Abort, Rephrase, Ignore?

Useful discovery: iTunes will authorise against multiple iTunes Store accounts, and this flows through to AppleTV. If the lack of useful captioning weren’t an issue I could absolutely see subscribing to 10 or so TV shows — the price is similar to buying a season on DVD but you get ‘em as soon as they air in the US, with no ads, and no mucking about converting for playback. 10 shows a year is cheaper than even basic cable here, and much better value too.

Last weekend I got fed up with Vista making things break and nuked the PC, installing XP and using it only for games and video encodes. The “main” machine is my old first-generation G5 iMac hooked up to a decent display, and it’s perfectly usable though I can really notice the difference between this old machine and the first-gen Core2 Duo iMac at work. Not going to do anything in any great hurry, but this does rather confirm for me that I should be looking to update to a newer Mac at home some time this year.

We had a large bin delivered on Wednesday and have spent some of the long weekend clearing out accumulated rubbish. I’ve finally chucked the last remaining big box of cables and we’ve gained maybe 1/3rd of our study back. The kitchen is also looking much better. By spreading this out over the weekend we’ve been able to get stuff done without feeling like we’ve given up much time to do it.

Weight-loss continues, slowly. I’ve lost about 7kg since we started this 3-ish months ago. Our scales have given up, so we’ll need to buy new ones. 7kg is a drop in the ocean — overall I want to lose 60kg from my starting point — but hey, 10% is 10%. It all feels quite viable, I’ve quit with the obsessive calorie-counting now, but that stage is useful for getting your head into the right place.

The new Portishead album sounds a bit mechanically goth. It reminds me a bit of Switchblade Symphony, but with more drum machine. Not sure how I feel about it, will have to give it a few more listens.

Popularity: 32% [?]

Tags: Mac, Music, Random by matt
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Transmission is very nifty. And I thought uTorrent on Windows was good!

Also, good e-commerce experience of the day: Book-a-Bin. Nice simple straightforward “specify what sort of bin you want, when, and where” system, handles the payment, the bin simply arrives when you asked for it and goes away as booked. Have used it before, and have booked another bin to cart more of our accumulated rubbish this weekend.

Popularity: 25% [?]

Tags: Mac, Random by matt
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Gave up on Synergy2, leaving aside the issues with daemonizing, having the server running on OS X was resulting in wacky Warcrack mouse behaviour. Have dug out an old Belkin USB KVM. It too has its issues — in particular it takes a few seconds for Windows to notice devices when I switch to that machine, and in the past it used to do annoying things like automatically flip inputs if the monitor was put to sleep. Which is a bit of an issue when you’re dealing with system reboots/etc.

Otherwise, so far so good. Except for iTunes+AppleTV. Streaming is fine, syncing video is fine, but trying to sync the 10k+ music files causes the system to eat itself after about 500-600 tracks. Suspect it may simply be that 1GB of RAM and a G5 is not exactly what you’d call “current” and iTunes is gnawing its eyes out trying to cope, but it’s tricky to track down when the system runs so slowly that you pretty much have to reset to get control back…

I had hoped to move the video encoding work over to the Mac. It’s a slower machine, but OS X is pretty good about running this sort of thing in the background with limited impact on interactive stuff. But the mplayer/mencoder bug which screws up subtitle support appears to be extant only on OS X and in every build I can find that’ll support H.264 as a target codec. Having tried a few randomly-selected SVN trees I’ve been unable to make it build at all, each time for different exciting reasons. Same deal with the ffmpeg kit. So for now that task is back on Windows too.

Will see how this goes. My experience has been that most computing environments irritate me within a few weeks at best, and while I’m quite happy with Leopard at the office this dual-system scheme is probably going to get on my nerves after a while. Longer term I may simply wind up buying a more modern Mac and putting everything on that, worst case with the video stuff would be a GUI-less Linux VM, and everything else I care about (WoW, Spore, Puzzle Quest) seems to have a Mac port. But that’s probably end-of-the-year stuff, so We Shall See.

Popularity: 34% [?]

Tags: Mac, Tech, Video, appletv by matt
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I’d been liking much of what Vista has to offer as a home desktop system for a while now, but have run into enough little niggling driver/application issues — particularly since installing service pack 1 — that I’ve finally had it.

The old G5 iMac has been dragged upstairs. It is now my primary “work” computer, it’s got enough grunt to handle web browsing, terminal sessions, and iTunes to manage the AppleTV, even if it’s old enough that it can’t play H.264 content without stuttering. The PC has been nuked and had XP reinstalled, and it’ll have only games and maybe a few video tools installed.

Synergy is handling mouse+keyboard. The Mac synergys doesn’t seem to like running in the background, but I can live with having a terminal session open with it. I’d report it as a bug but there doesn’t appear to have been any activity in two years, so probably not much point. If there’s a better tool for this out there, I’m all ears.

Popularity: 18% [?]

Tags: Tech by matt
2 Comments »

I remember looking at LiveUpgrade at my old job and it not working very well because I was trying to be all tricksy with it and make it do things beyond the most basic “clone this and apply these patches” — I was trying to use it to convert Solaris 8+VxVM to Solaris 10+SVM, and while it should have worked, it didn’t, and it felt like the failure to work was down to arbitrary limits and hard-coded inanity in LU.

So I’ve never really seen it working in any useful fashion.

This week, while thinking about how best to set up the new shinies (an X4600 to play the role of database server, and a pair of X4100s to be its minions) LU somehow popped into my mind. As I have a little time to play with for a change, figured it couldn’t hurt to fiddle.

So we now have a new default configuration for all new Solaris systems. Single filesystem for the OS at ~50GB, a spare slice of the same size for the alternate BE, with the rest going to swap. This is assuming 136GB spindles.

And it works quite nicely. There’s some risk of actually being able to patch things in future, thanks to the easy back-out route and the much less-insane downtime requirements.

I’d like to think that we’ll migrate existing systems to a similar configuration, it’s certainly technically possible to do, but I’m not going to count on having the time to do it. Shall have to settle for a very gradual process of conversion by replacement.

Popularity: 20% [?]

Tags: Solaris, Tech by matt
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The scenario: two machines running Sybase ASE 12.5.4. A database that needs to be replicated one-way. Must allow for fast-bcp during the mornings prior to business commencing. Oh, and don’t spend any money.

After poking at ASE Replicator a bit I decided it was (a) too complicated for the job; and more importantly (b) too fragile. It seemed a bit too easy to confuse.

So I’ve written a set of three shell scripts. The first runs after the fast-bcp jobs are done. It disables bulkcopy and truncate-on-checkpoint so the “replication” can even work in the first place. It then takes a full dump of the database and loads it on the secondary machine. Thankfully the database isn’t too big, so the dump/load cycle takes only a few minutes.

Every five minutes during working hours a second script dumps the transaction log and loads it on the second machine. This takes seconds at the moment, though it’ll probably be a bigger job once things go into production. Thus lockfiles.

At the end of the day a third script runs, turning bulkcopy and truncate-on-checkpoint back on, and cleaning up the area on the Filer where these intra-day dumps are going.

It seems to work so far. It’s not very smart, if there’s a problem it’ll send email and bail out, leaving the lockfile in place to impede any further work. But it didn’t take too long to write and it hasn’t involved buying anything, so that much should keep people happy.

Popularity: 20% [?]

Tags: Sybase, Tech by matt
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I may perhaps be taking too much enjoyment from:


# zfs snapshot tank0/sybase/home@copy
# zfs send tank0/sybase/home@copy | ssh root@db2 'zfs receive tank0/sybase/home'
# zfs destroy tank0/sybase/home@copy
# ssh root@db2 'zfs destroy tank0/sybase/home@copy'


But I’m not sure I care. Is good.

Except for the bit where I repeatedly typo it as ‘destory’.

Popularity: 23% [?]

Tags: Solaris, Tech by matt
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“Here, enjoy this $1 billion pile of laptops. What, you wanted training and electricity?”.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Tags: Politics by matt
1 Comment »

Why yes, I can.

The dryer function in our five-year-old Ariston unit died last spring.  I’ve been resisting buying a standalone dryer ever since, largely because it’s been sunny enough of the time to use the washing line, though also through simple procrastination.

In any event, winter looms.  The weather is getting darker and wetter, and opportunities to dry clothes on the line are becoming few and far between.  So early this week I finally gave in and ordered a Fisher & Paykel unit.  It arrived yesterday, and has been working Just Fine taking care of our backlog since.

Unlike the older-style dryers I’m used to this thing doesn’t leave clothes horribly wrinkled.  It also doesn’t take hours to get the job done.  The latter is almost certainly helped by the washer being a front-load unit that doesn’t leave clothes dripping wet at the end of the wash.

I do still feel a little uneasy about using a dryer again — I was enjoying hanging clothes on the line, and it made me feel just a little bit virtuous — but the alternative when it’s raining is no clean clothes.  Not a great look work-wise.  So.

Popularity: 22% [?]

Tags: Random by matt
2 Comments »

Still happy with the decision to buy an AppleTV. Have a fairly straightforward process down for converting random downloaded AVI files (mencoder to the rescue), and Handbrake has been doing a good job with DVD content.

The unit has gotten confused once and refused to play protected content downloaded from the Australian iTunes Store. I suspect this is because of the shonky trick playing shared content from a US account, but it’s only happened once and it’s a bit of a “black box” solution with limited debugging options. A reboot fixed it, anyway.

“Vodcasts” from the ABC are pretty nice. I’ve got iTunes nabbing Good Game and Media Watch. There’s no technical reason they couldn’t be higher-quality video, so it’s a pity the ABC seem intent on building some sort of proprietary BBC-iPlayer-style system instead of simply using what they already have. As an end-user AppleTV is a pretty nice platform for this sort of thing, and the RSS+videofiles approach should work on just about anything. Presumably the issue is, as always, legal rather than technical.

My only real gripe with AppleTV is the size of closed captions. Too small. Probably OK for younger deaf people with excellent vision, but useless for anyone with poor vision. Wouldn’t be surprised if the largest-growing part of the deaf world is older people who are likely to also have their eyes crapping out on them too, so the tiny text seems like an odd choice. But at least it’s there, presumably increasing the size is the sort of tweak Apple can make later.

More captioned content would be nice, as would be video on the local iTunes store. Support for streaming video other than Youtube (e.g., the South Park freebies) seems like it’d be a winner in the US market where these things are available. My understanding is that while AppleTV is not what you’d call an open platform, it is reasonably modular. The potential is huge if Apple were to open things up a bit.

Good use of AU$500? Yes, provided you were already willing to spend that kind of money on something like a DVD player or one of the other networked media players.

Popularity: 28% [?]

Tags: appletv by matt
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