bryan wann :: binary fury

I am in the market for a Mac Mini now to replace my Xbox + Pentium II box in closet solution for media storage. Before Christmas, they were somewhat plentiful on craigslist at good prices, now they’ve dried up or people are throwing more memory in them and they’re going for more than retail.

The Xbox + Xbox Media Center + Pentium II FC5 box in the closet works really well in principle for watching movies and storing my > 10MB TIFF scans. I only have a laptop, but it fills up quickly with my music collection, video, and when I’m scanning photographs. Therefore I offload my storage to the lowly PII in the closet. The two major problems are energy usage and speed. I’m not fond of having a server and xbox running 24/7 when they’re only being used a few hours a day. I addtion to the server being a lowly PII, the box also has four ATA/100 hard drives. This is a painful bottleneck for the amount of data I shovel back and forth between my devices.

Turning off the Xbox means I need to find a media center solution for the Mac Mini. Sure, there’s the new Front Row which comes with OS X, so I hooked my laptop up to the TV to play with it today and get a feel. You know what, Front Row sucks. It’s slow isn’t the best interactive experience. I try to do something like load the list of Apple music trailers, decide it’s taking to long and try to do something else, you’re stuck. I furiously hit different buttons to abort, but the application is blocked until loading completes, then all of my button presses catch up.

Front Row is also picky about which types of video it can handle. I’ve got all sorts of Quicktime components for DivX, Xvid, WMV, AC3 installed and it still won’t play some videos. VIDEO_TS support is not available either.

Xbox Media Center works very well, in over 8 months of daily usage I have few complaints. You point it at a remote files hare and go. Its interface has a snappy response, I have good amount of menu and playback control using an Xbox controller, it plays almost anything I have laying around, no problems with VIDEO_TS, and it’ll drive 480p with component cables. I really like the fact I can select and control video playback with a web browser.

XBMC has a few pitfalls I’ve discovered. The extra scripts are a bit wonky, I’ve broken the Apple Trailer script and can’t seem to fix it. Being an xbox, I can’t ssh over to it and readily fix it. Since there’s no official Xbin compiler, getting updates depend on knowing the right people. The xbox’s CPU is too slow to play native 720p or 1080p video.

Following disappointment with Front Row, I downloaded MediaCentral from equinx. First thing I noticed (and really appreciate) is that it supports the Apple remote. The canned music gets monotonous after a while. IP TV is a nice touch, although some channels depend on Real Player, blegh. I’m annoyed that VIDEO_TS files have to go under “DVDs” and other video files go under another menu; this may be hackable, I don’t know yet. Video playback of some files don’t seem nearly as sharp as Quicktime or XBMC; it’s almost like they’re twiddling around with the aspect ratio.

At this point it seems like I can get rid of the crufty PII in the closet and move my storage to a Mini + stack of external hard drives, but I’m still stuck with the Xbox. Anyone know of any other Front Row alternatives that can compete?

[bryan@staff1 bryan]$ date
Sun Mar 11 01:59:59 CST 2007
[bryan@staff1 bryan]$ date
Sun Mar 11 03:00:00 CDT 2007

Electricity is still on, TV still works, water is still on. Our patched Linux and Solaris systems rolled just fine. My Fedora Core 2 systems in the lab have the 2005 tzdata package installed, but they never had /etc/localtime updated (somewhat intentionally for this purpose), they do still say 2:00.

Today I’m officially a resident of a cube farm at work. I’m not happy about it at all. Letsee, I’ve gone from running my own show with my own offices, to working for somebody else while working in an office with a window, to working in a dark inner office, to working in a cubicle. I’ll keep the bug spray around in case I’m moved to storage. I’m about two steps away from joining the French Foreign Legion and living in a tin doghouse.

I disassembled half my cube today and rebuilt it just so I could have my monitors in the corner where I can at least see somebody coming in from the corner of my eye. I later noticed everyone else’s cubes in engineering was setup the same way. Regardless of if I’m actually doing/watching something scandalous, I don’t like being snuck up on. It’s likely to get a person elbowed or stabbed. I’m also not a big fan of being in a confined space all day. We’ll see how long it is before I’m in a corner in a fetal position. Burton and Philip are no longer within talking distance, which was really handy at times when we were working on something together.

The good news is, the move makes it easier to bicycle or run to work and I should be able to get lunch < 10 minute walk away.

Last week, a JetBlue airplane with passenger was parked on the tarmac for 10 hours because they couldn’t take off or return to their gate because of weather; other planes were in the same situation for 8-9 hours. A few months ago, a plane was parked on the tarmac here at Austin for 8 hours for bad weather. JetBlue flight staff reportedly opened up the doors to let in fresh air. In both of the extreme cases, passengers ran out of food, clean toilets, heating, and patience.

Why did the passengers tolerate this? Why would they put up with such miserable conditions trapped in an aluminum vessel for nearly half a day and not go anywhere? Are people truly that obedient? Were they that desperate to get to their destination that they didn’t want to risk “rocking the boat” by causing a ruckus?

The longest I’ve ever been parked was an hour a few years ago at DTW. Fortunately I was so worn out I fell asleep and didn’t wake up until the flight was in the air. I often ponder what that experience would drive me to if I was stuck on a plane for > 8 hours. If I popped a door and released the emergency slide, what sort of laws would they say I broke? Is there such thing as mutiny on commercial flights?

I acquired my new TV yesterday. I had a certain price range in my head that I expected it to be, then was pleasantly surprised to find it was much lower at Fry’s when I was wandering around. I tried to buy it Friday night, but discovered my debit card has a daily spending limit. The medium-sized bank in Oklahoma I still use does not have 24-hour customer support I could call to re-adjust it. Saturday morning I got it approved and headed back to Fry’s. On the drive up, my salesman called me to let me know the TV was put on sale this weekend for a President’s Day sale — $500 off! Since the extended warranty was a function of the retail value, it too dropped $140. This tickled me to no end, I was going to be able to buy it for $1000 less than what I was saving up for.

The TV is amazing. It adds an order of magnitude of improvement to the whole brain rotting television watching experience. One end of my apartment is all glass doors and windows which projects a considerable amount of glare on any TV in the morning. While I was in the showroom I took my flashlight to see if I could get any nasty glare off this unit. I couldn’t there, and I don’t get any in my apartment.

From my apartment I can pick up at least 6 digital local broadcast channels: KLRU/PBS, KEYE/CBS, KXAN/NBC, KNVA/CW, KVUE/ABC, KTBC/FOX. Even though most of the programming is non-HD, digital reception of the stations is superior to the analog reception I watched before. A new antenna also lets me pick up other channels I didn’t before, mostly en Español

In addition to the image quality, there are several other things that are just flat out nice features. The unit takes my many inputs for DVD and game consoles, I no longer have to get up to flick a switchbox to change what I want to do. All audio now runs through the TV, so I can finally control volume remotely after 15 years. It also takes me down to one remote control for all my gadgets without buying some expensive universal remote. Mitsubishi has what they call “NetCommand IR”, which is a set of IR emitters you stick in front of your DVD player, VCR, and other gizmos. You program a mapping of remote control buttons into the TV, then you can control whatever device is selected on the input. For example, when the DVD input is selected, the play/stop/pause buttons work the DVD player; when the VCR input is selected, the same buttons work the VCR. You don’t even have to flip a switch on the remote. Brilliant!

I must toss my VCR though. VHS movies look absolutely horrible on the big screen. I need to get DVDs of my favorite VHS movies and get rid of the tapes.

Tuesday I flew to Virginia for work. Snow was dumped all over the northeast so I got diverted to Balitmore. While I was there, we got three inches of snow overnight which promptly froze. Fortunately I got back to BWI without any grief.

As I was passing through security at BWI, TSA pulled me aside and confiscated the 1 liter Mountain Dew in my bag. When I was on the plane, I discovered I had a screwdriver from the datacenter in my jacket pocket (which was passed through the x-ray machine). I feel safer, do you?

So much Zelda. I stood in line Sunday morning at Target to buy a Wii. They had 68 units, at 7:30 AM there were about 35 people in line. I finally gots me one! I also bought Elebits and Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (she gets around) while I was there. Every waking hour not at work has been playing. Sunday afternoon was a Wii and fried chicken router maintenance party at a colleague’s house. Much Wii Sports was played. Along with many “Damn the white devils” lines from Burton, my favorite quote was:

<burton> ha ha what kind of fat nerd do you have to be to actually get an injury from Wii?
1 hour later…
<burton> ow, I think I hurt my elbow with that weird backhand

The last Zelda I played was Link to the Past on SNES; I’m missing the experience of several games, but I’m really liking this one and don’t know if it can be topped. The graphics are awesome, I did the Tron-like effects of the twilight. It’s quite interactive, the gameplay is good, but gets confusing when there’s a lot of action at once. I’m fighting off some hawk and this housecat runs up to me wanting to talk, wtf? What’s up with Illa, she’s totally into Link and he ignores her. This is by far the darkest game I’ve ever played, not only visually and in storyline, they’ve definately got the creepy shadow music very well. It makes me wonder if this is what hell is like, if we’re suddenly turned to spirits damned to all eternity being haunted by black shadow monsters.

I also bought a Nintendo DS Lite. I decided I am not going to be on another 5+ hour plane flight without some sort of entertainment to keep me sane. For that I purchased Final Fantasy III and VI. I hear FF VI is the greatest FF ever, so I’m trying to validate that claim.

I’m now shopping for a new HD TV. Playing Wii is just not the same coming from a 65″ to a 21″. I’ve settled on a 57″ DLP, I’m told the Mitsubishi Diamond WD-57831 is the one I want to keep for all eternity. That puts me saving for another month or two, but it should be really sweet. The Mitsubishi and JVC I’ve looked at are amazingly crisp and don’t have any annoying glare.

I’m annoyed with television journalism again. Anna Nichole Smith died. She’s fucking dead. Get over it. I understand the whole story of her life thing, but I don’t know why we put her on such a high pedestal and cover it like Princess Di died. I’m annoyed in general that the US population cares so much about the personal lives of celebrities and actors. What has Smith done for us to garner so much attention other than provide countless hours of drama, much like any show on MTV these days? Today on CNN, “contents of Anna Nichole’s refrigerator”. Wha? We’re trying to figure out if Iran is supplying weapons to Iraqi insurgents and we’re worred that her fridge had Methadone in it?

God help us all if Paris, Britney, or Lohan ever die. They’re in the media so much, it’s going to be a national week of mourning.

Tomorrow I’m off to Virginia again.

After 11 years I finally got around to figuring out en_US.UTF-8 locale on Solaris. Most Linux machines usually have UTF-8 enabled by default, but it took a few minutes of man page reading to get Solaris fixed up.

Which means, I can now easily write in different language sets from my shell!

よこそう

السلام عليك

Sort of, anyways.