Kevin's Musings

It’s hard to believe but I have been 35 for two weeks and a New Jersey resident for almost exactly that same amount of time. I have put in 7 days at the new job. The work is pretty much the same (Java/Tapestry/Database). The people seem good to work with.

The commute is 80-90 minutes, which isn’t too bad. I have to get up earlier than before, about 6:30am, and get home at about 7:15 if I am being direct about it. I take the train into NY Penn Station during which I have been listening to “New York Times Daily Digest” (provided by Audible). From there I have two subway trains and either a bus or a 6 or so block walk. All in all the commute isn’t bad. The commute home is mostly the inverse of the commute in. I have made a website to help me determine when the trains come and go, which is mostly helpful on my return trip. I am using a monthly pass so I can catch any train and not worry about buying tickets. Since I can take any train back I have sometimes been doing stuff in the city before my return trip — seeing a concert (The Bobs), movies, shopping, etc. The return trip is also good for a quick nap, provided you don’t miss your stop (haven’t done that, yet).

I was able to resolve the smoke smell in my apartment by switching apartments. The new apartment is on the 3rd floor, which is neither here nor there… It is the same layout as before just a little higher up the stairs or elevator — I can always use the exercise.

I saw Kung Fu Hustle a few days ago (awesome!!) and Hitchhikers Guide Friday night (very entertaining). If you have inclination toward seeing either I would recommend them. I am really looking forward to Star Wars Episode 3 and think I have narrowed down my theather choice to two theaters (both in digital, of course).

Today I spent a RAINY day at Six Flags Great Adventure. Six Flags GA is about 45 minutes away (driving). It was a fun day, I ended up SOAKED (from the rain) but the lines were SHORT! so I can’t complain. I love the rain, so it was perfect for me. Some really nice coasters there. I got a Six Flags season pass so I hope to hit a few others Six Flags locations (and this one again) this season. Notably Six Flags New England is only like 160 miles away so I plan go up there this summer. Maybe attach that to a visit to Boston? Its (milage wise) close than Las Cruces is to Albuquerque, so…

No scuba prospects yet, but, I found two scuba shops that I haven’t visited yet. I would like to check out something nearby within a month or two.

Until next time…

Well, I got all my stuff packed up and key stuff into my vehicle by about 10pm on Thursday evening — which is about what I expected. Early Friday morning (about 5am) Deb and I hit the road. We had a nice overcast morning so the sun didn’t get into our eyes during the drive east out of Albuquerque, quite a blessing. We arrived in Tulsa about 5pm and had a nice dinner (and dessert!) with my dad and his wife. We hit the road again about 7:30pm and made it almost to St. Louis before stopping for the night at just before 2am. We got a good nights sleep and hit the road again at about 10am. We drove through several states, stopping for the night in Breezewood, PA at just before 1am. I was planning to stop in Breezewood, anyway, but the road was closed from 11pm – 5am so we had to either stop in Breezewood or take a detour so it was “meant to be”, we guess. We got left Breezewood at about 10am and got into Rahway, NJ (at our new apartment) just before 3pm. The worst of the traffic for the entire trip was the last 30 minutes in New Jersey, and even that wasn’t terribly bad. We had perfect weather the entire drive.

We got into our apartment. The building is nice, the area is nice. Some of the surrounding area needs improvement but it seems the area is going through improvements so it really does appear the entire neighborhood is “on the rebound”. The apartment, as I said, is very nice but there is a smoke smell. I am looking to see if there are other apartments available that don’t have the smoke smell. It is a bummer that brand new apartments, that have had one tenant, already has a smoke smell. Oh well! We went to Target and got a bunch of “necessities” (like being back in college), had dinner at Unos (mmm good), and dessert at The Cheesecake Factory (for my 35th birthday).

Looking out the back windows (or on our porch) is a nice bar named “The Back Porch”. They will have music and stuff there on the weekends, but, I think we can live with it. We stopped in for a drink and met the people who work there, all seem quite nice.

On Monday we found a great little deli / sandwich shop just around the corner from our apartment and had a great breakfast sandwich there. We then took a trip into the City — doing a dry run on the trains and subways to work. Looks like the commute will be 60-90 minutes, depending on how things go. I may look into what all the alternate routes are, but it’s not bad. Then we walked from my work, through central park, and over to a move theater and see the move “House Of D” which we really enjoyed. It is in limited release in LA/NY so it was fun to see a movie about New York, in New York, before the rest of the country can see it. FUN!

Well, the first few days seem to have gone well.

Until next time…

Went and saw Sin City this weekend. This is a fantastic movie IF you can handle the violence. It is an uber-violent movie dripping with style. If you like violent films if they make your significant other squeamish take a friend, this movie goes a long way toward redefining violent films. Visually it is quite a treat — it really captures the comic book feel. I liked this film a lot, but, if you couldn’t sit through Pulp Fiction, Resivour Dogs, or Natural Born Killers this NOT for you.

Played more Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. This is a great game, lot of fun. My single complaint with it is that on almost every level you have secondary objectives of “hack eight specific computers”, “disable six hidden microphones”, etc. This can just tend to get a little tedious, if you miss one you either just skip it or go back and search the entire level. Also, I had some problems figuring out the “hacking” technique but after I stopped being lazy and read the manual it is really quite nifty. All in all I would say my favorite is Pandora Tomorrow, probably Chaos Theory in second, original in 3rd (but they are all great games).

Did some more cleaning up, throwing things away, shredding, and packing. The big day is coming up soon. We decided to try to do the drive in 2 days instead of 3 — with the theory of 2 really long days of driving might be better than 3 pretty long days of driving. Also, we decided on an apartment in Rahway, NJ — they are brand new, just opened last September (2004). The apartment complex is really nice and only 1.5 blocks to a train station. Hopefully the neighborhood is as nice and revitalized as the apartment manager suggests. We are leasing it sight unseen but doing so really simplifies many things about the pending move. I feel somewhat confident there is nothing in Manhattan/Long Island/Staten Island that is this nice with these features with a shorter commute (that I would be able to find in time).

Finally, my Birthday is coming up (April 17th). We should be in the new apartment for my birthday and can do something in Manhattan (or NJ or wherever) to celebrate the big Three Five. Time flies when you are having fun, eh?

I am going to be without a television for about 6 weeks and needed to figure out a way be able to play my Xbox/Gamecube without a television. Watching TV shows and movies won’t be a problem as I now have my media server computer running BeyondTV and Meedio which I can just plug into the VGA port on my monitor (and run my desktop computer through DVI). I started looking at various ways to get Xbox video on my monitor. The first thing I thought of was using a video capture card (such as a Hauppauge PVR250, an ATI TV Wonder Pro, something along those lines. I have two Hauppauge PVR250 cards now but they are dedicated to my PVR so I didn’t want to give one up. Ultimately I decided that the video quality would be sub-par because I would be going from HDTV (now) to S-Video on the computer and could easily introduce some unacceptable lag (unknown). After extensive research I found the Neoya X2VGA and the VDigi Enhanced VD-Z3. Both boxes are effectively HDTV Component Video to VGA transcoders. They are about the same price, seem to have about the same quality (excellent, HDTV quality). Both have really slow shipping times (2+ weeks to get one to North America). I decided on the VDigi VD-Z3 because I can hookup any HD component video source to it (not JUST the Xbox) and it gets really good reviews (well, they both do). I found one on eBay and I should have it within about 3 or 4 days (much better than 2 weeks).

On a lighter note, I picked up Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory for the PC last night. If you haven’t played Splinter Cell you really should pick it up. I have been a big Splinter Cell fan since it first came out on the Xbox. I played both Spinter Cell and SC: Pandora Tomorrow on the Xbox. I played a demo of one of those two on the PC and didn’t like the control scheme but after revisiting SC: Pandora Tomorrow and the SC: Chaos Theory demo I decided I do like the PC control scheme…. Not to mention seeing Chaos Theory running at 1280×1024 on a GeForce 6600GT blew me away — the graphics are incredible (well not as good as Half Life 2, but…) the gameplay is just as smooth as on the Xbox and, unlike on the Xbox, you can save ANYWHERE, not just at certain points. I am a convert — Splinter Cell on the PC rocks.

Finally, we think we found an apartment in Rahway, NJ. We are keeping our figers crossed, but, it seems we have found a really nice place that is very close to a train station and about 42 minutes from NY Penn Station. The commute will be quite a change for me, but, it will be a train commute on, I think, one train — so I can just sit there and listen to an Audio Books or whatever. Then from NY Penn Station I am two quick subway rides and a walk (or Bus) to work. Should be roughly a 60 minute commute. This is less than a co-workers commute from Long Island (about 90 minutes) — I would guess a relatively average NJ commute. If I hate it we can move to the city (or wherever) in six months or a year.

No opinion change on BeyondTV. I like it. I wish the remote control interface was more responsive — not sure how to solve that. Maybe for the TV I use this on the Firefly remote would be better? Dunno. Anyway, it is a perfectly reasonable PVR. Better than ReplayTV especially since it is dual tuner. I haven’t figured out ShowSqueeze yet, but, there is always more time in the future, right?

I spent a bunch of time playing with Meedio this weekend. I have determined that for both Music and Videos it is best to just remove (via the configuration program) the default My Videos and Music Library and replace them with “Media File Browser” (or whatever it is called). Using the “File Browser” you can see the actual directory structure. Using this I setup my MP3 directory as

   Artist
      Album
      Album

I put a jpg file in each artist directory and one in each album directory. Now the system is based on directory structure instead of on the tags. I prefer being based on directory structure instead of tags not because I don’t tag my MP3s (my MP3s are very well tagged) but because the “Artist” on MP3s varies… a single album often has multiple arts, on a normal album artist can change from track to track. This annoys me because I want to pick my music by the Artist then Album, but I don’t want to do things different if it is a compilation album, soundtrack, whatever. This has always been my preference and no media program seems to get this right (at least not that I have used)… except one.

I wrote a program a while back (that I still use) called Jookie. I will have to get it posted to my web site. Jookie helps you pick from with your music, but it doesn’t actually play music — it uses Winamp to play the actual music. It just reads the directory structure every time and assumes you have things setup in Artist / Album structure. You double click an album and it either queue it or plays the album. If you choose you can also drill down to the song and play or queue the song. This is a very simple program but it works great. One nice feature that I made part of Jookie is a TiVo-like jump forward 30 seconds, jump back 7 seconds feature. This is nice when you are listening to recorded radio shows that don’t have commercials snipped out.

I have been using SAX again to parse an XML file into Java objects… I did this a while back on another project, but, a new project needs to do some database processing based on information provided in an XML file. When I did this before I found it to be pretty straightforward and found it to be so again this time. Nothing terribly complex and I haven’t written a DTD for my XML file yet (I wrote Java code on my objects to validate themselves which does much of the work the DTD would do and some extra that it probably wouldn’t). The parser works great… now I just need to write the code that does the database work based on the content of those objects. Always more to do!

Played a lot more with PC PVR software late night. I think I am quite happy with BeyondTV 3.5.2, so I will probably go with that. The downside to BeyondTV is that it doesn’t include any “media player” options such as playing video files (Divx, Xvid, etc.), playing audio (CD or MP3), looking at picture albums, etc. The SnapStream “media player” solution is a program called BeyondMedia. BeyondMedia looks nice but its integration with BeyondTV is essentially nil (a menu option to launch BeyondTV) and its video playback leaves something to be desired — although I figured out ways around most of the issues I was having. I WAS pretty happy with BeyondMedia until I looked at Meedio. Meedio has, I believe, a more functional video player, has a nice theme-able interface, and TONS of plug-ins (and a .NET oriented plug-in architecture that looks pretty straightforward… I make try to write one some evening when I have free time). There are even Meedio plugins related to BeyondTV, so, it appears that Meedio can have better BeyondTV integration that BeyondMedia (how ironic).

There is talk of a new version of BeyondTV (4.0?) that integrates more seamlessly with BeyondMedia, improves the BeyondTV interfaces (makes it theme-able?), etc. but who knows when that is due — I haven’t seen any release dates or feature promises. It is also worth noting that Meedio has a PVR component that is “under development”. I haven’t looked at this yet (I still may), but, if it is as “pre-release” as I think I will hold off for now.

Anyway, I think the combination of BeyondTV and Meedio is probably the best thing going on Windows right now for full function PVR/Media Center. I have uninstalled BeyondMedia and added the BeyondTV integration with Meedio. The system seems to work pretty darn well. One cool feature of Meedio that I haven’t seen elsewhere is the Meedio Video player remembers your position in a video you are watching if you exit out of watching the video. When you go back into the video later it offers to resume or start over. This is a NICE feature because I often don’t watch an entire video in one sitting.

Also, I was easily able to make Meedio work with my Hauppauge remote (well, my Harmony, actually). I was also able to make BeyondMedia use the Hauppauge remote as well.

Until next time…

If you have been my blog while you may know I am a PVR nut. I have two ReplayTVs (a 5040, upgraded to 120MB, and a 5540) and have been working for what seems forever on a PC-based PVR. I have never gone the TiVo route because of their proprietary video format (but TiVo-To-Go may someday prompt me to reevaluate this). I have been using MythTV for 6 months or a year and have liked it, but, with every release it seems to get flakier and flakier. I tried running it on Redhat and it takes forever to get everything running — and when you have problems it is often difficult to resolve. So I moved to KnoppMyth. KnoppMyth worked great on the first release I tried but it was missing some features. When a new version of KnoppMyth came out I upgraded and it worked pretty well, still missed some features, but “commercial detection” would crash the MythBackend, so I turned off “commercial detection”. Recently I saw the KnoppMyth R5A12 was out. People said it was stable (although marked as “alpha”) so I went and grabbed it. I got it running (with just a few glitches I had to fix) in short order, but… it crashes my system a fair bit, the front end crashes a LOT, when you are playing back a recorded show and press pause, pressing pause or play doesn’t restart playback (you must press Exit and go back in). There were other problems and I was finding few solutions.

So… yesterday I was so frustrated with it I decided to dump the MythTV and try some of the Windows-based PVR programs. All the recorded shows exist on a Linux XFS partition which isn’t readable (as far as I know) by Windows, so, I deleted all the shows I didn’t cared about, wrote a script to rename the shows I did care about so they had meaningful filenames, then backed up all the .NUV (recorded show) video files to another machine. Finally, I formatted the hard drives and installed WinXP on the box.

WinXP went one as smoothly as usual. The box uses a Chaintech 7NIF2 motherboard (EVERYTHING on the motherboard, it is a very nice board) so getting all the drivers (ethernet, audio, video, etc.) up and running was fast and simple (from the CD). I installed updated nVidia GeForce drivers from the nvidia.com site. I did a complete “Windows Update” to get everything up to snuff, install .NET 1.1, etc. Finally, I went to install the Hauppauge drivers (this box has two Hauppauge PVR250 tuner cards in it). The two PVR250 cards are “different”, so, when I installed the drivers from the CD-ROM one of the tuner cards worked and the other didn’t. I got the latest drivers from the Hauppauge web site and both cards worked fine. The system was “ready for software.”.

Last night I tested GB-PVR, a freeware PVR package. This software is decent and has some plusses but doesn’t feel terribly polished. I may come back and play with it some more, it did work, but it just feels homemade.

I also tested SageTV. I generally liked SageTV and I heard it is probably the most stable of the bunch. It has lots of features. I think the interface could probably use some fine tuning and it failed to play back (or even see) many of my Video files (it didn’t seem to even see .WMV files for some reason). This didn’t bode well for SageTV as I want it to play back any kind of video file. Otherwise, I liked SageTV.

I also tested BeyondTV and Beyond Media. I like the interface of this set of packages better. It played back all the video files I tried on it (at least after installing the latest ffdshow video codecs — you would want the newest “alpha” version, not the older versions). My complaints with BeyondTV/Beyond Media are that the two programs have different interfaces and aren’t integrated. You can go between them but it really feels like you are going to a completely different program (well, you are). Also, out of the box BeyondTV supports the Hauppauge Silver Remote, but Beyond Media doesn’t. My Harmony 688 remote is setup as a Hauppauge Silver remote (artifact of using MythTV) which isn’t directly supported by Beyond Media. I read this morning that there are some changes I can make to the IRRemote.ini file (the Hauppauge IR Remote configuration file) to make it work with Beyond Media. I will try those tonight. People have mentioned stability issues with Beyond TV… we’ll see if this latest version seems stable. One BIG plus of the BeyondTV software is that it supports “ShowSqueeze” (converting the video file from MPEG2 to smaller formats), and, I think, commercial detection. These are big plusses in favor of BeyondTV.

You might then be asking what about Windows Media Center Edition. I will have to say no for that… (a) because it is Microsoft and (b) because it uses a proprietary video format that cannot (at least easily) be transcoded to a smaller format (such as Xvid, etc.). MPEG2 files are just too big!

So where does that leave me… I am still not sure. I need to evaluate more tonight. If I am going to pay for Windows PVR software I want to love it, so… we’ll see. I am currently leaning toward BeyondTV/Beyond Media.

Well, my last trip to New York City was to interview with Weill Medical College of Cornell University doing software development stuff, notably Java/Tapestry/JDO – I think I will fit right in.

I will continue to work at Honeywell through mid-April and then shortly after I will be starting in Manhattan, upper east side. The tricky parts now will be arranging to get all of our stuff from Albuquerque to New York and finding a place to live. New York rent is HIGH, so this should be interesting. We are excited about all the possibilities that New York will provide and everything is so close on the east coast. What an adventure!

My new monitor (Dell 1905FP) arrived as did my new video card (Leadtek 6600GT). Wow the new card is great and I cannot speak highly enough of the monitor. I have it attached via DVI and it looks GREAT. Even games that drop the resolution down to 800×600 look great on this monitor (native resolution of 1280×1024) — I was a little worried about running it at lower resolutions but my worries seem to be unfounded.

My relatively brief visit to New York went well. More on that in a week or so, maybe. No pictures to speak of.

Over this last weekend we took a road trip to Phoenix to see my wife’s dad and step mom. It was a nice trip. The drive from Albuquerque wasn’t as long as I thought it would be (about 6.5 hours).

Testing in Taekwon-do is this weekend – going from green belt to green belt with blue stripe. I am not too worried about the testing except that my school merged with another ITF school and that completely changed the required kicks and required breaking to what seems to be a much higher level. This isn’t a big problem, but, I feel there is quite a bit that it is now expected that I know that maybe we were never taught.

No scuba trips planned right now.

A couple things I am working on… I have been playing with how one using VB6 or C# would record from any particular input on the sound card directly to mp3. I have found some solutions that range from free to about $100 per developer that use Lame, proprietary, gogo.dll. I still need to play with this some more. Looking to write an app like TimeTrax. We’ll see. I originally used TotalRecorder to record MP3 (which works great!) but it doesn’t appear they offer a component to let me record to MP3 that I can then distribute. Haven’t decided if the free software will do enough or if maybe I will break down a buy something.

Also, I continue to look to see how one could take HTML 4.0 (with the extended table-related tags/information) and produce PDF. If the problem was HTML 3.2 I could use HTMLDOC, Corda Highwire, HTML2PDF, etc. but the HTML 4.0 requirement seems to muck everything up. It is interesting now that all current browsers (Firefox 1.x, IE 6.x, etc.) handle the HTML 4.0 table tags correctly and will print them nicely. I wish somebody would write a program like HTMLDOC but based on the Mozilla print engine with built in PDF support. I am sure something like this could be done but it doesn’t really interest me enough to attempt it.

Performance on my desktop system has been quite problematic lately… Usually things worked OK but sometimes the mouse would just freeze. Sometimes when it would happen the IDE light would be on steady for a few seconds. Light on or not, after a few seconds the system would start responding again like nothing happened. My experience in the past suggested this was due to a sector going bad on the hard drive and it would be reported in the WinXP system log, but, the log didn’t mention any problems. I did full chkdsk (including media test) but that reported no problems.

I started to suspect a rogue process, but, rebooting didn’t matter so I uninstalled a ton of software and then checked the process list, nothing abnormal running. Problems would still occur when I killed all “extra” processes.

Another very annoying symptom was that when I played games there would VERY frequently pause for no reason, sound often stuttering repeatedly. This made almost all games completely unplayable.

So I started wondering if maybe my RAM was bad (or maybe an IDE cable?) I doubted both of these because the system didn’t lock up completely, just freeze for some seconds at a time. I would think bad RAM or cable would be more likely to cause crashes. The last thing to check was to see if maybe one of my RAM modules was bad (there are two modules) so I decided to remove one of them and test the system. I removed one DIMM and then I was getting very flaky video right from the self test screen. STRANGE! This occurred no matter what memory configuration I had installed and in what slots. So I admitted defeat for the night and turned off the system.

This morning I decided to change video cards (from a new ATI Radeon 9800 Pro to an old GeForces 2 MX400). What do you know, it appears the flaky video problem that started last night cleared up and games run without stutter. I haven’t used the system long enough to see if that was the whole problem, but, it appears it is.

Where does all this leave me? Either my Radeon 9800 Pro is completely hosed (and has just been getting worse) or my motherboard (Gigabyte 7N400Pro2 v2.0, latest firmware) has some odd compatibility issue with my Radeon 9800 board. Some searching usenet suggests a few things to try: changing AGP from 8x to 4x, disabling the “SmartFan” option in the BIOS, and getting a bigger power supply. I will likely try these, but, my guess is that the video card is now toast. This is odd because it is a pretty new card, but, we’ll see.