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.
An update on books I’m reading
So I'm always reading a book. Or two or three. At the same time of course. However, I'm not a very fast reader, nor am I a consistent reader. So even though I'm "always reading a book", it may take me 4 or 5 months to finish one.
Last year I read probably 3 or 4 books. So far this year I've read two and am almost finished with a third:
- The Fellowship of the Ring (first book in the Lord of the Rings trilogy)
- Johnathan Livingston Seagull
- Eragon (almost finished with this one)
They've all been enjoyable. While these are the ones I've finished (or nearly), here are some that I'm still in the midst of:
- The Art of Scalability (about scalable system and business architecture)
- Learning Groovy and Grails
- Myths of Innovation
- 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know
- Oracle Essentials
Blog face lift
I've been using Movable Type for blogging for a long time now, like 2 years. I am now switching to WordPress. Reason being- I did a custom install of Movable Type and I don't really want to go through the effort to upgrade it, or maintain it. My hosting service provider has an auto-install of WordPress with automated upgrades and plugins and all sorts of things that I don't have to manage. Simple enough.
So, I've imported everything from my MT blog over here and think this will be a better long-term blog platform.
Oh- p.s. I changed the name of the blog. Different name, but same concept.
Saw Paul Simon in Concert in Seattle
My wife and I flew to Seattle April 14-17 so we could go to a concert. :-) We went to see Paul Simon as he kicked off a new tour, and we went to the first concert of the tour. It was at the WAMU theater, which is part of Qwest Field in Seattle (Qwest Field is where the football team Seattle Seahawks play).
crazy love
afterlife
rewrite
love is eternal sacred light
so beautiful or so what
only living boy in new york
I know what I know
that was your mother
father and daughter
50 ways to leave your lover
kodachrome
diamonds on the souls of her shoes
slip slide and away
hearts and bones
the obvious child
train in the distance (? not sure)
gone at last
love and hard times
encore 1:
sounds of silence
(? can't remember)
here comes the sun (beatles cover)
late in the evening
Raising Money for a Film the New Way
The old way of raising money to make a film consisted of one or a combination of all of the following:
- Use your credit cards, max them out, apply for more and max them out. repeat until deeply deeply depressingly in debt.
- Beg family members, close friends for money for you project.
- Lower everyone's expectations of getting paid, if they had any to begin with.
- Search for and pitch like crazy to investors. This requires connections to those with money.
- Apply for some art grants. This may be difficult unless you or your project fit into the requirements for the grant.
- Mortgage your home.
- Sell plasma at the blood bank.
Finally Finished Editing Vacation Video from 6 Years Ago
6 years ago my wife and I went on a great vacation to New Zealand. I took my video camera (a Canon GL-1), and shot lots of video footage- about 3-4 hours of raw footage. We were there for 10 days. It was great.
While in film school I was taught video editing on three different software products: Adobe Primier, Final Cut Pro, and Avid. Out of all of them I liked Final Cut Pro the best, and felt most comfortable in it. So, back in 2004 (the same year that we went to New Zealand) I purchased a Mac Pro tower and Final Cut Pro (academic version). And I imported the footage and began editing it near the end of that year. Since then I've gotten rid of that tower and now have a 20" iMac and have the latest version of Final Cut Express (it is better than my old version of FCP from 6 years ago).
I just "finished" editing it this summer 2010! Whew! I put finished in quotes because there are things that could still be improved, but I'm not going to worry about them any more. It is time to move on to another project. Now that the editing is done, I need to put the DVD together for it.
One of the main reasons it has taken me so long is simply that it hasn't been a top priority for me. And I also find that when I'm editing, I want the final result to look professional. When editing my own vacation I try to imaging someone else who is not familiar with me or my wife watching it and edit it so that it would be interesting to them. I mean, at some point I expect my children to see these videos and I hope the videos stand on their own without needing to be explained. Is that over kill? Perhaps. But it means that I'm not ashamed to show off my work to any one. Even if I look ridiculous in parts of the video, the video itself tells a story in an structured way.
So lessons learned? I'd say, when editing vacation videos, make it a higher priority to finish them within a year of the trip. Next time. 
What else? Definitely I learned a lot about audio levels. Things sound totally different when on the computer versus on the tv. Any music on the sound track needs to peak somewhere around -17db and dialog captured from the camera should be between 0db and +7db depending. Audio was a big time consumer for me. I hate to have to adjust volume on the tv when watching something, so you need to do all the normalizing when editing. But it pays off if you can hear everything when watching it on the tv and don't need to touch the remote at all during it. Any other lessons? Perhaps one more- migrating a video project from one computer to another, and from one version of video editing software to another can be risky. There was a time when I nearly had to start all over again when I got my new iMac. The lesson learned- it is better to complete a project on one platform than to let it languish and have to be migrated onto another. The risk of something going wrong and chances for headaches are pretty high.
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.
ideas for blog posts
I haven't written for a while, but I have gathered several ideas to write about. Here are a few of them:
- My SageTV setup, and why I chose to go with SageTV versus MythTV, or TiVo or others.
- Controltier. This is an automation framework for deploying and managing software. It is a bit complex but can be very powerful. I use this at work.
- My presentation at Postgresql Conference East, entitled "Postgres Administration for Sysadmins". This presentation covers basics of configuration and running Postgres and monitoring your database.
- An updated how-to for Virtual Box- setting up several servers and getting them to talk to each other.
- How-to on getting CUPC (cisco's chat/video thingy app) working in Virtual box vm.
- Snippets of some of my screenplays (works in progress).
As you can see, I actually do have things to write about, now if I could only make the time.....
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.
Light reading over the Holidays
So, it's Thanksgiving weekend and I find myself online reading a few articles and blog posts. One of note that I wanted to comment on and point out:
The benefits of vanilla CGI vs FastCGI for Perl apps
What people value in a web development process/toolkit is significantly weighted by the process and tools that web developer a) first learned, and b) is most confortable using. Meaning that a developer whose first experience programming web applications was with Catalyst and has since found Mojo more comfortable and uses it regularly, will have a different set of "values" (or criteria by which other things are compared) than a developer who started web development with straight CGI.pm and is now a Jifty user. (this bias should extend itself to any and all programmers, but I find it more appearant in web developers where there is more contention about which toolkit is better than another).
Whew. OK, after all that, I have to say that I agree with Mark and feel that "vanilla CGI" is a great way to get things rolling as a developer without having (usually) to change a thing to a web server. Just write your code and go. I also feel that if people expect things to run slow in CGI and not in mod_perl or FastCGI because that is their biased environment of choice, then they will program accordingly. Meaning that they will write code that is slower, heavier, etc. because "oh, mod_perl will take care of it and it will be fast enough," or something similar.
I've never actualy heard anyone say that, but I hear things close to it from other developers (Java web developers mostly) who feel like everything is perfectly normal when you have to rely on huge complex tools and frameworks and middleware and dedicated containers and separation of tiers and abstracted everything and this and that and the kitchen sink too just to develop web applications. This "normal bloat" I'll call it, is where that bias I mentioned earlier really comes out. If people can't even see that their tools and process is overly complex, burdensome, and has a moderate to high degree of dependencies for normal development and opperation, than how can you persuade them that it is perfectly fine to live without that? How can you make them see that that is not "normal" for many, many other web developers?
Living without FastCGI??? Shudder. You're still using perl for web development?!?!?!? How can you live without Hibernate for data access (or replace with your favorite language specific tool here)?!?! Running perl CGI without mod_perl??? Are you stupid??
Yes, stupid like a fox. Err... I mean, doh.