I have a SageTV HD Theater, dual tuner HD HomeRun, a D-Link NAS and an original Mac Mini running SageTV Server. This provides two major benefits:
* ability to stream audio, video and photos from a computer or NAS to the TV * ability to record and playback HD over-the-air broadcasts with DVR software
The living room set up is:
HD OTA antenna ---> HD HomeRun ---> GB Switch AV Receiver and TV
Then I've got a cat 6 ethernet cable running under the house connecting the switch to a router in another room:
D-Link NAS --> router --- Mac Mini
With respect to noise, this works well, since the HD Homerun and SageTV are completely silent (though the blinking green network activity LED on the SageTV should also be silenced).
I kept costs down by using a free, first generation Mac Mini that was headed for the electronics graveyard. But, it appears to be too under performing for the task. I had to upgrade it to 1 GB of RAM for it to be tolerable, but I'm still having problems when using it with the NAS.
The setup does actually work well as long as it is writing just to the internal hard disk. If I have it write to the NAS and then stream from the NAS through the Mini, most HD channels have an intolerable amount of stutter. However, I still need to experiment with directly mounting the NAS from the SageTV and using an external USB drive on the Mini. I also purchased the Placeshifter software, but haven't had time to try it out, yet.
I wrote a lot of Occam code for transputers around 1989-1992. I thought the language was well-designed, certainly for that time period, and very simple to learn. I was able to pick up all the syntax and start coding productively in less than an afternoon, although I already did know C. The message passing syntax is especially simple. The complete ABNF grammar is only a couple of pages.
We built a parallel pipeline for signal processing. Adding more processors was as simple as connecting a few pins, modifying our config file and restarting the system. I usually ran it with 48 transputers in the grid. The same Occam code ran on each chip, though there was some special case code executed only by the chip taking in data from an array of Motorola DSP chips and the chip combining all the processed data to hand off to a 486 for display. The algorithm was effectively a pipelined map reduce with real-time constraints.
Debugging was a bit challenging. We resorted to two approaches - hooking up LEDs to unused pins and raising a signal on a pin (obviously good for only simple stuff) and writing code to pass log messages down the pipeline that got funneled to one chip for display on a console.
A few years ago someone opened 9 credit card accounts using my SSN and managed to run up US$13,000 in charges before all the accounts were frozen. In addition to changing my address and birthdate with the three major credit reporting agencies, he altered the name he used to open new accounts, almost as if he wanted to see how far he could push it.
After using my real name for a couple of accounts, he opened an account using Bobby as a first name, instead of Robert. Sure, it's a common nickname, but it appeared no where else before that point on my credit reports. And then he switched to Bobbie. Next he opened an account with a different middle initial of L. As the coup de grace (or just a careless mistake), he reversed the first and last names and opened an account as Stewart L. Bobbie. I don't know if any of his applications were rejected, but over half of the 9 had significantly incorrect information and were still approved. In addition to the name changes, he used three different addresses in the midwest in states where I had never lived.
For the first couple of accounts, he made a few initial payments before stopping payment. I mentioned this to my brother-in-law who is a police officer who had previously specialized in solving economic crimes. He said this was a common strategy of the savvier fraudsters. After making a few mid-size charges and payments (often returning the merchandise where they can get cash rather than credit back), they go for a much bigger charge. If they went for the bigger charge right off the bat, it's more likely it would have been rejected and the account frozen.
--single-transaction and --skip-lock-tables are mutually exclusive, so you don't need to include --skip-lock-tables. Also, --opt is added by default, so you don't need it, either. Of course, it doesn't hurt to include them, other than making the command longer.
Best info I could find quickly was an interview at robotsrule.com with John Sosoka, CTO of Ugobe. Here's a couple of the more relevant quotes:
"Pleo does have his USB port and an SD card to allow Pleo to be updated."
"In order to play with voice recognition you have to write it in C or assembly code. While possible, it won't be supported by the PDK tools at first, although we won't do anything to stop you. We want to get the controls in to let people to quickly be able to play with the sensors and motors, and things like that. Over time we will create better tools for people to do lower level things with Pleo."
"People will have brilliant ideas of what to do. We will allow them to implement them. We want to see what can be done."
"We actually started with some proprietary software at first and one of the reasons I wanted to make the switch was to allow programmers to just get gcc and some other tools and you're good to go. You can run gcc and just start working your way through it."
"In terms of Pleo's internal memory, the main memory in Pleo is 4 megabytes. I think Pleo is in the 50 Megahertz range for the main processor and 64 Megahertz for the processor in the back."
At my company we host applications for many large enterprise customers on boxes running CentOS. CentOS works great for us and we have enough experts on staff that we can support ourselves. However, some of our customers choose to license our applications to run on premise in their data centers. In 100% of the cases so far, they have chosen to license RHEL. Sometimes this is because while they may have competent system administrators for day to day tasks, they don't have people with enough experience to figure out how to fix things when a patch goes seriously awry. In other cases, corporate policy requires that everything running on production systems has a current support agreement. Just like with the old cliche of no one ever getting fired for choosing IBM, fear and CYA sell the known.
I have an incinerating toilet at my cabin that uses no water. Just an awe inspiring 1200 degree F incineration compartment for reducing solid waste to a teaspoon of ash. Up in the mountains, you often don't have the option of a sewage hookup or even a septic tank. Composting toilets can also work, but the smell tends to be stronger than what the inicinerating toilet emits.
There's no automatic mechanism for dumping the ash out in the yard, but the manufacturer's brochure assures me that it is safe to do so manually. Of course, there's a lot of other questionable material in the brochure.
SIP is a lot more than just a VoIP standard, but I will grant you that the primary use of SIP today is very probably VoIP connections.
SIP = Session Initiation Protocol. You use it to set up, control, and tear down sessions.
Before SIP, the primary session management protocol for VoIP was H.323, which came out of the videoconferencing space. For basic audio calls, H.323 is a pretty heavyweight protocol. Also, it doesn't take advantage of many common Internet protocols. Of course, that's because it preceded many of these protocols.
Currently, the number of H.323 based solutions exceed the number of SIP based solutions for VoIP, but the tide appears to be shifting.
There is also an extension to SIP called SIMPLE (SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions). SIMPLE is somewhat of a competitor to the XMPP protocol that Jabber uses. SIMPLE has the advantage of being able to more easily leverage a SIP connection, but XMPP is much more mature and feature rich.
I have the Plantronics DSP 500 headset, which doesn't require that your computer have a soundcard. The headset works well with at least Red Hat 9 and Fedora Core 1. Both recognized it during the install.
I've primarily used the headset when listening to music and when playing UT 2003, but I plan to try it with Skype soon.
The list price for this headset and mic is ridiculously high, but you can usually find it on Amazon for a 50% or greater discount. For $75 or less, I would say it is a good deal.
Re:Perdido Street Station
on
King Rat
·
· Score: 1
I discovered Mieville and Perdido Street Station (PSS) due to the old "Another Reader Like You Recommends" feature at Amazon. The main overlap between the other person and me seemed to be books by Gaiman or Gibson.
I struggled through the first half of PSS and kept with it mainly because I felt that I was supposed to like it. The storyline eventually tightened up, and the last half was an engaging read.
Having read Neverwhere and American Gods, I can definitely see the similarities, but I would also toss in a reference to Sterling and Gibson's steampunk book The Difference Engine. PSS describes a brutal alternative world where electronic high tech did not evolve.
Instead, they have thaumuturgy involving the manipulation of additional forces of nature. Also, criminals, among others, are "remade" as part of their punishment into horrific combinations of human parts and animal parts to better serve their masters.
No, you aren't the only one. Unfortunately, there are so many typos (missing words, incorrect words, and even badly misspelled words) that the flow of the book is significantly impaired. I had to reread many sentences just to figure out what he had intended to write.
Despite the many typos, I think this is an excellent book and I would highly recommend it to anyone architecting or designing enterprise applications.
His definition of an enterprise application is based more on examples and characteristics than on a dictionary style definition. He characterizes an enterprise app as one with "persistent data", "usually a lot of data", where "many people access data concurrently", with "usually a lot of user interface screens", and usually with a "need to integrate with other enterprise applications." Based on my experience architecting enterprise apps and reviewing the architecture of other companies' enterprise apps, I think this is the right approach.
His examples of types of enterprise applications include a payroll system, airport reservation system, patient records, shipping/tracking, and customer service. He explicitly does not include applications like word processors, elevator controllers, telephone switches, compilers, and games.
The patterns in the GoF book are typically at a lower and much more generic level. In this book, Fowler focuses primarily only on the patterns that appear most commonly in the enterprise apps he has seen.
If you find yourself looking for more detail on the network and concurrency related patterns in Fowler's book, than I recommend you check out Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture Volume 2 [POSA2], but I would definitely start with Fowler's book first.
I split a SweetDreams plan with a friend. For $10/month each, we share: 1 FREE domain registration 3 full domains, 15 subdomains 450 MB Disk, 25 GB Transfer 60 Mailboxes, 15 Users 10M MySQL Cn, QT Streaming
One cool thing is that when we signed up about 9 months ago, we got 400 MB and 10GB for the same price. They upped those limits for free.
They do limit MySQL usage under the plan (see their website for MySQL Cn explanation), but they claim that only about 2% of users were anywhere near the limits. Due to high CPU usage for DB connections, they wanted to distribute more of the cost to the heaviest users.
Though there have been an unusually large number of problems over the last few months during their Data center move and their Debian Potato to Woody upgrade, overall I have been very happy with uptime and performance.
As others have posted, they are sometimes slow about upgrading packages (Perl, Python, etc.), but they have to balance stability for all users against having the newest stuff. It's easy enough to install your own local copies if you need newer versions. They give you lots of disk space in the plans, so for most people it's not a big deal.
Also, they are very up front about problems and proactively give you lots of info on changes and problems they are working on. One catch for some people is that they primarily provide only email support with the basic plans. You do get one free phone call to support a month. However, I generally get email responses from them in less time than I spend on hold with my ISP (Earthlink). I have never had to call DreamHost, but I'm not hosting for other clients and or a business. WombatNation
Slashdot Mirror
I have a SageTV HD Theater, dual tuner HD HomeRun, a D-Link NAS and an original Mac Mini running SageTV Server. This provides two major benefits:
* ability to stream audio, video and photos from a computer or NAS to the TV
* ability to record and playback HD over-the-air broadcasts with DVR software
The living room set up is:
HD OTA antenna ---> HD HomeRun ---> GB Switch AV Receiver and TV
Then I've got a cat 6 ethernet cable running under the house connecting the switch to a router in another room:
D-Link NAS --> router --- Mac Mini
With respect to noise, this works well, since the HD Homerun and SageTV are completely silent (though the blinking green network activity LED on the SageTV should also be silenced).
I kept costs down by using a free, first generation Mac Mini that was headed for the electronics graveyard. But, it appears to be too under performing for the task. I had to upgrade it to 1 GB of RAM for it to be tolerable, but I'm still having problems when using it with the NAS.
The setup does actually work well as long as it is writing just to the internal hard disk. If I have it write to the NAS and then stream from the NAS through the Mini, most HD channels have an intolerable amount of stutter. However, I still need to experiment with directly mounting the NAS from the SageTV and using an external USB drive on the Mini. I also purchased the Placeshifter software, but haven't had time to try it out, yet.
I wrote a lot of Occam code for transputers around 1989-1992. I thought the language was well-designed, certainly for that time period, and very simple to learn. I was able to pick up all the syntax and start coding productively in less than an afternoon, although I already did know C. The message passing syntax is especially simple. The complete ABNF grammar is only a couple of pages.
We built a parallel pipeline for signal processing. Adding more processors was as simple as connecting a few pins, modifying our config file and restarting the system. I usually ran it with 48 transputers in the grid. The same Occam code ran on each chip, though there was some special case code executed only by the chip taking in data from an array of Motorola DSP chips and the chip combining all the processed data to hand off to a 486 for display. The algorithm was effectively a pipelined map reduce with real-time constraints.
Debugging was a bit challenging. We resorted to two approaches - hooking up LEDs to unused pins and raising a signal on a pin (obviously good for only simple stuff) and writing code to pass log messages down the pipeline that got funneled to one chip for display on a console.
Waves Audio is offering a processing chain for their own tool as well as for Cubase and the very popular ProTools.
http://www.waves.com/content.aspx?id=5798
The equalizer is $300 and the noise supressor is $2900. I think they are targeting above my level of concern.
A few years ago someone opened 9 credit card accounts using my SSN and managed to run up US$13,000 in charges before all the accounts were frozen. In addition to changing my address and birthdate with the three major credit reporting agencies, he altered the name he used to open new accounts, almost as if he wanted to see how far he could push it.
After using my real name for a couple of accounts, he opened an account using Bobby as a first name, instead of Robert. Sure, it's a common nickname, but it appeared no where else before that point on my credit reports. And then he switched to Bobbie. Next he opened an account with a different middle initial of L. As the coup de grace (or just a careless mistake), he reversed the first and last names and opened an account as Stewart L. Bobbie. I don't know if any of his applications were rejected, but over half of the 9 had significantly incorrect information and were still approved. In addition to the name changes, he used three different addresses in the midwest in states where I had never lived.
For the first couple of accounts, he made a few initial payments before stopping payment. I mentioned this to my brother-in-law who is a police officer who had previously specialized in solving economic crimes. He said this was a common strategy of the savvier fraudsters. After making a few mid-size charges and payments (often returning the merchandise where they can get cash rather than credit back), they go for a much bigger charge. If they went for the bigger charge right off the bat, it's more likely it would have been rejected and the account frozen.
--single-transaction and --skip-lock-tables are mutually exclusive, so you don't need to include --skip-lock-tables. Also, --opt is added by default, so you don't need it, either. Of course, it doesn't hurt to include them, other than making the command longer.
Best info I could find quickly was an interview at robotsrule.com with John Sosoka, CTO of Ugobe. Here's a couple of the more relevant quotes:
"Pleo does have his USB port and an SD card to allow Pleo to be updated."
"In order to play with voice recognition you have to write it in C or assembly code. While possible, it won't be supported by the PDK tools at first, although we won't do anything to stop you. We want to get the controls in to let people to quickly be able to play with the sensors and motors, and things like that. Over time we will create better tools for people to do lower level things with Pleo."
"People will have brilliant ideas of what to do. We will allow them to implement them. We want to see what can be done."
"We actually started with some proprietary software at first and one of the reasons I wanted to make the switch was to allow programmers to just get gcc and some other tools and you're good to go. You can run gcc and just start working your way through it."
"In terms of Pleo's internal memory, the main memory in Pleo is 4 megabytes. I think Pleo is in the 50 Megahertz range for the main processor and 64 Megahertz for the processor in the back."
At my company we host applications for many large enterprise customers on boxes running CentOS. CentOS works great for us and we have enough experts on staff that we can support ourselves. However, some of our customers choose to license our applications to run on premise in their data centers. In 100% of the cases so far, they have chosen to license RHEL. Sometimes this is because while they may have competent system administrators for day to day tasks, they don't have people with enough experience to figure out how to fix things when a patch goes seriously awry. In other cases, corporate policy requires that everything running on production systems has a current support agreement. Just like with the old cliche of no one ever getting fired for choosing IBM, fear and CYA sell the known.
I have an incinerating toilet at my cabin that uses no water. Just an awe inspiring 1200 degree F incineration compartment for reducing solid waste to a teaspoon of ash. Up in the mountains, you often don't have the option of a sewage hookup or even a septic tank. Composting toilets can also work, but the smell tends to be stronger than what the inicinerating toilet emits.
There's no automatic mechanism for dumping the ash out in the yard, but the manufacturer's brochure assures me that it is safe to do so manually. Of course, there's a lot of other questionable material in the brochure.
Hmmm, maybe I should take it to Burning Man.
SIP is a lot more than just a VoIP standard, but I will grant you that the primary use of SIP today is very probably VoIP connections.
SIP = Session Initiation Protocol. You use it to set up, control, and tear down sessions.
Before SIP, the primary session management protocol for VoIP was H.323, which came out of the videoconferencing space. For basic audio calls, H.323 is a pretty heavyweight protocol. Also, it doesn't take advantage of many common Internet protocols. Of course, that's because it preceded many of these protocols.
Currently, the number of H.323 based solutions exceed the number of SIP based solutions for VoIP, but the tide appears to be shifting.
There is also an extension to SIP called SIMPLE (SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions). SIMPLE is somewhat of a competitor to the XMPP protocol that Jabber uses. SIMPLE has the advantage of being able to more easily leverage a SIP connection, but XMPP is much more mature and feature rich.
I have the Plantronics DSP 500 headset, which doesn't require that your computer have a soundcard. The headset works well with at least Red Hat 9 and Fedora Core 1. Both recognized it during the install.
I've primarily used the headset when listening to music and when playing UT 2003, but I plan to try it with Skype soon.
The list price for this headset and mic is ridiculously high, but you can usually find it on Amazon for a 50% or greater discount. For $75 or less, I would say it is a good deal.
I discovered Mieville and Perdido Street Station (PSS) due to the old "Another Reader Like You Recommends" feature at Amazon. The main overlap between the other person and me seemed to be books by Gaiman or Gibson.
I struggled through the first half of PSS and kept with it mainly because I felt that I was supposed to like it. The storyline eventually tightened up, and the last half was an engaging read.
Having read Neverwhere and American Gods, I can definitely see the similarities, but I would also toss in a reference to Sterling and Gibson's steampunk book The Difference Engine. PSS describes a brutal alternative world where electronic high tech did not evolve.
Instead, they have thaumuturgy involving the manipulation of additional forces of nature. Also, criminals, among others, are "remade" as part of their punishment into horrific combinations of human parts and animal parts to better serve their masters.
No, you aren't the only one. Unfortunately, there are so many typos (missing words, incorrect words, and even badly misspelled words) that the flow of the book is significantly impaired. I had to reread many sentences just to figure out what he had intended to write.
Despite the many typos, I think this is an excellent book and I would highly recommend it to anyone architecting or designing enterprise applications.
His definition of an enterprise application is based more on examples and characteristics than on a dictionary style definition. He characterizes an enterprise app as one with "persistent data", "usually a lot of data", where "many people access data concurrently", with "usually a lot of user interface screens", and usually with a "need to integrate with other enterprise applications." Based on my experience architecting enterprise apps and reviewing the architecture of other companies' enterprise apps, I think this is the right approach.
His examples of types of enterprise applications include a payroll system, airport reservation system, patient records, shipping/tracking, and customer service. He explicitly does not include applications like word processors, elevator controllers, telephone switches, compilers, and games.
The patterns in the GoF book are typically at a lower and much more generic level. In this book, Fowler focuses primarily only on the patterns that appear most commonly in the enterprise apps he has seen.
If you find yourself looking for more detail on the network and concurrency related patterns in Fowler's book, than I recommend you check out Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture Volume 2 [POSA2], but I would definitely start with Fowler's book first.
I highly recommend DreamHost.
I split a SweetDreams plan with a friend. For $10/month each, we share:
1 FREE domain registration
3 full domains, 15 subdomains
450 MB Disk, 25 GB Transfer
60 Mailboxes, 15 Users
10M MySQL Cn, QT Streaming
One cool thing is that when we signed up about 9 months ago, we got 400 MB and 10GB for the same price. They upped those limits for free.
They do limit MySQL usage under the plan (see their website for MySQL Cn explanation), but they claim that only about 2% of users were anywhere near the limits. Due to high CPU usage for DB connections, they wanted to distribute more of the cost to the heaviest users.
Though there have been an unusually large number of problems over the last few months during their Data center move and their Debian Potato to Woody upgrade, overall I have been very happy with uptime and performance.
As others have posted, they are sometimes slow about upgrading packages (Perl, Python, etc.), but they have to balance stability for all users against having the newest stuff. It's easy enough to install your own local copies if you need newer versions. They give you lots of disk space in the plans, so for most people it's not a big deal.
Also, they are very up front about problems and proactively give you lots of info on changes and problems they are working on. One catch for some people is that they primarily provide only email support with the basic plans. You do get one free phone call to support a month. However, I generally get email responses from them in less time than I spend on hold with my ISP (Earthlink). I have never had to call DreamHost, but I'm not hosting for other clients and or a business.
WombatNation