Advanced Theory

I recently upgraded my main Windows box and decided to convert the old system into a MythTV server. So far I've been successful getting MythTV running on Ubuntu Fiesty Fawn, but it is still more of a PC than a consumer appliance. I'm hoping by the end of the project my wife and I will be able to watch and download videos and not feel like we're using a computer. After getting everything set up I will put it to the ultimate test and see if MythTV can replace our old SD DirecTv Tivo with a HD over-the-air recording solution.

Before I get into the details of what I've done, here are the hardware specs:
2.2GHz AMD Athlon 64 3700+
2GB DDR 400 (PC 3200)
(2) 250GB Western Digital Caviar SE16 (SATA 3.0Gb/s)
ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe
XFX GeForce 7800GT
550W Antec TRUEPOWERII
Hauppauge WinTV-HVR 1800

To start the project, I decided to install Ubuntu instead of Debian since this server will be more focused on UI than my previous servers have been (which have been headless development servers). Once the OS was installed I used Aptitude to install most of the important MythTV packages, LIRC, rsync, Samba, Apache, Subversion, and other tools I use for development.

After I got the basic MythTV front-end up and looking good it took a couple of weeks to get everything to work together. I struggled with LIRC and getting the ATSC capture care to actually capture video. At one point I was pretty freaked out that I might not be able to move forward. But after a lot of sweat and tears I have video capture, the remote control and video playback all working on a basic level. Now I'm waiting on Amazon to ship the antenna I ordered so I can install it in my attic and move on to live tv. In the meantime I will continue to improve the system and make posts on my progress.

While attending a conference, my wife learned that generational traits cycle between four major stereotypes: idealist, reactive, civic and adaptive. The idealist generation is represented by the Baby Boomers, who were born during between 1946 and 1960, represented a generation of protest and ideals. Generation X was reactive, and remains strongly aware of the problems that previous generations leave behind like environmental issues, deficit, racism and social problems. The civic generation, The Millennials, are peer oriented and have always know computers, the Internet, cellular phones and practically instant communication between one another. Their experience with technology mirrors their parents, the Baby Boomers, whose childhood held the rise of the television as a staple in the American living room.

This made me think about what traits would appear in the next generation and what causes would be central to their lives. Considering their parents will be made up of Generation X, whose primary concerns revolve around fixing previous generation’s mistakes, the next generation will be steered towards solutions to these problems. The previous adaptive generation, The Silent Generation, lived, but didn’t participate, in the aftermath of the World Wars and Great Depression. This generation produced a majority of leaders in the civil rights and women’s movements and created a marked movement towards equal rights.

Today, whether you believe in peak oil or not, energy is one of our most critical and addressable issues. By 2010 there will dozens of electric vehicles and plug-in hybrid models available and the next generation will ALWAYS be aware of energy and environmental issues focused around conservation and emissions. They will be responsible for shifting society from dependence on non-renewable energy to sustainable solutions. Like the Millenials, who never knew life without the Internet and constant connectivity, the next generation will be a Green generation who will always be aware of the energy they use and the consequences behind consumption.

About a year ago I upgraded to Vista in order to support development and testing in that environment. I have to admit, I was excited to read about drivers that ran in the user space and confirmation dialogs that prevented files from making system changes without root permissions. Finally, I thought, I could effectively run Windows with user level accounts. Which is why I'm so disappointed with where I'm at now.

My wife and I both use this computer, the idea was to have one system that would be up-to-date and capable of running all of our games as well as perform all our other business tasks. Recently she installed The Sims: Bon Voyage expansion and like all games it requested admin permissions to install. Thinking nothing of it she provided it and her expansion installed along with a friend: Securom.

So the real issues began weeks later when I tried to make a backup of a DVD and all of a sudden near the end of the process my system crashed hard. I had never seen a blue screen in Vista before, even after my system's memory modules went bad the only thing that happened was services and programs kept shutting down and restarting as Vista tried to keep everything alive. So I rebooted and tried again. Same thing. I tried several other movies. Same thing.

So now I'm in a spot. I've taken all of the possible non-intrusive IT approaches I could come up with, including updating the firmware on my DVD drive and reinstalling the software I was using. I'm able to now copy a full DVD, however, if I attempt to copy a second my computer blue screens. It could be the DVD player overheating, it could be Securom messing up my drivers. I can't know without losing a day on the problem.

The real rub is that The Sims doesn't work any more! After the initial installation we never played the game, my wife needed me to move over her Sims games from our old system to the new. Once I did that and tried running the program, the damned game kept telling us we were using a copy of the game to run it and wouldn't play! For those that don't know, pretty much every time you install a new Sims expansion it requires that you run the game off of the most recent disc in the series. So if you have well over $100 invested in the series, and have five expansions like my wife does, you could technically install it and loan it out to 4 different people allowing them to play different iterations of the game. I mean, once you install one expansion it never asks you to provide anything but the latest expansion. So when EA introduced Securom on The Sims: Bon Voyage, it still doesn't stop the normal consumer from borrowing! Pirating it is as easy as giving all but the most recent expansion to your friend to try!

What is really unfortunate from a producer and consumer standpoint, is when I was younger I borrowed, copied and pirated all sorts of software. It was the consequence of a large amount of time coupled with a very small budget. I couldn't afford to buy all that software; in fact, there was little chance back then that any one I knew could talk their parents into dropping the money to get Photoshop or Visual Studio, just to try it out (my high school still taught programming on Apple IIe). I learned a great deal from my early days, and now I pay for Vista, Visual Studio, Office, Nero, and every piece of software, including all of the games I've installed on my PC in nearly the last decade. And in the last decade I've seen low-cost utilities like Visual Studio Express and "lite" versions of software become more available while demos, shareware versions of game, and burdens to the consumer become worse.

So what I am saying here is I no longer want to buy games for my PC. I don't want to waste my time sorting out who's going to screw me over. I've already changed my pre-order of Fallout 3 from PC to Xbox 360. The only producer I trust at the moment is Valve, because at least Steam has been friendly to me.

It's a shame that I have to abandon the PC for consoles. Microsoft is at fault because they can't create an operating system restrictive enough to ensure that games don't install software that mucks with my drivers. Very few pieces of software should ever be given that level of access! In fact, I'd like to be told what level of access software I'm installing gets. Can it overwrite any values in my registry, or does it just have limited access; can it modify drivers and system level attributes, or is it just going to install in program files; is it going to have access to personal information? Microsoft's failure to create an operating system that doesn't force proper access by its programs has me considering installing Linux or buying a Mac. After all, if I can't trust the software I'm installing to not be a douche then what's the purpose of code signing? The only thing Windows has over other systems is games and driver support. So when my games destroy my drivers, why should I stick with Windows?

I was working in Vista today as the administrator when I ran into a problem. Apparently someone owned this computer before me and had ownership of several Gb worth of source code. After receiving several "You do not have permissions to delete this folder" messages I fired up Google and found out how to reclaim ownership of folders:

takeown /f %1 /r /d y
icacls %1 /grant administrators:F /t

Now if you're not putting these two commands into a batch file you'll want to replace '%1' with your target folder. The first command takes ownership of the files and folders recursively and the second grants full access to the administrators group. Now you should be able to delete whatever non-system files you want.

Really amazing use of the Wii's controller for VR head tracking.

Google recently released a preview SDK for Android. I must say I'm happy that Google is moving towards opening up development on mobile handsets. Not only am I sick of being locked into Verizon's Brew applications and closed ownership, I think Google is one of the few companies that understands the next major shift in how people use technology will be to mobile devices. Maybe not necessarily phones, but to devices that allow instant, anywhere connectivity. You can already see this shift beginning with Apple's iPhone and the presence of the web browser to console systems. I can't be the only one that wants near-instant web browsing and information at my fingertips. Waiting for a computer to boot is so nineteen-ninety.