zen.org Communal Weblog

While doing some work, I was listening to “Homeward” by The Sundays. The open window behind my monitor shows a bright sunny day in Ireland, a gentle breeze ruffling the (far too many) sheets of paper on my desk. My mind quickly left the code I was trying to debug on the screen, and put me driving on Highway 17 in the hot summer of 1993.  I was on my way home to Santa Cruz on a Saturday afternoon from work. (I was single, hacked obsessively, it was Silicon Valley, of course I was working on the weekend.) There I was in my second-hand 1990 Hyundai Excel, working my way up to the summit where the temperature would drop by 10 degrees and I’d start my downward spiral on the curvy roads to get home. In the tape deck is a cassette (which I still own) with a copy of The Sundays’ Static & Silence album, playing for the 100th time.  The song finished, I left the image of the car twisting and turning its way along the many curves and came back to reality.  It’s truly remarkable how much is unconsciously saved in the depths of your mind.

If you visit the Guinness website, they first ask you what country you’re from. It’s not even necessary, since they can actually figure this out based on your IP address.

But the fun only starts there. After the more expected choices, there’s a series of hyphens then an alphabetical list, starting with Afghanistan. Most of the time there’s no reason to be honest with this sort of question (marketing demographics, bah) I went with Afghanistan.

The result was better than the fact they even ask:

SORRY

Sorry, we are unable to allow you access to our website due to regulations in your country of access

Please leave the GUINNESS® website »

The “Please leave” line is a link to Google. A little script would let you put together a list of all the countries they believe aren’t allowing access to their site. Wonder how they keep track of laws and regulations for every country on the planet?

While picking up a dropped toothbrush, he bonked his head on the sink. “Ow!!”
I tried to reassure him: “Aww, sorry you bumped your head Patrick.”
“Oh it’s okay, it’s not your fault.”

“You really should drink water. It’s good for you—it’s healthy.”

On the toilet, he asked me to wipe for him (as he seems to request frequently, never with any success). Handing him the toilet paper, I replied, “No, Patrick, you go ahead and do it—it’s your butt.”
“No, Dad, it’s your son’s butt.”

We had a situation where we needed to be able to call someone in America from a payphone in Ireland. No calling card handy, nothing the phone company in Ireland could do to charge it to our Ireland-based home account. Can’t do a collect call. Can’t do 3-way calling even though it’s mentioned in the phone book. Can’t do conference calling cuz the department for it in the Irish phone company goes home at 6pm. Is it actually impossible?
Whatcha do?

In Ireland, call the international operator (American accents) at 1-800-945-555. They’ll call anybody you want and let you charge it to a credit card.

Whew.

Patrick watched Ireland win tonight’s rugby match against England; it gave Ireland the Triple Crown, the gold cup they get for beating all of
Wales, Scotland, and England (the other “home nations”). It was a great match, with an incredible ending. E and I cheered and clapped our hands, and told P what had just happened. He looked from E to me, then shouted, “YES!!!!” and began fervent clapping.

hee hee

We don’t like the image of him playing this game, of course, since they beat the living crap out of each other. (Making American football players look like total wooses with all the padding and helmets.) But we also know it’s really common for kids in school, and he’s as likely as any to take part. Our neighbor across the road and his son have both played rugby extensively throughout their school years.

We’ll keep our fingers crossed he doesn’t break anything too important. 🙂

I did an apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade -u on our MythTV box to update it to the latest and greatest. After doing the upgrade, though, we were no longer able to watch live TV. I read through the release notes and found the LiveTV part had changed drastically. (Hmm, is it about here you’re wondering why I upgraded everything before reading what was changing?)

The LiveTV change makes it possible to watch something for a while, hit record, and have it save everything you’ve seen so far.

The fix to let us again watch live TV through our MythTV box was to run mythtvsetup and look under Capture cards and modify the single /dev/video0 entry that’s in there to have a Default Input value of S-Video 0.

When I first set up the box, I’d set up two inputs, one from the “regular” cable (Tuner 0) and one from the NTL Digital Cable box (S-Video 0). The intent was to make the MythTV record shows off the regular cable so we could watch whatever we wanted from the digital cable (no channels changing out from under us). I found the quality of what was being recorded for regular cable wasn’t the greatest, so I finally ditched the idea and stuck to just recording programs off digital cable. (Hmm, perhaps I should give Tuner 0 a try with the new version?) I deleted the Tuner 0 input connection, leaving just S-Video 0.

So it appears the new way of capturing live TV in a style that can be retroactively recorded has closed the part of MythTV that would iterate through input connections if the default doesn’t work. Instead, it will throw you right back at the initial screen for the UI. (Actually, this change is more of a workaround; still need to look at the diffs and figure out the real fix to the code to make it stop throwing us back out.)

Having changed it from the old Tuner 0 to S-Video 0, I restarted mythtvbackend, then mythtvfrontend. Voila, we can again watch live TV and pause it when the phone rings or someone comes to the door. Or to avoid commercials by pausing til we know they’re done (commercials are considerably less frequent in Ireland/UK television than in the US, but they’re still there). Thanks, MythTV!

I visited a site to see what times Breakfast on Pluto [you need broadband for that link] is airing in our local theater on Friday. So the page came up, I clicked on “Fri”, and nothing happened. Hmm. Try again, try reload, nope. Ok, fine: View->Page Source. The first few lines told me the evil truth:

<script language=”VBSCRIPT”>
Function ScheduleRequest(ByVal ReqDate)
Dim pi

times.seldate.value = CDate(ReqDate)
ScheduleRequest=””
Set oXML = createobject(“Microsoft.XMLHTTP”)
oXML.open “POST”, times.gateway.value, False
… etc …

Yes, Dark Lord, your wish is my command, no one shall buy a movie ticket online unless they run Wind0ws.

Why the hell would someone choose to implement this in Visual Basic ? <spit/>

(Turns out the movie’s stopping in Ireland on Friday. At least the DVD’s out in April in the US, and hopefully not too much later in Ireland and the UK.)

Step 1: With a Finder window open, click on the Library folder that’s in your home directory.

Step 2: Drag it onto your desktop.

Step 3: Make it log off or reboot the iBook in question.

The end result: all of your preferences, your keychain of logins, your Safari bookmarks, your entire world has vanished.

The fix: put Library back in your home directory, not on your desktop, after you’ve logged off to make sure already-opened files don’t make you actually lose everything. We accomplished this by making an SSH connection from another computer. Another fix could be logging in as another user and opening up an Applications->Utilities->Terminal window and doing it manually.

I don’t know if there’s an elegant way to recover from this startlingly crippling little step.

Oh, I forgot: Step 0: Do all of these steps as a four year-old boy. Patrick Kehoe, über-hacker.

Really makes you wanna consider moving there:

Sweden plans to be world’s first oil-free economy

Evergreen… Sweden will develop biofuels from its forests. Photograph: Mattias Klum/Getty Images

You remember Exxon, right? Alaska? Death and destruction?

They posted the highest profit earnings of any US company. ever. Wonder how they did that? Hmm, well “[in early 2005] Exxon pumped more than $8 million into more than 40 think tanks; media outlets; and consumer, religious, and even civil rights groups that preach skepticism about the oncoming climate catastrophe [of global warming].” Mother Jones May/June 2005 Issue