As my mother says “we’re a TiVo family”. Rarely do we watch television as prescribed by the broadcasters. We skip commercials, jump through the dull parts of shows and almost never watch live TV. Case in point: my parents prefer to watch who gets kicked off American Idol before they watch the performances. So when the TiVo broke, it became a rather well containted catastrophic entertainment crisis.
I started noticing a problem when I was up late watching “What Not to Wear.” The picture froze and no commands on the remote or the actual TiVo would work. Hoping this was an isolated incedent, I rebooted the TiVo. Unfortunatly the next day it seized up three more times and to top it off it reset itself twice as well. Needless to say, there was a problem.
I have been listening to Security Now! for some time now and from that podcast I gleaned that I was not the first to have this dilemma. Steve Gibson, creator of Spinrite and star of the show has mentioned several times how Spinrite has been able to save many TiVo’s hard drives. This Tivo seemed to follow the typical problemantic behavoir and I knew we needed a hard drive fix. I have been too poor to purchase a copy of Spinrite and not trusting the drive inside the TiVo in anyway, I searched for a decent replacement drive. I wanted to get a Seagate DB35 series drive as they are made specifically for PVRs and apparenlty all TiVos use them. However waiting for a new drive to come by mail was not an option. So we set off and purchased a typical consumer Seagate drive.
I now had the replacement part and just purchased a Torx T10 and T15 screwdriver for the special screws. It was time to pull the TiVo apart. Inside I found consumer-level Western Digital hard drive. Special hard drives my foot. I pull the drive out and stuck both it and the new drive in a free computer. I grabbed a copy of the mfstools on a boot CD and went to work. I followed the instructions I from upgrad-instructions.com and the Hinsdale Howto. First I backed up the TiVo’s OS to a thumb drive. Then, as my parents wanted all of their old recordings back, I copied the entire old drive to the new one using mfsbackup and mfsrestore. After a couple hours the copy was complete.
Time for the moment of truth. I put the new drive in the TiVo, plugged everything in and turned it on. Nothing. I started to panic, as we needed the TiVo back. I switched the drive’s jumper from cable select to master. Still nothing. In desperation I began flipping through the television input and to my surprise I was on the DVD input and not the TiVo. There on the screen was the TiVo boot up message that up until that I had seen all too frequenly recently; but instead of despair from another surprise reboot, this was the image that will forever enshrine me as the household TiVo hero. All the recordings were restored, all the recording schedules were intact and my family could happily watch television again. Plus I added 60 hours of recording time. All in a days work for the good Dr. Findley.
So I’ve transitioned over to using git from svn as my source code management (SCM) tool, and I truly love it. git was created by Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux. It was Linus’s Tech Talk at Google and my friend Andrew’s persuasive arguments that put me over the edge and got me really going on it.
So now that I’m using the best SCM tool yet, there are a few SVN behaviors I need to replicate. An important one is being able to push my changes to a server that I can then pull down to whichever machine I am at. I have looked around online and found a mostly handy guide on creating setting up a new remote repository but it wasn’t quite what I was looking for. So in the nature of Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) culture, I decided to create a guide myself. I hope the below helps:
This first part is for those who are setting up a fresh new git repository:
mkdir my_git_repo
cd my_git_repo
git init
touch temp.txt
git add .
git commit -m "initial commit"
git clone --bare ../my_git_repo.git
Create a working directory:
git clone my_git_repo.git
Typical coding behavior
# Start of coding
git pull
# Sometimes while coding
git add *some files*
git commit -m "Commit message"
# End of coding
git push
I overheard the phrase “That is so meta!” from a YouTube engineer at Google Developer Day 2007. Who uses the prefix ‘meta’ as an adjective? So here I am not only in Silicon Valley, but I’m also in the capitol city of buzz-word creation and abuse. I laughed to myself and went about enjoying all the wonderful presentations put on by Google engineers.
So today my friend, Justin Hileman, mentions that he wants an invite to socialthing.com. Go have a look. It’s a site that aggregates all of your social networks into one pleasing-to-the-eye page. It was “so meta!” As I was gazing upon this site and feeling unpopular for only being apart of only three social networking sites, it dawned on me the dramatic difference between the independent web movement and the behavior of corporate conglomerates.
Corporations are always trying to buy out one another and turn themselves into one massive company. Case in point: the recent attempt of Microsoft to buy up Yahoo. Adobe and Macromedia merged. Nearly every car sold in America is constructed from only a handful of major car companies. This trend has been going on basically since the adoption of capitalism.
The web seems to be going the opposite way. Instead of having all of your major sites merging into one company (like having Facebook, Myspace and Orkut merge), other sites crop up to group all the data coming out into one meta site. Some great examples: Mint.com (money), Google News (News), and Google Reader (RSS feeds). Even sites like Facebook are importing your blog posts and your Last.fm music into one central source. If corporations could find a way to generalize their products the way that web sites generalize their data, I’m sure we’d see many more umbrella providers doing the same thing. Maybe that’s what mail-order catalogs are all about?
So this post goes out to all of you who miss my blog posting. Pretty much I hate writing. I get more excited about taking out the trash or laundry (well maybe not laundry). Here’s the funny thing, I have thoughts for a really fun blog post about once a day. Pathetic, huh? Perhaps if I finally get into this whole habit of blogging, my hatred for writing even be less than my distaste for doing the dishes.
Some blogs I read recommend that you post in the morning. I think they mean that time when you wake up, not the wee hours when one should be asleep. Perhaps I’ll try that when I graduate, which is in approximately four weeks from today. Only two weeks of classes left, a week of finals and then putting on silly clothes and throwing hats.
So there is a wholelot of hoopla about the new iPhone SDK. For those of you non-techies out there, it’s this toolkit that lets you write cool programs for the iPhone. While I think that the many things they are doing are great, I think there is something much bigger that will come out of this than just some cool games. Perhaps the biggest news is the enterprise support for things like Exchange, VPN and push email (think Blackberry). While generally I could care less myself, I know that for many people, not having enterprise support is what was holding them or their business back from allowing iPhones in the business. Also there will be several businesses wanting to write custom iPhone software just for their employees. Now here’s the reallly big thing: Apple really hasn’t made a big dent in the business market, but the iPhone could be what gets them in the door. Here’s the scenario:
A company decides to make the iPhone their next phone. They make some custom software for it. While making custom software, the internal developers fall madly in love with Objective-C and Apple’s build enviroment. (Before you mock me, remember that the first web browser and server were made on a NeXT box, precursor to Apple OS X, which Tim Berners-Lee fell in love with because that development enviroment is fantastic.) After said developers have strong happy feelings, they’ll want to do the same sort of development for non-iPhone things. Where will they want to develop? On a Mac.
While this might not happen right away, I think this may be the halo effect that Apple has been looking for to get their great software/hardware into businesses.
So I’m a huge music lover. While I know there are thousands of other music fanatics, what tends to separate me from my other officianados is that I prefer albums. While 7″ singles were essential in the days vinyl, artists had to be able to produce a full record that could to be listened to straight through without skipping or sucking. I received a turntable for Christmas, have been listening to amazing current records such as Radiohead’s Kid A and The National’s Boxer, but more importantly I have been putting on my parent’s records such as Joni Mitchell’s Blue and Neil Young’s Harvest. The thing I noticed is they were consistently amazing all the way through, which is quite different from today’s current music scene. Too often artists think they need to fill only a portion of the disk with something decent. Records forced artists to fill the whole thing with their best. I’m always drawn towards artists that can produce an album not a collection of singles.
The other great thing about vinyl is the quality of the recordings. On Radiohead’s Kid A, an album I have listened to literally hundreds of times, I was blown away by the level of detail and the ability to distinguish new sounds I had never heard before. Joni Mitchell’s Blue perfectly captured her stunning voice and delicate melodies. This is what music listening is all about.
Where has the music scene gone? Why did we ever go away from perfection? Sure records scratch and MP3’s are quite portable but does that mean we should give up our music morals for some one-off poorly recorded crap? Away 128kpbs MP3’s. Show me an album for every track continues with the greatness that was the first. Give me quality and give me heart and soul. Excuse me while I relish in the grand old days of vinyl rock and roll.
“That’s the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they
really hate [are] lousy programmers.
- Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle in “Oath of Fealty”
So I was watching Chuck, this great show on NBC (owned by the great evil conglomorate Universal) about a Geek Squad IT guy who is forced to become a spy. At the end of the episode (Chuck vs. The Tango), I heard them play the National’s Slow Show and I was just ecstatic. Seriously this is the music industry’s best kept secret, you need to hear this band as it will change your life. I’m just so glad they are getting some much deserved air time. Chuck plays tons of great music, it may become a new place for me to check out new music. Don’t believe me? check it out yourself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_(TV_series)#Music. The show has a definite cheese-factor to it, but we can get over that right?
Here is one of my favorite performances by The National of one of my favorite songs:
Today is a great great day. Why you ask? Because the long awaited album from Radiohead has just been announced. When is it coming out you say? In 10 days. ONLY TEN DAYS! I can hardly believe, I can scarcely conceive that in little over a week my ears will be graced with fresh new sounds from the greatest band in the world. I recommend buying the diskbox as I did. And yes it’s worth it.
