(partial) myth joy

Posted by cafuego on Tuesday 26 August 2008. In categories &mythtv  &dvico  &fusion dual digital 4  &v4l-dvb

Yay! It would seem that with the latest updates to the xc3028 tuner driver, my DViCO Fusion Dual Digital 4 (USB id 0fe9:db78) can use the newest drivers again.

Up to my last attempt at tracking the newest drivers, loading them would cause a system hardlock, which isn't particularly helpful on a PVR. Well, whilst the olympics were on I don't suppose it mattered that much. Komkommertijd, as we say in Holland.

Olympic Cheats

Posted by cafuego on Saturday 9 August 2008. In categories &sport  &drug  &cheat  &AIS  &hypocrisy

As was probably unavoidable, in the week or so leading up to the olympics there were stories of drug cheats being found out and banned.

What strikes me as somewhat odd is that the news shows managed to get clips of Australian athletes condemning these drug cheats.

Australian athletes, who only have the help of their own efforts and a multi-million dollar government funded high tech research agency, to win as many gold medals as possible to reinforce nationalistic pride. In what way is that NOT cheating?

replicants

Posted by cafuego on Thursday 5 June 2008. In categories &backup  &debian  &openssl  &mysql  &replication

I found myself with some spare time the other day and decided that my current mysql backup strategy is not the best in the world. The mysql server is a virtual machine in a Brisbane datacenter and it's backed up via a script that calls mysqldump on each installed database and dumps the content to (compressed) files. These files then get sucked down via rdiff-backup.

This is fine in principle, but does mean it's possible for me to lose 24 hours worth of data due to an accidental '--; DROP table students.

hardware upgrade (continued)

Posted by cafuego on Tuesday 15 April 2008. In categories &hardware  &intel  &libre gfx  &x3500

Hmm. It seems I was a bit too enthousiastic in proclaiming the virtues of the X3500 chip when playing UrbanTerror.

Although it manages around 50 fps (which is fine) when I run around my local server, it manages less by an order of magnitude (2 to 4 fps in a busy area) when connected to a public server, with 15 others players running around as well.

So perhaps I need to invest in a new GFX card.

my long awaited hardware upgrade

Posted by cafuego on Saturday 12 April 2008. In categories &linux  &hardware  &intel  &asus  &mainboard  &libre gfx

In part of my line of work - web application development - you tend to develop software that needs to work (properly) on an awful lot of different web browsers. If these all adhered to web standards, a simple run through the W3C Validator would suffice. Unfortunately life sucks, and as such there is a need to test all sites on as many browsers as possible.

I use virtualisation to run a bunch of windows browsers in their native environment. However, testing this way took an awfully long time, as my desktop computer had a "mere" 1.5Gb of ram and only a single (Athlon64) CPU core. By the time you add GNome, Evolution or Thunderbird and Firefox to this, not a great deal is left for virtual machines.

What with DDR2 ram prices being pretty much at an all-time low and CPUs not being far behind in cheapity (wrong, but sounds nice) I decided it was time for some new tools of the trade.