Seems I have fans reading this blog at Makro, as when we were there last saturday it took ages until I received something else to put back in the cart… Sigh, can’t have it all I guess 😉

Am i the only one getting pretty annoyed at these ads?

For starters, it’s a bit silly to show me this ad as I have no way of becoming an In.di kijker even if I wanted to (short of me moving to an In.di-covered area of course), so even if I would now say "WOAH, I LIKES!!!" there wouldn’t really be any point. + you still have to wait for the episodes to air before actually having recorded the entire season, so that’s not a very nice ad technique is it… (unless I’m mistaken, "neem hele serie op" just sets a number of scheduled recordings in the future, it doesn’t simply download the entire series from In.di servers, right?).

Other than that, I just wish I had the money to get VT4 to broadcast "Pirate bay kijkers hadden het VOLGENDE seizoen reeds VORIG JAAR op hun harde schijf staan" right after the In.di ad. Sigh.

Na mijn vorige taalles is het weer tijd voor een nieuwe… over het alombekende maar nietbestaande gezegde "gepakt en gezakt". Fout, fout, fout! Het is bepakt en bezakt!

Na het veelvoudig op TV te horen moest ik er toch eens iets van zeggen, dus beste Vlaamse TV-vedetten (niet-Vlaamse en niet-TV en niet-vedetten mag ook), lees deze post even, en we kunnen weer verder. Graag correct zeggen en schrijven 🙂 

Update: okay, met schaamrood op de wangen moet ik bekennen dat het blijkbaar fout is, en dat gepakt en gezakt klopt… nochtans had ik nadat ik het hoorde een hoop google result pagina’s bezocht en die waren het met mij eens… de site van de Nederlandse Taalunie zat er echter niet tussen… Bedankt cedric !

I’ve set up MythTV with a separate frontend and backend machine a while ago. Now, I don’t always watch TV on my TV, but also on my workstation (as does Diana), which runs Windows XP (yea yea, eww, eww, etc). There isn’t any working MythTV windows frontend available, and some people don’t seem to like the idea so they guess there never will be one.

I’ve asked a few questions on the #mythtv-users channel relating to documentation of the protocol, which is severely lacking, but apparently the only thing one should do in that case is bash the person who is asking the question. So I’ll just bash back: someone really needs to learn how to write a decent protocol.

For starters, there is no back/forwards compatibility. At the start of the session you announce your version, and if it doesn’t match with the backend, you just get thrown out. Done.

Then, it’s a bit of a ridiculous protocol, with 8 characters where you can put (in text format) the length of the upcoming message, and then for x characters, the message itself. Parameters are separated by []:[], okay, probably not a likely sequence to be somewhere inside a variable. But you can only do some things with this protocol. If you want to get information instead of action out of the backend, you have to connect to the MySQL database yourself, which means another open port, another grant statement into your MySQL users, and another way to get incompatible when some small part in the database structure changes.

MythWeather, the weather forecast plugin, is also broken. Well, it’s broken in reality right now because msnbc changed their site, but that’s bad luck and can be fixed. But it’s also broken by design, as there is a webpage part, in PHP, for your MythWeb server, and then there’s a python part for on your frontend. Both with totally different code, just pulling the location from the database – in my opinion the frontend should query the backend through the protocol for the current weather info and be done with it. A frontend should be just that, a dumb front end retrieving info from the backend.

MythMusic. Ah, another great piece of design. You have a music collection on the backend, which is set up for MythTV. Then you have your frontend, which contains the actual music player. However, the backend does not stream your music data to the frontend, instead you must mount a (smb/nfs/whatever) share on your frontend (on the same mountpoint as where the music is on your backend, no less) and then it will play your mp3’s locally.

Of course in the transcoder profiles, many ID’s are hardcoded so you can rename and switch all you want, the transcoder will still pick profile id 2 from your database wether it’s what you wanted or not.

I haven’t dug deeper into this stuff, but I’ll bet there’s more where that came from — in my view caused by lack of decent coder docs combined with a broken protocol implementation.

I read on the channel the backend would likely need a complete overhaul, the database structure is completely idiotic and the frontend theming sucks majorly, so one has to wonder if there is ANY piece of this software which actually works the way it’s supposed to. 

Update after more coding: it also crashes the entire backend when you give it bogus data. Combine this with absolutely no authentication whatsoever on the protocol and anyone can fuck up your scheduled recordings, tv watching, etc.

Update after calming down and receiving a wider audience by way of mythtvnews.com: many of these issues are known and are being worked on, but of course Rome wasn’t built in a day – if you can help, I guess it would be welcomed in making MythTV better — after this post you may think I hate it, but in fact I think it’s great, otherwise I wouldn’t be using it 🙂

Time for another rant… when writing PHP code, PLEASE PRETTY PLEASE use <?php instead of the short-sucky <? tag to start your PHP code. This is disabled on many machines, including all of mine. This means whenever I find such an application I want to use, I install it on my server and it goes bork. Sometimes, everywhere <?php is used except in 1 or 2 places, making the thing fail when you’re least expecting it.

This  implies you have to use <?php echo instead of <?= too, and yes, that is more work, but it’s certainly much nicer, as I don’t have to open each and every .php and .inc and .whatever file, replacing <?= by <?php echo, <? by <?php and then <?phpphp by <?php, right?

Yes PowerAdmin , RackTables , ZenPhoto , I’m looking at you. 

Edit: Oh look, WordPress doesn’t make &lt; out of < in the post title – bug reported. I think.

From April’s Linux Format in the "Mailserver" column:

Reader’s letter:

I fail to understand why Linux Format keeps dismissing and talking down Gentoo Linux. I note that the latest issue has yet another dig at it [Gentwho?, Distrowatc, LXF89]. I have been using Gentoo for about two years, and my only regret is that I did not discover Gentoo earlier – there is no way I would go back to any other distros I’ve tried with the problems of finding compatible dependencies. You imply that it takes a long time to install Gentoo. That is true, but if one considers the time spent in uninstalling unwanted programs and finding dependencies for other distros, then that is a small consideration. As for the difficulty of installing… It couldn’t be simpler if one takes the time to read the manual carefully. One does wonder if your magazine’s reluctance to endorse the system is due to the fact that Gentoo users have little use for the software included on the discs you issue with the magazine and are less likely, therefore, to buy it?

 – Graham Young, Nottingham, England 

LXF reacts: 

How would we "endorse" Gentoo? By writing about it? Oh, we already do that… Er, by putting it on our (apparently redundant) coverdisc? No, we do that too. Hmm. I have an idea: we could print a massive poster extolling the virtues of the system. In fact, we just have – you are holding it right now. In the true spirit of the Gentoo build-it-yourself culture, you need to do a bit of work yourself, but it’s easy if you follow these simple instructions: 1) cut out all the individual words from any 20 pages of the magazine. 2) Boil down the spine binding to acquire some glue. 3) Lay the remaining pages flat and glue on the words in the correct order to make an inspiring message. (NB for a stage 3 poster only, you can simply take a big marker pen and draw on the pages yourself.) 

Standard Gentoo-fanboy post, thoroughly torn down by LXF.

*rant* 

Most of the time when I see someone asking how to kill a process on *nix I see someone responding "kill -9 <pid>".

Alas, this is NOT the way you kill a process … the process gets killed alright, and a little too hard. So for everyone not understanding, here’s a small explanation. Everyone who knows, just skip to the next post 😛

Normally when you (or something) kill a process, it gets a SIGTERM. When a program receives SIGTERM, it knows it should shut down and saves all its open files (or prompts the user), closes its file handles, etc etc. When you use -9, you send a SIGKILL which causes the OS to clean up the process without further ado (e.g. when it doesn’t respond to SIGTERM anymore), and shut it down. This also kills the process indeed, but doesn’t always have the intended effect when looking at data loss… Remember it 😉

*end of rant*