May 2008

There were 56 posts published in May 2008 (this is page 2 of 6).

More Myth

I watched some videos with MythTV last night and tested the commercial skip feature. It was flawless! I’d been disabling this feature because the mythcommflag process puts a load on my measly 1 GHz backend server: enough to make the server unsuitable acting both as a backend and a frontend. As long as I’m using a separate frontend, though, things work just fine. The commercial skipping is definitely worth the extra CPU cycles.

I’m still wowed by this tool. What’s really unique about MythTV is the way it slices up what we used to know as television. Tivo, the trailblazing PVR, gave us the ability to treat a television program like a book: you can walk away from the program and “pick it up” the next time you had time to watch.
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Phishing attempt is stoped

This just arrived in my inbox. Someone obviously didn’t read my earlier post:

From: “Google-AdWords-Noreply” support at google.com
To: markt at blahblahblah.blah
Subject: Your AdWords Google Account is stoped.

My account is stoped. My God, how could this have happened?

I Can’t Watch This

Inspired by my MythTV tinkering…

I Can’t Watch This
Weird Al Yankovic

I can’t watch this. I can’t watch this
I can’t watch this. I can’t watch this

My my my my TV makes me so bored
Makes me say, oh my lord
What is this garbage here?
Wanna cover my eyes and plug my ears
It sucks, and that’s no lie
It’s about as much fun as watching paint dry
Lowers my IQ one notch
And that’s the reason why, uh, I can’t watch
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Good description of the Debian/Ubuntu security flaw

Linux users often like to poke fun at Microsoft Windows for being prone to security attacks. Now the joke’s on Linux users: at least Debian and Ubuntu ones. It seems for over two years these distros were hashing their SSH/OpenVPN and other OpenSSL-generated keys using entropy that wasn’t quite entropic. Thus, the keys are easily guessable – a colossal security mistake.

My friend Mike B. sent me a link to DailyTech’s excellent description of the gaffe. It’s well worth a read.

We own the greenway!

We took a family bike ride along the greenway and got to the Mecca of greenway riding: Shelly Lake! That’s about 8 to 10 miles away from our house (and then 8-10 back)! It took about an hour each way but the whole family did a fantastic job.

More soon. Nap time now. 🙂

The eyeball sting is going around

A joke among the family (and nowhere else) is an adaptation of the Muppet Show joke involving talking houses.

“My wife’s not feeling well,” one house says to the other.

“What’s the matter?”

“She’s got the eyeball sting!”

This is uproariously funny to Hallie and Travis (the original punch line is “she’s got the shingles”). I wasn’t laughing earlier this week, though; I had the real eyeball sting. It was some sort of conjunctivitis in my right eye.
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Roll out the barrels

I drove yesterday for the first time in days and was surprised to see gas at $3.85 a gallon. Oil crossed the $135/barrel mark yesterday and will no doubt continue upward. Was this the “Surge” of which Bush was speaking?

I was just thinking back to my posts about gas prices. Here’s one where $1.97 was too much. Ha! And then there’s my July 2005 “Crude Awakening” post. I’m wistful for the $2.30 a gallon prices I was bemoaning then.

Back then I was also wondering when gas might be $5 a gallon. I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re there by the end of the year. All the more reason I’m happy my commuter vehicle of choice has two wheels.

Mythbuster

I’ve had this tower PC all spec’ed out as a MythTV box for probably two years now. Its got a Hauppauge Nexus-S DVB-S satellite TV card and an AverMedia PVR-150 TV tuner card (a TigerDirect cheapie) in it as well as a 300Gig hard drive. All I could get out of it was some of the free satellite TV channels, and then only using command-line linuxTV applications to change channels. I could never get the TV tuner card to work, so the box sat mostly idle.
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