Category: General

MythTV discussion

I went to a Boston Linux and Unix
Users Group (BLU) meeting last night to hear a talk on MythTV by one of its developers
(Jarod Wilson who works for Redhat).

Some points of interest about real world MythTV use:

  • Recording from a cable box is more haphazard than you would
    wish — the most reliable way to record anything you’ve paid to
    be able to watch is to get the Hauppage HD-PVR which lets you
    plug in the composite video cables from the cable box and use an
    IR blaster to change the channels. Modern cable boxes have a
    firewire output, which should let you both record digitally and
    change the channels, but it’s fairly haphazard what channels
    your cable company will let you see unencrypted on the firewire
    output. Also, the HD-PVR will allegedly record in either 720p
    or 1080i, but there are some issues with the linux drivers for
    interlaced video, so you’re currently safer sticking to
    720p.
  • Most of the USB remote control boxes on the market,
    including the HP branded one that I inherited from Bonnie, are
    essentially the same as the Windows Media Center one.
  • If you’re setting up a filesystem partition for mythtv, XFS
    is currently stable and designed for large files. ext3 is
    usable; ext4 is a bit bleeding edge and people have lost data
    using it.
  • If you can’t handle the volume on the mythtv users mailing
    list, there’s an indexed
    archive     that you can search.
  • The speaker repeated the common wisdom that an NVidia
    graphics card with the NVidia binary-only driver “just works”.
    This has been very much not my experience, but it must be true
    for lots of people.
  • He admitted that his first install of MythTV took a week of
    hard work before it “mostly worked”. He says that once you have
    the setup working, using it (even for the non-technical) is no harder than a commercial
    system (such as Tivo), and administering it is a couple of
    minutes a week for an experienced Linux user, but setting up is
    definitely harder than it should be.

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Backing Up

I just upgraded my computer hardware, so I’m typing this on a
shiny new
computer with 4 cpu’s, a terrabyte of hard drive, and 8 Gigs
of memory.

Getting all the stuff from the old computer to this one is
still harder than it should be, but is easier when you upgrade
while the old system is still working.

What ought to be true is that if you move the /home directory,
install the same set of packages, and import the data from the
database, you should have a working system.

Some people claim that you can just copy /etc and /var to the
new computer and then the new system will work the same way the
old one did. I didn’t find this to be true, and I’ve been hand
moving the things from /var and /etc that I turn out to need, or
reconfiguring the new system. Part of why this is less true for
me is that the new system is a 64 bid install, and the old one
was still 32 bits.

In any case, when you have the luxury of the old system still
working is a good time to check that your backup procedure is
working, and to add things to it as you find yourself manually
moving something from the old system to the new one.

The most embarrassing hole in my procedure was that I found my
system for entering lilypond into emacs via USB keyboard didn’t
work because I’d installed a little program it needed in
/usr/bin (which should be only executables from the package
management system, and doesn’t get backed up) instead of
/usr/local/bin.

I don’t yet have either gallery2 or wordpress working right on
the new system, but the old system seems to have the same
problems, so it probably isn’t the backup procedure.

My own backup procedure is largely rsnapshot, along with some
scripts that back up databases and the websites that are hosted
elsewhere. This gets everything you need (as long as you tell
it the right files to back up), but is fairly large and
cumbersome, so one of the things I’m missing is recent off-site
backups. It backs up to a 1
terrabyte firewire drive. Each backup takes up about 160
Gigabytes, but the files that are the same are hard linked, so
10 backups are only about 200 Gigabytes.

Anyway, I’m very happy with the new system, because now when
the backup procedure starts I just barely notice, instead of
having to stop what I was doing on the computer and go get a cup
of coffee.

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Report on the July 14 meeting

We played:

Schedule

We will be having our usual dropin meetings on Tuesdays at
7:45 PM at my
place.

We’ll probably skip August 11, so that people can go to the
special West Gallery
Quire workshop with Francis Rhodes.

La Marseillaise, and other unpalatable words

If you want to think more about the words than you could last
night while
trying to fit them to the music at speed, my research for my blog entry
yesterday turned up a page with several translations, as well
as a Bible site with all the well known translations of Psalm 137.

La Marseillaise

Since I recommended reading the Declaration of Independance on
July 4, I decided to recommend reading (or, better, singing) La Marseillaise on July 14, Bastille Day.

It isn’t as strong of a recommendation; the writing really
isn’t as good, nor are the sentiments as elevating.

But you really have to understand 19th century European
nationalism to have any shot at understanding the way the world
is still organized in the 21st century. So you should read this
as well as the patriotic songs of other countries. And for
understanding why you should oppose war on almost all occasions,
there still isn’t any text better than Psalm
137.

This
site has several versions of translations into English. The
one done by a French committee is interesting — I’d love to see a
summary of the discussion that led to “patrie” being translated “Motherland”.

If you’re in this area, we’ll sing all or most of the verses
tonight at the Cantabile Band
rehearsal tonight.

The Amazing Mrs. Palin

I didn’t think until this morning to connect Sarah Palin to the
tv show The
Amazing Mrs. Pritchard, which describes a supermarket manager
who becomes Prime Minister of Great Britain.

The New York Times has an article
this morning
about the ways the Republican establishment attempted to advise
her on how to become one of them. The quote that struck me was:

Mr. Malek [described earlier in the article as “a longtime Republican
kingmaker”] said he told Ms. Palin that “You have got to set up a mechanism so you can return calls.”

“You are getting a bad rap,” he recalled saying. “Important people are
trying to talk to you. And she said, ‘What number are they
calling?’ She did not know what had been happening.”

I am someone who frequently tries to organize people whose desire
to be in touch with the world isn’t ardent enough to have forced
them to organize the possible ways of getting in touch with them
so that there’s a reliable way to make contact. That “What number
are they calling?” sounds really familiar. You have work phones
and home phones and cell phones and email addresses and fax
numbers, and nobody could possibly check all of those all the
time, so if you hear that someone has tried the wrong one, you
tell your informant what the right one this week is. And I can
see where kingmakers aren’t used to dealing with
people like this. In my part of the world, even successful
organizers on a much lower level than the ones who run campaigns
for Governor are better organized about how to tell people how to
get in touch with them than this.

As I remember the TV show, Mrs. Pritchard does have some
trouble adjusting to living in the middle of the mechanisms set
up so that a Prime Minister’s phone calls get returned and
commitments get recorded. It’s part of the unreality of the
format that it’s a temporary adjustment difficulty that gets
wrapped up in a 50-minute show. But it’s also part of the
portrayal of Mrs. Pritchard as an unusually intelligent woman that
she does realize the necessity of the mechanisms.

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This is England

This
movie is about a 12 year old boy who is temporarily
recruited into a skinhead group in northern England.

It’s very well-done. I could have sworn I smelled the pot
during the scene where they all get high and sit around
giggling.

It’s also fairly unpleasant to watch a fair amount of the
time. So watch it when you’re in the mood for that. I realized
I was when I was browsing through the channel guide and it was
on one of the stations I don’t get, so I logged on to Netflix
Watch Now.

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Gojira

This
movie is the original Japanese version, which the Raymond
Burr version was loosely based on.

This one has an all Japanese cast, with a more than usually
active pretty girl and three scientists, of varying degrees of
madness, but none of them evil.

It was made only 9 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the
characters’ struggle with the idea of a weapon of mass
destruction, even in the face of a monster dealing out mass
destruction is inspiring.

The older scientist who wants to try to communicate with
the monster even though everyone else is trying to figure out ways
to kill it should have remained a stock character in monster
movies, and for some reason didn’t. Probably for the same reason he gets ignored in this movie.

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Wakefield Summer Band concert

The first Wakefield Summer Band concert of the year is
tonight. If you’re near Wakefield, and want to spend a pleasant
evening on the shores of Lake Quannapowitt (it looks like for a
change we’re getting good weather today), I gave details in the
weekly Cantabile
Band post.

I never played in a band in high school, so I’ve never been
properly socialized as either a tuba player or a band musician.
And there are lots of kinds of music I’d rather put the time into
than band music, although the really good arrangements are a lot of
fun to play.

Two summers playing tuba in a summer band (and one on alto
horn) isn’t enough to make you a very good tuba player, but it’s
amazing how useful you can feel just playing the easy notes on the
tuba arrangements.

From a low brass perspective, the best arrangement on tonight’s
program is Phantom of the Opera, where the
direction says “With a menacing manner”.

When I got the tuba and took it to Osmun Music to buy it a
mouthpiece, they guessed it was made in about 1910, so it’s almost
100 years old. It’s in Eb, which makes it easier to carry around
than the currently more usual Bb tubas. It’s also closer to the
same range as the serpent.

I’m not the only person in that band who doesn’t work seriously
on their instrument during the winter, so from the point of view
of hearing a good concert, you should probably wait to come until later
in the summer. The concert will last less than an hour, and if
there are good places to go drinking afterwards in the area, I
haven’t found them, so it isn’t worth driving a long
distance, but it’s certainly a pleasant option for how to spend
your evening if you live in Wakefield.

Torture in Tolkien

I’m rereading the Lord
of the Rings, which I do every couple of years.

I’m at the house of Tom Bombadil right now. Thanks to Kate
Nepveu’s reread on tor.com,
I’m enjoying the verse Tom Bombadil speaks in — I knew he had his
own rhythm, but I’d never noticed the rhyme scheme before.

So far, the only other thing that’s struck me as new this time
is thanks to the political debate on torture.

In the second chapter, The Shadow of the Past, Gandalf says to Bilbo:

What I have told you is what Gollum was willing to tell – though not, of course, in the way I have reported it. Gollum is a liar, and you have to sift his words. For instance, he called the Ring his “birthday-present”, and he stuck to that. He said it came from his grandmother, who had lots of beautiful things of that kind. A ridiculous story. I have no doubt that Sméagol’s grandmother was a matriarch, a great person in her way, but to talk of her possessing many Elven-rings was absurd, and as for giving them away, it was a lie. But a lie with a grain of truth.

The murder of Déagol haunted Gollum, and he had made up a defence, repeating it to his “Precious” over and over again, as he gnawed bones in the dark, until he almost believed it. It was his birthday. Déagol ought to have given the ring to him. It had obviously turned up just so as to be a present. It was his birthday-present, and so on, and on.

I endured him as long as I could, but the truth was
desperately important, and in the end I had to be harsh. I put
the fear of fire on him, and wrung the true story out of him,
bit by bit, together with much snivelling and snarling. He thought he was misunderstood and ill-used. But when he had at last told me his history, as far as the end of the Riddle-game and Bilbo’s escape, he would not say any more, except in dark hints. Some other fear was on him greater than mine.

The emphasis is mine.

I had never before noticed that Gandalf had tortured Gollum,
using much the same rationale as the Bush administration.

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United Breaks Guitars

Ran into this
video, by singer/songwrite/guitar player Dave Carroll about his
experience checking his guitar on United Airlines and trying to
recover damages when it was broken. He claims it will be a trilogy. The link on the youtube page
is broken, so here’s
a little more information about the incident.

This is a serious problem for all musicians who travel, and
more of them should be fighting back this way. I know of several
large recorders that have suffered serious damage in airline
travel.