journal

Admittedly not very often. The thing is I am busy, and writing a whole post seems like a lot of work. So I’ve been twittering a fair amount. Feel free to follow me on there if you desire. To catch everyone up:

• brooke visited the MN this past weekend. It was fun to see her (and everyone else) again!
• Catherine has an internship this summer at a fancy financial firm downtown.
• LSK is in full swing, but this might be its last year.
• Work is good, but we need help. If you know linux, java, have made a webapp before and can get yourself to Plymouth, MN every day let me know.
• My myth cluster is mostly operational. We’ve had some storms and I think it killed one of my analog tuners, but I just bought a 2nd HD tuner, so that’s fun. I’ll probably have to get one of those new Hauppauge HD-PVRs that take advantage of the analog hole via component somewhat soon because eventually I’ll want to capture something on HD cable that isn’t in the clear.
• I installed a ceiling fan in the rumpus room so that room is a lot more comfortable in the summer now. Its the one room in the house that doesn’t really have air conditioning and needs it so this helps.
• Sprint killed SERO pricing so I’m either never getting another subsidized phone again or leaving Sprint when my contract is up. It’s probably cheaper to get a non-subsidized phone and keep my current plan but on the other hand I wouldn’t hate owning an iPhone in a year.
• The dogs continue to be a rewarding challenge. Currently Chewy is hellbent on breaking out of our yard to chase rabbits. We have to throw a towel over him and drag him in the house from time to time. He’s getting a little surly in his old age, I think.

That’s about all for now. Maybe I’ll add my twitter feed as a sidebar plugin to the blog so there’s something new to read here all the time.

Take care!

This one is a preview of his new show coming to PBS in September:


This is a talk he did on what’s wrong with what we eat:

Jamshid A Vayghan, Ph.D.

Mashups in the Enterprise: useful for the whole enterprise, not just small subsets of people.

Demos:

• mapdango
  
  lots of information, none of it super useful. Kind of a plaything more than a day to day useful tool.
• IBM internal app
  map + account list + ibm locations + business partners = useful info for traveling employees.
  Sort of like that “where I am” app that tips you off when you’re near a friend. (Forget it’s name.. Mooney uses it.)

Architecture/Design

• SOA
  Make a bunch of services (web services I’m guessing) and publish the APIs to the enterprise. SOAP/REST. IBM uses a REST framework to go between the mashup and their multitude of internal RDBMS.
• IBM allows data updates depending on who the user is.
• Useful for:

• Visualie info using geolocation
• Extend existing legacy and non-legacy applications including packaged applications like Siebel (do it yourself instead of paying someone else to do a lot of work)
• visualization-based info aggregation
• Situational awareness: Push the data to the interested parties (RSS/ATOM).
• SOA without Enterprise Information Management (EIM) exposes data issues to more people, places, processes. Data must be accurate and consistent or it isn’t useful.
• Security also important and not always easy with WS
• Clear ownership of the service must be defined
• Write services that can be used for anything. Don’t limit it to the needs of one service, or at least make sure its extensible.

Questions:

• How are mashups different from RAD apps?
  It’s the combination of existing services to make something new quickly rather than just a quick, one use app.
• Is this a new idea?
  Not a new idea but a better way to do it since its not tied to one specific technology (lots of frameworks support web services etc).
• Why are mashup apps rather small?
  Just glue code… using the existing services.
• Isn’t it impossible to write services that actually meet all the needs of the mashups?
  Need to break through cultural resistance and make the services change if needs arise. Benevolent Dictatorship can work, but a more democratic model for control of the data will probably work better.

So after a couple attempts to get CentOS to work properly, I decided maybe it wasn’t worth the effort. After all, there are things like Knoppmyth and MythDora and Mythbuntu out there that make life with a roll your own PVR easier. So I opted for Mythbuntu, mostly because MythDora seems to not be kept up to date very quickly, I generally have ill feelings toward Knoppix (not based on anything other than aesthetics) and I’ve really liked the things that the Ubuntu people have been doing and Mythbuntu definitely exhibits the same attention to detail that Ubuntu in general does. The only downside is my less familiarity with the OS (being Debian based rather than RedHat), but I’ve quickly overcome most of that.

Anyway, I’ve got .21 running on Mythbuntu 8.04 and it seems to work pretty well. Couldn’t get my IRman serial IR receivers to work, but it seems like the Lirc project stopped caring about IRman devices about a year ago. My solution is to solve it with money so I bought a couple MCE remotes since they are USB and are generally well reviewed and well supported by lirc.

I am still having a problem with one of my frontends properly playing HD content. XvMC seems to work but it only plays about 5 seconds at a time with a couple seconds of pause between them. I had added more RAM hoping that would fix it (previously it was running in single channel mode but now its faster RAM in dual) but it hasn’t. I don’t want to have to replace anything but it seems like either my video card (some variation of an nvidia 6200) doesn’t quite have the requisite skills to play HD content or my crappy celeron D just sucks too much. I tried to replace the celeron D with a Pentium D but despite the mobo claiming support it was not stable. If I replace the mobo/CPU then I have to buy new RAM as this is a DDR1 box… blah blah blah.. it never ends.

Anyway.

There’s been a lot of chatter on the Mythtv-user list about using CentOS for myth instead of Fedora since Fedora’s support cycle is so short. I decided to move my myth cluster to CentOS 5.1 and am documenting the specifics.
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Catherine has been home sick all week, and I’ve worked from home for a lot of it as well and as a result of being at the doctor’s office all the time or the fact that the world melted and I’m getting my annual hit of allergies. In any event we’re both not awesome. Anyway. That’s all. Back to cable.

The startribune has an interesting video on raising chickens in the city. I’m all for raising your own food, etc, but if I lived within 100 ft of a chicken coup I wouldn’t be pleased. Oh wait, I do. And I’m not pleased. Plus I have a suspicion that they aren’t for eggs or meat, but rather for fighting.
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Bittman shows us how to use fermented black beans (black soybeans, not the latin american beans). The Chicken with Black Bean Sauce is one of my favorites at Village Wok.

Starbucks is getting new coffee makers. My brother in law who works at the ‘bucks tipped me off to this on Sunday but you know, I guess I didn’t think I had inside information. They are also getting new espresso machines that compensate for nuances in grind and water temperature etc.

Somebody should send me a jar of this ketchup.

The NYT Style section has an article called How to Survive in New York on 99 Cents. My favorite quote is “For dessert each night we turned to the slightly wanton charms of the Little Debbie product line, particularly young Debbie’s Oatmeal Creme Pies, whose velvety filling so perfectly captures an imagined marriage between buttercream frosting and Noxzema.”
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