jason's weblog

jason's weblog

	About jason's weblog, jason typing stuff Jason Haslup jason at haslup dot com Subscribe RSS: Subscribe Links These are a few of my favorite links. my girls what i read my links			Thu, 29 Jan 2004 18 Hours and Counting... blog :: hdtv CBS-HD should be showing up at 6am on Friday, January 30th on either channel 80 or 81 (depending on where you are, I believe). I'm not all that optimistic anymore that I'll get it, though... I emailed my DirecTV co-op (since I'm not actually with DirecTV) and they seemed unaware of the new CBS-HD channel. Crazy. I forwarded the press release, so I'm hoping that will help out. I do give them credit for having the HD package on the first day it was availabe in July of 2003, though, so maybe I'll be ok. So as it stands, CBS-HD just in time for the Superbowl, which also means in time for the Masters whenever that is (April?). That will be cool... I hope they make it commercial-free again this year. Two hours of high definition golfing goodness. Not much other news other than DirecTV's HD-Tivo should be coming out by March or April. By then my year at this non-DirecTV service provider might be up, so I might try wrangling a discounted HD-Tivo if I sign up for DirecTV service. I'll update tomorrow... hopefully I'll have good news! Tue, 27 Jan 2004 Doggie Cam blog New and improved (sorta) doggie cam is up. Actually, the only improvement is that I'm not saving every image... last night I found some motion detecting software that I use to compare the current and last image. If it says something's changed, I save the new image. So, my history folder isn't getting stuffed with pictures that are taken every 15 seconds. Of course, a perfectly valid question is "why keep a history?" I dunno. Because I can't throw anything away (ask Mystique). Yet another sign that I must be getting old: I'm getting bored by TV. However, we are addicted to Couples Fear Factor, so I think they offset each other. Mini updates from other sections: HDTV CBS-HD should start on DirecTV in four days. I think... just in time for the SuperBowl! Zaurus Streaming mp3 music wirelessly to my Zaurus causes static in the music. It's definitely caused by the wireless card (I can play a local mp3 file but hit a web page and hear the static). That's kind of a bummer. I don't know if it's a problem with the Zaurus or the card. linux I downloaded the Fedora ISO images and am planning on installing it on ember, my poke-around linux box. I also downloaded KDE 3.2 beta RPMs (for Fedora), so I'll be giving that a try. I still like XFCE (version 4) on tess (main linux box), but I've heard good things about KDE 3.2, so I might make the switch. At work, of course, it's all ratpoison + emacs. No real need for more than one window there... That's it! Mon, 26 Jan 2004 Almost Perfect... blog :: zaurus I almost had it perfect on Saturday night... I was reading the DaVinci Code while listening to streaming mp3 music on my Zaurus but the music kept skipping in and out. So close to the perfect late-night quietly read while your wife sleeps device. I'm pretty sure it was just the fact that xmms-e (embedded xmms) takes a bit too much processor time to be sharing it with the wireless ethernet card. I need to find a very lightweight MP3 player (dump the gui) and maybe setup my streaming server to push out a constant 96kbps rate instead of whatever the mp3 file is encoded as. Maybe then it'll work. Fri, 23 Jan 2004 New Organizer App blog :: zaurus This little app just popped up on one of the Zaurus boards and it's pretty cool. It's korganizer (datebook/todo manager + more) that works pretty nicely on my 5500, even with the 240x320 screen. Very impressive... it looks even better on a 640x480 C860 screen, but I'm trying not to think about that. Anyhow, check it out if you've got a zaurus. In other Zaurus news... I replaced my 64mb MMC card with a 256mb secure digital card and it's made a world of a difference. I can now suspend and resume the Zaurus without losing that directory (it wouldn't get remounted correctly), and the speed increase is also pretty noticeable. All in all a great upgrade for $60. I've also got a Sharp CompactFlash camera on the way... a surplus site had them for $28 (I missed the days when they were $15!), so I got one. I think it's only 640x480, but it might be a cheap way to get a mobile webcam so I can post pictures of the snow from work. I've got my Holdem app GUI pretty much ported to the smaller screen, so I might be able to replay my hands on the Zaurus pretty soon. I'll post some screenshots as soon as it looks half-way decent... Doggie Cam blog Figured I'd give an overall update today, plus some news of our new doggie-cam... Not much exciting going on in Bozeman... haven't had snow in a week or so, maybe more... not that we're complaining, mind you -- we've still got snow left over from the dumping in December. I think we might get some this weekend, though. We're dog-stting a golden retriever/yellow lab mix for some friends of ours for a while and that's been interesting. I'm going to start calling her Houdini because up until today, she's been able to escape out of the room we'd like her to stay in during the day. We've tried lots of things, including a nice gate I built myself (but wasn't actually fastened to a wall). Yesterday we put a 40 pound sewing machine in front of the gate so she wouldn't move it, but she just slid it out of the way and after an hour or two, she was out roaming the house. How do we know this? Because of doggie-cam! I setup my old webcam in that room to watch the gate... we caught her escape on camera over a series of pictures taken every five seconds. This weekend I'll organize them and put up a link... it's kind of funny seeing the other dogs and their reactions. Last night we bought an actual doggie/child gate and put it in the hallway... so far (4 hours) it seems to be working... you can see it by clicking here. I think it's updating every 20-30 seconds... if I happen to see something happening I decrease the interval to get some more shots. Ok, it just started to snow. Good timing. More later! Fri, 16 Jan 2004 New Zaurus Section blog :: zaurus New PDA, new section! Got my Zaurus SL-5500 yesterday... I couldn't bring myself to spend $800 on one of the C860's, so instead I spent $150 on an eBay SL-5500... so it's really similar to my original zaurus, but better. Plus I already have an extra cradle and power supply since the bad guys didn't swipe those :) Anyhow, just got it last night, so I haven't done much with it. My wireless ethernet compact flash card (another purchase on ebay) works right out of the box, so that's nice. I also got the USB cradle to work with my linux machine without too much trouble. Next up: my linux box at work which might be a little more difficult, but I think I'll be ok. At worst I'll have to recompile my kernel, which is actually ok because it's already running a custom kernel I created anyhow. Toot toot. (that's me blowing my own horn) This weekend I'm going to reflash it to the OpenZaurus ROM image, as opposed to the default Sharp image that's on there now. Might as well try the different roms out while I don't have anything important on it... I also need to start working on synchronization with my addressbook and calendar, both of which are text files used in emacs. The BBDB addressbook seems like it'll be pretty easy, especially since some nice fellow wrote a perl module to access the file via an api... all I have to do now is dump it into the Zaurus format and I'm set. I'll worry about syncing later. I've got a 64mb multimedia card that I'll probably use to store apps on... I think that should be enough initially, but Costco usually has bigger ones for a good price. Might have to sneak one into the cart during our Sunday Costco visit... So that's the plan for the weekend and the Zaurus... more updates soon! Thu, 08 Jan 2004 DirecTV + CBS HD + Fox HD blog :: hdtv Good news from DirecTV -- apparently they're going to start broadcasting CBS in high definition to some markets... Fox will be following soon, I think, as well. I'm not quite sure I'll be able to get those feeds, but I think I might be able to since I get the national network feeds. I'm hoping my rural DirecTV provider (don't ask) turns everything on in time for the SuperBowl (in HD!). Also, I'm hoping Tivo will announce their HD recorder soon... I think they have a press conference today at the Consumer Electronics Show (going on now), so keep your fingers crossed. I'll be selling my original Tivo on eBay soon... it has a lifetime subscription already, and the original Tivos are great for hacking. I hope to get $300 - $400 for it... maybe $500 if I throw in my TivoNet card I never installed. Some Quick distcc Results blog :: linux I setup distcc on my main box (1.8ghz P4) and my other box (800mhz athlon) and compiled the 2.6 kernel with and without distcc. Of course, I only did this once, so it's certainly not scientific, but it's interesting: Regular compile (main linux box): 27:21 (mm:ss) distcc compile (two machines, -j4): 17:39 So there you have it... I saved 10 minutes, which is pretty cool since it was nothing to setup (just installed some RPM packages and set an environment variable). Next project is installing gentoo linux on my poke-around-on machine (900mhz celeron) and get that into the distcc cluster... Wed, 07 Jan 2004 Gentoo & the Zaurus blog :: linux This looks pretty cool... somebody ported the Gentoo Linux utilities to the Zaurus clamshell PDAs. That means you can do simple things like "emerge emacs" which will grab the emacs source, compile it, and install it on your Zaurus automatically. You can even setup distcc so that your desktop linux machine cross-compiles the package instead of having your Zaurus do the compiling. Very cool stuff... Not much else in linux news... still running my apt-enabled RedHat 9 box as my desktop... it's nice to be able to do 'apt-get dist-upgrade' and have my entire system updated to the latest version of everything installed. I think there's even a repository for the 2.6 kernel, but I haven't gotten up the nerve to try that, but I think it'd be fine since any other kernel upgrades I've done via apt work just fine. More later... I'll install distcc at home tonight to see how cool it really is... 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