I moved

Greetings everyone,

Please update your bookmark (haha am I really read by someone ? ) I have move to https://www.lamssoft.org .

Thx

LaMs

Computer Science Papers... Really ?

Before stating to blog about today's topic, I would like to assure you that the MythTV setup part will come as soon as I get time to make some good screenshot and all. I'll also look to enter inside MythTV development soon... when the mid-term exams and homework will be done.

Today's topic is about a funny website that my friend François Proulx shown me a couple of week ago. The site is in fact a "Computer Science Papers Generator" it's really funny when you try it. But what is much more funny is when you read on the website and see that a paper generated by this system have been accepted in the WMSCI 2005 conference... a proof that sometimes selection committee are not looking to the contents of a submited document but to the format.

Anyway, try it, enter some friend names and you will laught. Sometimes you can even find similarity with some University Teacher in the use of BuzzWord ;)

MythTV Setup (Part - 1)

Using a TV is something very trivial for everyone right now and for my roommate and I it was not fun at all. So, we built our "Uber Mega Cool Media Center" using MythTV and some pieces of hardware that was useless in the closet.
The MythTV hardware we have is :
- A WinFast K7S 741GXMG Motherboard holding an AMD Athlon XP 2400+
- 1024 MB of DDR333
- A SoundBlaster Live 5.1 that we use for the Digital Output on it
- An Hauppauge WinTV PVR-150 MCE-kit for the TV-Tuner and the built-in Mpeg2 Encoder
- An NVIDIA Geforce 6200 256MB with TV-OUT
- A Wireless card Microsoft MN-730 which have a Broadcom chipset on it.
- And an LG DVD Writer
When we first tried to build the MediaCenter we tough that using Linux MCE would be a good idea... well we tried to install it during 2 days !!! So, we then tried KnoppMyth ... there was always a problem with the kind of automatic hardware detection and everything went wrong each time we tried. The KnoppMyth was even worse, it fails to boot after the installation !!!

So my roommate and I glare at each other, and since we are two Linux administrator in our past time, we decide to stop trying to use and integrated solution and to build our own !
We used Kubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.04 as a base system. We setup the Nvidia Proprietary Drivers for the graphics card, so we could have OpenGL acceleration for movie playback. It was so simple having everything working.

The remote that comes with the PVR is recognized using the driver lirc_mceusb2 so a simple modprobe did the job.

We then prepare our secondary disk to be mounted in " /media/data " because we will buy a new hard drive soon to replace the little 40Gig that holds our Movies for now and by doing a mount point it's easy in the configuration :)

We applied a so often forgotten philosophy... KISS which stands for Keep It Simple, Stupid that practically always lead to a very simple and efficient solution.

We added those repository:

deb http://medibuntu.sos-sts.com/repo/ feisty free non-free
deb-src http://medibuntu.sos-sts.com/repo/ feisty free non-free

#added mythbuntu repos
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/mythbuntu/ubuntu feisty multiverse universe restricted main

This gave us the package needed to enable the MP3, Codecs and cool stuff needed when you want to use an *buntu distribution with multimedia. The last one gave us some updated packages for MythTV.

Well for now I'll end it here but I should come more in details soon with screenshot and stuff. Anyway, it's so simple when you do it yourself and using the already made package that with the Hardware list in the beginning of this post you should be able to build your own right away.

Any question on some more specific aspect drop a comment I'll answer.

Quick launch ...

Well, well well... every Mac users should know Quicksilver, if not ... then you MUST check this.
Quicksilver is an apps that make you launch any application by simply tapping the firsts letters of its name. It's very usefull, and fast any hardcore computer users will become addicted! I will not describe all the possibility of Quicksilver there's a lot! but look at this overview from the official project's website.

But unfortunately this apps is only for OSX... True, but when an apps is as useful as Quicksilver, we can always expect to see some opensource project emerging, trying to fulfils the needs on other platforms. On Linux there's a project that is very similar (but still lack some finest) and is called Katapult. There's a feature I really like in Katapult that I did not found in Quicksilver and it is the integrated calculator.


Katapult and Quicksilver can also find a contact in your address book or a specific file name wich you can launch the application associated with it directly.

For the unfortunate that use the OS of Redmond there is Skylight.

Interclue Firefox Addon ...

Today I would like introduce a firefox addon that I tough is usefull. It's called Interclue. "But what is Interclue doing ?" you may ask, Interclue is showing you what's hiding behind a link. It's very nice, look at this screenshot!


I simply pointed my cursor at the "Tableau de bord" link and hit crtl. It's cool!
I found this addon when I was reading my Linux news on linux.com
Let me know if you like or hate it.

Biggest Party at ÉTS

Well it's a long time since I write here, I'm sorry about that. I prefer not to write instead of saying something not interesting. By the way I wish a lot of persons will come to the biggest party at ÉTS (my engineering school) so here is the flyer to give you more information. But I must warn you that it's really the best school party in Montréal !

If you're a lady, bring another one and you have a 2/1 ticket!

September 14 !!!

Social networking ...

Today, I would like to blog about social networking... In this era of Web2.0 and internet as a Second Life the website for social networking are becoming more and more populars. For those that have no idea of what I'm talking about... well these sites gives you the opportunity to keep in contact with a person you met at a meeting, like LinkedIn that is used more as a business relationship tools. Well this could be boring, but is a good help when you're searching for a job. But there is also some site extremely popular that made you addicted to it ... I'm talking about Facebook. This site give you the possibility to find some lost friends of the elementary school, keep contact with everyone, join network as your feeling and ... maybe ... meeting some new and interesting persons. All this in a fun way, you can even do a food war 0_o or being a zombie and bitting your friends...

You remember I talk about a mysterious girl I seen in Subway this week? Well, I was too shy and been unable to talk to her even for simply telling her that she was beautiful... I was angry about myself and asked me why I was so afraid ... anyway. I was on facebook yesterday, searching how many persons had "The Island" in their favorite movie list, then I see an interesting picture of a nice looking girl but on her pic she were looking sad, so I took all my bravery and decided to send her a quick message telling that she's cute and that I hope this will made her smile... I had nothing to lose at all ! She answered with a nice thanks and a smile. I really don't know why I was so afraid in the first place... The G/F of a friend yesterday said me that I did a mistake when I send the message to the facebook girl... she said me that I should have used an open question so it would have let the doors open for more than one exchange of message... Damn! I'll know for next time... Isn't it by doing mistake that we improve ourself ?

Sylvain