Category: Geek

There’s been a bit of a fuss kicked up over a NYT article about TV piracy, particularly among the MythTV community. Although the fuss might be a little overblown, there are a couple quotes which come across as a little misguided:

The members of the MythTV community, who now do not have to pay monthly fees to rent set-top boxes or digital video recorders, have plenty of more mischievous company in trying to outwit the television industry. Millions of viewers are now watching illegal copies of television programs – even full seasons copied from popular DVD’s – that are flitting about the Internet, thanks to other new programs that allow users to upload and download the large files quickly.

What, people who are using their PCs as TV recorders are suddenly rubbing elbows with DVD pirates? Although they don’t explicitly come right out and equate the two groups, they’re putting them uncomfortably close together here.

And horror of horrors, we’re not paying for commercial DVR boxes! How dare we use our own labour instead of paying a company to assemble them for us, and damn our ability to conjure up the parts out of thin air. Oh wait, I guess we *do* wind up paying somebody for those parts… And it’s hard to blame people for choosing to use the free TV listings that are already published on the net by companies in the TV industry itself instead of paying for a subscription service. You can’t give something away with one hand and then slap people with the other for actually taking it.

Not surprisingly, the repercussions – particularly the rapidly growing number of shows available for the plucking online – terrify industry executives, who remember only too well what Napster and other file-sharing programs did to the music industry.

Yeah, the poor, beleaguered music industry went on to develop new methods, break records and increase sales. How horrible it would be if the same thing were to happen to TV!

I like to consider myself semi-competent at these newfangled computer-thingies, but I keep finding myself running into problems that are slightly beyond me.

Occasionally, while watching recorded shows in MythTV, my Linux box will just freeze up and has to be manually reset. It’s *probably* a problem with the Nvidia driver’s XvMC mode, since it never happened when I was using the plain non-Nvidia Xv display mode instead. Maybe. Or maybe I simply hadn’t used the old Xv mode long enough and didn’t see it occur by pure chance and the problem lies elsewhere. Maybe it’s overheating, or there’s memory corruption somewhere. Who knows…

While playing World of Warcraft, I’ll randomly get booted back to the login screen. Is it the server being flaky again? Could be, they’ve had a lot of trouble lately, except that it doesn’t happen to others at the same time. Something on my end then, perhaps. Video driver problems, maybe? They’ve been responsible for a lot of other problems, like the instability I was seeing in KotOR. Unfortunately it’s not clear, as I’m not getting the usual driver failure message in this case. Just a plain bug in the game then? Who knows…

And now the hard drive in the XP box is acting strangely. Now it’ll occasionally spin down for a second or so and then spin back up again, as if it had lost power for that second, and then Windows freezes up. Usually when I’m trying to log in to World of Warcraft, for some reason. A problem with the power supply, perhaps? Well, I’ve moved it around to a few different cables now and there’s no difference, and it’s a fairly-new power supply with plenty of spare wattage. Maybe Linux would give me more detailed errors — except that when I boot off of a Linux live CD, the drive behaves itself perfectly well. And after rebooting back into XP, it’s been continuing to behave for another day or so. Except that it occasionally makes piercing high-pitched whines, too. So, is my drive about to fail, or is the power at fault, or is it some Windows or WoW thing?

Who knows…

Despite having used ‘vi’ and its variants as my primary editor for quite a while now (ever since it was the only editor that ran well on the university’s old Sun 3s), I’ve never really bothered to learn many of the ‘advanced’ tips and tricks. Insert, delete, copy, and paste always seemed to be good enough.

I thus only just recently discovered how to indent and unindent without having to manually insert or delete spaces repeatedly. I really should have earlier since it comes up quite often while coding, but there’s always that short-term laziness…

Anyway, in ‘vim’ at least, the useful controls are:

“>>” – Indent the current line. Use a numeric prefix to apply it to a certain number of consecutive lines.
“<<” – Unindent the current line
“>%” – Indent the entire current code block. This is the really useful one, since quite often you’re cutting and pasting a block of code into a place at a different indentation level, and you want to shift the whole block. The cursor has to be positioned at the start or end of the block, like with the basic “%” command.
“<%” – Unindent the entire current coding block.

And you can also select a region with the mouse or Shift-V and use “>” and “<” alone to indent or unindent the selected block.

Somewhat related to this is the “=” command, which modifies the indentation to match up with how the current syntax mode would have indented it based on its own built-in rules and environment settings.

“==” – Automatically adjust the indentation of the current line.
“=%” – Automatically adjust the indentation of everything within the current code block, including other blocks within this one.

And again, selecting a region and using “=” alone will apply automatic indentation to the entire region.

When I went to upgrade my server to the 2.6.9 kernel (which it turns out I can’t use at the moment anyway for other reasons), I discovered that I still had some debugging options enabled in my current kernel config, from a problem I had over a year ago. OOPS.

I wouldn’t have expected it to make *that* much of a difference, but after recompiling 2.6.7 without them set I can now play back recordings in MythTV at full speed, using around 80% CPU. It still stutters slightly whenever something else kicks in, like a web server hit, but it’s still a vast improvement.

Now I just have to solve the frigging B&W video problem. Hopefully a new-but-cheap GeForce 4 that’s on the way will fix that…

Although my earlier attempt at quietening my gaming system failed miserably, it’s finally now one tenth as noisy as it was before. It’s still not exactly complete silence, but it’s like an empty library in comparison to what it used to be.

How did I do it? It was rather simple, actually — I just ripped two of the three hard drives out. One of them had been acting up lately, going through bursts where it would suddenly power down and back up again. No data had been lost, but I don’t really trust it anymore. The other one was an ancient 12G drive, and the only reason it was even still in there was because it was the boot drive and removing it would have required reinstalling all of the OSes, which is moot now.

Plus, removing the drives removed the need for a couple power splitters and one IDE cable, so the cabling isn’t quite so chaotic inside. I also discovered that I was using a 40-pin cable on the remaining drive, so switching in an 80-pin cable should get it up to full speed. The video card doesn’t have to split its power with a drive anymore, which will hopefully help with some strange video driver crashes. And without the other drives, there will be less heat generated. Ripping out all this stuff has made the system the quietest, coolest, and most stable it’s been in years. Damn, I should have done this a long time ago…

Of course, now I have to reinstall everything and I’m about 40G shorter on space (with 100 left), but I can live with that. I just won’t reinstall Linux on it, which hadn’t been getting much use anyway. I also won’t both reinstalling Win98SE, since pretty much everything I have works under XP now, and the few that didn’t (Pod, Daggerfall) aren’t too important anymore.