I've turned off commenting on my blog since I've been blogging mostly at Torrentocracy and I've really been pelted with blog spammers lately. It's too annoying to keep up with and I'm not content to live with graffiti spray painted on my home.

I'd sure like to see some kerry commercials making an issue out of Bush requiring people to sign loyalty oaths in order to attend Bush rallies.

Drudge links to this:

but not to this:

Here's a mini interview I did on my corporate blogging for Dell on Jon Cass's PR Blog.

I've added links on my Linux page and my Links page to Torrentocracy. This is a project I am working on which combines RSS + Bit Torrent + Your TV. In a nutshell, it enables a cool new way for you to get the media (audo/video) which you watch on your TV.

Tomorrow is father's day. I'm seeing a spike of traffic from people doing google searches for "dad jokes". Dad would be proud.

Mark June 14th as the first day I saw a Bush 2004 ad in Texas. Of course, I saw these back in Ohio months ago. Apparently, pessimism never created a job and John Kerry spends his time talking about the Great Depression.

While wasting time on the internet, I ran into a thread on a message board asking people what the number one song was when they were born. You can find out what it was here.

Looking over the list of number 1s is pretty interesting if not just to get a sense of the times through their choice in music. But what really struck me was that starting in 1992, the actual number of different number 1s per year completely dropped off and has more or less stayed lower since. I wonder what the exact correlation to 1992 is, but overall I think it says a lot about the effects of media consolidation. Less choice equals less number ones.

And the answer: In 1992, the FCC passed duopoly rules allowing ownership of more than one FM radio station in a single market.

In my quest for streamlined home entertainment, I must now pimp the MX-500 universal remote control. You certainly don't need to have your own home built DVR to get benefit out of this sucker (only downfall, its a bit big). The split between a programmable LCD with real buttons is how it should be done. Plus, you can program buttons to do multiple remote commands for different devices ... long story short, I can now press one button, it turns on my stereo and sets it to receive audio from my television and then turns on my TV. Bottom line, this is now my only remote control on the coffee table and it works well.

Buy this thing. It costs around $100.

I was griping before about my problems getting MythTV set up as as my homebrew DVR, but one by one I've cleared out my bugs and got it working. The real key to everything was finding the ivtv X driver. Once installed, things have been smooth sailing.

Right now I'm torrenting down media from the internet, transfering two phish shows from my old machine (lol, a PowerEdge server) while I watch TV and blog. I've gone fair use blue in the face.

I'll throw this out before I do any googling, but it seems to me that my Linksys wireless router doesn't like it too much when I'm on a bit torrent session. Or, at least, it all works and I'm not firewalled, but whenever I'm on one, my internet speed on my other box completely drops off. I'm only torrenting about 60K down and 40 up so that isn't much of an excuse. My guess is that the flaw comes in from the multiple people I'm sharing files with through the router to the internet.

Oh, and speaking of sharing info digitally...

And speaking of Vegas, it looks like you can't use google yet to track Southwest flights. bummer.

jambase.com gets a fresh new look, while Andy Gadiel closes down his site.

Vegas here I come.

When it dawned on me that when I move to California in September, I won't be able to take my Time Warner DVR with me, I decided to cut the commercial teather and build my own dvr. Using the afore-linked HOWTO to setup MythTV I was probably able to save myself a ton of heartache, but the process has not been entirely smooth. In fact, until I saw this message on the users list yesterday, there was a good 10 day period where I couldn't figure out why my system magically stopped showing tv video (I'm an apt noob and got burned by an automatic bad upgrade ... guess i'm in-apt ... sorry, bad joke).

Anyway, in back-revving to the working version of ivtv, I realized it is a perfect candidate to be dkms-ified. One Sunday afternoon later, and here you go (or directly at ivtv-0.1.9-25dkms.noarch.rpm). This DKMS-enabled ivtv RPM contains both the utility portions of the ivtv package pre-compiled as well as the ivtv driver source which DKMS then builds for whatever kernel you're running (which means it replaces both the old ivtv RPM and the the ivtv-kmdl RPM).

From what I've seen with mythtv, the previous convention was to use "kmdl" to mark kernel driver RPMs, but why limit yourself to pre-compiled binaries for only one kernel at a time, when you can utilize DKMS to do all the dirty work for you? Moreover, you can satisify the hard-core types that only want to build from source on their own box while satisfying us lazies who just rely on an RPM. Plus, now, as you boot into new kernels, DKMS will automatically build and install the ivtv package for you (assuming you have your kernel sources installed). If people think this is a worthwhile thing, let me know and I'll perhaps go repackage the other kmdl rpms for myth.

Oh yes, and speaking of feedback, does anybody know:

- How I can convince X that my TV is not as wide as it thinks? I'm using a Hauppauge 350 card, and while the tv output fits the screen perfectly, all the background myth menus get the left hand sides cut off. Also, for some reason, they mythconfigure pays no attention to my X and Y offsets which I would think would be useful in attenuating this problem.

- Why audio is coming out of the RCA audio jacks on the 350 and not the headphone jack? I direct the audio into the MIC of my soundcard, but when I then output that through my stereo, it's rather crackly.

- Why when I try to bring the menu up during live tv playback, it hangs my entire system?

As you can tell, it's all a work in progress. But hopefully dkms will make this process easier for everyone.

The March edition of Dell's Power Solutions magazine includes a paper I co-authored with Matt Domsch on Simplifying Linux Management with Dynamic Kernel Module Support. It's more current than the Linux Journal article and is also focused more towards using dkms from the systems administration perspective.

Today, I flew home to Cincinnati for the weekend. My dad tracked me directly on google, watching the little graph of my flight, knowing before I did that I got in 20 minutes early. Meanwhile, last night I stop by Barnes and Noble to pick up a copy of Bringing Down the House to help put me in the mood for my upcoming Vegas trip, only to spend a half hour searching for the book because I didn't know where it was. My searching finally led me to a computer marked "For Employee Use Only" and only after comandeering it, did I realize it would be in the "games" section.

Why oh why does Barnes and Noble not just put kiosks throughout their store to help their customers? I guess they're waiting for Amazon to completely eat their lunch.