The Musings of the Kat

Posted by Kat Crichton Sun, 20 May 2007 08:49:00 GMT

Until recently I've been using an open source diagram creation program called Dia. It's an adequate (if a little clunky) alternative to Microsoft Visio. You drag and drop different shaped blocks and join them together using stretchy arrows, all of which can be customised to look as you wish.

However, as a programmer, I want to lay out a set of relationships and let the software work out the best way to represent them.

Enter Graphviz, a set of open source tools for doing just that.

I used the DOT language to describe my MythTV set-up as a collection of elements connected together with wires, IR and Bluetooth. It also allows you to group similar elements together and even create subgraphs.

It really does an excellent job of laying out a readable diagram and I'm itching to find some way to use it in production.

Posted by Kat Crichton Wed, 21 Jun 2006 11:58:00 GMT

I've decided not to put it off any longer. I've finally had enough of Windows. It's time for the big switch from my increasingly sluggish Windows XP machine to Linux.

I've had more Linux than Windows machines at home for ages, but have never really had the guts to use it as a regular desktop PC.

I'm pretty sure the transfer will leave me with a more stable working environment and I'm very sure that Microsoft don't really deserve my hard earned Sterling for the DRM/Spyware ridden Vista.

I'll probably still use Windoze for games until I can persuade Wine to play them, but for everything else, there's a viable Linux alternative.

So far, I've migrated my office documents, email (including GPG), contacts, calendars, instant messaging. I'm now working on getting my iPod working properly (it's already looking like I'll be able to sync my contacts and calendar easier than before).

I feel better already!

Posted by Kat Crichton Tue, 06 Jun 2006 11:42:55 GMT

Discovered that XMAME now has a parameter -grabkeyboard that fixes the problem in my last post.

When XMAME runs from MythTV, it grabs the keyboard focus, instead of leaving it on the paused MythTV interface... Hooray, I can play OutFoxies again!

Posted by Kat Crichton Tue, 16 May 2006 18:56:00 GMT

Well, I've managed to get MythTV working fine with Fedora Core 5. XMAME isn't quite working in conjunction with it, because of a feature of the last version of Metacity window manager that caused the fullscreen window to not have keyboard focus. I think this is reverted in version 2.14.3 which I'm downloading right now.

Haven't yet got an iTunes server running on the box. I've read about the Multi-Threaded DAAP Daemon which seems to be a better DAAP server than the one I recommended previously. I'll update my little tutorial if I start using that instead.

Fedora Core 5 seems to be pretty good. Not 100% sure about the new bubbly look, but if it continues to offend my sensibilities I really should try and create my own desktop skin. Mind you most of the time it sits quietly behind MythTV, so It's not such a big deal.

Posted by Kat Crichton Sat, 15 Apr 2006 05:01:00 GMT

Okay, now I've done the sensible thing and put Rails into the vendor folder - after a couple of weeks of no site.

That should stop any further problems occuring thanks to my hosting company upgrading (as they should) to the latest version.

Mind you, the latest version includes the capacity to Freeze to a specific version, which should stop this sort of thing happening again.

Posted by Kat Crichton Fri, 13 Jan 2006 12:30:00 GMT

Found a nice little project that transcodes MythTV .nuv files to iPod video and provides them as a subscribable podcast feed.

Unfortunately it relies on the xvid support in the latest version of ffmpeg (only available through CVS), that doesn't want to compile on my FC3 machine. Will post if and when I get it working.

Posted by Kat Crichton Wed, 05 Oct 2005 18:11:00 GMT

Windoze just doesn't seem to be capable of it.

You want to upgrade a PC's processor; so inevitably, the motherboard and memory have to follow suite. You try to boot the PC and it goes into a reboot-loop.

This has happened a few times recently and each time I end up reinstalling Windows. Not that I mind too much, Windows seems to need regular reinstalls to stop it from seizing up altogether.

Linux seems to handle new hardware a lot better, although it's always possible to boot into a low run level (a rather extreme equivalent of Windows Safe Mode!). You just don't get the Windows clog-up problems with Linux, as applications' settings aren't all installed into one bloated registry file.