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I patched 'none' encryption into openssh many years ago: http://membled.com/work/patche...

I have a poky script nsra to automatically rename spaces to underscores in every filename under the current directory. The companion script lcra renames README.TXT to readme.txt, etc, but leaves mixed-case filenames alone.

I like to use Google. When I accidentally trashed most of my bin/ directory, I was able to recover most of the scripts from Google's cache.

Another alternative is to make yourself a Sourceforge/Savannah/whatever project and use their CVS service. You do keep your important stuff in version control, right?

It's not really useless given the right input. Most people just use the default library, which (i assume) doesn't provide any options for lossy compression. But that doesn't mean it's impossible to use PNG for lossy image compression.

Lossyness just has to do with changing the data that you feed into the compression algorithm. If you know the PNG algorithm well enough, you can make small adjustments to the image before compressing it in order to maximize the efficiency of the compression algorithm while minimizing perceptible changes.

Here is one example of this.

I got rid of my television about two years ago - not so much as a deliberate decision as by just not bothering to buy one when I moved house. It did indeed free up time for other things but as at the time I was maintainer of xmltv, which I created particularly to manage my own TV viewing, I ended up in the strange position of maintaining software I did not use. And then the 'other things' allowed for by not watching television started sucking up more and more of my life, and I no longer had time to work on my free software project, which had been the most important and fulfilling form of recreation for me. So I'm not sure the change is for the better.

You can get free TV listings for Australia (and a bunch of other countries) at XMLTV. Haven't used it myself so I'm not sure about accuracy, but it is free.

I did once analyse titles of British TV programmes to find keywords that make me more or less likely to want to watch a show.

If only all that information were free. (That is how MythTV gets its listings.)

Because then you would be competing with TiVo. I've got a myth setup going and it's fecking awesome. It also took a ton of time to get working, but that was mostly because I'm using a shitty old Compaq and had non-MythTV related setup problems.

So even if these systems were all set up nicely by, say, Phillips, there are still tons of maintenance issues with MythTV. First off, there is the problem of channel listings. In North America Zap2It has been nice enough to offer free (with registration) listings to Myth users, and many other countries are left to scrape webpages for their listings with XMLTV. Then you come to the problem of tuners for different signal types... e.g. North America vs. Europe...and last but not least, cost. You are using generic components for a very specific task, this does not make things cheap. It is almost impossible to get TiVo size, style, and functionality for the price of a TiVo, starting from scratch...but for many geeks, and Do It Yourselfers, it's quite rewarding and worth it in the long run.

I keep my mail in Unix mbox format. This is the format used natively by pine and many other Unix mail programs, but more importantly it's text-based and common enough that it'll never be indecipherable in the future.

Non-Unix mail programs often have the ability to export messages in a text format that is a bit like mbox but non-standard. I have written outlook_text_to_mbox to decode the text and CSV files written by MS Outlook.

This thing is written in C# (and I gather the # stands for RAP) and I only know java.

I've been writing a PVR system in Java for about a year now as a home project (running on a win box) , and I've got it working pretty sweet. Its not pure java, as it uses VirtualVCR for the grabbing and XMLTV for grabbing the listings. My next job is going from the WIMP style interface to something a little more set top box like. I'm also considering using a wireless joypad as a remote.

It just a shame that the UK source for XMLTV has been so unreliable over the past year. First ananova stop serving listings data, then the radio times changed their site to block xmltv, before relenting and releasing the listings in an alternate machine readable format. Lets hope the RT guys keep that going.

Relevant sites:
VirtualVCR : http://virtualvcr.sourceforge.net/
XmlTV : http://membled.com/work/apps/xmltv/

XMLTV sounds like what you are looking for.

I did start hacking on something to do lossy PNG compression but didn't finish it. The hard part is integrating the code with libpng so that it lossily compresses the image data but not the headers.

At $79, you can hardly afford the harddrive to roll your own PVR.

What about the subscription cost? I'd still like to see someone build a quality homebrew PVR for $399. Unless there time is worth nothing and they have access to really cheap hardware, you can't beat the price of a ReplayTV or TiVo.

The problem comes when someone hacks these to pull their content updates from another source. The The Hacking the TiVo FAQ hosted by samba.org is against it... but what will happen to TiVo's business model when someone hacks together support for XMLTV or RSS enclosures?

Abstract

PNG images are pixmaps compressed using Deflate compression, the same as used in zipfiles and by gzip. This compression has a Lempel-Ziv matching stage and then Huffman codes the results. By changing the LZ compression to allow approximate matches of repeated strings, we can have lossy compression of PNG images, while the output file is completely standard PNG format.

It is already possible to do prototype-based programming in Python. Also in Perl. But the syntax may be a little awkward.

To be really useful, a homemade pvr has to solve the problem of obtaining program listings.

May I direct your attention to this.

This is currently what MythTV uses.

Regards
elFarto

Unfortunately for the free PVR software packages, there is no free guide data. xmltv can be (and is widely) used, but it typically grabs data by scraping from zap2it, where there the TOS explicitly forbids this ("you may not modify, copy, frame, cache, reproduce, sell, publish, transmit, display or otherwise use any portion of the Content"). If Freevo or MythTV got large enough to show up on Tribune Media Services' (the owner of zap2it) radar, they'd be squashed like bugs.

Too bad no one offers a subscription-based xmltv feed.

I have my cvsroot/ directory in my home directory. So I obviously can't put _that_ in CVS...

Copying form letters is very bad - they don't get read. But if you're wondering about how to use LaTeX you might want to look at some stuff wot I wrote earlier today. (mp_letter.tex in that directory; the other .tex files are earlier stuff.) I don't want to hold it up as a great exemplar though... write your own words and opinions. (But follow the FFII guidelines!)

It might be helpful (for those who don't know) to learn a bit about the ArsDigita experience with Java. aD was philg's old company and developed a toolkit (the ACS) based on Tcl and Oracle. The software was a bit kludgy in many ways but had the advantage of being fairly scalable and written close to the database, so you could tune the queries and generally figure out what was going on. The lack of typechecking in Tcl didn't matter too much because SQL queries and stored procedure calls are checked at compilation - and besides, if you keep the edit-test cycle down to under a second you can quickly find bugs.

The rewrite of the system in Java, based on using database abstractions and (would you believe) HTML abstractions was a complete crock and ended up being not only slower than the Tcl/SQL version, but less maintainable and much more buggy. I think they got something out of it in the end, after dropping 90% of the extra complexity and object-oriented-itis, but there's no way Java plus an object-relational mapping layer was the right implementation language.

OpenACS and Java makes a similar argument to philg's, but more coherently and less trollishly. I agree with his essential points however. And what he writes is based on experience, both with managing a web development company and with teaching students.

I don't really know much about this, but would something like XMLTV be what you are looking for?

The cipher 'none' does exist but normally it is specially disabled in the source code. I have a patch to OpenSSH to enable cipher 'none' but I haven't updated it in a while.

Adding ",none-cbc" to the ciphers list had the same result as just ",none" -- sshd rejected it.

It's not obvious that a null cipher must compromise authentication,

How many of these topics will we see?

They are $200 and you save time, money and effort. Even the geek effect isn't worth it this time.

Spend the money and help a company.

Here's a list of sites that can help if you're married to doing this:
Freevo
XMLTV

It does appear to be based on the 'ACS Java 5.x' code inherited from ArsDigita. According to Red Hat's pages it uses the same Java object persistence layer for accessing the database (as opposed to the original ACS's design of coding close to the DB) and the same 'Bebop' XML/XSL system for generating HTML. Since they have made a release, I imagine it's now in much better shape than it was when I worked on it in 2001. (Diary and report; the second half talks about the design of ACS Java. See also the OpenACS project's thoughts on Java which is a coded reference to the design of Red Hat's platform. It says 'DO NOT LINK' but it comes #1 in Google search results for 'openacs java' so I don't think I'm giving away any secrets.)

"unrefactored" code - code which has a lot of duplication and should be cleaned up

The other day I hacked up a similarity tool which gives an index between 0 and 1 of the cross-redundancy between files. (It gzips the concatenation of the two files and compares this with gzipping them independently.) Maybe a version control system could run this on all new file checkins, so a file is rejected if it is too similar to some file already under version control. This would cut down on cut-and-paste of existing code, which is generally a Bad Thing (refactor instead).

Not true. XMLTV solves that problem by grabbing TV listings off the Web. This is what MythTV uses to schedule recordings.

The other day I hacked together a script similarity which uses gzip compression to work out how similar two files are. I find this useful when searching for almost-duplicate files.

TV Listings are available for do it yourself PVRs.

If you're willing to screenscrape, you can use XMLTV to get your listings. The only potential problem is that if lots of people start screenscraping the free web sources are likely to try and stop people from doing so.

If you're willing to pay for the service, you can use TVNow and pay $30 per year (about $2.50 per month, a fraction of what Tivo charges).

Their problem is that they spend a lot of money to consolidate the tv schedules - and they offer it free on their site using the advertising model. When people scrape it for their own use, they're subverting the ads, and zap2it loses money instead of making it (bandwidth, servers, staff, syndication). It's a much larger problem because of the way XMLTV scrapes - hundreds, if not thousands of pages must be retrieved and parsed to get the complete schedule.

Now before you all scream anti-corporate statements, realize that if enough people "steal" their content, they'll simply shut it down, as no company (and no one) wants to lose money.

For an interesting previous thread on this very topic, check here.

It already does:

• Live TV/timeshifting
• Program guide
• Record individual programs, or regular timeslots
• Basic editing of pre-recorded shows (bye bye ads!)
• Uses XMLTV for guide information, which has grabbers for many geographical areas.
• Kicks Ass

I actually started working on this a bit for the excellent DScaler TV tuner card app (this is a Windows app), but I haven't gotten very far yet, mostly due to having lots of other more pressing projects, but I wrote some hack-job code to display current guide data in a simple box overlay drawn on top of the DScaler TV window. It really needs a much more comprehensive treatment than that, but the point is this is a couple of week project. If you are interested, get in touch.

1) Get satellite and a Bell ExpressVu PVR. I've had mine for almost a year now, and am very happy with it's performance. I've barely touched my VCR since then!

2) Get a PC with a video capture/playback card (like ATI's All-In-Wonder Radeon), and some open source software and roll-yer-own PVR. You can get TV listings for Canada with the XMLTV project. The Linux VCR HOWTO will probably be helpful.