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I found that Mozilla, Mozilla Firefox, and undoubtedly other browsers weren’t making the background gradient (the cool white-to-gray pattern) look correct from the style I was trying. For whatever reason, they made the square around the pen image more obvious; I tried playing with the background-* settings, and changing gradient.gif to gradient.jpg (expecting issues around GIF patents), but no change. So now we’re trying Jaws pattern from the same style contest. Early morning silliness.

Nope, konqueror hadn’t shaken off its headache when I looked this morning, so I get to try to recreate the story from (my) memory later.

Three time now in the last two days, I’ve written a story for my blog and because of some random kestroke the KDE browser Konqueror goes running happily into an infinite loop, never to return. This most recent loss was sharing a great time I had with our 2 year-old son before dinner. Time to either download and build the latest KDE to see if it’s improved, or just stick with Mozilla Firefox and stop trying to settle with the default. It’s too frustrating to find myself trying to type a Euro symbol (Compose + ‘=’ + ‘e’) or hit Compose & another letter, only to find the browser oblivious and unretrievable.

I suppose I could make the KDE window manager no longer understand the Compose key, but that would force me to revert to doing a Copy & Paste to type a Euro symbol, a character I actually need every few days. Bleah. Fine, I’ll let Konqueror spend the night with its own interests and see if what I was writing is miraculously still there in the morning. Nighty night.

I’m giving the artistic efforts of others a try. Today, it’s a slightly tweaked copy of Hadley Wickham’s great entry entiltled Rubric in Alex King’s style contest.

Weird, I was going to suggest you go over to Global Vote 2004 and cast a vote for your choice in the US election. It sends you a confirmation email with a link you click to prove that you’re not fake. (This isn’t to say such a bit of hackery couldn’t be created for an infinite number of accounts casting an infinite number of votes. Or a few million, anyway.) I tried doing it first to make sure it’s working, and got “You have already voted or you are using a fake security code” when I visited the confirmation link. Heh?? No note that it needs cookies to work, though I’m hesitant to try again.

There is no obvious way, at least spoken of on their site, about how they will prove the results as being legitimate. Not just made up for release 48 hours before election day to the global media to give an extra push to one candidate over the others. But now they’ve got my email address.

Conspiracy?

In today’s Boondocks comic, it’s pointed out how the electoral college “essentially removes the power of the people to directly elect a president, and was designed to shift policital power to southern states who could count three-fifths of their disenfranchised African slave population toward their representation in Congress and thus get more electoral college votes.” All part of an antiquated democratic process that is seemingly never open to review or change.

Seemingly never, though it should be noted the Supreme Court now has undocumented authority over the whole shebang anyway.

On an impulse, this morning I switched the input line into the tv-box. I plugged the tv-box’s input line to instead go into the TV, to see just what the tv-box has been getting. Messy, snowy, though not quite as severe as was appearing on the tv-box. That’s from using the wall plug for NTL basic cable apparently. (I wonder if the tv-box itself is emitting enough distortion to cause it?)

There’s also a coax cable coming from a separate box on the wall for NTL digital cable. That line goes to a small splitter where the guy who installed it made the signal both go to the regular (fly plug it’s called?) plug on the TV, and also to the input on the NTL digital cable box (made by Pace). Fine, I made the tv-box’s cable plug into that little splitter for its input, instead of the wall. Tried the tv-box’s cable now into the TV again, and voila, a nice crisp picture. Hmm.

I put the cable back into the tv-box, so it’s now getting that nice crisp picture as its input. I make the TV show me the S-Video coming from the tv-box. It’s certainly better, though it is still a bit snowy and jerky, and it only shows a channel ‘1’ with no channel title on the bottom of the screen. Something else must be screwed up. I ran mythtv-setup again saying ‘yes’ to the question, “Would you like to clear all program/channel settings before starting configuration?” Then again created a new Video Source named “NTL”, choosing “United Kingdom (Alternative)” for its channels. Down to terminal window for adding channels where ps shows me that it ran

	  tv_grab_uk_rt --config-file '/home/mythtv/.mythtv/NTL.xmltv' --configure

But it’s not the happiest; it gave me the prompt

	  Enter the name of a channel, or '.' to finish selecting channels: BBC1
	  Which channel to add?  (I hit Return here)
	  Died at /usr/bin/tv_grab_uk_rt line 257,  line 4.

Maybe a bug? Fine, I’ll get the latest version of the script to see if it fixes the problem of not listing the channels matching your search string, like the previous KnoppMyth-included version did. I have to first install CVS since KnoppMyth doesn’t include it by default: apt-get install cvs. When it asked about location of the repositories, I left the /var/lib/cvs default and on the next screen, chose ‘ignore’ to not worry about not having any. Also told it to not enable the CVS pserver. Great!

Now we can get the file:

	cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/xmltv login
		(ignoring the warning about .cvspass not existing yet)
	cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/xmltv co xmltv
	cd xmltv
	perl grab/uk_rt/tv_grab_uk_rt.PL new-uk /usr/share/xmltv
	as root:
	  mv --backup new-uk /usr/bin/tv_grab_uk_rt
	  chmod 755 /usr/bin/tv_grab_uk_rt

Looking at the diff between the versions, I see that the tv_grab_uk_rt script is now calling ask_choice instead of ask about which channel to add. That was the fix so it now properly lists the matches for ‘BBC1’ or ‘RTE1’.

Back into the Channel Editor we go, now add RTE1 again (since we didn’t get past creating the Video Source), added RTE1 using A11 for both the Channel Name and Frequency ID, but on the third screen asking for the frequency in Hz I left that blank, as well as not modifying the subsequent screen. Then re-ran mythfilldatabase. Much more quiet now (a few messages about wide characters for perl’s IO/Handle.pm line 147, but nothing else). For whatever reason, it’s still invoking

	  /usr/bin/perl /usr/bin/tv_grab_uk_rt --days 1 --offset 0
                --config-file /home/mythtv/.mythtv/NTL.xmltv --output /tmp/mythuZ2Jfu

which has me curious since one of the sites yesterday had a comment about making it understand that it’s getting a full two weeks of information in the radiotimes.com output now. Perhaps I need to rebuild mythfilldatabase to make it understand that? Yeesh.

After a while it’s made it to October 21 in getting the program information, but it’s also still giving the

	Duplicate entry '1000-2004-11-03 22:15:00-678-' for key 1

error. Oh well, more tonight maybe.

Heh, this is a blog catagory turning into a ChangeLog.

I’m working on fourty years, Zoë is working on four months. I have decades of immunity built up, she has weeks. Why do I get sick just as often as her? I don’t expect to never have a cold again, I just thought that I should be immune to some colds out there when she isn’t.

After some crazy effort, I can now visit the URL

	http://p/program_listing.php

and it correctly lists the shows on tonight on both RTE1 and TV3, the two channels I’ve added. It turns out all attempts to use ‘tv_grab_uk_rt’ as included in the KnoppMyth R4V4 that I installed are going to fail. I came upon notes both on the MythTV Users list and the XMLTV site. It turns out radiotimes.com, the site used by the perl script to get airing information, started to block the User-Agent that the script was using to identifying itself. But they were really cool—instead, the’ve put the information for the next two weeks available in raw XML format.

So I had to download the newer XML 0.5.35 from the XMLTV SourceForge page. I built it by doing

	  tar jxf xmltv-0.5.35.tar.bz2
	  make Makefile.PL
	  make
	  make test          (this does tons of them)
	  make install

Following the examples on those mailing list sites, I ran

	tv_grab_uk_rt --configure

and then invoked

	tv_grab_uk_rt

That seemed to be getting useful information finally, so I invoked my old friend

	mythfilldatabase

but it gave me errors of the form

	Updating icons for sourceid: 1
	Unknown xmltv channel identifier: rte-1.rte.ie
	Skipping channel.
	Unknown xmltv channel identifier: tv3.ie
	Skipping channel.

How odd. Some more reading, and I discovered my mistake—if you look at the channels.dat file that radiotimes.com gives the script, you can see that they’ve changed the format from what it used to offer. Instead of just “231:RTE-1” it now says

	rte-1.rte.ie:231:RTE-1

In the mythtv-setup Channel Editor, I’d thought I was so clever figuring out that I had to put 231 in the ‘XMLTV ID’ field for RTE1. Those identifier errors above helped me realize that it was searching based on the first field in that file, so now the ‘XMLTV ID’ should be the server name, like rte-1.rte.ie for RTE1. Fine, I fixed both RTE1 and TV3.

Some more swimming with Google and I found a discussion talking about exactly this problem. I went into the Channel Editor, and for both RTE1 and TV3 I changed the “Channel Number” and “Frequency ID” entries to be A11 for RTE1 and A9 for TV3 (based on what was in the pal-ireland file I mentioned earlier). The fundamental change being made with this was that my channel number of “1” for RTE1 and “3” for TV3 seem really wrong after reading all of these sites, including this most recent discussion page.

Having the frequency entry in both fields may be correct, but there’s no obvious change yet. I just tried looking at either channel, and they’re both snowy and hard to see. Though I’ll admit the RTE1 channel has more color and movement on it compared to the grey/white mess that was there before. TV3 looks the same as it did.

Wonder what I’m missing? That’s all right—the fact that it’s getting the show information is a big positive step for only a little amount of effort today.

I looked at some of the other stuff the MythWeb interface gives you when you point your browser at the tv-box. Included is MythWeather, which sounds really handy. At the moment, it shows current and upcoming East Irvine CA, including a weather.com radar shot. Wonder if it’s easily changeable? All I’ve found so far is the entry in the /usr/share/mythtv/KnoppMyth.sql file, which has the line

	  INSERT INTO settings VALUES ('locale','USCA0326','MythTVhost');

The “USCA0326” number appears to come out of an entry in /usr/share/mythtv/mythweather/accid.dat. But it’s unclear if it’s possible to change this value in any way other than manually with mysql. Maybe if I upgrade the MythTV software on my system to the 0.16 version released on September 20th, it’ll be as integrated as the release notes suggest and this sort of change would be easy? Another day…

Argh! I wrote an entry, and it ATE it!! I should know better than to change to another category when I’m in the middle of something, but still. Shoot.

I was talking about the kick butt food scientist Shirley Corriher. Just found out that her agents are the same agents my parents have!! Whoo hoo!! And she has a new book coming out sometime called Bakewise, to add to Cookwise.

Crap. I just remembered I have cinnamon roll dough in the bread machine!! ACK!