Illusory Follies

Not a whole lot new here… I haven’t done too much new and exciting stuff. I’ve been tweaking my PowerMac G5 a little bit — trying to find out what it’s capable of. I’ve been very impressed. Not only can you change a lot of the under-the-hood settings within the OS X environment, but you can run virtually any Linux/BSD based application including window managers like Enlightenment and KDE. Very neat stuff.

I also finally got my MythTV box up and running well. My only complaints now are the pauses between channel switches (MythTV prebuffers and requires a pause so there’s no fix for it) and also occasionally I get some slight audio and video jittering. I think that tweaking some of the decoding settings will fix this just fine. It’s currently recording prescheduled shows (which I can schedule through a web interface running on my server) and all the other details are working. I’m just waiting for more and more features to be integrated into it. My feeling is that sooner or later there will be a fork that takes MythTV solidly in a new direction that focuses on stability, ease of use, and reliability. For now, I have a “free” TiVo which cost me the price of a Hauppauge PVR-350.

Just some thoughts… Extreme Programming is a neat concept (that’s been around for a while) and it really does seem like it’s a sound concept. On every programming project that I’ve worked on I can see how Extreme Programming could have helped us avoid pitfalls. Anyway — just something to think about… Here’s the website.

While looking through Enlightenment’s website I found a link to a neat terminal program that’s designed to replace xterm… It’s called eterm. I’ll definitely be giving this a shot.

This looks interesting… A very slick looking window manager for Linux called Enlightenment. It’s strong points are speed, compactness, and (most importantly) beauty! It’s nice to be able to use a window manager that makes OS X look a little out-of-date. More info on their website.

Just stumbled across a neat Mac OS X only program designed to help organize and manage your media called Delicious Library including books, videos, and even games. It’s a cheap program ($40) and you can opt to buy a spiffy little bluetooth barcode scanner for an additional $174. This allows you to easily add books and videos to your collection and also manage loaning the same items out to friends. The data is stored in non-proprietary formats so that’s also a plus… Definitely worth considering for people with more than a few books or DVDs!

Anyway… This is my first post in quite a while. Many, many changes… My wife and son and I have moved from Fairfax, VA to Puyallup, WA. We’ve finally settled in and I’m getting into a routine so it’s back to the blog for me. Changes in my technological standing include the addition of a Power Mac G5 — a very generous present from my father-in-law. I’ve been trying to get used to using OS X while converting my old primary system that used to run Windows XP into a brand spanking new Fedora Core 4 box.

Some new hardware is also en route for my MythTV box. I will probably get it this next week and begin installing everything. Most likely I’ll be wiping both Linux servers that I have and starting over using Fedora Core 4 and some new stuff that I’ve run across. I’m especially interested in playing around with Enlightenment DR17. Very pretty looking… Additionally, I intend to at least START to get some ideas going on my future company website at http://www.paradigmatic.net. We’ll see how far I make it.

There’s a really neat extension for Firefox called “GreaseMonkey” (http://greasemonkey.mozdev.org/). It’s really quite ingenious. Basically it allows you to make customizations to web sites on the fly on just your client browser. So for example, say that you want a link to your email account to appear on www.cnn.com. You could edit it so that HTML that’s received from www.cnn.com is filtered and a link to your webmail is inserted before it renders it on your screen. It’s all seamless and it’s really really cool. They have a number of “overlays” like this for Gmail which allow you to remove the ads that are displayed, add features, and other neat stuff. Even just for a site like Slashdot you can change things if you don’t like to see a lot of the junk that’s displayed or whatever you want.

It’s capable of being used malciously. Obviously, it could do very bad things if you installed scripts from untrusted sources. Overall though, it’s a very neat thing and a REALLY neat new web browsing experience. I haven’t been this impressed in a while… Here’s a huge list of GreaseMonkey scripts… They have a couple for CNN (remove ads, remove sidebar, etc.). Just install the GreaseMonkey extension from the link above and then browse to the list of User
Scripts. Right click on the appropriate link to the script (with a .js extension) and click “Install User Script). All it takes is a refresh to Apply the settings.

Well, I’ve decided that a car computer is a big pain to build. In case the lack of postings in the last several months wasn’t obvious enough, I’ve taken a break from it. Apparently I managed to dammage the motherboard and I really don’t feel like replacing it right away. I think I’m just going to wait on it.

In other news, I’ve been spending a lot of time on my Linux server — getting my tv-out to finally work, messing around with SlimServer software, playing around with Jabber servers, Secure FTP, OpenVPN, VNC session encryption over SSH, and checking out some security tools like nmap and Nessus.

I’ve been thinking about some home automation stuff but I’m going to wait until we own our own place. I’ve also been looking a bit at getting some more servers to experiment more with Asterisk and some other neat new things… With servers getting so cheap now ($300 for a basic Dell PowerEdge) it’s pretty easy to get some new hardware to play with.

Also, I’m planning on spending some time on coming up with a professional web site for my company, Paradigmatic IT Solutions.

More updates as they happen…

Firefox has a feature in the newer versions which it calls “Live Bookmarks”. Basically it’s just a very simplistic RSS feed reader that creates a folder in your bookmarks area with the current RSS feed items. This is kind nifty… I usually don’t like to have to load up another application to handle RSS feeds and lightweight RSS feed readers like Sage are just a little more complex than I would I like them to be…

But… even better — if you use del.icio.us for managing bookmarks (which I do since it’s fast to save, easy to organize, and available on any Internet connected computer) you can combine both of these features. Del.icio.us provides RSS feeds for all of your bookmarks or for specific tags. So, if you have a bunch of links for the tag “work” you can just grab the RSS feed for “work” into a Live Bookmark and voila, you have your bookmarks stored on a centralized (and reliable) computer as well as being easily accessible.

Great stuff…