Misc.

A bit of catch up... I've added the following notes to the wiki:

• Generating SSL certificates for Dovecot
• A fix for Asterisk's music on hold starting and stopping on its own

.

Forcing an EPG update in SageTV

Here's an easy one for SageTV users: if you somehow mung up your EPG so badly that it thinks that your last update was somewhere in the future and your next one really IS in the future, you can force an update by going to "Setup -> Setup Video Sources" and clicking on your video source (hint: it'll start with a number). Click on your source and then "Channel Setup". Then scroll down and click on one of the channels with the green ball on the left. (Hint: the green ball should go away.) Click on it again, so that the green ball comes back.

Now go check your SageTV homepage (if you have the web interface installed). The datestamp for the "Last EPG Update" should be right about when you clicked on the channel button the second time. (Wiki notes here.)

For Sparks

Link for Sparks: HamSoft - Linux Software for the Hamradio Community (their spelling).

Video phones

Spent the evening wandering around on TalkShoe, messing with various video phones, and installing software on a development platform. It's becoming apparent that even though X-Ten, the SIPPhone on the N800, Ekiga, and the Grandstream GXV-3000 can all "do video", how well it's done varies greatly.

Case in point: a setup where the GXV-3000 calls an X-Ten softphone. The video from the GXV-3000 is quite nice, the X-Ten softphone displays it without any problems. It even scales well.

The X-Ten softphone, however, has issues with its own video stream. On an 800 MHz machine, it has a lag which noticebly grows over time, until the application is running so slow that the program's buttons are unuseable until you hang up from the other end. (The video from the GXV-3000 keeps up during all this.)

(Note: On a 1.2 Ghz dual core, it appears to keep up.)

A N800-to-GXV call is a bit different. The N800 is able to keep up. It's just that the resolution of the camera on the N800 is just so low that the picture on the receiving end is comprised of giant pixels and overdriven colors. It's just too dang ugly to look at!

My recommendation is to try and maintain end-point parity (use the same hardware or software on both ends). That way, it may be a bit ugly but you don't end up comparing mediocre (the soft phones) with the good (the hard phones).

Innocent bystanders?

Nothing gets my blood boiling quicker than someone forcing me to act on their own half-a$$ed research (yeah, I have one of those jobs). While my job has nothing to do with law enforcement or legal, IA and other people's work does play into it.

What gets my hair standing on end is that certain organizations are trying to get laws passed to criminalize file sharing (vice being a civil matter), yet they can't do their own dang research properly.

Be sure to click on the links for the authors. They have some other interesting projects going on.

Note: the Slashdot article pointed only to the UW research paper, this is the associated web site. Free Printer741 now!

Nothing

Nothing to see here. This post is just to claim this blog in a specific feed reader. Please ignore.