Scott's Blog

I had the misfortune yesterday to go on to this IRC channel to get some help in building LinuxMCE. Within a few lines I had been insulted by someone, dont remember the name, began with T. I persisted a bit longer and then the joker had the arrogance to say that I would get further, quicker if I worked with him.... Our survey said "ee uurrrrr". Wrong, he/she would get further if he/she learnt some manners.

I don't know why I bothered going back to LinuxMCE. I remember being told something like "why don't people buy the hardware I want them to buy", by someone from this group when I asked how to get some dvb card working. That was I while back before I discovered vdr and XBMC.

I've just ordered some Z-Wave components from Zwave4U and I've been looking around for some software to control them. If I want Linux open source (which I do), then I seem to have 2 choices, one is the homedaemon software, and the other is LinuxMCE. I'm going to start with LinuxMCE as it seems more active in the ZWave space and has support for the USB device that I've bought (Aeon). I don't really want to install all of LinuxMCE as I already have a media centre, but chatting on the forums, I understand that I can run just the DCERouter/mysql and I should be good to go with MessageSend. I don't like mysql but I will live with that for now, I suspect that the SQL needed by the DCERouter is not that complicated/mysql specific and could be ported fairly easily.

To start with I will download the trunk for LinuxMCE. Takes a long time as there is a lot of stuff that I do not want, and will delete later.

I found jQuery the other day while looking for a ticker tape scolling control to put in an ASP.Net page. I found this very neat example at this site which also has some other concise jQuery examples. There is one problem with the liScroll code however. If the width of the total number of ticker tape items is short compared to the ticker window then the speed of the tape changes after the stop on hover over. I think this is down to the following lines:

var defTiming = stripWidth/settings.travelocity;
var totalTravel = stripWidth+containerWidth;


The timing needs to be a factor of the total distance the div is moving, not just the width of the div. I think it should be:


var totalTravel = stripWidth+containerWidth;
var defTiming = totalTravel/settings.travelocity;


SELECT
(CASE WHEN ([database_id] = 32767) THEN 'Resource Database' ELSE DB_NAME (database_id) END) AS 'Database Name',
SUM(CASE WHEN ([is_modified] = 1) THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) AS DirtyPageCount,
SUM(CASE WHEN ([is_modified] = 1) THEN 0 ELSE 1 END) AS CleanPageCount
FROM sys.dm_os_buffer_descriptors
GROUP BY database_id
ORDER BY DB_NAME(database_id)
GO

So the Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott announces that he was banging his secretary in the middle of Clarke's "murderers and rapists go free" moment of triumph. Coincidence or not?

I am making my server into a media server, primarily so I can use it to host my mp3s for transfer to my car mp3 player. I bought a 200GB disk, and ran into a problem with my kernel. Its pretty old (2.4.18) and didn't see all the cylinders on the disk . Turns out the LBA48 (48 bit addressing which gets round the cylinders and 137.4GB limit) is not in 2.4.18, but I think came in 2.4.19. There is however a patch which fixes this. So I now have my car mp3 player automatically syncing (using rsync) when I park outside my house. It shuts down after it gets the power down ACPI event and has finished a successful sync.

Just when you thought this Labour government couldn't get any more unbelievably insulting, it starts changing the definition of the word voluntary a la George Orwell's 1984. In its manifesto it stated it would bring in ID cards on a voluntary basis. Now it is saying we must pay more to renew or obtain a passport in order to get this "voluntary" ID card. So if you want a passport, you must have an ID card. It calls this "voluntary" as you don't have to apply for a passport. Well, hello Home Secretary, is there anyone at home? The vast majority of people in this country like to travel abroad and consider, rightly, that a passport is a right. Tossers.

Wow, insulted by how stupid the goverment must think I am. Her husband gets a "gift" of £344,000 and doesn't tell her - yeah, right. She then takes out a loan jointly for £408,000 which is paid of just a few weeks later apparently with the same "gift", and she still does not know about it. Come on. What a load of bollocks.

I've started a Sourceforge project for my ibus mp3 stuff:ibusmp3.

So new stuff will go there, unless its not project related. Source code for linux to talk to the ibus is there in CVS.

According to this EPIA equipped Vespa its 25 watts. Looks like I should get away with a 60W supply. The lower the better as far as I'm concerned, less need for a fan, less heat, cheaper.

Requirements for this are that I need a wireless card. I've heard wireless USB support in Linux is mixed so I think I prefer to go with a PCMCIA card which has excellent support in Linux.

This site looks interesting, but what is the wattage of this VIA EPIA MII 12000 board?

EPIA reviews

This little page could be handy in calculating the power suppy rating I'll need:

Mini-Box Power Calculator

Well I had another go with the laptop and the car today, and I turned off CRTSCTS and it worked again. I wish I could be 100% sure that this is the cure, but I'm pretty sure I tried that the other day. Anyone I can push on with connecting up the audio now, and it will soon be time to think about buying a proper box and getting a fast booting linux distro on it.

If you want to have 2 columns in the same table and syncrhonize their values, then this can be achievied with triggers. That is, you have 2 columns, col1 and col2, and when col1 is changed you want to update col2, and vice versa. This can be useful for migration amongst other things. In this example I make col1==col2, but that need not be the case: you could have col2 == col1 / 2 and the same structure of triggers could be used:

You need 2 triggers examples of which are below. I do not use @@ROWCOUNT, as it contains the effect of the last SQL statement, so if there is a trigger than is on the same table and that trigger runs before these 2, then the value in @@ROWCOUNT is not useful. I've also done a little fudge for NULL values, which you may or may not be able to use, depending on whether you can think of a value that will never occur in the column. If not you will have to expand the check to see if the value is different to cope with NULLs. Remember that NULL <> anything(including null) is false as is NULL = anything.


CREATE TRIGGER TR1 ON [dbo].[t1]
FOR INSERT, UPDATE
AS
IF UPDATE(col1)
BEGIN
DECLARE @rc int

SELECT @rc = COUNT(*) FROM INSERTED
IF @rc = 0
RETURN

UPDATE OSS_VOYAGE
SET col2 = i.col1
FROM t1, INSERTED i
WHERE t1.ok = i.pk
AND ISNULL(t1.col2, 'xyz') != ISNULL(i.col1, 'xyz')
END


and

CREATE TRIGGER TR2 ON [dbo].[t1]
FOR INSERT, UPDATE
AS
IF UPDATE(col2)
BEGIN
DECLARE @rc int

SELECT @rc = COUNT(*) FROM INSERTED
IF @rc = 0
RETURN

UPDATE t1
SET col1 = i.col2
FROM t1, INSERTED i
WHERE t1.pk = i.pk
AND ISNULL(v.col1, 'xyz') != ISNULL(i.col2, 'xyz')
END

Had a mixed day today with the Ibus/Usb interface. Before lunch I had it reading and writing successfully to the car. I could increase the volume from a little C program and I thought I was nearly finished with tweaking the interface side of the code. Then after lunch I put in more of the response to the radio poll code and now I can't send anything. I can still read fine, but my increase volume program no longer works.

So I've ordered the resler.de RS232 part to eliminate the USB device as a problem. Maybe tomorrow night, I'll plug the laptop in again just to see what happens with the USB interface again.

Bollocks.