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.