Bonus link: Arianna Huffington for Governor
I gotta admit - the flash animations on this site are really pretty funny.
I gotta admit - the flash animations on this site are really pretty funny.

3:31:52 PM  #     comment []  trackback []

All 9 Members of a NASA Safety Panel Resign. All nine members of an expert panel established by Congress to advise NASA on safety resigned Monday, with several citing frustration over a lack of influence. By Matthew L. Wald. [New York Times: NYT HomePage]

Is this good or bad news? I'm trying to figure it out. NASA wasn't listening to safety concerns, now they promise to be good doobies and listen. NASA don't seem to have anyone to listen to about safety anymore - they alienated the existing (just resigned) safety panel.

This is the kind of news I don't like to hear. I believe in NASA, seeing the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station is inspiring. But, it feels like the next group of safety experts had better be able to walk on water and really hold their own politically or else we won't have anything interesting happening at NASA.

3:09:35 PM  #     comment []  trackback []

Sage TV
I gave up on MythTV. I really liked it a lot. After nearly a month of puttering around with it, setting up the kernel, changing it, getting the next set of dependancies, updating the configuration, installing this and that - I did have a perfectly working MythTV system. It was great - the program guide worked wonderful and there was even a set of web pages to setup recordings. I even had most of the additions built and just about working - stuff like MythDVD and MythVideo and MythWeather. MythWeather was one of the coolest - it had four screens and showed you the local weather. It worked really well.

Except for one detail - I couldn't find out how to create a video DVD or video CD of any recorded program. I spend a couple weeks trying to figure this out. Many places had hints and pointers and suggestions, but no firm set of directions. I needed to get the output video files from MythTV which were captured on a Hauggepauge PVR-350 converted to DVD or Video CD format. And I just couldn't find the collection of commands to do it.

So, I gave up. I could probably fuddle through it for a while more and within the next month or two, I'd have the magic required to do it. But I have a problem with spending the next month or two on it - the new tv season began this week. I needed to solve this problem by the end of this week.

I remembered seeing a pointer to Sage TV back when I was just getting started with MythTV. Sage TV is a Windows based program and the one major feature that I saw there was that it records in a DVD format as one of it's options. Cool.

Last night was the night - I wiped out RedHat 9 which had a great MythTV (sad face... I'll miss MythTV) and installed Windows 2000 server and all of its updates (this took a while). Then it was on to installing the latest Hauggepauge drivers and applications - nothing too difficult here. I missed a reboot once and that caused the driver to not quite work - a reboot later and these were working. I installed the latest video driver from nVidia and the sound drivers from Creative. Tried out the Wintv32 program to setup the channels and fine tuned the few that aren't quite right for Shrewsbury. And Voila! I had a simple TV screen working on both a computer monitor and on the TV. Installed the sage tv requirements (Java and DirectX) and popped in sage tv. Blamo - it was working on the first try. The program guide is busted right now - so all we see are channge 5 with no programs listed... but I'll get that fixed tonight - there's an addition called xmltv (which I had setup and used under MythTV), so this shouldn't be too hard to finish.

Hopefully by tomorrow, I'll have a video DVD with something on it that works... looking promising so far.

Update: One little detail - unless your wife is a geek, don't bother showing her progress. She won't be really interested in seeing that the TV works, almost.

11:30:52 AM  #     comment []  trackback []

Scientists Discover First Gene Tied to Stroke Risk. Researchers say they have discovered the first gene that underlies common forms of stroke, a disease that affects more than 600,000 people a year in the United States. By Nicholas Wade. [New York Times: Technology]

Interesting news - not quite ready yet... but these are the kinds of  things we'll be hearing more about as human genetics are being explored. You can see how this might eventually lead to a drug that is tailored for this particular genetic sequence and then there would be a test to find out of the drug might work for you (i.e. do you have the gene?)

11:11:53 AM  #     comment []  trackback []