once you unpause, the feed simply continues from where you left off. Not missing a bit of TV you actually want to watch is a great feature.

Being that the GiVo is running Linux, I am able to easily SSH to the box for any admin or tweaking needed. The people at KnoppMyth really made the initial installation and setup a breeze. In terms of difficulty overall with the setup, it is meant for someone comfortable with Linux. However, their FAQ, user forums, and mailing lists are incredibly helpful. Countless hours were saved thanks to the user forums. The community as a whole is extremely active and knowledgable. What’s also nice about the distribution and Linux PVR movement is around the TV tuner cards manufactured by Hauppauge. These cards, PVR250 and PVR350 usually, work great with the distribution with some minor tweaking. My recommendation if one were to persue this endeavor is to go with one of the Hauppauge cards over other TV tuner cards.

Weather is fun!!!

I think the weather updates are working as designed. Every fifteen minutes, the server downloads current O’Hare data, weather forecast, and area forcast data via FTP from The National Weather Service. From there, the data is parsed to figure out what the local conditions are, decide what image to show on the left banner, convert ºF to ºC, and figure out the wind. To keep the look of the left navigation menu standard, the link to the weather is not a standard link. One can click on the “weather” word to go to detailed weather information.

E-cat sample is working for the most part. I have yet to register the AspTear dll, so the site is not able to check live inventory data. Bummer. Edit: Registered the dll, all is working fine.

Random thought: I think it’s funny that there is a deadjournal.com to go with livejournal.com.

Since I’m too cheap to buy the CoffeeCup web cam software, I am going with web cam software from booru.net. I found the software while browsing through what used to be shareware.com. The new software works great, and is extremely small in size. I have also updated the web cam page.

Nothing New

I have been thinking about updating my journal entries using livejournal.com for some time. I would have to create some sort of script to pull that data to this server. I did enjoy creating the code for these .plan updates. For right now, going to stick with what I’ve got.

I am now hosting my sister’s site on my server now. I did all of the necessary stuff yesterday. Content/look is definitely lacking, but it will improve over time. Plus, I’m sure it will be an extremely colorful site, to say the least.

I was thinking that I have not put up any real content on this page for a long time. I should think about doing that. One thing that I don’t like about the .plan code is that only one plan per day. As the plan is updated, the time updates to the current time. Self, think about just logging the initial .plan update.

I have been working on learning PHP on and off for awhile. I’m amazed at how much better it handles many things better than ASP 3.0. ASP.NET seems to take up the slack, but I already know VB. Anyway, to use PHP with Access would require me to use a DSN, which is quite slow. Not going to do that. I would like to be forced away from IIS/ASP for a bit, but so much is running on it already. I’m thinking about installing Apache & PHP to run on port whatever, something different from 80. This would allow me to run PHP scripts, yet still have all of the other pages be functional.

I am in the market for a gas grill. One thing about those things is they are quite expensive. I’m sure one could buy a cheap grill, but the thing wouldn’t last. Alas, it is almost always better to spend the extra money now for much better quality. I have been in the mood for barbeque for at least the last month.

Barbeque Ideas

• allrecipes.com bbq section
• about.com bbq
• soyouwanna.com bbq

Server move update

All files moved back to server…finally. The web cam is online and kicking. Last time I checked, it’s pointing at Joe the frog. Page counts were lost again, no big deal. Also, the site stats reflect all of the moves, no data lost.

Distributed.net stats are working…kind of

I wrote the code for the stats engine based on these “guidelines.” To say the least, I screwed up by not dealing with changing IP addresses in the code when I made the stupid thing. So, I cannot change the code to deal with different IP addresses since the new IP addresses were used by other machines six months ago. Bummer. Also, the graphs are not being drawn correctly. If the error checking works as designed, it should just say “Fatal error…” or something like that. Alas, I’m sure I will find a solution.

SETI stats

SETI queue is causing some problems. For some unknown reason, it is not allowing external IP addresses to connect to the queue. I have set it up to allow any IP address to connect, but it’s still not working. Works fine with internal IP’s.

E-commerce working sample

Not sure why it’s a big deal, but this is still offline. I have fixed the errors with moving everything. No time to move the files over. Plus, working on the July update anyway. Guess I will do a major update. I decided it was too time consuming to convert the database over to anything besides Access. The data integrity is rather poor, containing all of the characters that screw with SQL to no end. Alas, I decided to simply create stored procedures in Access to speed up the transactions. I know they are not true stored procedures, but response time on the pages improved greatly with the move.

Photos database

Functioning normally. Added support for video files to the database. Example of the newly supported formats.

Book reviews site

Newly created site using ASP and Access. I’ve spent approximately 25 hours creating the site. It’s coming together, not quite there. The hardest part so far is again dealing with Access and the problems of having users updating data while other users are trying to read reviews. I think I have worked it as best as possible. The site is created piecemeal, using many include files. Also, the SQL queries output the entire rows of data into arrays so that I can immediately close the database connection. I then loop through the array to output the reviews. Not a complicated site at all, but the error checking is the best part. In looking back, I think the site would be better if written in PHP, but oh well. The hardest part so far is to have a look that is inviting to all, especially youngsters.

Server move in progress

Windows 2000 Server decided it was time for a re-image. For now, the site is running of another machine not quite up to the task at hand. So, web site response/use is quite slow.

• Web cam is offline
• Distributed stats database is offline
• SETI stats are offline
• e-catalog sample is offline
• Photos database is responding poorly

All of this will be resolved ASAP so that the site is not dependent on the one slow computer. Mail is not affected. Also, the page counts on the bottom of each page reset to zero with the move to the temporary server.

Graph added to distributed.net statistics. It most likely will not work, but check it out anyway.