buzzco.org

As many of you know, I have a first generation xbox as my main media box. I have Avalaunch and Xbox Media Center installed on it. It is getting pretty old and I want to upgraded it. I can’t play anything HD on my 47 inch plasma TV and that bothers me.

I want to upgrade to something that will play movie files from either a CIFS share. I don’t really want the thing to have a local hard drive, and if it does, I would like it to be solid state. Like a SD card or something similar. I don’t want to build it myself, mostly cause I am lazy and don’t want to have to fiddle with it.

I was thinking about canceling my cable, so I don’t really care about DVR/PVR.

I was looking at the Roku but I don’t know anyone out there that has played with one. Also, I don’t currently have netflix.

Any body have any ideas for me ?

A long time ago, when I was but a wee lad, I used a program called GAIM. It was good enough for me. One of my favorite features was hitting 1 for a smiley. Some time ago they took that out.

To get it back, create a file in your ~/.purple directory called gtkrc-2.0

I put in the following:

binding “my-bindings”

{

bind “1″ { “insert-at-cursor” (”:-)”) }

bind “2″ { “insert-at-cursor” (”:-(”) }

bind “3″ { “insert-at-cursor” (”;-)”) }

bind “4″ { “insert-at-cursor” (”:-P”) }

bind “5″ { “insert-at-cursor” (”=-O”) }

bind “6″ { “insert-at-cursor” (”:-*”) }

bind “7″ { “insert-at-cursor” (”>:o”) }

bind “8″ { “insert-at-cursor” (”8-)”) }

}

widget “*pidgin_conv_entry” binding “my-bindings”

It almost Halloween. Which means lots of really bad horror movies.

I watched ( all or part of )the following this weekend:

Night of the Living Dead

Halloween

Halloween 2

Halloween 4

Halloween 5

Halloween 6

Salem’s Lot ( the one with Rob Lowe )

Carrie

Christine

A Nightmare on Elm Street

28 days later

American Werewolf in London

Constantine

Pet Sematary

Notice Halloween 3 wasn’t on there. Cause that one was junk. What is a Halloween movie with out Michael Myers ?

About 4 or 5 years ago, I was in need of a new alarm clock. This was before the Target in the mall (in Poughkeepsie) opened so I headed down to the Wallmart.

For 20 dollars I got a pretty sweet alarm clock. 2 alarms, that I have set for weekend/weekday. And the best part? it set the time from the radio waves. I would never have to worry about resetting it after a power outage. Awesome, cause I am pretty lazy.

That was until 2007. See, this clock has “smarts.” It knows when to reset it self for day light savings. (Don’t get me started on how much I hate DST.) When the US Congress decided that instead of fixing real problems, they would screw with time, they changed when DST started and stopped. No one told my alarm clock.

I woke up this morning, like every morning when the alarm clock went off at 5:45. I walked the dog. I made the dog breakfast. I finished up my laundry. I showered, dressed and woke up my special lady friend. I had to give her a ride home and then head to work. Then I noticed the clock on my cable box. 8:30. The alarm clock said 7:30. Confused, I rushed to my cell phone. 8:30. Her cell phone; 8:30 Damn. Thinking that maybe just maybe the cell towers were screwed up, I went to the car. 8:30.

My alarm clock thinks we still set the clock back on the last Sunday of October, not the first Sunday of November. I was an hour late to work because of it.

Now my question is, who should I be mad at? Congress for changing DST? The manufacturer of my alarm clock ? or myself ?

Well, its that time of year again. I am heading to Montpellier France for a week. I am giving a presentation at the IBM location there.

I am looking forward to being in Europe again.

Though, I will miss my doggy. Lando has been getting bigger and bigger everyday.

I recently upgraded buzzco.org. It took a while, since I had some difficulty getting SSL to work.

I found 2 great online docs for doing some of the stuff I wanted to do with SSl:

• http://www.openldap.org/pub/ksoper/OpenLDAP_TLS.html#4.1
• http://tldp.org/HOWTO/SSL-RedHat-HOWTO-3.html

After reading threw those I was all ready to setup my site.

The layout is not too difficult.

• buzzco.org/ and buzzco.org/wordpress are my wordpress install ( I am running 2.3.3)
• buzzco.org/projects is my Trac (Bug reporting and wiki.
• buzzco.org/svn is my Subversion server.

I wanted projects and svn to be authenticated through Apache’s mod_ldap. This used basic auth so I wanted to also use SSL so the password’s would not be sent plaintext over the internet.

First step I did was to generate my SSL certificates. I did not want to use a self signed cert, since the private key is sent with the cert. So I decided I would create my own SSL certificate authority (CA). I don’t have the cash to get this signed by a high level CA, such as Verisign. I found startSSL. Perfect. Free and supported by Firefox out of the box. They have documentation for setting up the keys and certificates with Apache.

Now I have SSL for a year. Yay.

I am not a developer. I am a tinkerer

I write small stuff. At work, I have been tricked into doing some java development. Its kinda fun, getting make into the grind. But there are some things that I have be finding ( or refinding; its been a long time since I wrote usable java.)

Anyway, I was implementing the singleton design pattern. You may have heard of this. I have done it many times in many different languages, but never really had to make it enterprise ready. So I started to look into it making sure I understood the voodoo.

First I normally use something like double-check locking.
Well I shouldn’t. I see lots of articles on the web that use this. Well it really doesn’t work. Me not being the best java programmer didn’t know that. But then I found this.

So instead, I am using something like this.
The cause for double-check locking to fail for use on singletons is complicated, and was hotly debated before the Java Memory Map was revised in 5.0.

I am really glad I didn’t just go with the double-check locking. I have a feeling that the rare race condition that is exposed would be really hard to detect.

I have been using google reader for a while now. I like the way I can get my “internets” spoon fed to me.
My shared items are here. There is an rss also.

I have a bunch of good feeds, and I don’t always share some of them.
Since I am a bit of a music freak, I wanted to highlight some sites that have rss feeds that I like.

• http://www.tinymixtapes.com/
• http://freakytrigger.co.uk/
• http://www.cokemachineglow.com

I really like tinymixtapes. I am even a “robot”. Basically, anyone can go to the site, and enter a few words on which to have a mixtape generated. Then, one of use “robots” can create a mixtape (well, really a playlist) that we feel captures the mood of the request. Think exploding dog for playlists.

Its fun.

I run this site using wordpress. I have been looking for a way to share the photos I take with my RAZR on my website. The WordPress Flickr Photo Album plugin for wordpress allows me to easily cache my flickr photos that I post with fspot. It provides a sidebar widget and a nice interface to add pictures to any post.

I like this web 2.0 crap.

Before vacation I bought a Motorola RAZR. Its a need little phone. Since I have the V3m, it has a micro sd card slot. For Christmas I got a 1 gig card, so I have been playing with the camera on it. Its a 1.3 megapixel with no flash, so the photos are kinda crappy.

Since I am not in Poughkeepsie, I don’t have a way to grab the photos of the micro sd card. Bluetooth to the rescue. I followed this guide to get a gnome-vfs in ubuntu for obex.

I think this is just want I need. Its wireless, graphical and it works fairly well.