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Free Stuff!

I’m embarrassed to say that I googled for an ebook for one I wanted to buy at Amazon, instead of actually purchasing said book since I felt shafted that I couldn’t get free shipping as a Canadian. I swear, I’ve gotten free shipping from them before. I *could* get free shipping from the Canadian site at Amazon.ca, but prices haven’t been adjusted for Canadian dollar spike. Why pay $50 CAD for a book when it’s going price is $30US. Forget Chapters/Indigo for that matter, as the same book is like $60-$70 CAD. With the Candian dollar stronger than the American, why let myself get lynched?

Anyways, I actually found that very ebook. It was the first hit I got from Google. The site that serves it is www.scribd.com, and they’re basically like a youtube of documents. You post a document, and they host it publicly for everyone. I don’t know who takes the time to get the pdf versions of these books up, but a lot of popular books are indeed up on scribd.

The books I’m reading on their right now are:

The Mythical Man Month - A classic in software engineering that outlines the process of software development.

Code Complete, 2nd Edition - A book on how to write better and more complete code. Kinda like the bushcraft of software. Coding is a craft, and as a software developer who is always trying to continually get better, it’s a book that I quite like.

Anyways, both books are ones that I will purchase as soon as the list value for us Canadians matches the American price. Otherwise I can’t bring myself to buy the books when they’re almost twice the cost simply because I’m a Canadian.

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Another note along the lines of free internet stuff. This is pretty late news, but I finally downloaded the new Radiohead album. No, I didn’t pirate their music, but I got it from their official website.

If you goto www.radiohead.com, you can purchase their new album online for the low low price of whatever you want to pay for it. Entering $0.00 is a valid price, and will allow you to download their album. You can also buy their fancy box set for $80, and it’ll get shipped to you. I’m listening to it as I type this, and it’s an amazing album so far. If you’re a radiohead fan, go out and get it if you haven’t already. If you’re not a radiohead fan, go out and get it anyways. Hell, I would pay for it if I had to.

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A Fall Week

No, this is not another techie post. I think I’ll avoid writing those if I can, as this isn’t really the forum for that. And hey, this is supposed to be a personal blog about myself and not about technology. Although I love gadgets and technology, and it is a big part of my life, my life doesn’t equate to it… at least, I hope not

So anyways, I give you a recap of the last week of my life.

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Ultimate frisbee has returned after a 10 day hiatus due to the Canadian Thanksgiving break. We played both our games on the weekend on the Ottawa U astroturf. I love that stuff!

Once you’ve played on the fancy shmancy turf, it’s hard to go back to regular grass fields. No hidden ankle-breaking divots to run around, no slipping on wet grass, and no nasty stains. It’s always nice to play on astro-turf. I have even had a chance to play on the even fancier turf at the Landsdwon Football stadium. Fall Ultimate has been pretty awesome for venues.

I thought we’d be rusty after such a break, but we were revved up and we creamed both our opponents. Saturday’s game was pretty much a straightforward victory, even in the rain and without female spares. We played the same opponents we played during the finals in the summer, and again we beat them down. It was like deja vu all over again, as they continued to rely on the same defense that they tried to use in playoffs. Zone defense is easily beatable, especially when its the only defense used.

Sunday’s game was a little more of a contest. We were matching points tit-for-tat for about the first 10 points of the game. Offensively both teams were hot, and there was no real defense going on. We played a man at first, but decided to mix it up and go zone since they were considerably speedier than us. Our zone shut down their offense for some solid turn overs and we ended up creaming them thereafter.

Ultimate is great :-). I honeslty can’t think of any other sport that I would enjoy more. It’s very deep in both strategy and athleticism, so I’m continually learning the game. The assloads of running are starting to whip me into shape (I can walk flights of stairs without gassing, huzzah!), and the intellectual side of it is simply beautiful to see in action. To watch a solid offensive play in motion is a thing of beauty.

I guess the only way to describe it would be to say that it’s tons of continuous play and running like soccer, but the movement of the disc allows for a lot of strategy like in American Football.

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Saturday I was invited to a LAN party out on March road in Kanata. It was pretty fun as I got to play more Quake Wars: Enemy Territory, which just came out this month. What can I say? I can’t ever complain about 8 hours of gaming. Though we only had 6 guys playing, it was still fun to game in a group.

I also bought Team Fortress 2 which came out last week. It’s simply addicting as hell, and an amazing game. I basically had to choose between getting Halo 3 and getting TF2… I think I made the right choice. I really don’t have much time to burn on playing video games, so I’d rather spend my precious gaming minutes on a game that I would actually enjoy playing online :-).

It’s amazing to see that computer gaming technology has reached the point where games look like Pixar movies… rendered in real time. The graphics in TF2 are pretty close to what you’d see in Toy Story. It’s quite a feat when you think that something like Toy Story took millions of dollars of hardware to render.

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Renata usually does an annual pumpkin carving event, where we invite a bunch of friends and kids over to carve some pumpkins and have a potluck. So in anticipation we’re decorating and cleaning up the house to make room for it. Renata’s sister is also unexpectedly flying in from Arizona to spend the week, so our weekend, aside from Ultimate and the LAN party, has been spent cleaning up the place.

Living in a house has its costs I guess. I’m slowly adjusting to the suburban house-hold life style. I’ve learned that things are in a constant state of needing to be cleaned, and that yard work has be done more than once every 6 weeks… which I’ve been doing most of the time. Sigh…

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Linux HTPC, the Easy Way

Apparently I didn’t do my research well enough for my htpc box.

I completely retract my previous sentiments that it would take awhile to get MythTV on a new Linux install up and running. It is now as easy as a Windows MCE installation as there exists Linux distros that are packaged with MythTV, with the sole aim to run as a HTPC box.

MythBuntu, MythDora, and KnoppMyth (based on Ubuntu, Fedora, and Knoppix respectively) are packaged to get MythTV and Linux up as painlessly as possible.

Of course, you won’t get a full fledged Linux Desktop with some of the installations, but you also get something more slimmed down and streamlined for what an HTPC is doing. MythDora is actually pretty feature complete as a desktop.

You can read more about it here: http://www.linux.com/feature/118668

It just goes to show that if there is demand, the Linux community will adjust pretty quickly to fill in the gaps.  It’ll be interesting to see how these distros will mature in a year or two.

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Linux HTPC: Ubuntu + MythTV

My parts came in and I found some time this weekend to assemble my HTPC. I’ll explain some little things I found in my weekend project.

Hardware:

As I mentioned earlier blog post, the whole rig ended up costing me a little over $500 after taxes and shipping. For those interested, the specs for my machine are:

• Generic value Biostar motherboard. ~ $60
• 1 Gig of Value DDR2 RAM ~$30
• AMD Athlon X2 3800+ CPU ~$90
• 250 Gig SATA Hard Drive ~$80
• Generic DVD-ROM ~$25
• Antec NSK2400 Case ~$100
• nVidia GeForce 7200 GS ~$60
• Microsoft MCE USB Remote ~$35

As you can see, I avoided “high end” parts, as I’m not looking for performance here for my system. Watching movies and listening to music doesn’t demand much performance, so there’s no need to break the bank for expensive parts when they’re not needed. With today’s modern CPU’s, a “value” CPU goes a long way. Also, most of the low end components generate little heat and in effect, little noise.

There are some things I would change though if I had to rebuy everything again. I would’ve bought the EE (energy efficient) version of the AMD CPU, which draws only 65 Watts of power. I also could have avoided buying a video card if I bought a motherboard that had integrated component out. I am very happy with the 7200 GS video card though, as I bought it specifically for the fact that it has no fan.

One very nifty thing about the Microsoft Remote Control is that it comes with two infrared sensors that effectively turn the remote into a floating mouse. It acts exactly like Nintendo’s WiiMote, which is super handy for navigating around the desktop while sitting on your couch. I haven’t set up that functionality yet, but it is supported on Linux.

The Antec NSK2400 case is very slick for the living room. It looks like a piece of home theatre equipment, and like most Antec cases I’ve come across, it’s very well built with lots of attention to details. The hard drive and optical drives are stored in separate compartments, with little racks for quick installation. You just slide the drives into the racks and tighten the screws, and voila, your drives are mounted to the case nicely. The case also comes with quiet fans and a power supply that’s near silent too. All in all, the NSK2400 is a great case and a great buy at only $100.

After installation, the entire rig was near silent. Without the little blue power light, I wouldn’t be able to tell if it’s on or not in my living room.

Software:

Now you must be wondering, how hard would it be to install Linux, MythTV, and get it running to be a fancy home theatre PC? Have no fear, cause I’ve blazed this trail this weekend and it turns out that it’s not all that bad.

Ubuntu has been THE Linux distribution for user friendliness and ease of use. It also is very active and has a ton of support since it’s become so popular. Hell, the Linux installation base doubled this year and I’m going to make the safe assumption that this is due to Ubuntu. I have played around with other distros, but to get something up quick and fast, I like Ubuntu.

However, when I say installation isn’t “that bad”, I mean to say that you will have to do a little legwork to get it up and running. This basically means that you will have to open up the command line console and follow instructions to get things working. Also, you may have to open up some config files in a text editor to make some changes. However, the semantics behind the commands are things you don’t have to actually know. You don’t need to know “what” is happening when you run things, it’s just that you have to step through the instructions. You only need to be capable enough to follow simple instructions like:

1) Open a command console.

2) Copy and Paste this exact command: “sudo apt-get install mythtv-themes”

If you can do that, then you can get it up and running. You may run into some driver issue if you are using obscure hardware, but if you use run-of-the-mill mainstream stuff it should simply work out of the box. If you have hardware that is less popular, you may have to do some Google sleuthing to see if someone has run into this problem and has solved the issue.

As I’ve mentioned, due to Ubuntu’s popularity, if there is a driver issue that hasn’t been resolved in a release, someone probably will have. It also helps that Ubuntu is updated and released once every 6 months, so most issues are resolved pretty quickly. Though the new release (7.10) is coming out in a week, I couldn’t wait to get my box up and running so I settled for 7.04.

It took me only about 20 minutes to install Ubuntu onto the box. All of which required me to hit “OK” and “Next” about 3 times and to choose the hard drive partition I wanted to install to, and then letting the installer do its thing.

Upon booting up on Ubuntu, I couldn’t get my wireless card to connect to the network correctly. However, on the Fiesty (7.04) quick start page it mentioned that I might have to disable a module to get it to work. This sounds “tricky”, but it involved nothing more than me copying and pasting the one command I needed into the command line. Ubuntu comes with a handy graphical tool that’s very similar to Windows XP’s wireless network tool. You just click on the network you want to use, and off it goes.

Next, I couldn’t seem to get my integrated sound to work. I Googled the device that’s on my motherboard and found a thread on the Ubuntu forums explaining that I’d have to download the drivers and install them to get it working. Realtek, the brand for my integrated sound, had Linux drivers on their website. I downloaded them and ran the installer. A minute later I had glorious sound!

I proceeded to read the instructions on how to install mythTV from this site: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MythTV

The Ubuntu documentation is very well written, and catered for us “newbies”. It even walks you through all the steps to get Ubuntu installed and setup. I followed the instructions a bit, and about an hour later I had MythTV up and running. I had to tinker around with some config files to get the remote working exactly the way I wanted, so that added about another hour’s worth of time.

I also configure some other bits to tie up loose ends. I installed SSH, so that I could configure the box from my main PC. I also installed all the codecs required to play various video files (mkv, xvid, divx, etc…) and I got SAMBA up and running to share files over the network with my windows box.

MythTV

MythTV is very slick.

It comes with an RSS aggregator so that you can get your news/blog feeds delivered to you in the living room. It also had channel guide listings, which it grabs from the internet. I didn’t test this, as I don’t have cable, but I could see it being super handy to browse and set your recordings for the PVR and general TV watching functionalities.

It even comes with its own web-browser, so if you had a wireless keyboard+mouse in the living room you could surf the ‘net within it using any browser you fancy. And it has a weather lookup plugin, which I couldn’t get to work. Apparently, it grabbed its data from msnbc, and msnbc had changed their XML data. So unless you do a little coding to get it up, the weather feature doesn’t work until the next release of MythTV.

Unfortunately I don’t have cable TV, so I couldn’t test its PVR abilities. Which I guess are its main features, but playing my videos on it have been a dream.

Conclusions

After $500 and about 6 hours setup time (including hardware install). I was able to getan HTPC running in my living room playing high def video to my TV.

Considering that TiVo costs $300US for an HD version + a monthly subscription, Bell sells their PVR box for $550, and the fact that an HTPC is an all purpose computer, it’s pretty hard to deny the value that a cheap HTPC can gbring you.

As for software, Ubuntu + MythTV offer a strong combination of user friendliness, cost ($0), and functionality. Albeit, setting it up is not for the impatient. It is definitely more involving to get it up and running than Windows Media Center edition. Whereas Windows MCE may have taken me 2-3 hours to get up, this whole project took me about 5-6.

However, the end product is much nicer. As MythTV evolves and grows, and with Ubuntu versions getting hammered out every 6 months, it won’t take long before installation time is shorter and features become even more slick. With Ubuntu 7.10 coming out in a few days, I might give that a twirl sometime soon. I’m fairly certain that someone in the community will streamline the installation to the point where you just run a script and everything will be setup for you, it’ll happen eventually (I’m just too lazy to make it myself :-p).

You cannot overlook the tweakability of a computer either. With a little tinkering, you can get a lot of features that you want that you can’t do with a black box. You’re not locked in by hardware, and with Linux, you have pretty much free reign as to how you want things set up.

So is it worth the cost + time to get a htpc up? Without a doubt. You get PVR functionality without the monthly fee, at roughly the same cost. Add in the fact that it does way more than what a standard PVR does, then surely it’s a great investment. However, even with a Windows MCE install, it does take a little bit of time to get things setup. In the end though, the investment in time should be well worth it.

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Andy McKee

So I’ve been practicing a lot more classical guitar since Renata bought me my new one. I’ve been showing some gradual improvement, but there’s still a lot that I need to work on.

I’m self-taught, so the lack of proper-technique is starting to show. I’m also pretty new to it. However, I bought myself a few classical guitar books and they’ve helped me spot the “how-to’s” and the what-not-to-do for classical guitar. This has helped me play better for sure, and has given me new gusto for wanting to improve. I’ve learned a few new songs, and have polished some of the ones that I already know. Maybe I’ll post some recordings when I have some time. Classical guitar is beautiful, and I hope over the years my hobby will help me play great music.

Another inspiration to help me pursue guitar has been the guitarist Andy McKee. He’s an amazing acoustic guitar player, and his songs are great. He doesn’t play the classical guitar, but rather the steel string acoustics. His finger picking style and technique shows incredible mastery.

I ordered his CD “Art of Motion” off of the internet and it finally arrived. It’s definitely one of those CD’s that I won’t be able to forget out of my collection. Here’s a clip of him recording one of the songs off the disc:

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HTPC Impulse Buy

So I bought a Home Theatre PC (HTPC) on a whim last week. Okay, maybe it wasn’t exactly a whim as I bought components to build one… online… which is definitely an indicator of premeditation. But who’s counting? It’s not my fault I was surfing my favorite online PC parts vendor, adding all sorts of parts onto my virtual shopping cart, punching in my credit card and address, and hitting “OK”.

It’s also a really silly buy considering I already sort of have a HTPC in the form of the XBOX 360 sitting in my living room, which connects to my PC to stream movies and music. But I demand performance, damnit, in ways that the 360 can’t give me.

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Why the Xbox 360 is shitty as a Media Center:

Namely, the 360 is a very frustrating media center to use. It will only act as a streaming media center if it connects to a computer running Windows Media Center Edition. You can’t actually store video files on the 360 on the hard drive, and you can only stream them. The 360 does indeed come with a hard drive that stores movies, but only videos that come in through Xbox Live are stored on there, you can’t just dump anything you wish.

My TV is a fair ways away from my computer, so a wireless connection is my only option here. To get smooth, stutter-free video requires that the wireless network is performing well… and in peak hours it doesn’t. Around me I can pick up 7 or 8 different wi-fi connections, which all interfere with my signal. This means that sometimes I can’t even watch video until the interference calms down since I don’t have a hardwire ethernet cable hooked up to my xbox.

Moreso, the 360 only can view movies that are in Microsoft’s proprietary WMV format. Almost all pirated movies and TV shows on the internet aren’t encoded in WMV for many reasons (well, it’s simply a shitty format). So to stream a non-wmv video to my living room you have to transcode (re-encode to another format) your video into the wmv format, which results in a lot of definition loss. Think of it as taking a photo-copy of a photo-copy.

Also, the Windows Media Center interface is lacking. Strange, considering that Microsoft has built its software around usability to have a product that lacks in usability. It handles small archives of data “okay”, but when I use it to serve my fairly large mp3 collection (40 gigs or so), the interface is cumbersome. There is a search function to look for artist/album names, but the search seems to miss a lot of valid hits. I have given up on the search feature altogether and I usually end up scrolling through my artist lists to find a particular album. Trying to reach the “R” section to listen to some Radiohead typically involves me holding down the “next” key for a few minutes to scroll to it. Like I said, painful.

In the end, the streaming videos fail to deliver all the features you’d expect from playing back video. Pausing, rewinding, and fast forwarding sometimes works, sometimes it doesn’t work at all, and when it does work it’s very clunky. I seem to only fast forward in 30 second intervals, meaning that if I want to stop watching a movie in the middle, I have to hit fast forward a hundred times to reach my desired location. Hitting rewind, depending on the type of file streamed, sometimes rewinds back 5 seconds, or sometimes it rewinds to the beginning of the video altogether. I’ve had some instances where hitting rewind takes me back to the beginning, but hitting fast forward doesn’t work… so it means sitting through stuff to get back to where I was. Ouch.

Finally, I want the flexibility to NOT run Windows Media Center on my PC. The Media Center component is integrated into the operating system, so I can’t simply install it on top of my XP Pro install as an application or service. Linux support for the 360? Forget it.

So for all these reasons, it’s frustrated me enough to buy my HTPC… even though the Windows Media Center with XBox 360 sorta works.

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Hopefully my HTPC will provide me with a great media center experience that is lacking with the 360.

I went on NCIX.com and picked up as many parts as I could in the “discount bin”. An HTPC doesn’t necessarily have to be powerful relative to today’s modern PC’s. What it does have to be is quiet. This means the cooler the components, the better as you have to avoid adding fans to the machine to keep it running.

I don’t need the fastest CPU out there for it either, as decoding movies onto the screen doesn’t require too much performance or ram. I’m also not looking for a beefy video card, as beefy video cards tend to draw a lot power, thereby increasing heat and noise levels. I bought the Geforce 7200 GS, which set me back about $60. It had exactly what I wanted, an HDTV Out port and passive cooling (no fans!). Apparently I didn’t do my research thoroughly enough (hence the “impulse” buy) as I could’ve bought an ASUS motherboard that had onboard video with an HDTV decoder and port built in. I also should have bought a cheaper single core processor, instead of the dual core one I got instead, as the single core draws less power. Oh well.

Shipping was free, and since the company was based in BC I didn’t have to pay Ontario PST. My grand total after taxes was about $540. Not a bad deal considering I got an entirely brand new PC out of it, which in all accounts runs faster than most machines out there. I did try to hunt around for a used PC before buying it, but buying a decent used machine for a good price is hard.

A machine that’s roughly 2 or 3 years old would’ve worked for me easily, but computer prices back then were much higher. Also, people don’t realize how fast computers depreciate in value. So most used PC’s out on Craigslist, Facebook, and classified boards cost WAY more than what’s justified. People buy a machine for $1000 three years ago thinking they can sell it used for half the price… unfortunately for them, $500 goes pretty far these days in terms of hardware. If anything you might get 20 to 25% of what you paid for, and the general public doesn’t seem to realize this.

Anyways, I’m thinking of slapping on Ubuntu Linux on it as the operating system, and running a media center program called MythTV. I also bought a remote control to work with it. Running Windows Media Center on it would defeat the purpose of getting it, and being locked into Windows for a media center box is very limiting since I can’t interact with the machine without a keyboard and mouse.  Having a keyboard and mouse lying around in the living room is a big turn-off.  At least with Linux I can control my media center box remotely through the command line terminal on my PC.

In the end, I’m hoping to have gotten a nice HTPC for only about $500.  Not only will it allow me to watch movies and tv shows that I pirate from the internet (I don’t have cable TV anymore, as I download everything anyways), but it will also act as a PVR, music box, and basic gaming machine (I have all the SNES and Nintendo games as Roms).

Now all I need to do is wait for my parts to come in the mail anytime now!

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