RasterWeb!

I’ve known for a long time you could build your own DVR, but it wasn’t something I really felt like I had the time or money to invest in. I finally got to see my friend John‘s MythTV setup and dang, is it nice! He said the total cost was about $400 for all the parts needed. He built the box himself and dropped in a 200 gb drive and plenty of RAM, though he says lots of people run it on lesser machines.

John said that it took a weekend to build it, and that he followed a 40+ page document that pretty much outlined exactly what to do. (Are there enterprising individuals selling ready-to-run boxes? You know, if you’re not an expert Linux do-it-yourselfer.) Now I’m all tempted and can see this being a future project. I do like the Moxi, but for the pure hackability aspect, I can see some amazing things that could be done with a MythTV box…

Argh! I somehow missed the fact that Family Guy was returning this week. Since I’m hundreds of miles from my TV and Moxi and I didn’t schedule it to record, I’d be out of luck, but luckily I got remote scheduling working. To get remote scheduling to work you will need someone with keys to your house, and a telephone, and the knowledge to walk them through scheduling the recording…

I’m still in Minneapolis at the No Fluff Just Stuff thing, because, you know, it’s The Year of the Java…

Actually, I’ve seen a lot of stuff that isn’t Java. I attended sessions on agile development, Ruby (including some Ruby on Rails), Groovy, and even Ajax.

I’ve got all sorts of notes and bits to type up, but I’m too tired (like a bicycle) right now, so I’ll save that for later. Out of everything I’ve seen so far though, I think Ajax is the one I’m most interested in. It probably was before as well, I just need to find a few spare minutes to experiment with it. Onward!

Ahhh, Madison, it’s been a while, and the Dane County Regional Airport, nice to meet you. It’s a small airport, really small. I think the gates are numbered 1 through 10. Security check-in took less than 5 minutes. (Oddly enough a reporter from Madison emailed me yesterday about podcasting, hoping I was local.) I’d like to spend some time exploring Madison again this Summer, we’ll see how that goes.

The flight to Minneapolis was short and sweet. I almost think I would have preferred to drive, and it’s less waiting around and more on the move. Nonetheless, I’m now in Minneapolis at the airport borrowing an electrical outlet, which is never easy to find at an airport. Oh you can find them, but they’re either carrying 200+ volts with some funky heavy equipment outlet, or they’re located in poor locations, like right below the payphones or along a wall with no seats. This time I’m in a comfortable seat right next to an electric wheelchair that’s recharging. Power!

My co-worker is delayed. Seems the authorities had a plateful of hassle for him at the airport because of an expired vehicle registration, so he missed the flight by five minutes. (Missing the flight by 5 minutes due to vehicle related issues seems to be a trend among my co-workers.) He said he’ll be here 2 1/2 hours later. More time for me to sit around doing nothing. Actually I’ll take this time to check wireless connectivity here, since they seem to allow access to some site for free… Main screen turn on!

If Barbie was a programmer she might say “Internationalization is hard!”

In all this much to painful research on i18n and unicode and charsets, and all that jazz, I happened across this:

Argh… Yeah, you see those ?’s in there… Is it just me on my computer, using my browser that sees that? If we dare try to validate http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/javaint/ we get the message: No Character Encoding Found!

Believe me, I am not picking on O’Reilly or Andy or David, who are all probably 10 times smarter than I am in internationalization issues (and other things.) I am merely pointing out that after beating my head against my desk trying to solve form submission and internationalization and localization problems, I’m about ready to give up on these computer things and go back to printing ink on t-shirts…