Category: Uncategorized

I failed to mention this but I had recently appropriated another 32″ LCD TV for the home. It is a Panasonic TH-32C12K screen which is only HD-Ready but has a double-layered screen. I found it for cheap at a local Carrefour for only RM1399 (£250). It even has an SD-Card slot which can be used to view photographs. Anyway, one interesting thing that caught my eye about this television is that it uses GPL software!

I was just browsing through the menus last weekend when I came across a menu entry to display the license entry. Clicking on it displayed both the GPLv2 and LGPLv2 license. Interesting. It is good that Panasonic is a manufacturer that clearly advertises the use of GPL code. It even lists the website to download the source-code. Nice. However, the website where the code is made available is not very well done and I have a feeling that the code is probably not nicely organised either. Still a better attempt when compared to most other houses who co-opt open source code and try to wriggle their way out of their responsibilities just because nobody else knows about it.

Anyway, I thought that this was something worth mentioning.

I had never given this HTPC software a try before but I decided to do it yesterday night. Moovida is another interesting project but it never quite got the traction of many other HTPC software. The Linux platform is still heavily dominated by MythTV although I think that it is a little dated by now. I decided to give Moovida a spin on my new LCD TV and pulled the packages from the experimental Debian repository.

It was the first time that I had pulled anything in from experimental and I had to learn how to do it. At first, I merely did a apt-get -t experimental install moovida but it kept complaining about dependency issues. Then, I looked around and found out that experimental does not have a complete set of packages and I needed to add in unstable packages too. After doing that, I got Moovida to install easily. Then, it was merely a process of configuration and playing around with it.

I immediately tested out its online streaming capabilities. I managed to pull in music from various online services and also from my own local iTunes server. One thing that I noticed immediately was that Moovida automagically pulls in album covers and all from the Internet. So, the playlist had nice little pictures attached to them.

Then, I decided to test out video streaming and visited TED instead. I managed to watch the latest TED video on development around the world. On my 512k ADSL connection, it was mostly watchable. It had a discernible lag about once a minute when it was busy buffering but it was otherwise enjoyable. Again, Moovida would pull in thumbnails from the Internet when browsing for videos where available. I guess that it is time to upgrade my line to 1Mbps.

So far so good.

Then, I faced some problems. I have yet to figure out how to configure the local media. While it could pick up my daap music files, it had trouble connecting to my upnp media server. So, it was not able to pick out local videos and images that I shared. There are some error messages on the console so I think that this is merely a configuration problem. I might try mounting them as NFS/CIFS and see if that will work, tonight.

All in all, I think that Moovida is an excellent media player application, even if it lacks the powerful PVR capabilities of MythTV or Freevo. However, the VIA platform that I had it running on was a little slow. Even at 800×600, there was some jerkiness in the TED video. I guess that a combination of live streaming and playback is a little too taxing for the little bugger. I will probably migrate it over to an old AMD laptop of mine to see if that helps matters.

Anyhow, this is just a little thing because I fully intend to purchase a PS3 soon. Once that is done, the PS3 will probably play the role of a HTPC instead. But temporarily, I will have Moovida to play around with. Then again, Moovida/XBMC might still have a role to play at home simply because they can support more video formats and various nifty online streaming capabilities.

Sometimes, I wonder what kind of things get into peoples’ heads. At work today, I was given access to a number of servers in order to install our application on it. Another department had set it up for our usage. Unfortunately, I ran into problems real quickly. I was not able to install any application on it. Turned out that while I had root access via sudo, I did not actually have root permissions.

Sometimes, things happen that give me pause. I wonder.

Last weekend, I decided to browse around for an ergonomic keyboard. I dropped by the Digital Mall, PJ right after attending the local network IET AGM. The exact model that I am using at the office, Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000, seemed to be the only mass-marketed ergonomic keyboard in the market. It was selling for around the RM200 price range at most retailers (cheapest I found was RM199).

What I did notice however, was that Microsoft seemed to be flooding the channels with their older model keyboards. Most of them were going for about 50% off their RRPs. Unfortunately for me, the ergonomic keyboard was not one of the models being flouted. So, I would either have to settle for an over-priced piece of plastic or find some other solution.

I feel that for most ergonomic keyboards, the proof is in the pudding so to speak. One should actually use one before deciding whether or not they are actually useful as ergonomic keyboards. Unfortunately for me again, the only model that I have used and come to love is actually a Microsoft product. However, I was hoping to find similar ones from other manufacturers.

I looked and looked but did not find many. The only other ergonomic keyboard available was the Logitech Wave series and another Microsoft series. Honestly, I found this rather sad. As someone who spends most of his time typing away at the keyboard, I have started to appreciate the use of ergonomic keyboards. I may actually end up shelling RM200 for the Microsoft one at some point.

And I thought that the only way to make people cry using sand was to throw it in their eyes. The winner of Ukraine’s Got Talent managed to accomplish that without throwing sand at anything except a light-table. She told the story on Germany’s invasion of Ukraine during WW2 with nothing but sand and looking at the audiences’ reaction, I would think that she was a worthy winner. I never knew that one could do that with sand. Amazing!

Always by your side.

PS: I wonder what she could do with a Microsoft Surface?

I had just completed my book club reading assignment – Air by Geoff Ryman. It made an interesting read because I had never read anything written like that before. The story itself wasn’t particularly special but I found the writing style quite interesting. The author uses very short sentences and descriptions throughout his book. I do hope that it is his style and he had not been needlessly edited out by his publishing company.

Air is the story of a town’s fashion expert Chung Mae, a smart but illiterate peasant woman in a small village in the fictional country of Karzistan (loosely based on the country of Kazakhstan), and her suddenly leading role in reaction to dramatic, worldwide experiments with a new information technology called Air. Air is information exchange, not unlike the Internet, that occurs in everyone’s brain and is intended to connect the world. After a test of Air is imposed on Mae’s unprepared mountain town, everyone and everything changes, especially Mae who was deeper into Air than any other person. Afterwards, Mae struggles to prepare her people for what is to come while learning all about the world outside her home.

The story itself is grounded in some facts, which is good. I like my fiction to be at least believable to an extent. It was all the more interesting because the book touched on certain issues that I have been considering recently. I particularly liked the fact that the people who lived in the story seemed to be made up of a eclectic mix of various races and religions, all living in constantly tumultuous harmony. In some ways, it reminded me so much of home.

However, I kind of dislike the way that the author made up the names of stuff, just for the sake of naming stuff differently. Like instead of a credit card, the author calls them Clever Cards instead. I ended up spending quite a bit of time distracted by this and trying to figure out what it was that the author actually meant. I could usually find a direct analogy to a real-world word that meant what the author was trying to say. Also, the bastardisation of so many words by spelling them out as they sound phonetically rather than using the actual word was rather distracting as well.

This reminded me of the recent XKCD comic about made-up words:

All in all, if Geoff Ryman writes books like this, I don’t think that I will be buying many more of them. He has some nice stories to tell but his style is too distracting for me.

A beautiful story, woven off a tapestry of lost innocence, broken promises and opportunities denied. Although I got free tickets to watch this film when it first came out, I missed it because I had some other things to do. However, I had always felt that this was a film worth watching and so I bought myself the DVD a couple of weeks ago. Although the story was told almost entirely in a foreign tongue (possibly Pashtun) nothing was missed in the telling.

The acting was not particularly good but it was good enough. I liked the fact that it showed an Afghanistan, a modern Afghanistan, free from the ravages of war just before the Russians invaded. It was just like any other country in the 70s. However, things got really screwed up after that. No matter how bad things already are, they can always get worse. That is my belief. I particularly liked how kites brought everyone together. There was some interesting CGI work done on the kite battles.

Anyway, it is a film worth watching if one has 2 hours of time to spare on something a little different from your normal Hollywood fare.