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Naming Convention

pablo — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 18:27:06 +0000

If we were today to rethink the naming convention we use for people (first name, middle name, last name), would we approach it the same way? Would we use a hierarchy to represent people as in john.smith.us?

Definitely street names and cities should be using a more logical naming convention like /America/US/EastCoast/NewYork/Manhattan/5th/472/4.

But of course this is just scratching the surface.

I’m not advocating for a change of this naming convention, I’m just wondering what would naming would look like if we came up with a new convention.

XBMC issues with smb

pablo — Wed, 12 May 2010 02:19:53 +0000

I’ve been having issues with XBMC playing files served through samba, I don’t recall when this started, but for sometime I couldn’t even browse the collection of files in my own server. Nothing changed, well, I did upgrade Ubuntu to 10.04 on my server, but I think this was happening before that.

Anyway, I browse the internet and didn’t find anything related to this error or how to fix it.

After looking around in the configuration I’ve found something which caught my attention and I got it working.

The error I was getting was:

23:09:42 T:3077850992 M:1831804928   ERROR: SMBDirectory->GetDirectory: Unable to open directory : 'smb://'
unix_err:'2' error : 'No such file or directory'
23:09:42 T:3077850992 M:1831804928   ERROR: GetDirectory - Error getting smb://

And what I had to do is remove the XML path in $HOME/.xbmc/userdata/guisettings.xml that started with the tag . Removed that, restart XBMC and things started to work again.

Autoreload

pablo — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 00:15:15 +0000

I was working today on a website and looking for a way to use my dual head setup to speed things up I decided to write a quick script to reload a webpage every few seconds. I ended up having a neat HTML and Javascript code that I uploaded to http://www.littleq.net/reload.html. I know, there are Firefox extensions that do that, but I didn’t want to reload my Firefox to install that (yes, I know there’s a Firefox extension that allows you to install addons without reloading, but I didn’t have that installed).

Media Center revisited

pablo — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 14:16:12 +0000

I recently wrote a post about my new media center, running off my laptop, well, while that setup was sweet and all, there was some sort of hole in it, that is, my laptop went belly up…

That was quite unfortunate, but it gave me the possibility to play with some new stuff, namely ITX setups.

I have finished yesterday building my ITX box, an Intel D510mo with an Atom D510 processor (dual with hyperthreading so 4 threads), 2 GB of RAM at 800 Mhz, WiFi PCI card on a Vitsuba Blackbox case, with a generic DVD-RW.

The setup is very sweet, I had lots of troubles building the system, at one point I thought my motherboard was faulty and I had to take it back to the store, but it seems the motherboard was ok, it was simply a matter of the mother producing a short while sitting in the case because of a mislocated screw in the case.

After the case was done I proceeded to install Ubuntu Karmic 9.10, to my surprise I had lots of troubles installing it, I had to perform the installation booting the netinstall through PXE (since I was out of CDs and all stores were closed). Once I was able to install Ubuntu I found that Ubuntu didn’t support the video card in the motherboard, and during the boot sequence the screen would go blank and there was pretty much nothing I could do about it.

Googling around I found other users with the same problem and determined to go with the same solution others had used… saying goodbye to Ubuntu and the beautiful Debian and APT world and totally selling out to the Fedora and Red Hat town (notice my strong bias :p).

I went through the horrible Fedora installation experience which is like getting hit on the ballsack while driving on a bike with no seat, configured GDM to autostart (which amazingly is not supported through gdm-config) and then I proceeded to build XBMC (since there is no XBMC build for non debian distributions (well done, and no, I’m not being ironic)).

It turns out building something like XBMC with support for many different codecs is not as straightforward as imaginable, who would have thought?! (now I am being ironic).

Here are some tips for others:

* Add extra repositories (Fedora sucks)
su -c 'rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm' su -c "rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release.rpm"

* Install extra packages (Fedora blows)
yum -y install ccache subversion git gcc-c++ boost-devel mesa-libGL-devel glew-devel libmad-devel libjpeg-devel libsamplerate-devel libogg-devel libvorbis-devel freetype-devel fontconfig-devel bzip2-devel fribidi-devel sqlite-devel mysql-devel libpng-devel pcre-devel lzo-devel libcdio-devel libsmbclient-devel SDL-devel SDL_image-devel SDL_mixer-devel enca-devel jasper-devel libmms-devel libXt-devel libXtst-devel libXmu-devel libXinerama-devel libcurl-devel dbus-devel hal-devel pulseaudio-libs-devel pulseaudio-libs-zeroconf faac-devel avahi-devel ffmpeg-devel a52dec-devel libdca-devel faad2-devel mpeg2dec-devel libass-devel libmpcdec-devel flac-devel wavpack-devel python-devel cmake gperf unzip make libtool flex bison libtiff-devel avbin-devel libmicrohttpd-devel libdvdcss-devel faad2-devel

* Fix paths (Fedora reeks)
ln -s /usr/lib/mysql/libmysqlclient.so.16.*.* /usr/lib/libmysqlclient.so

* Get XBMC
svn co https://xbmc.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/xbmc/trunk/

* Build XBMC
./bootstrap ./configure --disable-debug --enable-external-libfaad --enable-external-libdts --enable-mid --enable-profiling --enable-external-libmad --enable-external-liba52 --enable-external-libmpeg2 --enable-external-libass --enable-external-libvorbis --enable-external-libogg --enable-external-libmpcdec --enable-external-libflac --enable-external-libwavpack --enable-external-python make -j 4 make install

Note that the make -j 4 command might succeed but not finish, I have found a few times that when using make in parallel even with multiple cores it will skip files, you want to use make -j 4 a few times to accelerate the process but do make sure its actually finished running make.

The value of selectively listening

pablo — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 20:34:07 +0000

I have recently come across this eye opening post. I mean, it probably was eye opening back when it was written in 1995, heck, I bet most Newsweek readers back then yield something like “I knew it, that Internet thing is bullcrap!”.

This article, astonishingly titled Why the internet will fail, runs down through the many reasons why Internet would be something we would all get over soon really quickly, like we did with Tamagotchis (thankfully).

Now, this is not your run of the mill ignorant news reporter who talks about things s/he doesn’t understand, this was written by Clifford Stoll, an astronomer and technology writer, working out of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Yet, he can be quoted saying

Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

This author was an authority, someone that we could think that knows much more than we do, so if we disagree with his view we might want to review our opinion.

And this is something that I have seen over and over again, the number of specialists, analysts, etcists, that express an opinion on their field and its completely wrong, completely off base. Of course, we are all humans, we tend to make mistakes, so don’t take this as being judgmental, I’m just saying, we should listen, but we should selectively listen and always make up our own mind and not act on other’s opinions but our own.

The value of a picture

pablo — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 21:59:30 +0000

June 3rd, 2009 — Pablo in Yosemite

Looking at this picture makes me remember the endless horizon, the way things can be put in perspective, how unimportant and trivial things can be, how everything is in balance, since there is no out of balance in real life. Sight unseen, makes me yawn in the presence of rush.

This picture surrounds me.

The value of idle time

pablo — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 03:04:19 +0000

I have recently read a quote attributed to Einstein, it reads something along the lines of “the best ideas I have I have them while I shave”. This got me thinking, how much idle time do I have on any given month?

I am an Internet junky, and completely obsessed with efficiency, so I may not be a good statistical sample, but bear with me on this one.

Aftter considering the different idle times we get throughout our daily lives, commuting, personal care time, all meals, I have realized that most of those times I have occupied them (except commute since I work out of my home office) with some supposedly time saving activity, whether it is checking my email, browsing, reading blogs, even when I shower I have managed to be able to do “something”, even if it is just listening to music (come to think about it maybe I could tune some podcasts).

It feels like I’m constantly multitasking, maybe this is a good thing, or maybe not. Even now, I am on my way to a medical check up writing this post on my iPhone.

This forces me to ask myself “What’s the value of idle time?”. For some reason it feels like my ideas begin to flow so much better when I’m not doing something else, when I’m only commuting. It would seem like our information overload and constantly-online capabilities on our smartphones, our inclination to be constatly productive has actually defeated it’s own purpose messing with our creativity.

Listening to other people’s ideas requires not listening to ours, at least for a brief moment. You can use others’ ideas as a trigger for inspiration but at one point the marginal value of listening becomes detrimental to our own creativity and innovation. In the very same way that this happens with consumers indifference curves this can’t be quantifies nor generalized as more people require more listening and some people require less listening.

Ok enough about this, I’m going to continue reading on my kindle now.

XBMC

pablo — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 14:30:11 +0000

We have recently bought a couch for my place and so we decided to spin off our multi purpose monitor to a new media set, we don’t watch much television, but we do enjoy movies and series, so I bought a new LCD screen and had a small piece of furniture custom made to serve as a TV stand.

I used my old laptop, a Toshiba 15″ Dual Core 2Ghz 2.5 G to serve the media, I have to say, I installed the latest available Ubuntu (9.10) and tested a few media centers. After much playing around I sticked to XBMC, its a great media center, originally designed for X-box, that allows you to manage all of your music, videos, pictures, etc. You can even check the weather and watch youtube right from your media center!

Recommended addons: A remote control (a physical one, you can pick those up for a few bucks at ebay), a remote control for your iPhone, there’s a $3 app “XBMC Remote” that’s great, you can see the synopsis of movies right in your iphone

Hello world indeed!

pablo — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 15:43:34 +0000

Hi! First post here, interestingly enough this is the first post and most likely the least read one, so I won’t put too much thought into it.