Category: Rant

Great things; sucky things; boring things; stupid things…

MythTV — Part II — Giving KnoppMyth A Try

My battle continues with MythTV installation and configuration.

There’s no question in my mind as to why MythTV is MythTV. I just can’t get the stupid thing to run right.

Just earlier I wrote about my troubles with MythTV under Fedora Core 3. So I said I’d give KnoppMyth a shot. I couldn’t wait for a couple of days, so I forged on with the saga.

10PM, sitting there thinking this KnoppMyth should work. It’s an auto-install wonder.

Think again. Stupid KnoppMyth got stuck with trouble writing to the disks a few times. I had to use Fedora’s partition/format utility from the boot disc to reformat the disks before KnoppMyth would even run properly. So that took me about an hour to resolve.

To be fair, KnoppMyth installed and auto-dected a good majority of everything right away. And the install went relatively smoothly — everything from the OS, MySQL database, MythTV and almost everything else. ALMOST: PVR 150, audio card and ethernet cards got left out.

So before I invest more time on KnoppMyth, I decided I’ll try it on Kyung’s old Optiplex GX110. Maybe I’ll have better luck on his machine. If all else fails, I will go back to Fedora and deal with problems I already am familiar with.

Those guys at Systm definitely oversimplified KnoppMyth’s ability to solve everyday-man’s problems. But then again, I do have a pretty old system to boot (Dell Precision 410; circa 1999).

Better luck next time.

MythTV — Part I — Struggle Begins

My battle with MythTV installation and configuration.

In light of my newfound cable service, I decided to put one of my spare Dell boxes to work in doing a home-grown TiVo. So a few days ago, I ordered a Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 150 capture card to give it a shot. It’s a relatively new card with decent performance for the price (after a Buy.com 10% off coupon — roughly $85).

I spent most of the weekend tinkering with Mythtv running on Fedora (Core 3). I got most of the information from Jarod Wilson’s site (excellent documentation). But last night at 3AM, I finally gave in to Mythtv and called it a defeat (for now).

There are a few problems concerning my set up; one of them being that Fedora Core 3 is not particularly happy about the onboard Crystal sound card (it worked in Core 2 though). Topping that off, WinTV-PVR 150 seems a bit too new to get a stable driver. I spent a lot of time just getting the module to load into the Kernel during my first install. It turned out that the latest Linux Kernel doesn’t like the module. I had to roll back to the older 2.6.11-1.27FC3smp to get the damn thing to just load.

Then there’s the problem with the IR transmitter and receiver. Apparently lirc 0.7.0 doesn’t support PVR 150. Though I’d installed the new lirc 0.7.1 (which supposedly does support PVR 150), the receiver still did not produce any output despite hours of Googling and trying out new settings.

Frustrated, I finally completely erased the setup and started fresh again on Sunday. But this time, something happened to the partitions which Kernel 2.6.11-1.27FC3smp didn’t like and freaks out at boot. Does it have anything to do with the fact that I installed VMWare 4.5.2 (thanks, Kyung!) prior to the reboot? Speaking of VMWare, it runs beautifully smooth under Fedora Core 3 with Windows 2000 on it. Very very nice.

In the coming few days, I might give it a shot again. Last night just right after I gave up, I found a clip from Systm that demonstrated a clean install using KnoppMyth — a ONE disc install wonder. The only problem, again, is that its lirc driver is still at 0.7.0 and won’t like my PVR 150 card. But on KnoppMyth’s discussion forum, someone posted a patch that’s claimed to have made it work. Hopefully it’ll finally work so I can finall grow fat and old on Simpsons episodes.

Stupid MythTV… Stupid PVR 150 card… Stupid Fedora Core 3 and its new Kernel…

The Big Move

Moving sucks. But it has to happen every now and then.

After consulting the Great Chinese Calendar (per my mom’s advise), we decided to schedule today as the “Big Day” for our pending move to the new apartment. Today’s supposedly an acceptable day for not only moving household items, but also bed setting. There’s a school of philosophy that believes in the proper positioning and settling of the bed. And of course, that includes the time and date on which the bed is to be moved.

The scheduled move time was between one and four in the afternoon (looks like our friends from the moving industry picked up on this long time tradition of the phone and cable guys!). But instead they showed up at five (after several phone calls). As I am typing this, they (two medium built foreign-speaking men) already moved all the boxes into the truck.

Argh! I hate moving.

Jai called earlier to see how things were going thinking we’d already moved. He calls from time to time to check on us. Though we haven’t seen him in a few months, it’s still nice to hear a friend’s voice once in a while.

The cats didn’t take the move too well. One of them (Baobao: the fat one) we managed to shovel into the bathroom like we’d ingeniously planned. The other one escaped from the bathroom and hid herself in the closet. Sucks to be cats.

What sucks more are cat owners. Our arms and chests were scratched up like Jackson Pollock‘s “Galaxy”.

After the movers unloaded our stuff at the new apartment, we went back to fetch the cats. It was easy to convince Wawa to load her up in the car. Baobao was a very different story. The first challenge was to hold her (at which she hisses). Another challenge was to be able to hold her AND carry her all the way to the car — impossible. You may be saying “use the pet carrier!”. But noooo. She’s already associated the pet carrier with “going to the doctors and get jabbed with a needle”. Just seeing one makes her nervous, let alone getting her into one.

At the end, we spent 20+ minutes dancing with her and cornered her at her favorite lookout window. It was over when we got her front paws into the carrier. No animals or humans were hurt in this exercise.

Baobao ended up spending the night exploring the new apartment. Wawa took the night off and hid herself under our bed. As for us, we dropped like a couple of dead flies on our bed after shower. Perhaps it was the new place; or perhaps we were too disoriented from the move, neither of us slept well.

I hate moving.

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Thai Police Certificate

It’s finally here!

After weeks of fact-finding and agonizing time spent waiting, my Thai Police Certificate finally arrived as part of documents needed for our application for Canadian PR.

Grace and I had a bet on which country’s police certificate would be completed first. Taiwan won, hands down. It was done within days (having every bit of information online didn’t hurt).

Naturally, the bet came down to between Thailand and Malaysia.

Thailand didn’t provide much online. But at least a form was available with some instructions from a Thai Embassy in Canada. Armed with that information, Grace still had to call a couple of Thai Embassies in the States to really get the nuts and bolts of the process down.

The same couuldn’t be said about Malaysia, however. The only available information I found was from an Australian Embassy where Malaysia has special diplomatic relations with, hence the instructions were useless. And when Grace called the Malaysian Embassy in L.A., they bounced her between different departments before someone was able to give her something informative. And the person even gave her a tip: “It’d take 3-6 months to process”. The person hinted that it’d be safer to bet on the “SIX” month side of the timeline. And that was back in March.

To be fair, Thai Embassy wasn’t much better. Grace had to call three different embassies just to get everything (L.A. branch bounced calls to automated machine; NYC branch simply defers responsibility to other branches; Chicago branch was the only decent one with a very nice staff). And when she finally talked to someone, instead of a lame “three to six months” guarantee that the Malaysian Embassy provided, the Thai Embassy basically said “it’ll be done when it’s done” without any specific timeline. However, the nice lady on the phone did stress that the process would be “a lot” faster if someone in Thailand were to follow-up physically; my mom came to mind immediately. I also had to get finger printed (for the first time in my life), not one sheet, but THREE sheets of original finger prints.

Taiwan has its issues; efficiency certainly is not one of them. The push of its e-government, where almost every bit of information a citizen would need to make his/her life easier is onilne, has been a very successful one. I can’t even attest to that kind of efficiency about government agencies in Silicon Valley, where the dot-com boom was supposed to have revamped how the government operates.

So efficiency test results: Taiwan one — Thailand/Malaysia: zero.