JP's Blog

Media Manager v2.0 Released!

2011-07-04T12:43:00.002+01:00

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.

Some of the change high lights are as follows:

Better searching for film and TV information using XBMC scrapers
Tool to download and stay uptodate with the latest XBMC scrapers
Much improved film title and show name lookup by variours searching strategies
New actions, such as ability to execute system commands on media files and rename the media files
Enhanced renaming patterns which new token types and optional parts to patterns.
Can lookup film information from .NFO files.
Improved configuration options
New XML store for caching media information
Improved tag chimp source, that will use the sites API instead of scraping the HTML.
Maybe new configuration options (and a new configuration format).
New installer for all platforms.

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.

So click here for more information.

MP4 Libraries in Media Manager

2011-06-02T21:01:00.000+01:00

MediaManager 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....

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.

In version 2.x I've been working towards a pure java solution. I first of starting to use jaudiotagger. I found this while working on my podcaster application. This is more about audio files than video though. It works well for podcaster, but not very well for MediaManager. I had to hack it quite a bit before it would work, then I started to find problems with parsing some MP4 files.

I stumbled across mp4parser 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.

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.

Anyways once these problems are solved, MediaManager will be ready for release

MediaInfoFetcher is no more, long live MediaManager

2011-05-12T08:57:00.000+01:00

No 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.

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:

Better searching for film and tv information using XBMC scrapers
Tool to download and stay uptodate with the latest XBMC scrapers
Much improved film title and show name lookup by variours searching strategies
New actions, such as ability to execute system commands on media files and rename the media files
The renaming as also improved quite a bit as the patterns have new elements like optional parts.
Can lookup film information from .NFO files.
Improved configuration options
New XML store for caching media information
Improved tag chimp source, that will use the sites API instead of scraping the HTML.
New installer for all platforms.

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.

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.

Anyhow the next release is getting closer......

MediaInfoFetcher version 2.0 progress so far....

2011-03-01T20:50:00.004Z

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. MediaInfoFetcher 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.

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.

Some of the features to look forward to:

Added a source that uses XBMC media player scrapers.
Checks for and downloads updates of XBMC scrappers.
Removed the old XMLStore and replaced it with a new one that stores all media files in a single XML file.
Removed some of the source which were always broken. Now using the XBMC source instead.
Much better searching of media data (films and tv).
No longer uses Atomic Parsely to write .mp4 metadata. Uses a pure Java solotuion instead.
And much more to come....

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.

NFS on MacOS is broken!

2010-11-01T09:12:00.002Z

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.

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.

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!

So here is a list of apps I've discovered have problems:

iPhone simulator (Can't install developed apps)
xcode (Can't save files)
Installers (One of my macs can't install stuff unless they are done from local dir).

If anyone knows how to get round these problems I'd love to here it.

Bacula - The Open Source Network Backup Solution

2010-10-05T08:31:00.003+01:00

Been 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.

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!).

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.

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 Bacula. This is what I've using to perform backups now.

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.

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.

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.

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.

World of Warcraft stopped working in Crossover Games

2010-07-01T13:12:00.002+01:00

I'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.

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.

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.

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.

Moving from windows to Mac OS X

2010-07-01T08:29:00.006+01:00

Since 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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

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 :


/private/var/db/dslocal/nodes/Default/groups
/System/Library/DirectoryServices/DefaultLocalDB/Default/groups

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.

Running windows under VMWare

2010-06-23T11:33:00.002+01:00

I'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.

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.

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.
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.

Getting gadgets to work with linux

2010-06-18T10:13:00.002+01:00

So 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 codeweavers. The next step is get my tomtom, iPhone, iPod and Harmony remotes all working and syncing.

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.

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.

I'm also going to have to install outlook, and the only reason for this is that iTunes only really supports Outlook for syncing.

Crossover games 9.0.0

2010-06-12T17:45:00.003+01:00

My windows vista machine has recently developed a hard disc fault, their is a clicking noise and the machine keeps freezing. This machine is mainly used for playing games and syncing my iphone. I've got a new hard disc on order, but it occured to my I might not need to run windows on the machine any longer. Since stopping Neverwinter Nights development, I've been playing World of Warcraft (WoW) and Guild wars. I've notice that both of these run in crossover games now so though I'd give things ago.

So I've got crossover games 9.0.0 installed on my laptop, the laptop is less powerful than my windows machine so I won't be comparing performance. All I'm looking for is the games run correctly and they are playable.

First thing I need to do is install WoW, this is quite a painfull process as it's a huge game. It was painful on windows too. Rather than install from the CD's I though I'd use the Internet installer, so I downloaded it and used crossover games to install it. The install process then took 2 days....... 6GiG download. Wish I'd used the DVD now :-) Anyway, a couple of days later and it's all installed, but now it needs patching!!! This is really anoying thing about wow, you think it would just have installed the latest version. So anther day and a half later and it's patched to the latest version.

I can now run wow and see the initial screen. Crossover games has added a icon to my KDE desktop and start menu which is great. I now try to log into my WoW account, it's at this point things go really wrong. Turns out I downloaded the wrong version. I have the enUS and not the enGB, so I can't log into my account. This means another 4 days of downloading...........

Ok time to try something different, I move the Wow install on my hard disc and mounted my windows machines hard disc via samba. I now copy the installed version on their to the place where crossover games installed things before. There is a config file at the path "World of Warcraft\WTF\Config.Config.WTF". With the help of a crossover games WoW page I edit the settings in their to add the following:

SET SoundOutputSystem "1"
SET SoundBufferSize "232"
SET gxApi "opengl"
SET ffxDeath "1"
SET gxMultisampleQuality "0.000000"
SET gxFixLag "0"
SET fullAlpha "1"
SET lodDist "100.000000"
SET SmallCull "0.070000"
SET DistCull "500.000000"
SET farclip "477"
SET particleDensity "1.000000"
SET unitDrawDist "300.000000"
SET gxCursor "0" SET baseMip "1"
SET spellEffectLevel "0"
SET weatherDensity "0"
SET pixelShaders "0"
SET ffxGlow "0"

After all of this, I fired up WoW again and successfully logged in. I've been playing the game most of the day and it's all working really well. It's a little sluggish in places, like for example when it displays a tool tip. That is probably down to my laptop been a bit underpowered. All in all, crossover games is really impressive.

I think I'm going to be checking out VMWare next for running iTunes and iPhone syncing. If that works I'll be able to ditch windows for Linux.

Scanners in Opensuse 11.2 (64 Bit)

2010-06-09T08:34:00.002+01:00

For a while now I've been attempting on and off to get my flatbed scanner working in OpenSuSE versions. I've tried most versions from 11.0 to 11.2, but I always ran in to the same problem. The problem is that Yast tells me it will work on a 32Bit version of OpenSuSE, but not a 64 Bit version. I've got a "Epson Perfection 4490 Photo" flatbed scanner that I'm connecting via USB.

Last night I need to do some scanning and felt it was time to have another go and getting it working. Yast gave the same error message, so I though I'd check out the Epson website for drivers. First of their UK site was completly broken :-(, but their US site was working fine. I was surprised to find that their was drivers for Linux on their site!! How things have changed these days :-)

It turns out that the driver is a link to another site http://avasys.jp/eng/. This site seems todo quite a few drivers for Linux, amongst them are 64 Bit drivers for and instructions for my scanner. They also seem to have the source code on the site. It's quite possible that the OpenSuSE driver support for scanners could be improved by this.

iFolder 3.8

2010-03-21T12:42:00.004Z

For quite a while now I've been looking for something that allows me to sync folders on my Linux (OpenSuSE) laptop with my server. I quite like the way that windows provides roaming profiles. This allows a user to share a home area with multiple machines. The real advance of roaming profiles is that they can be disconnected from the network and then sync backup when reconnected to the network. This is great for laptops. Another big advantage for me is that all the windows machines store a copy of their files on my central samba server. This means I can perform a backup from one central location.

The problem with Microsoft romaing profiles is they only sync on login/logout. First of, I hardly ever log out of my windows desktop machine. I just lock the screen, and second it takes ages to sync changes. I dread having to reboot my windows machine.

So I've been looking for something that would allow a roaming profile type system on Linux. I've tried a few different options over the last few years (unison, csync, rsync) but none them have really been what I was after. So the last week or so, I've been giving iFolder ago. First of I have to say, the server setup was pretty painful. Even though it's sponsored by Novell, the setup took most the last week to get working. In the end I deleted all the ifolder rpm's and deleted any left over files, then reinstalled it. This time the setup process worked, so I'm still sure exactly what was broken.

iFolder consists of a Linux server and client applications that run on MacOS, Linux and windows. Their is also a web client. As soon as I realised this I saw that iFolder has a lot of potential. As well has using it on Linux, it should be possible to use it on windows. So far I've only used it on my Linux laptop, but if that works well I'll probably try it on windows aswell.

The server is written in C# and runs within apache. This means that anywere I can access my web server, I can access the iFolders. This is really great. It means I could sync my folders whilst saying at a hotel with wireless for example (Though my internet upload speed sucks a bit to much for this). The syncing also happens all the time and not just on login/logout. This works much better with the way I work. The web client is also pretty good, this allows me to access my files from work for example. Probably also means I can look at files on my iPhone to some degree.

The downsides of iFolder that I've found so far is that their is no headless command line client. This would have been very useful for on the server it's self. I could have then exported that folder via samba. The client on Linux is also a gnome application which does not fit very well with my KDE desktop. I notice that the client is written in C# which makes me wonder if their are KDE bindings for C#. If so I could probably convert it to run on KDE.

So far I've sync two folders, one (10Gig and 300Meg). The largest one worked fine, but the smaller one is complaining of conflicts. Their should be no conflicts so I suspect it does not like the filenames these files use. That could be a problem as I don't want to be limited by file name. However it does make sense if windows is supported as well. The client pops up a notification balloon when conflicts are found. It's then possible to output the conflict resolve window and fix any problems.

So far I've feeling pretty positive about iFolder. The client does not quite fit with the desktop, it offers a lot of nice features and works pretty well once the server is setup. Going to take a little longer trial before I final decide that it's a winner and put to rest my looking for a Linux roaming profile solution.

Multiple sounds devices in OpenSuSE 11.2

2010-03-14T20:15:00.002Z

My dell studio laptop has two sounds devices. Both of them are are Intel devices, one of them is the normal laptop stereo output, the other is the HDMI out. I've been having the problem that ALSA/Pulseaudio apps don't output any sound. I did manage to convince KDE to output sound but telling it go strait to the sound card, however that is less than perfect as I'd rather it went to pulse audio.

After digging into this for a while I discovered that the problem was the dual sounds cards. Alsa and PluseAudio need to know that the stereo output is the default. This can be fixed in YaST by configuring the cards in the correct order (the default one first). This article gave me the info.

At some point I'd like to be able to output digital audio so I will probably need to find a way of switching also/pulseadio between the two devices.

Linux backup

2010-03-11T19:54:00.004Z

For a little while now, I've been backup in my server to a removable hard disc. This has worked pretty well till a couple of months ago when I inserted the backup drive into the server (the drive is in a caddy). This caused the computer to switch off! and their was a nasty burning smell. I feared that I'd fried the computer, but it turned out to be the hard disc.

So rather than replace the hard disc, I started to think about a better solution. The problem with removable hard discs is that you can't automate regular backups. This lead me to start thinking about NAS drives. A network storage device could sit on the network and be used to backup to on a regular basis. I have a central server in my house witch all the other desktops, media center's and laptops backup to. So this means only the server needs to be backed up. Because it's Linux I needed a NAS that supported things like rsync and NFS. It's also important that files copied from the server to retain their permissions and owner ship.

After speaking to friends and looking around the Internet I deiced on the Netgear ReadyNAS duo. This can take two hard discs, and has loads of features, including NFS and rsync. The device works well in Linux, Windows or OSX. The documentation does not really mention Linux.

Once connected network I powered it on and got a scare. The device was very loud. Turns out this is a not problem, as it settled down. In fact I've never heard it do that again. Its actually very quite. Next I followed the setup wizard you get when you access the admin interface for the first time. I then added a backup NFS share. The share was configured to be accessible only from the server and allow root to mount it.

Now I use the following script to perform backups. It's still a working in progress (let me know if you have suggestions for improvement). This performs a incremental backup to the mounted NFS share.

#! /usr/bin/perl


use File::Path;
use File::Copy;
use File::Temp;

my $BACKUP_DIR="/mounts/backup";
my $RSYNC_OPTIONS="-a --delete -v";
my $NUM_BACKUPS=4;
my @DIRS=("/usr/local/","/etc/","/srv/","/home/","/root/","/var/lib/samba/","/mnt/Films/Films/");

my $backupPrefix=$BACKUP_DIR."/backup.";

for ($count=$NUM_BACKUPS; $count>=1 ; $count--) {
     if ($count==$NUM_BACKUPS) {
             if ( -d $backupPrefix.$count ) {
                     print "Delete backup ".$backupPrefix.$count;
                     rmtree($backupPrefix.$count);
             }
     }
     else {
             my $previousDir=$backupPrefix.($count-1);
             if ( -d $previousDir ) {
                     print "Moving backup ".$previousDir." to ".$backupPrefix.$count."\n";
                     move($previousDir,$backupPrefix.$count);
             }
     }
}

if ( -d $backupPrefix."1" ) {
     print "Copying previous backup\n";
     system("cp -al ".$backupPrefix."1/. ".$backupPrefix."0");
}

print "Backup up latest system changes\n";
foreach $dir (@DIRS) {
print "Backup up changes in ".$dir."\n";
mkpath($backupPrefix."0".$dir);
system("rsync ".$RSYNC_OPTIONS." ".$dir." ".$backupPrefix."0".$dir);
}

my $backupDataPath=$backupPrefix."0/backup-data";
if ( -d $backupDataPath ) {
     rmtree($backupDataPath);
}

mkpath($backupDataPath);
system("rpm -qa > ".$backupDataPath."/packages.list");

Apple customer service

2010-03-11T19:42:00.003Z

I've had my iphone just under a year now and other than it's lack of Linux support, I've been very happy with it.

This morning I notice that the battery was almost completely flat, so I plugged it into the charger. This is were the trouble started. For some reason the phone just went black and no amount of poking it would get it to turn back on. I tried all the suggested things on the web to do with resetting it, restoring it using i
iTunes, connecting to mains chargers. Nothing worked!

So I though I'd ring apple customer support, this was a pleasant change from customer support form other companies. I pretty much got strait though to a human and she took me though most the steps I'd already found of the web. She then emailed some stuff to try as well as confirming that my phone was still within it's 1 year hardware warranty.

The last thing she suggested was to arrange an appointment with the local apple store to have someone look at it. So since the phone was still not responding, this is what I did. You can arrange the appointment via the apple website, choose the time and leave a message. After that it was just a matter of poping down to the local apple store.

Once in the apple store, someone store me on time and took a look at the phone. They confirmed what I suspected and said the phone was faulty. Next they poped out the back of the shop and got me a new one. They activated it their and then so that I could use it and people could call me! The only thing left to do was go home, plug it into iTunes and restore my old phones backup onto the new one. This was pretty easy and worked without a hitch.

I have to say the whole experince was very present and quite surprising. I've had other broken phones in the past and it's usually been a lot more painful. Usally I've been without a phone for days. I can't think of any other phone that I could have got replaced the same day it broken. Thank you apple!

NWN2Library first release

2010-02-23T09:02:00.003Z

I've just made public the first release NWN2Library. This is a beta release (0.1 beta 1), so still a work in progress as I work towards the non beta version. I've upload to the release files to the website today, which can be found here.

This version has support for reading from TLK and 2DA files. This should work pretty well has the Neversummer web admin tool has been using this code for quite a while. Their is also a parser for the Bioware Neverwinter Nights 2 custom GUI xml files (Minor gripe, though I say XML, they are not really XML) . This probably the area that will see most work before the final 0.1 release.

NWN2Library & NWN2GUI

2010-02-17T07:54:00.003Z

I've been working on two new open source projects in the last couple of weeks. Here is a quick intro to both of them.

NWN2Library

The first of these is a Java library, called NWN2Library. The idea behind this is to provide a Java library that is used to access the resources of the game Neverwinter Nigths 2. It's still in development and I've not yet made a release of the library. However development is happening in a public SVN server now. Details of the project can be found here.

So currently has has the following features:

Can parse and read the strings from TLK files.
Can parse and read the database files 2DA.
Can parse the XML GUI files and produce a object tree of it's GUI components.

The XML GUI parser still needs some work but it's mostly done. Once thats finished I'll be making a initial release of the library.

NWN2GUI

The second project I'm on now very far a long yet, but its getting closer. This is a GUI application which is used to render NWN2 XML GUI files. The idea is you can make a change to a GUI, click a button and have it displayed with the changes. This is been developed as it's a real pain at the moment developing custom GUI's for Neversummer 5. The following screen shows how far the application has come so far:

As you can see from the screenshot, it's got quite a way to go yet. The XML GUI render has quite a few missing components and errors in existing ones. Also the main still needs quite a bit of work. I'm hoping to setup a google code project for it soon and develop the code in a public SVN server.

Neverwinter Nights 2 Custom Store GUI

2010-01-23T16:30:00.003Z

I've create a Custom store GUI for the persistence world Neversummer 5. The main reason for creating it, is so items can and their costs can be pulled from a database. First step is to make it look like the stock Neverwinter Nights 2 stores. Later on we can improve on them.

One of the things I've been having trouble with, is the dragging of an item from a players inventory to the store window to sell the item. Well with the hope of people in #nwn2cr I've finally got this working. I though I'd post about it as this kind of information is very hard to find.

My main mistake was trying to retrieve the event of a item been dropped on store GUI. This is actually done from the inventory screen.

Their are two events that were confusing me. OnMouseDrop and OnMouseDropReceived. So in a drag operation between two dialogs (in my case the inventory and the store) their is a source and destination of the drag operation. The source will fire the event OnMouseDrop, and the destination will fire OnMouseDropReceived.

I've not been able to figure out how to capture the dragged object details using OnMouseDropReceived, but OnMouseDrop works very well. I used the two following calls to capture the objects ID and send to to the store sell script:


OnMouseDrop0=UIObject_Misc_ExtractData("self:","objectid",0,local:3)            OnMouseDrop1=UIObject_Misc_ExecuteServerScript("gui_store_sell",local:3)

Their is another bit of magic that was also need. The above will fire for any event, so you need to know that the item is been dragged to the store. I added the following calls to the store window:


OnMouseEnter=UIObject_Misc_ExecuteServerScript("gui_store_mouse","ENTER")
OnMouseLeave=UIObject_Misc_ExecuteServerScript("gui_store_mouse","LEAVE")

The script gui_store_mouse sets a variable on the player when the mouse pointer enters the store window and deletes it when the mouse pointer leaves. Now the gui_store_sell script can check the variable before selling the item.

I was hoping to use a combination of OnMouseDrop on the inventory dialog and OnMouseDropReceived on the store dialog, but it seems that OnMouseDropReceived is fired before OnMouseDrop.

Hope this helps another scripter/modder :-)

Neversummer Blog's

2010-01-21T11:29:00.002Z

This is mostly a test blog entry to see if I can get it to appear on the new neversummer blog planet I'm setting up. The idea is developers can blog about the various projects they are working on within neversummer.

Dell Studio 1535, FGLRX and RandR 1.2

2010-01-12T17:37:00.003Z

I've had a little time to play around with the new RandR 1.2 support in ATI/AMD fglrx graphics drivers and I'm liking what I see. Make the laptop run with dual external monitors or the in-built panel is now really easy. It's a massive improvement over the ati-config approach I was using before.

Here are the commands I used to make the my Dell Studio 1535 run with dual external monitors:

xrandr --output LCD --off
xrandr --output CRT1 --right-of DFP_EXTTMDS --auto --output DFP_EXTTMDS --auto

These commands will now make it run with the laptop panel:

xrandr --output CRT1 --off
xrandr --output LCD --auto --output CRT1 --off --output DFP_EXTTMDS --off

Now I just need a nice way of attaching these commands to the screen setup button on the laptop :-)

ATI Drivers get Xrandr 1.2

2010-01-06T14:20:00.002Z

I've just upgraded my laptop to OpenSUSE 11.2 and whislt I was at it, I pulled in the latest ati fglrx driver and wireless drivers. For some reason the display driver put up a bit of a fight, I think the problem was left over of older versions of the driver.

Once I'd removed the old ones, the new driver installed and work without a problem. The laptop panel came up with my desktop. I took my laptop to the study and plugged into into the two external monitors (LCD and a CRT). Now things started to not work again. It would only use the built in panel. So i tried to use the "aticonfig" tool to fix the issues and I got a error message about aticonfig not working when randr 1.2 was active!!

This is great news, it means we now have proper randr in the ATI comerical drivers (if I've not made a mistake and load the free drivers :-) ). So I can now configure the mointor setup using standard randr tools. Also Xrandr is much easier to work with than aticonfig. I suspect it should be possible to write a script and attach it to the monitor key on the laptop.

I'll post again when I've had time to play with this a little more

OpenSuSE 11.2, KDE 4.3 on dell vostro 1520

2009-11-08T09:48:00.007Z

I while ago, my mum's laptop died. It was a old Acer laptop (for quite a while I had one of these too). This laptop had been running OpenSuSE for quite a while and mum had been very happy with the KDE desktop. The main reason for installing Linux, was that Windows XP had become unusable. A clean install of XP is nice had fast and responsive, however if you then install all the service packs and updates, the system becomes unusable! Recently the hardware had started to fail, first the battery, then the wireless...... So it was time for a new laptop.

After much looking around we got a Dell Vostro 1520 laptop. Now people who have seen my previous posts will know I'm a big fan of the dell laptops. The are built very well and have good hardware at a decent price. The part of the dell website that lets you customize the computer you are buying is fantastic. It means when I spec out laptops for people, it could be tailored differently for the person that will use it. We did look at other makes, but they were either to expensive (Sony, apple...) , a brand I've not heard of, or don't meet the required specs.

I decided to install OpenSuSE 11.2 RC2 as the the time of installing it, their were about 5 days till it's released. I have to say, once again OpenSuSE has made some big step forwards in areas that I care about. With a install using just the packages off the DVD, it was great and pretty much ready to use. However I add a few of the repositories amongst them are Mozilla, Packman and the latest stable KDE repos.

So in the previous release the things I had issues with were broken kde4 wireless application and no way to rip music to mp3 from a CD (k3b was not setup to do this). Both of these seem to have been sorted. Setting up the wireless was a joy. It was very easy. Ripping music from CD to mp3 is still a bit clunky. I would like music to be ripped to the hard disc automatically when a CD is put into the drive. However I get prompted if I would like to extract the audio with K3b or listen to the music with other apps. This works well, k3b was able to extract the audio. Slightly confusing for mum as she did not understand the term Ripping. Maybe these buttons should be called "Extract Audio" in the same way the dialog that prompts be for what to do with the inserted disc.

Their is one other thing I really like in the latest OpenSuSE is the KDE intergration with firefox. This is really awesome. I would like to see this go a bit further. For example use kget as the download manager. At the moment I use flexget to send stuff to kget, but that's a bit clunky. I'd also like passwords to be stored in the KDE wallet. I'm now also wondering if the FireFox hacks could be applied to all GTK apps? I use Eclipse at work and it's very annoying to me that it does not fit with my desktop.

All the hardware in the laptop is working great. Probably the first time that I've installed on a dell laptop and had all hardware working without tweaking. That might be down to the bleeding edge version of OpenSuSE though :-) The only thing that need a bit of tweaking were the special media buttons (play, next, prev, etc....). The just needed to be assigned to the amaork. Would be nice if this was done by default in KDE (though it does depend which media app you use). The volume controls were already assigned to the mixer app, so that was nice.

Ubuntu Karmic Koala (9.10)

2009-10-26T09:56:00.002Z

I mentioned in a previous post that a friend had installed ubunt 9.04 on his new dell studio 1555 laptop and that their were no real problems. Well it seems after a bit of time a few problems did show up. The 64-bit kernel (2.6.28) in ubuntu 9.04 had some problems with suspend.

So he installed Ubuntu 9.10 (kernel 2.6.31) and that fixed all the problems with suppend. He has to ad 'noapic' to the kernel line in grub/menu.lst because to get some the special laptop keys working. Their is a bug on it, so maybe it will be fixed in the next few months. Their is also no need to add entries into the modprobe.conf anymore to get the sound working.

So it looks like next release of Ubuntu (9.10) will be a good one for dell studio laptops.

Released PodCaster version 1.0

2009-10-25T13:33:00.004Z

Just made a release (1.0) of PodCaster. This is the fist time I've removed the beta status from the project. The release is mostly a bug fix release as it's been though quite a bit of testing and bug fixing.

Due to this been a bug fix release, the features are pretty much unchanged:

Capture Internet radio to audio files.
Create MP3, WAV and MP4 files.
Encodes metadata and cover art into the media files.
Create pod cast from captured radio stations.
Supports real audio and Microsoft ASF format.

Please goto here to find out more details and download the release.

Ubuntu 9.04 on a Dell Studio 1555 laptop

2009-10-12T13:44:00.002+01:00

A friend of mine has just bought a new Dell laptop to run Linux on. Since this is a new version on mine, though it might be useful to blog about it.

The laptop is a Dell Studio 1555 and has the following hardware installed:

Intel(R) Wireless WiFi Link AGN driver for Linux, 1.3.27ks
2.0 mega pixel UVC webcam
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU P7450 @ 2.13GHz
4Gig DDR2 Memory
ATI Technologies Inc M92 [Mobility Radeon HD 4500 Series]

Ubuntu 9.04 (kernel 2.6.28-15) was installed on the laptop. Apart from the sound, everything worked out of the box. The sound was just a matter of adding the following line on the modprobe.conf, which is going to be included in the new Ubuntu:

options snd-hda-intel model=dell-m6

Seems that dell are now using the Intel Wireless N cards instead of the one that was fitted in my laptop from broadcom. Seems like a smart move as it worked out of the box.

PS3, PSP and remote play

2009-09-20T10:57:00.003+01:00

I got a present of a PSP from my wife when ew got married and so far I've been very impressed with this little gaming device. The best game I have for it Burnout dominator, this is well worth a play and quite addictive.

The PSP is great when traveling, I was quite surprised how long the battery life lasted, and the games I have for it are very impressive. One of the first consoles I had was a Sega Game Gear (still got it somewhere). The PSP remainds me a lot of this console, but really shows how far things have come since then.

I'm finding that the PSP is great for those times when I want to game, but the TV is in use so the PS3 can't be used. This let me to wonder about the remote play abilities of the PSP. I'd not heard many people mention it so figured I'd give it ago. Basicly the remote play allows the PSP to connect to a PS3. The PS3 screen appears on the PSP and allows it to be controlled from the PSP. This is pretty neat, but so far I've not actually been able to find a use for it. This is because very few titles work with remote play on the PSP. None of the games I own work with remote play. I might buy one at somepoint to give it a test drive. Also non of the DVD's work over remote play. This is a real shame.

So far I've been using remote play to install PS3 updates, thats about the only use for it that works. I'd love to hear from others that have used remote play. It seems such a neat feature thats almost impossible to make any use of. Same more games don't support it. Might also have been interesting if Sony had given the PSP the ability to work as a wirless controller for the PS3.

MediaInfoFetcher Release 1.2.2

2009-07-29T17:48:00.001+01:00

Just made release 1.2.2 of MediaInfoFetcher. This is a small bug fix release mostly. The release can be downloaded from here.

Changes are as follows:

Bug Fixes:

Updated some of the soruces with changes from in the source html they parse.

First release of podcaster (0.1 beta)

2009-07-09T15:58:00.002+01:00

Just made the first release (0.1 beta) of PodCaster. This is a beta release as its the first initial release. Hopefully this will allow me to find any bugs in it and make a solid second release.

Thinking about the next release, I'd like to add some configuration options to allow the tools that PodCaster relies on to be configured.

Here is some of the features that can be found in this release:

Capture Internet radio to audio files.
Create MP3, WAV and MP4 files.
Encodes metadata and cover art into the media files.
Create pod cast from captured radio stations.
Supports real audio and Microsoft ASF format.

Please goto here to find out more details and download the release.

New project PodCaster

2009-07-09T10:42:00.002+01:00

A while back, I created to perl scripts that were used to record internet radio streams to files and place them in a podcast. This was maily because I like to listen to the nighttime shows in the day while I'm at work. Were not allowed to stream stuff over the work network because it places to much of a load on the network. So I came up with a better solution of recording them and putting them on my iPod.

This worked great for quite a while, but their were always some short comings in my scripts. I'm also mainly a Java/C++ coder, so the perl scritps are quite hacky. Then a while back, the scripts stopped working, I think this my badly written perl.

So I decided to recreate them in Java and started a new project called PodCaster, which can be found here. The idea is that it will replace the perl stuff I did before, but be cleaner and maintainable. Its progressed very well and quite a few new features have been added which the perl scripts could never do. Like for example encoding meta data into the recored audio files, adding cover art to the feed and been able to record the shows in different formats.

The Java PodCaster project still relies on some tools like mplayer and ffmpeg, but I might look to replacing them at some point with pure java code. The good news is that this is now nearing the first release (0.1). I expect I'll make the release official in the next couple of days.

iPhone

2009-06-22T08:18:00.004+01:00

So I've now joined the masses and go one of the new iPhone 3Gs's. I had a sony ericsson before that was looking kinda battered, so I was indeed of a new phone and be a gadget lover I though I'd go the the new iPhone. I want a phone that allows be to surf the web (the real web, not wap!) and check my mail, plus be good for games.

I the iPhone has lived upto my expectations, it's a great phone. I don't think i could go back to not having one now. I don't ever plan to stuf the wap web again, thats for sure. The app store is fantastic. Their is a decent about of free apps to and the ones that need to be paid for, are a lot cheaper than the games I used to buy on my old phone.

The web works really well, it's pretty much like I'm using a small computer to surf the web, the email works really well to, though it might be a curse been able to check work email anywhere. Having said that, email account can be turned on and off.

I've only had it a couple of days so far, but it's be pretty much all good so far. I think if I had to pick one negative thing about the phone, it would be imap email folders. Most of my mail is filtered by server side email filters, which mean they don't end up in my inbox, but go strait to the folders. The iPhone seems unable to check for new mail in any folder other than the inbox, which is quite annoying. You have to check each folder one by one. Love to know if their is a work around for this?

Released MediaInfoFetcher 1.2.1

2009-06-10T07:42:00.003+01:00

Just made release 1.2.1 of MediaInfoFetcher. This is a small bug fix release mostly. The release can be downloaded from here.

The project got it's first issue raised which as been fixed in this release. If you find any defects in the release or want to request new features, you can raise them here.

Changes are as follows:

Features:

Now able to rename subtitle files

Bug Fixes:

Fixed some null pointer issues
Updated to work with changes in source websites

IMAPFilter

2009-06-09T14:40:00.002+01:00

I found this great little utility the other day that I though I'd blog about. It's called IMAPFilter and can be found here. Here is the blurb from the site:

IMAPFilter is a mail filtering utility. It connects to remote mail servers using the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP), sends searching queries to the server and processes mailboxes based on the results. It can be used to delete, copy, move, flag, etc. messages residing in mailboxes at the same or different mail servers. The 4rev1 and 4 versions of the IMAP protocol are supported.

I'm now using this to get me email back under control. I've created a configuration file for IMAPFilter that will remove all mail from my mailing list mail folders which is older than 30 days. It also marks all mail in the Junk folder as seen. I suppect I'm going to be able to add other stuff too.

The utility is great because it can perform operations on the whole mail box. Mail filters only really work on the incomming message.

MediaInfoFetcher Release 1.2

2009-05-13T21:01:00.003+01:00

I've just released version 1.2 of MediaInfoFetcher. This is a application that can be used to find Film and TV Show meta data, and store it in various formats. It also can be used to rename media files using this data. The latest version can be found here.

Changes are as follows:

FEATURE: Recursive renaming of media files
FEATURE: Added a MythTV Store for writing film information to the MythTV database.
FEATURE: Added logging to the application (Using log4j).
FEATURE: Added new Film Hybrid source that takes the best of all the film sources.
FEATURE: Films can now have a genre flagged as primary
FEATURE: Added new www.tagchimp.com source for films.
FEATURE: Films can now also have chapter name information and long descriptions.
FEATURE: Films and TV Shows can now have non numeric ID's.
BUGFIX: Updated all the web parsers for latest changes to the websites.
BUGFIX: Fixed text output. Now shows text for "Fetching film from source" instead of "Fetching show from source".
PERFORMANCE: Speed ups for MP4 store using atomic parsley. It now longer writes metadata unless it needs too and artwork is removed at the same time as writing the metadata.

Let me know if you find any bugs with the relase! Enjoy!

XBMC on ARM

2009-05-01T11:25:00.002+01:00

I saw this today, which is very interesting. It's basically a short demo of XMBC running on the ARM platform. This is is the start of a really great media centre. I've so far been using Mac Mini's as media centres for their size, however the setup is a little complex and I've no need for local storage really. All the media I watch is on my server.

So the video shows XMBC running on a ARM Cortex-A8 beagle board. The actual hardware is tiny. The operationg system looks to be be booting of a SD Flash Card. I guess it would need some kind of IR control for me to use it and maybe a DVD driver, but these should be doable, both could be attached by USB. I think once OpenGL ES support is working I might see about getting once of these boards. They should be noiseless to.

Most my TV's are old, so I wonder if I can connect it to scart (I'll probally replace the TV at somepoint, but would nice not to be force into it).

Neversummer 5 Stores

2009-04-29T07:34:00.004+01:00

One of the big projects I've been working on for the last few months is a custom store system for the Neversummer project. The store system that comes with Neverwinter nights 2 is not really up to the task of dynamically pulling it's contents from the database and been able to set the buy/sell/identify price according to fields in the database.

Since we have all that data in the database already, I set about writing a custom GUI for Neversummer 5 that would allow us much more control of the stores. This is mostly complete now. The custom GUI stuff in Neverwinter Nights 2 is pretty impressive once you get the hang of it. It's mostly written in XML with some NWScripts. To start with I want the GUI of the store to be the same as the neverwinter nights 2 version, but pull content and prices from the DB.

Their are a few problems I've not found fixes for. First one been I would like to be able to drag and drop items between the store and the inv to sell them. I've not found a way to get the item that is dropped on the store.

The second problem is todo with context menus. I can't remember all the details now as it's been a while since I looked into it, but I think I was unable to stop the "Identify" menu item showing when the store was not open.

I'm currently working on the web frontend we have created to control the content of the game. This is going to be the place were the store contents are control. It's about 80% done now. When it's complete, people with access to the tool will be able to create new store and change the content of them easily.

Neversummer

2009-04-28T12:29:00.002+01:00

Util now I've not mentioned the other project I'm involved in, but as were looking to get blog's to apear on the projects website I though it was about time a blogged about it :-)

Neversummer is a world created on top of the nwn games. They are a completly set of content, that uses the neverwinter nights game engine. I started to work on Neversummer 4 after been a player for quite a while. Now were working on Neversummer 5 which runs on Neverwinter Nights 2.

My main contributions have been in web based tools for adding and controlling the game content and NWN Scripts which I used by the game engine. If your intrested in find out more, then visit the website.

Media Centre's - Plex

2009-04-20T09:26:00.002+01:00

I've been looking into different media centres for use in my home. I made a previous post about XBMC. This showed a lot of promise, but had a few issues (since that post I've tried the SVN version and a lot of the problems have been resolved). Since the main use I have a media center is on a mac mini below the DVD, I though I'd give Plex ago.

Plex is a media center that was forked for XMBC and only works on Intel MacOSX. The aims of the project are to produce more integrated version of XMBC for OSX.

As I stated in my previous post, I've been running MediaCentral from Equinux. However this had a few problems:

Unable to eject the DVD!
Not able to play .mkv's (they don't show up in the media lists)
No plugin support
No meta data display

Also whilst looking at XMBC I found that playback of media was choppy (This might not be the case with the SVN version, I've yet to try this).

Anyway I'll start of by saying, I've been very impressed with Plex. First of it plays all my media files with no problems, both low def and high def content.

Once of the features that I really like is the the remote control support. Both Plex and XMBC (I'd not tried this till now) allow you to use a harmony remote. So I no longer need to use the apple remote with it's limited buttons. This has been really great. It makes the media center much more usable as I refuse to attack a keyboard and mouse to something below the TV.

It's also possible to add special buttons for things like "Eject". So finally I'm able to eject DVD's from the mac mini with the use of a remote control. This is quite a big deal as I've always had to do it via SSH session from a laptop before.

The plugin support has been hugely improved from what I'd seen with XBMC. I've been using the iPlayer plugin and this is very responsive and no longer needs to spend ages reading content from the BBC.

The interface for downloading new plugins is very slick, I was quite impressed. You just go to the application section and select the pluing you wish to install. This was a big advantage over XMBC. Another nice feature is the automatic update. I was prompted to ask if I wanted to install the latest version. I select yes (with the remote control) and it installed the latest version!

Plex inherits all the good features of XMBC, so it has some really good themes (once i got used to default on called "MediaStream" I've really got to like it.) It's meta data support is also great.

The only negative I've found so far is that it does not allow the playing of DVD's. From what I've been able to find out, they claim that this is buggy and have disabled it. This is a real pain, at the moment I've using the PS3 to play DVD's. I'm hoping that this gets turned back on at some point. It's worth noting that XBMC has no problems with DVD's.

So in conclusion a very good media center for the OSX machines that does everything I'd want with the exception of DVD playback.

Media Centre's - XBMC

2009-03-23T07:41:00.003Z

I've been looking around for a media centre to use. I have a mac mini below the TV that is used to play content stored on my server. I'm currently running MediaCentral from Equinux. However this has a few problems:

Unable to eject the DVD!
Not able to play .mkv's (they don't show up in the media lists)
No plugin support
No meta data display

So because of these problems I've been looking around for other media centre's. The first I've looked at is XBMC. I'm looking for a nice looking media centre that hopefully works on windows, Linux and OSX. Though OSX is the only one currently that I must have it working on. I'm also looking for it to fix the above problems, as well as been fast. One other feature I'd really like to see, is the ability to get the metadata from the MediaInfoFetcher application I wrote.

So first off XBMC seems to work on linux, windows and OSX. However after playing around with it a bit this is not quite the case. I could not get it to start on my OpenSuSE Linux box at all, it just complains about a problem with Open GL. I suspect that this is a problem with the ATI Linux graphics drivers and 64 bit, though no other app has a problem. I tried it on a different Linux box, and it started fine their.

The windows setup was a little odd, first it seemed to be working fine, then I tried to setup the media, which is on remote samba shares as far as windows is concerned. This did not work as a XBMC witch is odd given that you would expect windows shares to work very well on windows. So I tried mapping them to drive letters, and got one of the sources add to XBMC. However I was not able to add the others. Every time I tried, I though the drive letter as relative to the users home directory. So not very usable on windows!

Next I tried it on OSX on my mac mini, this is the device that really matter as it's below the TV. I'll be expecting HD 1080p output for this and surround sound via the digital out of the mac mini. I also need the remote control to work as this device does not have a keyboard or mouse. All this stuff pretty much worked. The remote control functions took a bit of getting used to, but was actually quite good. All the previous mention problems were fixed, I could even eject DVD's and play lots of different media types.

Next up I wanted to try some plugins. One of the ones I was most eager to try was the iPlayer plugin. This worked very well. on mac os, but not on windows. It was actually very impressive watching iPlayer content on the large TV screen, makes you wonder if you still need a TV tuner.

I then tried to watch some media files, and this is were the mac OSX problems started. It would start of playing quite nicely, then become choppy. This is low def content, so it's quite unexpected. This content plays fine in Frontrow and MediaCentral. Also fast forwarding on the remote seemed a bit clunky and made things go choppy to.

The meta data display was great for films, however did not work very well for TV shows. Mainly because I wanted to be able to store them in a directory and take the show name from the directory. This was only supported for films, but I only wanted to do it for TV shows. It has the ability to add scrapers for different sites via XML files, which is quite nice, but I could not find anyway of parsing data fetch my own application.

In summary, it's a really nice media center with a lot of potential. At the moment, it does not quite meet all my needs due to the different problems on different platforms. I think the the choppy playback could be solved I'd probably use it.

OpenSUSE Build Service

2009-01-12T12:45:00.003Z

Whenever I install a new Linux system, I always find that their are packages I'm unable to get. So I usually end up building these from source. This is then something that needs to be done every time I reinstall :-(

It occurred to me that I'd be better of learning how to create RPM's and install things that way. This did make things a lot better, however getting them onto multiple systems and having to rebuild them when I upgrade the distribution was still a bit of a pain.

So I though I'd give the OpenSUSE build service ago. First thing I did not reliase was that when you create a account, you get your own Repository. Any packages you build go into here and then they can be moved to other projects if you want to.

So I've done this with my packages and now I just register my repository on my system and use the package manager to update the packages and install updates. This works great!. You can also say what distrobutions your packages should be built for and the build service builds them. This will make upgrading a lot easier.

So all in all, I think once the initial learning of RPM spec files and the build service was out the way, thing have got a lot easier and this will probably save me a lot of time.

I've now started adding some of my own projects, and things I usally build from source. Hopefully they will be usefull for other people too.

Upgrading to OpenSuSE 11.1 Some issues.

2009-01-09T13:20:00.005Z

So as I previously mentioned, I've been upgrading my machines to OpenSuSE 11.1. First of I have to save it's very impressive. As previously mentioned, it's great that ALSA works now on my laptop.

I've also upgraded my work computer, and this has been having issues resolving host names. I think I've not tracked this not to a IP v6 problem. I found out how to disable it here. Now things are much better on this machine.

On my laptop I've seeing problem with the networking. Basicly I use knetworkmanager to control the networking via the NetworkManager does not work unless you run it as root. It will launch as not root, but is unable to find either the wired or wireless networks. I suspect this is to do with dbus permissions but I don't yet know much about these :-( More investigation is needed.

UPDATE: I've tracked things down a bit more. I've been having problems with KDM, probally due to something I've done and my use of a usable version. So I've been starting X from the command line. I just tried GDM instead, it seems it must set something up when it's started, cause now I can see networks in the new KDE network applet and knetworkmanager from kde3! Hopefully when I fix up KDM, that will also work.

Dell Studio 1535 OpenSuse 11.0 and latest ALSA

2009-01-01T17:24:00.003Z

Over the Christmas I set about updating from OpenSuSE 11.0 to OpenSuSE 11.1. I always like to have the latest and greatest distro :-)

So I changed all my sources in Yast/Zypper over to the 11.1 distro and a manual update of most the packages, then the rest with a zypper dup. It all went pretty smoothly, the only exceptions were the kernel modules I'd compiled my self. These were the ATI graphics drivers (fglrx), the wireless drivers.

The first was a simple fix, I just reinstalled the ATI drivers. The second has been a bit more compilated as the broadcom source does not build agist the lastest kernel. Howerver I think I have a fix for this, so will blog about that another time when I've had a chance to test it.

The best thing I've notice so that about OpenSUSE 11.1 is that the sound hardware in the latop now works correctly!!! without any hacking. The sound is much louder, and both ear phone sockets work. Also the laptops internal speakers cut out with you plug speakers/head phones into either headphone socket. I put this done to the latest version of ALSA been in the OpenSuSE 11.1 release. Fantastic!

Just released version 1.1 of MediaInfoFetcher

2008-12-18T17:54:00.003Z

I've just released version 1.1 of MediaInfoFetcher. This is a application that can be used to find Film and TV Show meta data, and store it in various formats. It also can be used to rename media files using this data. The latest version can be found here.

Changes are as follows:

Able to rename Films with data fetched from the web.
Added new Film source for fetching film information from www.imdb.com.
Updated stores to store film information.
Added new MP4 store for storing metadata in mp4 files used in iTunes.
Added support for renaming .mp4 and .m4v files.
Film posters are fetched from the Internet and stored in .mp4 and .m4v files.
Updated to the latest format changes of www.tv.com site.

Happy Christmas! let me know if their are any bugs in this release.

Dell Studio 1535 Fan Speed problem and bios update

2008-12-07T22:01:00.004Z

I've been away with work for a week and I left my laptop at home (used a work one instead :-( ). When I came back and turned my laptop, I discovered a problem. For some reason the fan speed was set to be full speed all the time. This seemed to happen strait from boot, no matter what I did to change it.

My first though was that the temperature was a problem, so I checked this and the laptop is running quite cool. The cores were running between 22 and 24 degrees C.

So after fiddling around for a while I though I'd update the bios to the latest version. To my surprise, this fixed it! I'd love to know what might have caused the problems, if anyone has any ideas. As of yet , I've not tracked down a change log for the BIOS update.

Updating the BIOS from Linux had it's own problems, so I though I'd detail what I did to fix it. First off make sure you have the dell Linux firmware tools and libsmbios installed.

These can be found in the OpenSUSE repos. http://linux.dell.com/repo/community/content/suse11.0-x86_64/

Next you need to download the bios update from the dell support website. This comes as a .exe file, so you will need to extract the .HDR file from the .exe. To do this I used the following command:

wine 1535_A05.EXE -writehdrfile -nopause

This uses wine to extract it to the current directory.

Next you need to update the bios, do so at your own risk. This worked for me, but you do so at your own risk. Use the following command:

modprobe dell_rbu
dellBiosUpdate -u --hdr 1535_A05.hdr

Now reboot your system. When it reboots, it will install the new bios. Then it reboots itself again.
You should be able to see the new version number of the bios on the boot screen.

It's worth noting that the most useful information on updating the dell BIOS from Linux, I found here

Now back to having a nice quite laptop!

Bluetooth on the Dell Studio 15 using Opensuse 11.0

2008-11-25T21:56:00.004Z

So I've been wanting to get the bluetooth working under OpenSuSE 11.0 on my dell stuide 15. I've had it working on other computers, but it did not seem to work.

I've now managed to get it working by trying some of the ideas on this page. I had to adapt things to OpenSuSE a little, but basicly all that is needed is too edit the /etc/modprobe.conf.local and add the line "options hci_usb reset=1". Now make sure the bluetooth server is running at startup, and reboot.

If things are working, the command "hcitool scan" should list the bluetooth devices near by. I was then able to transfere files and pair my phone :-)

Bomber moves into KDE Games

2008-11-21T08:56:00.002Z

Work on bomber as progresses well. It was moved playground to kdereview for a bit of peer review. This turned up a few things. Most of the issues I fixed were because I'm a Java coder writing C++ :-) So I learning quite a bit about the best practices, which is good. Bomber has now moved into kdegames!! So should be in the upcomming 4.2 release. Time to start thinking about my next project.

For people reading my blogg for the first time, here is a repost of some information about bomber:

The aim of the game is to destroy the buildings below you, before you crash into them. The space ship will fly over the buildings, getting lower each time. Once the level is cleared, you start of the next, which is harder with taller buildings and a faster plane.

The game is still in development at the moment and can be found in the playground section of the KDE repository. Big thanks to Eugene who worked on the theme.

Media Info Fetcher

2008-11-15T09:53:00.004Z

I was face with a problem a while back, I had quite a few media files that and the wrong names. I wished to rename these too the correct names. I wished to be able to define what I though was a correct name. The main reason for this is that they show up in my media centre. A second thing I wanted, was meta data associated with each of the media files that could be displayed in the media centre.

It was for these reasons that I hacked together some Perl scripts that used the great Perl module. This allowed me to retrieve the meta data that I was after. However I prefer to work with Java over Perl and as my application was needing more and more features, I decided to rewrite it in Java.

So Media Info Fetcher was born. This is a java application that can retrieve Film and TV Show information, and rename it according too data it looks up off the Internet. This information is then cached using configurable stores so that hopefully it can be used by media centres.

I think I've achieved my first aim so far, but my second aim of getting a media centre too use the retrieved data has yet too happen. This is probably going to involve creating a plug-in for other media centres. Though I'm open too ideas about this.

Anyway I've just made the first release of the 1.0 version of Media Info Fetcher. So check it out here.

I've some plans for the next major version. These may change, but include:

Adding support for Films.
Adding more stores and sources.

Google Code

2008-11-13T09:11:00.002Z

I've been working the last few days on a new project that I wish to open source (More on this in another post when the project is in a slightly better shape) and I've been looking for somewhere to host the project. My first though was too give sourceforge a go, however a friend suggest I take a look at google code.

I'm pleased I did, I have to say that it's exactly what I was after. I was able to create a new project very quickly and the web base tools they provide are very nice. The whole site feels a snappy, clean and a lot less fussy than source forge. It's probably unfair to compare it with sourceforge from a hosting point of view as I've never used sourceforge for hosting. Howerver from the point of view of a user looking for software, I find google code much better.

Progress on Bomber

2008-10-28T14:07:00.004Z

Work progresses on bomber. I think the game is pretty much ready for a release now. It's been moved to KDE Review and I'm now in the progress of cleaning up the code a little. I just need to fix a few things that occurred since I'm a Java coder writing C++ :-) If all goes well, I hope to see it get moved to KDE Games in time for the 4.2 release.

Video on dell studio

2008-10-26T09:03:00.002Z

I've been looking into getting the video up and running on the dell studio 15 I bought using Linux. The aim is to have it boot up with the panel active, then press the FN+F8 key and change the screen setup so that the external LCD and CRT I have connected become active instead.

So first I tried to use the properitery ATI drivers, and got a bit stuck. So I though I'd sawp to use the radeonhd drivers. I had even less look with these initialy. I did try lots of different version, untill I started useing the cutting edge ones in the git tree. All had the same problem. I'd boot up and get a black screen! I think what is happening is it's not activing the correct screen.

Anyway after the free drives did not work, I swaped back to the ATI fglrx divers. I've not figured out how too boot up with the laptop in a extranl dual screen (and both with different resolutions) mode. I've also wrote a script in ruby that will spawn the screens over to the intrenal panel. However I've yet to find a way of booting and using the panel, then sawping to the external screens.

The modes I need for the extrnal screen don't get added when booting up and using the panel. This is a real pain. I'm also begin to suppect that the ATI graphics drivers are not paying a lot of attention to the xorg.conf file. For instance aticonfig --enable-monitor lvds, will cause the laptop to boot up in internal panel mode. However aticonfig --enable-monitor crt1,tmds2 will cause it too boot up in dual screen mode. The command was not run as root, so this did not effect the xorg.conf. However it does effect the way the X server starts up.

This is quite anoying, I supect I need todo more googling on the issue.

Wireless on dell studio

2008-10-13T20:58:00.003+01:00

So, just though I'd make a quick post. I've been having problems getting the wireless to stay connected on my new dell Studio laptop. I'm using the kde version of the network manager on OpenSUSE 11. Today I turned off the auto connect for the wireless........... and now it seems to stay connected all the time. Which is great!

Bomber for KDE

2008-09-29T14:26:00.006+01:00

I've been working the last few months on a new game for the KDE Desktop. The main aim of this was to get back into kde development. It's been quite a while since my last app kmud. So I want to create something simple that would allow me to focus on the actual programming and getting used to the QT/KDE APIs.

The aim of the game is to destroy the buildings below you, before you crash into them. The space ship will fly over the buildings, getting lower each time. Once the level is cleared, you start of the next, which is harder with taller buildings and a faster plane.

The game is still in development at the moment and can be found in the playground section of the KDE repository. Big thanks to Eugene who worked on the theme.

Dell Studio Wireless

2008-09-28T15:47:00.001+01:00

The Dell Studio laptop that I have is fitted with a "Dell Wireless 1510 Half Mini Card". This should allow a Wireless 802.11n connection. However this is were things get a little complicated......

I've got install a 64 Bit version of OpenSUSE on the laptop, so in the past I've used the ndiswrapper to use windows drives for wireless. The only drivers I could find on the dell website were for vista and these won't work with ndiswrapper to me knowledge.

After a little searching on the Internet I found some native drivers. These are from the manufacture of the card so are not open drivers, but mostly work. http://www.broadcom.com/support/802.11/linux_sta.php

These however are not perfect. I find that for some reason the connection to the wireless keeps dropping. I've yet to find a solution for this.

Linux on a dell studio 15 laptop

2008-09-28T14:40:00.001+01:00

So one of the reasons to start blogging was that I bough a new Laptop. It's a Dell Studio 15, which I bough to run linux. I though it would be a good idea to share my experience of getting things up and running on it. I know it will be problematic, so it will give people a chance to share their ideas and suggestions.

So what am I trying to achive? Well I'm going to be running OpenSUSE and KDE on it as these are the distro and desktop I perfer, but other than that heres some of the things I want to get working:

Remote control.

2 external monitors (1 VGA and the other HDMI) with different resolutions.

Been able too swap between the connected monitors via a key on the keyboard.

Sound working.

Both head phone jacks working.

Wireless working.

Laptop keys able to be used.

Webcam and mic need to work with messengers (skype, kopete)

I'm sure there will be other stuff I need too, but that should take a while anyhow....

My first blogg entry

2008-09-28T14:39:00.000+01:00

Well this is the first time I've tried blogging. Going to see how it goes and if I actually managed to keep publishing things. Time will tell......