tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22860418555008800882024-03-13T20:11:41.467+00:00JP's BlogSoftware Development, Gaming, TV Shows, Films and anything else that springs to mind.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14080712044994796483noreply@blogger.comBlogger70125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286041855500880088.post-49822331174487673782014-04-05T17:55:00.003+01:002014-04-05T17:55:54.107+01:00Order and chaos on the iPadI mostly play games via steam now a days, which is usually on windows ( though I hope to use Linux for most of them on day). I have also played quite a few games on my iPad. Most of these have been simple games to pass the time. My favourite type of games are MMORPG's so I though I would give Order & Chaos a go.<br />
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This is probably one of the best MMORPG's I have played on the iPad, they only other been pocket legends. Order & Chaos is pretty good. The controls are not to bad, work pretty well considering their is no mouse. The game has quite few features like RIFT and WOW. I took part in a dungeon run. Itis also free to play once you have bought it</div>
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On the down side the graphics are a little basic. Also their seems to be a lack of animations. For example the charge skills has you just appear next to the thing you are attacking.</div>
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I will carry on playing because of the convenience of having it on he iPad, however I hope these kind of games carry on to evolve on iOS with I proved graphics.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14080712044994796483noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286041855500880088.post-47554310149141604412014-03-27T08:53:00.002+00:002014-03-27T08:53:50.729+00:00Continuous integrationOne of the tricky tasks with creating opensource software is building opensource software. I'm a big believer in continuous integration. This is the idea that everytime the code is changed, a build is performed by a build server and all the tests are run. Typically the server will notify people who checked in code and failed the build.<br />
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For a while now, I've been using <a href="http://jenkins-ci.org/">Jenkins</a> at home to build my projects. I've also been using it at work. This is a great which a massive feature list due to it's plugin architecture. It's been pretty useful at work where I have a lot more resources to host it on, but at home it was always a struggle to fund machines need for building things.<br />
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Since moving to using VM's on my server at home, I've been able to build my projects without to much problem and make sure they are fully tested. Successful builds get uploaded to a public section of drop box. This allows users to download nightly builds that have been fully tested.<br />
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Some of my projects such as the <a href="https://bitbucket.org/shield007/atomicparsley">AtomicParsley fork</a> or <a href="https://code.google.com/p/itunes-remote-control-server/">itunes remote server</a>, need windows to build them. This is where I really start to run into problems. I'd have to pay for another windows license to run windows in a VM (A least thats my understanding). This would have to be done for each windows VM. Since they are not used for much else, this seems a waste of money.<br />
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It was for this reason that I was very happy to discover <a href="http://www.appveyor.com/">AppVeyor</a>. This is a continuous integration service that can build windows software. It's a shame that it can't build linux software as well, but their are other service providers that can. I can also build Linux software on my home Jenkins system.<br />
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To test out AppVeyour I connected it to my bitbucket project for my <a href="https://bitbucket.org/shield007/atomicparsley">AtomicParsley fork</a> and set up the build. I ported the build of AtomicParsley over to cmake a while ago, which made building it really easy. My build script looks like this:<br />
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<pre style="background-image: URL(http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_z5ltvMQPaa8/SjJXr_U2YBI/AAAAAAAAAAM/46OqEP32CJ8/s320/codebg.gif); background: #f0f0f0; border: 1px dashed #CCCCCC; color: black; font-family: arial; font-size: 12px; height: auto; line-height: 20px; overflow: auto; padding: 0px; text-align: left; width: 99%;"><code style="color: black; word-wrap: normal;"> mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
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Imaging my surprise when it built. Next step was to configure the build artifacts. These are the things that are collected after the build has finished. So in this case, the AtomicParsley.exe executable. I shall have to look into publishing he builds as the next step.<br />
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I've also been looking into cloud solutions for building Linux software <a href="https://www.codeship.io/">codeship</a> looks promising and their support team have been very good. I'm testing this using my <a href="https://bitbucket.org/shield007/mediamanager">MediaManager</a> project which is a much more complicated project. I'll blog more on this when I get things working.....</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14080712044994796483noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286041855500880088.post-13504021148231431332014-03-24T18:55:00.000+00:002014-03-24T18:55:01.245+00:00Playing RIFT againI've been playing on RIFT again most nights over the last week. It's been good <span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue Light', HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;">to be back playing! I think RIFT is a great game, it has an amazing amount of things a player can do and even better it's now free to play.</span><br />
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I used to pay a monthly fee to play rift, but now it's supported by optional in game purshases. This is great. It's also available from steam. I like this because all my games come from one place. Just makes things easier.<br />
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Playing RIFT, I remember how fun it is, and how much their us to keep you entertained. It still suffers from the reason I stopped playing, which is a lack of other players. It is not as bad as it was, I guess been free more people are playing. I would also guess though that people don't commit as much time as when they were paying monthly.</div>
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Their is much todo in rift like dungeons, adventures, chronicles, raids, war zones, crafting, fishing and much more. Their are also rifts though out the land that keep things going.</div>
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People looking to pass the time should play RIFT, no excuse not to now that it's free! Just needs more players which is a shame.<br />
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14080712044994796483noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286041855500880088.post-35105982026061223292014-03-18T19:44:00.000+00:002014-03-18T19:44:15.720+00:00TwitterSo I've taken the steps to setup a twitter account <a href="https://twitter.com/shield007">@shield007</a>. I figured it was time to stop avoiding it a figure out how it all works. I plan to tweet updates about the projects I'm working on and anything that is happening. So please follow me if your interested in the latest developments.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14080712044994796483noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286041855500880088.post-4255173815653247402014-02-23T20:16:00.000+00:002014-02-23T20:16:04.670+00:00MediaManager Release 2.2<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 16.899999618530273px; margin: 0px 0px 0.75em; max-width: 64em;">
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Media Manager v2.2 has been released. This is a major update that focuses on iTunes integration. Here is a list of the major changes:</div>
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<li style="word-wrap: break-word;">Able to use the latest XBMC addons as media information sources.</li>
<li style="word-wrap: break-word;">Many improvements to the XBMC addon source.</li>
<li style="word-wrap: break-word;">Handle TV episodes that contain more than one episode</li>
<li style="word-wrap: break-word;">Added new File Database store</li>
<li style="word-wrap: break-word;">Added ability to store seen file information within a database resources</li>
<li style="word-wrap: break-word;">Added command line tool to print database schemas</li>
<li style="word-wrap: break-word;">Added configuration option for strip tokens.</li>
<li style="word-wrap: break-word;">If sources, stores or actions are configured, sensible defaults are used</li>
<li style="word-wrap: break-word;">Added new database store</li>
<li style="word-wrap: break-word;">Show/Film search make use of ignore tokens to find media name</li>
<li style="word-wrap: break-word;">Added ability to configure database resources</li>
<li style="word-wrap: break-word;">Added images for seasons of shows. These are used by default for mp4 files.</li>
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<span style="line-height: 1.25em;">This has been quite a while coming, but it's finally here. The project website has now move to <a href="https://bitbucket.org/shield007/mediamanager">here</a>. Please use the project website</span><span style="line-height: 1.25em;"> to let me know of bugs or feature requests. Also if you find the application useful then let me know on my </span><a href="http://shield008.blogspot.com/search/label/MediaManager" style="color: #336699; line-height: 1.25em;">blog</a><span style="line-height: 1.25em;">. </span></div>
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The main focus of this release has been updating the XBMC scraper support to work with the latest scrapers and stores that make use of databases.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14080712044994796483noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286041855500880088.post-54483919374339466502014-01-23T22:13:00.002+00:002014-01-23T22:14:21.184+00:00The Road to MediaManager 2.2The The next release (2.2) of <a href="https://bitbucket.org/shield007/mediamanager">Media Manager</a> is has been quite close for quite a while now. Or at least I though it was. Each time I've been getting close to a relase I've had to put it off due to lack of time.<br />
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Well the good news is that it's had quite a lot of development over the last couple of months. It's also now hosted on bitbucket. The main reason for this is the removal of Google code features such as downloads! I consider hosting on github, but currently prefer bitbucket/mercurial. The move over will be completed when I make the next release, however all the code is now pushed to bithucket. Visit the project page <a href="https://bitbucket.org/shield007/mediamanager">here</a>.<br />
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The main focus the last couple of months has been supporting the lastest XBMC media scrapers. Their have been a lot of changes in the scraper format since I first added support for them. Some of the changes has caused things to break and media info to be missing. The XBMC scrapers are quite a bit more advance than the initial versions I started using. Media Manager now handles these new scrapers, allowing full information to be fetched for TV Shows and films. We are also now default to the frodo branch of the XBMC scrapers.<br />
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In order to support the new features of the XBMC scrapers I created a lot of new unit tests. The scrapers are some of the most heavily tested parts of Media Manager. These test will help a lot with future changes to XBMC scrapers.<br />
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The main driver for this was getting TVDB show images to work correctly. Their were quite a few problems with the scraper custom functions that had to be addressed. Most of the web documentation on the scrapers seems to be quite out of date now. This took a lot of trail and effort, but it seems to be working very well now.<br />
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Their are still a number of features left to implement for 2.2, the biggest is a pure Java replacement for atomicparsely. This is almost their, just needs testing....Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14080712044994796483noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286041855500880088.post-7075187023203158202013-10-13T11:20:00.001+01:002014-03-24T17:58:53.693+00:00PC GamesFor a while now I have been playing mmorpg such as world of Warcraft, rift, guild wars 2. With the odd game in between on my PS3 and iPad. The mmorpg's have been pretty good, except they don't really work on Linux. Each of those games are pretty time consuming, so I've not had chance to play any others.<div><br></div><div>Things have change now, I have finally god bored of them and started to look around for other games. At the moment the PS3 is not a real option as it is on the main TV, which is always in use. Also PS3 games tend to be pretty expensive. </div><div><br></div><div>I started by looking at steam again due to rumors of it's Linux support and a game console. I have been playing also rats of games. Quite a few of these were from humble indie bundles. Others were big name games. All of these we're pretty cheap. While the humble indie games might not be the most advance, they have great game play! They also work on Linux.</div><div><br></div><div>One great thing about steam is the wish list. If you add games to your wish list, then you are notified when they go on sale. This is great and has allowed me to get a number of games for very cheap. I also have the mobile app for steam on my iPhone and iPad, so I get.a notification on their when things go on sale.</div><div><br></div><div>Interestingly I have been buying a lot of windows only games. My hope is that one day they will be updated to run on Linux. If the game console takes off, then I suspect their will be a lot of pressure to have games running on Linux. People looking of stats of game use on Linux via steam might want to consider that I now by much more windows games because of Linux gaming. At the moment I can't see my buying any games for the PS3 or non steam desktop games.</div><div><br></div><div>The other thing I really like about steam is that is a App Store. Once you have bought a game, it's yours. So I can uninstall it and reinstall it as I like. Also I have been able to use the codes off my half life 1 CD to activate all the half life 1 based games in steam! One of the things I used to hate with PC gaming was that once something was uninstalled I would never play it again. Also most my old CD games no longer work. Steam keeps older games playable, and I can install them on other machines like my laptop when traveling.</div><div><br></div><div>I have been giving big picture mode a go, which will be the console interface. It is pretty good. I think I like,the PS3 interface better, but suspect that is just because I am more familiar with it. I want to use a controller with some of the games. Since I had a PS3 controller I connected this to my windows machine via a driver called MotionJoy. MotionJoy had a horrible user interface, but once it working it's great. Somes games were just meant to be played with a controller ( street fighter for example ). However like been able to use mouse and keyboard for other games. Steam gaming gives the best of both worlds. Very much looking forward to their new controller.</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14080712044994796483noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286041855500880088.post-78044645497385951522012-09-20T14:38:00.002+01:002014-01-23T22:00:17.420+00:00Media Manager 2.2 nearly here!The next release (2.2) of <a href="http://code.google.com/p/tv-and-movies-meta-data-fetcher/">Media Manager</a> is almost ready. Just need to set aside the time to do start the release process. I just wanted to give people a heads up that from this release I'm not planning to create packages for Linux distributions. So their will be no .deb or .rpm files. Instead people will have to use the Linux installer.<br />
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I realise this is less than ideal as I prefer to use packages on my own system, but I was spending too much time with each release making sure the packages worked and had the correct dependencies. I their is anyone who wants to help create packages of media manager, I'd be happy to support them in this!<br />
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14080712044994796483noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286041855500880088.post-32644808507406621862012-05-29T15:09:00.003+01:002012-05-29T15:09:42.508+01:00Media Manager v2.1 released<br />
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Media Manager v2.1 has been released. This is a major update that focuses on iTunes integration. Here is a list of the major changes:</div>
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<li style="margin-bottom: 0.3em;">Seen files can be ignored</li>
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.3em;">Directories can be watched for new media, which is then moved to the correct media directory.</li>
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.3em;">MP4 Files metadata now handled by fork of atomic parsley.</li>
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.3em;">Much improved MP4/M4V metadata.</li>
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.3em;">Support for High Def media.</li>
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.3em;">New Store for notifying iTunes of media file changes via a remote server running on the iTunes box.</li>
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.3em;">Improved windows support.</li>
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.3em;">Improved TV Show/Film searching.</li>
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.3em;">Fixed issues with launch scripts.</li>
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.3em;">Debian/Ubuntu install packages.</li>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 1.25em; text-align: left;">This has been quite a while coming, but it's finally here. Please use the </span><a href="http://code.google.com/p/tv-and-movies-meta-data-fetcher/" style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 1.25em; text-align: left;">project website</a><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 1.25em; text-align: left;"> to let me know of bugs or feature requests. Also if you find the application useful then let me know on my </span><a href="http://shield008.blogspot.com/search/label/MediaManager" style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 1.25em; text-align: left;">blog</a><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 1.25em; text-align: left;">. </span></div>
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I'm hoping that project releases will come quicker now with a smaller feature set. Currently work in in progress on the next release which will include a database store and a update to the XBMC scraper support.</div>
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The native tools that Media Manager uses have changed since the last release. It now uses <a href="http://mediainfo.sourceforge.net/en">media info</a> and my <a href="https://bitbucket.org/shield007/atomicparsley">Atomic Parsley fork</a>. The new iTunes store also makes use of my remote <a href="http://code.google.com/p/itunes-remote-control-server/">itunes controller project</a>.</div>
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To download the latest release please visit the project <a href="http://code.google.com/p/tv-and-movies-meta-data-fetcher/">website</a>. Their is a generic installer for most platforms and OpenSuSE/Debian/Ubuntu packages. Also you can find the latest OpenSuSE builds via my OpenSuSE <a href="http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/sunny007/openSUSE_12.1/">source</a>.</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14080712044994796483noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286041855500880088.post-24744272938302841182012-05-22T09:30:00.001+01:002012-05-22T09:30:27.679+01:00AtomicParsley Shield Fork 0.9.6 releasedI've just made another release of my <a href="https://bitbucket.org/shield007/atomicparsley">Atomic Parsley fork</a>. I found a bug in the new --outputXML option that generated the wrong output on windows XP due to the console character encodings been non UTF-8. So I though I'd best fix it up and do a release.<br />
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So to grab the latest release binaries or the source code, go <a href="https://bitbucket.org/shield007/atomicparsley">here</a>.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14080712044994796483noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286041855500880088.post-623387321401074982012-05-17T13:46:00.000+01:002012-05-17T13:46:33.858+01:00Using jenkins to build my opensource projectsI've been playing around lately with <a href="http://jenkins-ci.org/">jenkins</a>. Jenkins is a continuous integration server which has quite a good list of plugins. I've now got most of my open source projects building everytime a change is made. An in the cases of projects like <a href="https://bitbucket.org/shield007/atomicparsley">AtomicParsley Shild Fork</a>, I've gotten it to build on 4 different platforms every time a change is made to the source code.<br />
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Jenkins makes this pretty easy by allowing a master controll server and then salve servers. So I run the slaves on my different platforms. There are also plugins that allow VM's to be started for needed platforms. Thats something I want to explore for building on different Linux distributions.<br />
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The real advantage for me is when the build finished and Jenkins publishes the builds. I have it setup to uploaded AtomicParsley builds the public area of my drop box account. These are then linked to from the project website. In the case of <a href="http://code.google.com/p/tv-and-movies-meta-data-fetcher/">MediaManager</a>, it triggers another build which pushes the current build to the OpenSuSE build server and creates nighly RPM's of the project. These can be used by people who want to live on the bleeding edge.<br />
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The other thing I really like is that it collects all the test reports and generated documentation onto the jenkins server. This allows me to quickly review the latest build. I can see how this would be very usefull for teams of develops. However now find the building side of stuff is taken care of automatically leaving me much more time for development. Creating and testing relases is much less of a chore now.<br />
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Anyhow <a href="http://code.google.com/p/tv-and-movies-meta-data-fetcher/">Media Manager</a> is getting much closer to a release. Just testing things like the installers at the moment. Once I'm happy with them, I'll be pushing out the release :-)Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14080712044994796483noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286041855500880088.post-73033941340358630422012-05-14T15:01:00.001+01:002012-05-14T15:02:04.688+01:00Initial Release of Atomic Parsley Shield ForkA while back, I created a fork of atomic parsley so that I could use it in <a href="http://code.google.com/p/tv-and-movies-meta-data-fetcher/">Media Manager</a>. Atomic Parsley is used to display and edit metdata in a mp4 file. It was not quite up to the task of setting some of the new iTunes atoms, so I created a fork with the new features.<br />
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Well things have progressed pretty well and I've just uploaded the first release (Version 0.9.5) of my <a href="https://bitbucket.org/shield007/atomicparsley">fork of atomic parsley</a>. Here is a list of the features added in this release:<br />
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<li>CMake Build scripts.</li>
<li>Option to output MP4 atoms as XML.</li>
<li>Added support for 1080p iTunes atoms (--hdvideo option also takes a number)</li>
<li>Added --flavor option for setting flvr atom.</li>
<li>Allow sort order fields to be set in the format of --sortOrder name=value </li>
<li>Added missing sort albumn option</li>
<li>Added option for setting plID atom</li>
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I realise that lot's of applications use atomic parsley under the hood for handling mp4 file atoms, so I'm hoping that the --outputXML option will make reading the atom contents a lot easier. </div>
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I also took the optunity to setup a private <a href="http://jenkins-ci.org/">jenkins</a> continuous integration build server. This builds on 4 different platforms every time their is a commit to the bitbucket build repository. When their is a successful build, it uploads them to the public area of my drop box account. The end result is I now have nightly builds if atomic parsley as well as stable builds. To see the links to the prebuilt binaries, visit the <a href="https://bitbucket.org/shield007/atomicparsley">project website</a>.</div>
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If anyone finds any issues or features they would like to see, please raise a issue on the project website.</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14080712044994796483noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286041855500880088.post-57045323171648352112012-05-11T09:22:00.002+01:002012-05-11T09:29:15.522+01:00Initial release of itunes-remote-control-serverI've just published the inital release of my project <a href="http://code.google.com/p/itunes-remote-control-server/">itunes-remote-control-server</a>. This is a project to make it possible to control iTunes on a headless server without a GUI. It provides a TCP server which can be connected to locally or remote by other applications to control iTunes. Alternatively it also provides command line commands for controlling iTunes.<br />
<br />
Currently the server and scripts are able to perform these tasks:<br />
<ul>
<li>Add new tracks/videos to iTunes Library.</li>
<li>Remove tracks/videos from iTunes Library.</li>
<li>Tell iTunes that the metadata needs to be refreshed from a file of the track/video.</li>
<li>List tracks that have missing files (dead tracks).</li>
<li>Remove tracks that have missing files (dead tracks).</li>
<li>Display information about tracks/videos in the iTunes library.</li>
</ul>
These operations can be performed by command line scripts, but also by using a TCP server. The next release of <a href="http://code.google.com/p/tv-and-movies-meta-data-fetcher/">MediaManager</a> will use the server to keep iTunes in sync with managed media libraries. In fact I've been running the latest svn version of <a href="http://code.google.com/p/tv-and-movies-meta-data-fetcher/">MediaManager</a> using the control server for a little while now. Seems to be working very well.<br />
<br />
The server will work on windows or Mac OS X as long as the requirements are installed.<br />
<ul>
<li>iTunes (latest)</li>
<li>Mac OSX or Windows</li>
<li>Mac Ruby ( On Mac OSX)</li>
<li>Ruby Gems: escape, sqlite3</li>
</ul>
See the install guides on the <a href="http://code.google.com/p/itunes-remote-control-server/w/list">wiki</a> for details on how to install it. If you find any issues, then let me know my the <a href="http://code.google.com/p/itunes-remote-control-server/issues/list">issue part</a> of the website.<br />
<br />
I'm hoping that work can start on the next version now. Currently have ideas for some features such as:
<br />
<ul>
<li>Different database backends</li>
<li>Play, pause, skip tracks etc...</li>
<li>Create a GUI to control iTunes remotely.</li>
</ul>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14080712044994796483noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286041855500880088.post-11143569401913031282012-03-07T08:03:00.000+00:002012-03-07T08:03:03.229+00:00Adding more meta data capabilities to MediaManagerI'm please with the progress that have been make towards the next release of <a href="http://code.google.com/p/tv-and-movies-meta-data-fetcher/">Media Manager</a>. The biggest difference in this release will be much improved meta data stored within iTunes files and the ability to keep iTunes in sync. These achievements have cause be to create other projects. The first of these I already mention was a <a href="http://code.google.com/p/itunes-remote-control-server/">iTunes remote control</a> server written in ruby. This is nearing it's first release, it just needs it's windows support finishing off.<br />
<br />
I wanted this release of media manager to start a lot more meta data in m4v files so that they look a lot more like iTunes meta data. This means when you rip a DVD and want to iTunes to see it, it will look as if it can from the iTunes store. In turn this should mean it is viewable on iPads and apple TV's etc...<br />
<br />
This release of Media Manager move to using the AtomicParsley command line tool to encode and view mp4 metadata. This tool has been around a while, but the orginal site has not been updated in a long time. Since then their have been new atom types that have been added to iTunes. So I came across a <a href="https://bitbucket.org/wez/atomicparsley">fork</a> of atomic parsley. This is pretty good and has had a number of features and bug fixes. This still does not do everything I would like, so in turn I've forked this project. I'm hoping that my fork's changes can be push upstream once they are ready. My fork can be found here <a href="https://bitbucket.org/shield007/atomicparsley">https://bitbucket.org/shield007/atomicparsley</a>.<br />
<br />
So I will be packing up my fork of AtomicParsley with Media Manager. The new features I've add so far are the ability to set the flavour atom (flvr) and a output option to list iTunes atoms in a XML format.<br />
<br />
The flvr atom can be seen in files downloaded from the iTunes store. So that I've found that it contains these values:<br />
<br />
<ul><li>1:128</li>
<li>2:256</li>
<li>4:640x480LC-128</li>
<li>6:640x480LC-256</li>
<li>7:720p</li>
</ul><br />
It took me a while to work out what all of these mean, by I think I have it now. 7:720p is for videos that are 720p. These also don't have to be 16:9 aspect ratio. 1:128 is for audio files encoded in 128Kbs lossy. Simlary 2:256 is audio files encoded in 2:256 lossy. 4 and 6 were the tricky ones. It turns out that 640x480 is the 480p resolution, LC is the format profile of the audio. and 128/256 is the Kbs of the audio.<br />
<br />
Usually 4 is used by low definition films and TV, 6 is used by music videos and 7 is used by High Def content. Their are probably other entries for this atom. If people know of any let me know. I can cater for them as well.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://code.google.com/p/tv-and-movies-meta-data-fetcher/">Media Manager</a> is now making use of a tool call <a href="http://mediainfo.sourceforge.net/en">mediainfo</a> to query the video and audio information of the file. This enables media manager to know thinks like the flavour, aspect ration, type of audio etc...Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14080712044994796483noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286041855500880088.post-88231642191571999162012-02-10T10:44:00.000+00:002012-02-10T10:44:40.584+00:00New Project: itunes-remote-control-serverThe other day I create a new opensource project on Google code called <a href="http://code.google.com/p/itunes-remote-control-server/">itunes-remote-control-server</a>. The idea behind the project is to create a TCP server that can be used to control iTunes. This will allow easy headless control of a iTunes machine.<br />
<div><br />
</div><div>I'm aim to use the server with my other project <a href="http://code.google.com/p/tv-and-movies-meta-data-fetcher/">Media Manager</a>. The idea being that once media manager has made changes to media files it can tell iTunes about the changes. This will keep iTunes in sync with the media directories been managed by media manager. Their are two parts to this, a new store within Media Manager which will hopefully be in the next release and a TCP server on the iTunes machine.</div><div><br />
</div><div>So I've created a basic server that works on Mac OSX. It's written in ruby and uses mac ruby script bridge to talk to iTunes. I'm hoping to add windows iTunes support before a official release, but this is still at investigation stage at the moment.</div><div><br />
</div><div>Currently the server will allow you to add or remote tracks from the iTunes library as well as listing/removing tracks whose files can't be found any more (Dead tracks). Their is simple authentication support and it's configuration is done via a XML file.</div><div><br />
</div><div>Their are also some command line utilities that can be used instead of the server if people want to drive iTunes from the CLI without the server. So far these are for finding tracks not in the iTunes library and dead tracks.</div><div><br />
</div><div>So currently I've not released it, though I hope this will not take to long. Just need to look into the windows side of things. If people want to try it out, then they will need to do the following:</div><div><br />
</div><code>git clone https://jp.stanford@code.google.com/p/itunes-remote-control-server<br />
cd itunes-remote-control-server<br />
gem build ./itunes-controller.gemspec<br />
gem install itunes-controller-0.1.0.gem<br />
</code><br />
<span style="font-family: Monaco, 'DejaVu Sans Mono', 'Bitstream Vera Sans Mono', 'Lucida Console', monospace;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"><br />
</span></span><br />
This will install the build gem and provide the command line tools:<br />
<br />
itunesController.rb <- The TCP Server<br />
llistDeadTracks.rb <br />
listNewTracks.rb<br />
removeDeadTracks.rb<br />
<br />
Anyway I'll post a update again when It's time for a official release. At that point the ruby gem will be downloadable from the website.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14080712044994796483noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286041855500880088.post-22396620854695936142011-07-04T12:43:00.002+01:002011-07-04T12:45:23.159+01:00Media Manager v2.0 Released!<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 1.25em; max-width: 64em;">Media Manager v2.0 has just been released. The project has had a name changed since the last updated (previously known as MediaInfoFetcher). This is a major update that focus on managing media (Currently TV Shows and Films) and much greater reliability when fetching meta data.</div><div style="line-height: 1.25em; max-width: 64em;"><br />
</div><div style="line-height: 1.25em; max-width: 64em;">Some of the change high lights are as follows:</div><ul style="max-width: 62em; padding-left: 25px;"><li style="margin-bottom: 0.3em;">Better searching for film and TV information using XBMC scrapers</li>
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.3em;">Tool to download and stay uptodate with the latest XBMC scrapers</li>
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.3em;">Much improved film title and show name lookup by variours searching strategies</li>
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.3em;">New actions, such as ability to execute system commands on media files and rename the media files</li>
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.3em;">Enhanced renaming patterns which new token types and optional parts to patterns.</li>
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.3em;">Can lookup film information from .NFO files.</li>
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.3em;">Improved configuration options</li>
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.3em;">New XML store for caching media information</li>
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.3em;">Improved tag chimp source, that will use the sites API instead of scraping the HTML.</li>
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.3em;">Maybe new configuration options (and a new configuration format).</li>
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.3em;">New installer for all platforms.</li>
</ul><div style="line-height: 1.25em; max-width: 64em;"></div><div style="line-height: 1.25em; max-width: 64em;">This has been quite a while coming, but it's finally here. Please use the project website to let me know of bugs or feature requests. Also if you find the application useful then let me know on my blog.</div><div><br />
So click <a href="http://code.google.com/p/tv-and-movies-meta-data-fetcher/">here</a> for more information.</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14080712044994796483noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286041855500880088.post-61391843873052057582011-06-02T21:01:00.000+01:002011-06-02T21:01:17.036+01:00MP4 Libraries in Media ManagerMediaManager 2.0 is pretty much ready to release apart from a problem with the MP4ItunesStore. This store is used to save metadata into mp4/m4v files so that they appear correctly in iTunes and can be used with AppleTV, iPad's etc....<br />
<br />
In version 1.x this store was based around a command line application AtomicParsely. However this always anoyed me as it was not very easy to use and was slot to drive it from java.<br />
<br />
In version 2.x I've been working towards a pure java solution. I first of starting to use <a href="http://www.jthink.net/jaudiotagger/">jaudiotagger</a>. I found this while working on my <a href="http://code.google.com/p/pod-caster/">podcaster</a> application. This is more about audio files than video though. It works well for podcaster, but not very well for <a href="http://code.google.com/p/tv-and-movies-meta-data-fetcher/">MediaManager</a>. I had to hack it quite a bit before it would work, then I started to find problems with parsing some MP4 files.<br />
<br />
I stumbled across <a href="http://code.google.com/p/mp4parser/">mp4parser</a> next. This is pretty good and does everything I need or so it seemed at first. I found a number of bugs in the library. I fixed a number of these and sent patches to the project (Still not been applied :-( ), I then found a case where a DVD I had turned into a MP4 file would get corrupted. raised a issue on this also. Not only did it courrpt the file, but it gave me no way of detecting a error. Due to these problems I had to stop using the library. The project has a hight amount of activity so I'm still hoping these things might get fixed.<br />
<br />
I've looked around for other Java solutions, but not found any. I could possibly write my own or fork one of the others, but that's too much work for now. Instead I've started to look at using a native library called MP4v2 which is used by a number of other C/C++ projects. To create the bindings I'm using JNA. This as not been without problems though. Currently on Linux I'm seeing segfaults unless I use a 32Bit sun JVM. Strangely this happens on a 64Bit sun JVM also. I'm currently hopeing to find out why and fix the problem, but will see what happens.......... It might mean we only have iTunes support for curetain Arch/JVM's.<br />
<br />
Anyways once these problems are solved, MediaManager will be ready for releaseAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14080712044994796483noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286041855500880088.post-90131619858282034192011-05-12T08:57:00.000+01:002011-05-13T21:52:45.574+01:00MediaInfoFetcher is no more, long live MediaManagerNo need to panic, MediaInfoFetcher has been renamed to MediaManager to reflect that the next version will be much more that a tool to fetch media information. It is not a tool for managing Media collections.<div><br /></div><div>Since my last post, Media Manager as really started to take shape. Many bugs have been found and fixed with is bringing it nearer to a release. Also it now has nearly all the features that will be present in the next release. These include the following:</div><div><ul><li>Better searching for film and tv information using XBMC scrapers</li><li>Tool to download and stay uptodate with the latest XBMC scrapers</li><li>Much improved film title and show name lookup by variours searching strategies</li><li>New actions, such as ability to execute system commands on media files and rename the media files</li><li>The renaming as also improved quite a bit as the patterns have new elements like optional parts.</li><li>Can lookup film information from .NFO files.</li><li>Improved configuration options</li><li>New XML store for caching media information</li><li>Improved tag chimp source, that will use the sites API instead of scraping the HTML.</li><li>New installer for all platforms.</li></ul><div>As you can see that is quite a impressive list of features going into the next release and their are still a couple in the works. The previous version had the concept of sources and stores, but now has the concept of actions. Actions are performed on the media files when they are found. So a new action as been created for renaming media witch used to be the only thing the old version could do.</div></div><div><br /></div><div>Users are able to write the own custom actions, stores and stores in Java and use them. This gives a great way for custom things, but also allows for testing of new actions, stores and sources before they make it to a release.</div><div><br /></div><div>Anyhow the next release is getting closer......</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14080712044994796483noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286041855500880088.post-66702514298927992962011-03-01T20:50:00.004+00:002014-01-23T22:14:49.764+00:00MediaInfoFetcher version 2.0 progress so far....<div>
It's been a little while since I posted any kind of update on the my open source project MediaInfoFetcher. For those not familiar with the project. <a href="http://code.google.com/p/tv-and-movies-meta-data-fetcher/">MediaInfoFetcher</a> is a application and a API which can be used to retrieve TV show and movie meta data from Internet sources. This information is then stored locally and can be used to rename media files with the correct title.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Version 1.0 was released sometime ago now, with several updates since then. However it was always had problems keeping up with the web sites that it scraped for information. So I've been working on version 2.0 for a little while now and it's making good progress. A lot of things will change in the next version which will help to keep it up today and always working in between releases.</div>
<div>
Some of the features to look forward to:</div>
<div>
<ul>
<li>Added a source that uses XBMC media player scrapers.</li>
<li>Checks for and downloads updates of XBMC scrappers.</li>
<li>Removed the old XMLStore and replaced it with a new one that stores all media files in a single XML file.</li>
<li>Removed some of the source which were always broken. Now using the XBMC source instead.</li>
<li>Much better searching of media data (films and tv).</li>
<li>No longer uses Atomic Parsely to write .mp4 metadata. Uses a pure Java solotuion instead.</li>
<li>And much more to come....</li>
</ul>
<div>
Things are shaping up nicely, but it still has a way to go before it's release ready. I'm very pleased with it's ability to use XBMC scrapers. This means it can always obtain media information without having to worry about it going out of date. It also means their are many more sites that media data can be obtained from as their are quite a lot of different XBMC scrapers.</div>
</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14080712044994796483noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286041855500880088.post-27068303846488883242010-11-01T09:12:00.002+00:002010-11-01T09:20:55.717+00:00NFS on MacOS is broken!I've been looking into iPhone development lately as I wanted to get an idea about what is involved. This means I've been force to use my Mac Mini for development. I'm not really a Mac user as I mostly use Linux (KDE). At first I wanted to use eclipse like I do for everything else. Currently this does not seem possible so I've been forced to use xcode.<div><br /></div><div>I'll probably talk more about xcode in a later blog entry, but for now I'd like to rant about how bad NFS support in Mac applications are. I have NFS shared directories so that my server contains all user details. This has lots of benefits like been able to move between my different machines, but the main advantage is that they data is backup centrally from the server.</div><div><br /></div><div>It seems many mac applications just don't work with NFS. I've never had a problem in Linux, all applications work with NFS that I've tried. I even play WOW from a NFS directory via crossover games with no problems!</div><div><br /></div><div>So here is a list of apps I've discovered have problems:</div><div><ul><li>iPhone simulator (Can't install developed apps)</li><li>xcode (Can't save files)</li><li>Installers (One of my macs can't install stuff unless they are done from local dir).</li></ul><div>If anyone knows how to get round these problems I'd love to here it. </div></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14080712044994796483noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286041855500880088.post-20223826751905877862010-10-05T08:31:00.003+01:002010-10-05T08:56:59.389+01:00Bacula - The Open Source Network Backup SolutionBeen a little while since I've blogged. I mainly blame this on World of Warcraft which I'm still playing quite a bit on Linux.<br /><br />I've been looking at how I do backups at home again. I've written a script (in perl) that performs my backups, but it's been having a few problems. First of I worte it to backup my how server to my Netgear NAS. It did this using rsync to a NFS exported filesystem on the NAS. It turned out that the NAS crashes when about half way though a full backup! For some reason the NFS is pretty flakly on my Netgear ReadyNAS (which is a sparc CPU btw!).<br /><br />The NAS also supported ssh and rsync protocols, so I stopped using NFS and started to transfer things over SSH. This however showed up another problem. It seems that the rsync parameter --list-dest does not work over SSH. This parameter is used to perform the incremental backups and only copy the stuff that has changed since the last time. To perform a full backup takes about 3 days currently (100Mbit network), so this is a no go. The backups need to be incremental.<br /><br />I've started to think about writing my own backup application, but this time making a client/server type app that does not use rsync. Instead would have it's own storage daemon running on the NAS. At this point I started to look around at other free applications and discovered <a href="http://www.bacula.org">Bacula</a>. This is what I've using to perform backups now.<br /><br />This is a very nice application that consists of 3 main parts. Their is a storage daemon, that sits on my NAS. A Director which is a server that controls everything and a file daemon that also sits on my server. The file daemon is the client that is responsible for pulling files when the Director requests them. The director then stores them in the storage daemon. The good thing about this is I can run a file daemon on all the machines on my network and just have a single director on the server.<br /><br />It was easy to install on my OpenSuSE machines, version 5 was available as packages and I used zypper to install them. Getting the storage deamon onto the NAS was harder. Their are packages, but they are a older version that is not fully compatible. I found I could perform backups, but not restore files. So I grabbed the latest sources and cross compiled it for the NAS which runs a SPARC architecture :-) If your familiar with cross compiling, then this is not to tricky. I need to some extra libs (sqlite3, zlib...) and then build the storage daemon static. After this it worked like a charm.<br /><br />Bacula is a very command line based application, it's controlled from configuration files and a console. Once I got these all working I manged to setup nightly incremental backups. The acuall backups appear to be a lot faster than my previous solution. Their are some GUI consoles, but this are basicly not much more that a place to type commands. So in my view still a command line. I bealive their is also a web client, but I've not got round to installing that. Will be giving it ago soon.<br /><br />If I don't find a good graphical client, then I might think about creating one. Main reason for this is we have a number of laptops in my family (windows and Linux) and I'd like these to have a good UI for doing backups.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14080712044994796483noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286041855500880088.post-42151471587419157382010-07-01T13:12:00.002+01:002010-07-01T13:20:04.475+01:00World of Warcraft stopped working in Crossover GamesI've been playing World of Warcraft most nights. What can I say, I'm addicted. As mentioned in previous posts, I bought crossover games to play WoW on my Linux Box and it was working very well. That was untill last night. WoW patched it self last night to version 3.3.5, cxgames/wine crashed a couple of time trying to update, howerver in the end I updated to the latest WoW.<br /><br />No I have the problem that I can't log into the game server. Seems Crossover games no longer works with wine! Hoping their is a patch for this before long otherwise I'll probally have to find another solution.<br /><br />As a software engineere I can understand how tricky it is to work with every version of the software. Don't expect blizzard shipped a earily release to code weavers before for pushing the patch to users. That would have given code weavers change to fix crossover games.<br /><br />I could run WoW on my new Mac Mini, but I'd much rather be running it on my main Linux box with dual screens. Since I've bought the Windows version of WoW I'd probally have to buy the mac version. Maybe if you buy wow you can use either version, not sure about that.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14080712044994796483noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286041855500880088.post-55286692477921910722010-07-01T08:29:00.006+01:002010-07-01T13:12:18.854+01:00Moving from windows to Mac OS XSince I had problems updating my firmware using iTunes in windows running in VMWare workstation, I've been looking for another solution. I seem to have found one! I bought one of the new Mac Mini's (The server version as to has better spec). I'm now using this for syncing all my gadgets.<br /><br />Mac OS X works a lot better for me than windows ever did. I've been able to connect it to the ldap server and nfs server on my network. This means and don't have to do much admin work on the sever, everything is controlled from a central location. Most importantly, when I backup my server and backup up all the user data on the mac.<br /><br />The new Mac's are very nice. I have a older one belowe the TV which serves as a media center and I've been thinking of getting more other TV's at somepoint. Having one which can be used as a desktop computer will help qutie a bit with setting these others up. I don't want to have to admin each of them, I'd much rather come up with a solution where they are all configured on my server.<br /><br />Reconfiguring Max OS X snow leapord to talk to my LDAP server and authenticated agaist it was pretty tricky. In fact I find OpenSuSE quite a bit easy to configure than the Mac. Most my admin work is done remotely from the command line for variours reasons, this a hell of a lot easier on OpenSuSE. Some think apple should sort out if they are seriours about Server opearting systems. In the end I got things working by changing the mac to use the LDAP profile "RFC 2307".<br /><br />The automounts are still now working, so that will be a task for another day. It seems that RFC 2307 is not the same as what my linux boxes use. I might be able to tweak the mac to work, otherwise I'll have to add new entries into the ldap for mac's.<br /><br />The next pain I had was group ID's. The ID's in the mac clashed with the ID's on my linux box. I fixed this by renumbering the ID's on the Mac, then adding them to the ldap server. I then updated the users so that on linux the mac groups were also visible. This was pretty complicated as the groups are stored on the mac in it's directory service as well as flat files. I wrote a perl script to perform the update. The directory service files are stored in these folders :<br /><code><br />/private/var/db/dslocal/nodes/Default/groups<br />/System/Library/DirectoryServices/DefaultLocalDB/Default/groups<br /></code><br />Anyway I've spent the last few nights putting all my iTunes conent into place and synced my phone last night. All is working very well. Will have to repeat the user setup for my wife's account. Hopefully firmware upgrade will go smoother this time.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14080712044994796483noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286041855500880088.post-76801334909000822802010-06-23T11:33:00.002+01:002010-06-23T11:41:14.654+01:00Running windows under VMWareI've spent the last week running windows vist 64Bit under VMWare to see if it can be used sync my gadgets (iphone, tomtom, harmony remote). All as been going pretty well, though still frustated my roaming profiles. The cause windows to take ages to log in and out. A nfs soultion would be much better given that this machine is a desktop one.<br /><br />I've been syncing my iPhone without problems, which gave me a lot of hope that things would work. However last night I tried to upgrade the firmware to iOS 4. This proved to be impossible and left the phone useable. I googled around and found some suggested fixes for the problem, however none of them worked and all involved hacking around with the Linux Host USB options. If I can't update the firmware, then VMWare is not going to work for me.<br /><br />I'm not considering other options, and it seems the best one is to by one of the new MacMini's. More money than I wanted to spend, but the benefits are quite large. First of I should be able to connected it to my linux next work with ldap auto mounts via nfs. No more roaming profiles! Backuping up to my Nas should be easy. My netgear nas pretends to my a apple time machine.<br />All my gadgets seem to work on MacOS X so I should be able to sit the box on the desktop and use VNC from my main Linux machine.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14080712044994796483noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286041855500880088.post-14217162951479145962010-06-18T10:13:00.002+01:002010-06-18T10:23:00.293+01:00Getting gadgets to work with linuxSo I'm not at stage 2 of replacing windows on my gaming machine. So far the games I play are working very well using crossover games from <a href="http://www.codeweavers.com/">codeweavers</a>. The next step is get my tomtom, iPhone, iPod and Harmony remotes all working and syncing.<br /><br />In a perfect world their would be native Liunx drivers for these products, but that does not seem to be the cause. The really anoying thing is that at least one of these devices is running Linux! So currently I'm evaulating VMWare. I will hopefully be able to install iTunes and all the other drivers under vista in VMWare running windows vista. So far the installation of VMWare has been pretty easy and I'm currently setting up vista to talk to my network (Samba PDC). The trick part was working out what product I actually wanted. The VMWare website lists all sorts of products, I'd suggest they create a table showing how they all differ.<br /><br />VMWare does strike me as slighly overkill for what I want, and I would quite happily pay codeweavers or anyone the price VMWare will cost me to get all these things working in crossover office. I wonder how many other people think this too? If I'd not already had to by windows vista, I'd give them that money also. I guess the main problem is getting USB devices working under wine and keeping up to date with the latest versions of iTunes.<br /><br />I'm also going to have to install outlook, and the only reason for this is that iTunes only really supports Outlook for syncing.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14080712044994796483noreply@blogger.com1