Akimbo

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I was at Fry's today with the kids, and while wandering around I came across the Akimbo. It's an interesting device -- a hardware player that downloads content over your Internet connection, and then plays those videos for you when you ask nicely. You can select what you want to download form their website, and they have a (smallish it seems to me) collection of commercial content. They seem to be aiming at being the next iTunes store -- you can get them to host your video blog, and they will make it available to their devices. You can even charge for people to watch your recorded rantings. I see a couple of problems though: The device is expensive ($200 US is recommended retail, you can get them for $99 at the moment) This functionality would be trivial to implement in MythTV for free (in fact, I have been sitting on a python script that does this for MythTV since LCA -- it just needs some cleanup before release) They use DRM Even worse, they use MS Windows DRM I wonder if anyone has asked them if they'd be willing to allow a MythTV client? [btags:]

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Time for a status update?

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It's been a while since I've commented on the MythTV book project, so it's worth a quick status update. We're basically into the home straight now -- we've decided what to cover in the book (which of course involves missing out on a few things which could be in there if we had infinite space and time), written the chapters (which are all now done), and are now working through technical review and copy edits. I'll keep you posted as we get closer to final production.

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Big TVs are evil, Ok?

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The NFL apparently nastygrammed a church for planning to host a Super Bowl party. The original complaint was first that the church was charging people, but also that they used the term "Super Bowl" (as if people would somehow believe that the church was associated with the NFL?). After the church agreed to let people in for free and not use the term, the NFL continued to complain, saying that showing the Super Bowl on a screen larger than 55 inches represents copyright infringement. http://techdirt.com/articles/20070201/140812.shtml

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Planes at 600 meters!

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On Friday, an aircraft hired by Google will be doing a series of low-level swoops over parts of Sydney, photographing the ground and waters below. The three-seater plane, decked out in Google livery, will have special permission to fly at an altitude of 600m. Providing the photographs turn out to be good enough quality, the images will be integrated into Google Maps, the free online mapping service used by millions of people around the world. Via SMH, links to Google site about the flyover.

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Please don’t

A fresh cup mentions the Ruby on Rails exception notifier plugin. The idea is that every time an exception is raised in your code you get an email. This is such a horrible idea that I need to take the time to comment. As someone who spends all his time dealing with large deployments of software, email is the worst way of reporting errors I can think of. Think about it: Email is unreliable to deliver. It could get queued on the reporting server, a mail router on the network, or on your delivery server. Worse than that, it could get marked as spam, or randomly discarded. Email is expensive. There are two kinds of expense here -- email needs to be written to disk reliably, which means you sync() when you write the mail to a destination or a queue. For some MTAs, this can mean several syncs() per email as the mail moves between queues. There can be more than one of these MTAs on the way to the final delivery target as well. Additionally, storing email at the destination is expensive. Think of the backups, virus scanning, spam scanning, caching on clients and so forth. Email is…

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Large inodes = faster samba

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Ted T'so just mentioned in his LCA 2007 talk that larger inode sizes improves the speed of Samba 4. This is because you can fit more file attributes in the inode. I can't find a reference to the benchmark results online quickly, but wanted to make a note of this.

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