i have installed two VMs on this laptop. one is actually a boot camp partition that is running windows 7. i love the fact that vmware will boot up a boot camp partition and reuse hard drive space to run a VM. this saves me tons of valuable hard drive space on this laptop. i installed a windows partition on this laptop because it also happens to be my primary gaming machine and i needed to make sure that i could natively run games. i don’t play games often, but i like having the option of being able to do so. additionally, there are a handful of apps that only run on windows that i really want access to. there’s just no other way around it, unfortunately.

the second VM i have installed is a very small fedora installation. i’ve been pretty torn about installing a linux partition on this machine. mac os x (and i pronounce this mac oh-ess-ex, even though i know it is mac os 10, but i can’t help it) is unix system with a wonderful GUI. i’ve gone as far as to install XCode and use many packages from macports and fink. i feel like i can pretty much do anything i want on my mac machine as i can on any linux box, but…

our work servers run on linux and there’s just something to be said about being able to run the exact same binaries as your dev/test/production boxes.

anyway, i had put on a base install of fedora and i could not get networking to work. my network configuration for the windows VM and the linux VM were the same. it turns out that when the linux VM was installed, the virtual networking device created used the host’s ethernet interface and not the wireless, whereas the windows VM used the wireless interface.

to get networking working again, all i had to do was add a second interface and all is well with the world again. i have 1GB of yum updates downloading and once that is done, i can start setting up this linux box.

it turns out that there’s an add-on to thunderbird called lightning which brings calendar support into thunderbird. that’s pretty good, but still, no centralized server to keep the calendaring data…and today i discovered this: a google calendar provider for lightning. this will allow you to use google calendar as your server. setup wasn’t completely obvious, but jonny at bfish has a very through walk-though of the setup of the provider and now i have my calendaring all set up. pretty elegant if you ask me, i like it a lot.

i’m working with code where the code is a mess. there are no regular conventions used, it almost looks like people used whitespace on a whim. it’s like writing english sentences and using punctuation whenever you feel like it. now, i know that i never capitalize when i write emails or blog entries, and i’m sure that there are those of you out there where it’s a big pet peeve and it grates on you. fine, i get that. sorry. but at least the meaning of the content is clear. at least, you know, in my head it all makes sense. but i just spent 10 minutes looking at a block of code trying to figure out why something isn’t working when it should be and i finally found out why. it’s because the previous programmer decided that the use of braces and whitespace isn’t very important to them.

in some places code looks like:

if ($variable==true) {
// do this
// and do this
} else {
// do that
}


in other places code looks like:

if ($variable==true) // do this


and in other places it looks like:

if ($variable==true) {
// do this
} else // do that


and in other places it looks like:

if ($variable==true) { // do this } else { // do this; //do that; //do this too; }


it kills me. i’m glad that i enforced a coding convention when we had multiple programmers here. all of our new code looks beautiful.

but i think i have just constructed the longest SQL query i have ever written. there has got to be a simpler way to do what i’m doing. i’m updating some code that was previously written and the code that was written before uses all of these temporary tables and it got all confusing for me. i’m sure that it’s probably easier to join against these temporary tables and views, but i decided to wrap it all in one big query. sure, it spans a couple of databases but it all works.

a 1568 byte query. 24 lines long. one query. sheesh, this is why i hate reporting.

it seems like it’s just a matter of the ps3 getting better codec support, but so far i’m still disappointed. if you’re going to implement divx playback, get good xvid and codec support! please!

*EDIT* it appears that the ps3 is consistently failing and sending that error whenever i pause the video and then restart it. this is sort of new behavior, i wonder if it has anything to do with the streaming server… *sigh*

the windows OS looks like it’s about 7GB. 7GB. man, that’s big. my cluttered up XP install on another machine is about 4GB big, so that’s a lot of bloat for vista. i’m willing to forgive it because i’ve always sacrificed speed and features for space when i work on code, but vista feels slower…

anyway, i went on a hunt looking for where the rest of the 8GB went to. program files is only about 350MB. and then i found it, two hidden files that i had forgotten about a long time ago. the swap to disk file and the hibernate file. this is what really hurt me as windows by default will manage these settings for you. the hibernate file is as big as your memory is, and in my case, that’s a 4GB file. the swap disk file is also dependent on memory and there was my missing 8GB. it’s because i have so much RAM that so much hard drive space is consumed.

i turned hibernate off to save myself 4GB. i don’t really use hibernate much, so i think i’ll be ok. so i’m now down to a 13GB lean install of vista. i’ve only given myself 32GB for my vista boot, so i hope that i won’t need anymore space than that.

frustration upon frustration set in when i couldn’t get the ps3′s HDMI to work. my configuration is a little awkward though. i’m actually feeding the ps3′s HDMI connection to my outlaw receiver which only has DVI inputs. so i am currently using an HDMI => DVI cable for video and a toslink cable for audio. it turns out that the way that the outlaw stacks its video ports over different connection types. that is, the component 2 video input and the DVI input are shared. so if you want to use DVI 2, you cannot use component 2 for anything else. makes sense, i guess….but that means that you are limited in terms of how many component inputs you can use if you use both DVI inputs.

anyhow, i got that mess sorted out and it looks like all is working just fine now. the next problem was that the ps3 does not support samba shares. this means that trying to share a folder over the network (like a windows share) is not possible. instead, what the ps3 does support is a DLNA media server.

what i really wanted to do is make use of my d-link dns-323 nas, but i had read that the UPnP server that comes with the NAS doesn’t work with the PS3. bummer!

i also read that gmediaserver is a DLNA server and there’s a port for the DNS-323 by fonz. great! i install and run it, but encountered some issues. i kept getting DNLA protocol errors. it turns out that the gmediaserver port by fonz for my NAS is broken and does not work.

by the way, i just wanted to take a second here to rant about DNLA. why? why oh why is this standard around? is it cutting edge? i’ve never heard of it until now. all of my streaming had previously been working over samba and it worked just fine. there shouldn’t be any royalties that you need to pay microsoft to use the samba protocol, right? grrrrr.

it seems everyone is using the twonkymedia server but i just don’t want to pay money for a streaming server. twonkymedia is a commercial product that seems to be compiled to work on a variety of platforms. what’s particularly interesting about them is that they support a large number of devices that have embedded linux. good for them, but bad for me, i don’t want to pay to stream files! but, i did install twonkymedia just to see if it works and it did work fine…

after more research, i read that the default UPnP server in the newly upgraded firmware for the DNS-323 should work. after a firmware upgrade, i enabled that, but it didn’t work. the same DLNA protocol errors!

after a little more research and some guessing, i found out that if you have the NAS’s iTunes server enabled, it interferes with the UPnP AV server. once that was shutdown, the NAS’s UPnP AV server seems to be working out ok. loads on the NAS are higher than i like them to be (i’m running a bittorrent client on the box too), but everything seems to be working ok.

after even MORE research, i’ve discovered that there’s a port of mediatomb for the DNS-323. mediatomb has an admin web interface and my initial testing of a video seems to work great.

so in summary:
to stream video from the DNS-323 NAS to your PS3, you need a UPnP AV server. the latest firmware has a server that seems to work fine, but you can also install mediatomb if you want something a little fancier.

*UPDATE*
there are a lot of issues with pure streaming of xvid files. it seems that if the encoding is not done properly (which is often the case in downloaded tv content), the PS3 will choke on your file. the way to ensure that your content will stream correctly is to transcode the files on the fly with something like tversity. i think that mediatomb now has a hook into mencoder if you have a powerful enough device to do real-time transcoding, but the DNS-323 is not that device.

until sony fixes the streaming issues, i’ve gone back to the xbox as my media center.

*UPDATE 2*
i have installed the twonkymedia server for the DNS-323 and have not yet run into any problems streaming video to the ps3. this really is awful because it’s a commercial product and you have to pay for it, but after the 30 day trial, i may end up buying a license because nothing else has worked problem free for me yet. i really wish that there was an open source/free solution that works on the NAS.

*UPDATE 3*
i have installed ffp 0.5 and the associated mediatomb package and everything works just fine for me for streaming to the ps3. it’s a nice free solution, though mediatomb’s indexing of mp3s is way, way slow.

sure there’s a web interface to do it, or you can sancho in, but i have grown accustomed to utorrent’s automatic RSS parsing features. what made utorrent’s RSS feed especially cool was that you can tag a show to be downloaded and once the file was downloaded, it won’t try to download the show again, even if you delete the file while the torrent is still in the RSS feed.

mldonkey doesn’t have any out-of-the-box features to do this and adding a torrent to mldonkey from the command-line is harder than you would expect. maybe i haven’t found the command-line way to do it, but i haven’t been able to find it yet.

anyway, i have finally decided to install PHP on the NAS box. this gives me a whole slew of new options. a little scripting magic later (i wish that the version of PHP i got had curl support) , i made an RSS parser, torrent downloader, and telnet client to access mlnet’s admin telnet command line program. all in all, the script seems to be working well after cron’ing it, so i’ve got the same functionality that i had before. yay. now it’s just time to make a list of all the things to download…