Sagetv, is it doomed or saved?
A few months ago it was announced that Sagetv was acquired by Google. There was a press release, and the hompage of Sagetv was updated, but otherwise it was a pretty quiet and under the radar operation. No one really knows the details of the deal, or what will become of Sagetv.
You can no longer purchase Sagetv or any of its products, as the entire store on their site is gone. The only part of their site that is still operational is the forums, but I've always felt that their forums weren't that helpful.
They did say that for those who own Sagetv can expect the program guide (the tv schedule for upcoming shows and what is on what channel) to still be functional until next Summer. So that means that either they need to provide a new solution for my DVR/PVR/Media center/streaming center/music/photos/etc server or I'm going to have to abandon Sagetv and go find something else.
This really has me worried. I expect good things out of Google, but Sagetv has been as very good product and solution. The next best thing out there is probably MythTV, but the best thing that Sagetv had over Mythtv was the custom made, prebuilt hardware, at an affordable price. There aren't good hardware solutions for Myth that pass the "significant other test", but Sagetv did as soon as I set it up.
Hurumph.
Yet Another Ubuntu Upgrade
So Ubuntu 11.04 was release a few weeks ago and I decided to upgrade this weekend. In prep for the upgrade, I backed up my laptop onto my external portable hard drive that I may need (my home dir, and a few other things in /etc, some cronjobs, etc.). I then did a clean re-install from CD. In the past the ugrade-in-place has taken a long time, and was not completely problem free. Whereas the last time I did a clean re-install it was pretty much problem free- except getting all my personal files/configuration/settings the way I like them all back took some time. So that is the same approach I decided to take with this upgrade.
root@spencer-laptop:~# cat /etc/modprobe.d/wlan.confoptions iwlcore led_mode=1
Recent Ubuntu kernel upgrade made my wi-fi led blink; drives me crazy
Recently, I got a normal update popup from my Ubuntu Update manager. The update included a new kernel as well as other items. I usually wait a few days on kernel updates because they can make some things break (like virtual box) and I'll need to do some manual fix-up work afterwards.
So I did the upgrade and after I noticed something new and very annoying. I use an HP laptop- Compaq 8510w, which has two led indicators for wi-fi. They have always simply been on when my wireless is on, or off when it is off. Never more than that. Well, after the upgrade those leds started blinking according to my wireless usage. At first I was like, "what the heck? What did I do to make that happen?" What ever it was, I was not pleased. It was so distracting that I was thinking of covering up those leds with black tape.
I then searched on google for any one else with a similar problem and I found one. Unfortunately I can't find it again right now, but the post I found mentioned the same latop and a similar problem but on Fedora.
Ubuntu 10.04 upgrade
I've been using Ubuntu for a few years now and quite like it. And when I saw they had released 10.04 I was excited to upgrade. The last two releases I did an upgrade-in-place with their upgrade tool and I didn't run into any major problems. So I did the same thing for this release. But that's where this story begins.
First I noticed that I was getting warnings and errors related to my X.org config. This was very alarming since I've never seen that before and I don't run any thing unusual in my x.org config. I tried a few different things to address it but could never really solve the problem. Then I noticed that rhythmbox was always crashing on me. Like all the time. Oh and my startup applications would never start up as they were supposed to. And compiz wouldn't work due to complaints about in correct driver even though I did install the correct one.
So after complaining about it for a week to my coworkers they suggested that I back up all my important stuff and then do a fresh install. Complety wipe it and install from scratch with 10.04. So I bought an external hard drive (500G) and did that. The fresh install was soooo easy and quick. I then carefully restored data back to my home folder. If you are doing this be careful not to copy back .gnome2 or .gvfs or anything .g* or at least be very cautious in doing so. Those could break things on an upgrade like this.
Conclusion- the fresh install worked beatifully. Ubuntu 10.04 works great and i'm not seeing any of the problems I had earlier. In fact it also fixed a completely separate issue I was having with my wireless card. So I'm definately still an Ubuntu fan.
Blogging is hard if you don’t do it
I've found that is it hard to keep up your blog if you don't keep up your blog. Sounds silly when I write it out like that, but it's true. If you don't make time for something, then it probably won't happen on its own. Enough said.
Sleep and the art of staying awake
It has been far too long since my last post, so... here's one now. I recently had a new baby boy. That has been really cool, but my 2 year old daughter has been more difficult, at least when it comes to sleeping.
Sleep is an interesting thing. For some people it is an absolute necessity for basic functioning from day to day. For others it is just a nice-to-have optional sort of thing. However, when you go for long periods of little-to-no sleep, anyone will feel the effects.
I'm trying my best to keep my lack of sleep from affecting my day to day behavior and general happiness, but it's hard. One of the main things that helps is good food and a good shower.
Software design patterns and excess
So this will probably be a first in a series of posts related to software design patterns and all my inner strugglings regarding what is hype and what is real. There are probably lot of other people out there that may have similar strugglings, and more than likely there are some out there that are blissfully unaware of the concerns. So what am I talking about? Well let's start where I started a while ago, with ORMs.
ORMs (Object Relational Mappers) are a basically a way to have a OO layer between your application code and your RMDBS. There are some basic "features" of an ORM, but not all ORMs support all of these. In any case here is a list of common features:
- OO interface to tables, rows, functions, etc, in your database. So you can use native application code and OOP to interact with your data.
- A more elegant/simpler API to interact with your database. Many ORMs use some other database API under the hood, but add routines and interfaces (or simplifies calls) that the normal API lacks.
- Object (data object) persistence. So that you can create an instance of some data you are modeling and then be able to store that object and revive it later with state preserved.
- Abstract the interaction between your application code and your database such that in the future if/when you need to move to a different database you application code will require as little change as possible. Ultimately, changing databases should be a matter of configuration files, or perhaps even less work. And your app code wouldn't even know the difference between Postgres, MySQL, SQLite, or something else.
Microsoft Exchange problems
So a while ago at my work, "they" decided to move away from Zimbra and go with Microsoft Exchange. The main points that made them want to switch were: 1) the calendaring/booking conference rooms/scheduling/sharing calendars didn't work very well in Zimbra and is "known to work in Exchange", and 2) email and calendaring for a large organization just needs to work. Now- I must admit that this is my take on what has been going on, and I may be wrong here. But, with that- my experience with Exchange has really sucked. The points for moving to exchange are one-sided.
Exchange doesn't work well with free software. Exchange is designed to work with Outlook, and no other client is even considered important. They do claim to have IMAP support for other email clients, but Microsoft's IMAP seems to be unstable. It continually has problems freezing up. About 3-5 times per day the IMAP service on the Exchange server hangs and needs to be restarted! Lame! And so all Thunderbird users are stuck playing this "is my email working now?" game all the time.
The other thing is calendaring only works with Outlook clients. Exchange doesn't support iCal/WebDAV or any other open standard. So for calendaring we pretty much are forced to use the web interface for Exchange. And the web interface for Exchange has two versions- a full featured one that only works on IE, and then a crippled one that is served to all other browsers. LAME again! So all the "features" of switching to Exchange are really only features for Windows users who use Outlook and IE. If you use anything else, then your email and calendaring just got a whole lot worse!!
Zimbra did have some known bugs in their calendaring, especially in booking conference rooms for meetings. However, I believe the folks at Zimbra have been working on that for their next release. Email never was a problem with Zimbra for any user that I could tell- Outlook or Thunderbird or whatever.
But I'm not bitter.... yet.