Java Thinking

SpringSource Roo I just found out this week about SpringSource Roo - a rapid development tools that promises: Working applications within 10 minutes of finishing the download I haven't used it yet, but at first glance it looks like a Grails/Rails type tool but being plain Java based as opposed to Groovy or Ruby based. This is a great move, since enterprises just don't seem to be able to get comfortable with dynamic languages - I mean, why continue worry about every little nut and bolt when Grails takes care of all that detail - Roo may just be the ticket for those too afraid to make the jump to Grails. SpringSource STS I've been using Netbeans 6.7 for Grails development these days (with what little time I have), but I'm thinking about trying out the latest SpringSource Tool Suite (STS) - I'm a big fan of everything SpringSource does, and I'm keen to see what their Groovy support in Eclipse is like. Replacing a DVD drive in Mythbuntu When I originally set...

I've been wanting a way to use playlists on my media center either from within MythTV or with any other player. The reason is I have a bunch of short videos (music and documentaries) that I'd like to be able to play consecutively. It turns out to be a case of just RTFM . You can create playlists for MPlayer from directory listings, and then associate playlists with a particular mplayer command. To generate the playlist from all files in a directory, I use the following: dir * | sed 's/\\//g' > all_videos.pls The sed part of this command removes the \ from escaped spaces... i.e. a file 'Hello world' is output from the dir command as 'Hello\ world' - the space is escaped. We need to generate a file without these escaped spaces for it to work properly. I use the following mplayer command associated with the pls extension: mplayer -shuffle -fs -zoom -quiet -vo xv -playlist %s

I've noticed that my MythTV ( Mythbuntu 8.10) machine was using 100% of its 1G and swapping. (Incidently, I was running the Blootube widescreen theme, and just switching to the MythCenter theme resulted in a snappier experience). So, I went to buy more memory - and found that 1G cost AUD23 and a 2G stick was AUD45. Nice. I went for the 2G but when a friend commented that mixing a 1G + 2G I'd miss out on dual channel. Bummer, but I'll live with it. When I first installed the RAM, I put the new 2G chip in the same channel (A) as the existing 1G. Booting the PC reported 3G in single channel mode, but it wouldn't boot! It simply reported a CRC error and stopped! I took out the 1G stick, leaving just the 2G and booted okay. Hmmm, so now I put the 1G back, but in one of the channel B slots so the 2 sticks were in different channels. Now, when booting it reported 3G in Flex mode! I'd never heard of this so I looked it up. It all gets explained very well here , and what it...

I've had to disable MemoKeys because it interferes with Intellij. I often use ALT-F1 to locate a file in the project tree, but this doesn't work because MemoKeys is intercepting the F1. There is some awesome goodness coming in Grails 1.1 - check out the release notes for the Beta . I just had a requirement to open an EPS file, but I found that GIMP (on Windows) doesn't natively support EPS. As documented , you need to install GhostScript and set an environment variable (i.e. GS_PROG=C:\Program Files\gs\gs8.63\bin\gswin32.exe). Restart GIMP and you should be right. Running a VPS costs money, so reducing the amount of ram required helps. Java applications have the disadvantage of using resources even when they are not being used, so I am interested to read about this strategy which may reduce not only the upload size but the memory footprint. I don't know if anyone has measured the effect on memory - I hope it helps.

I've installed MythTV frontend on my laptop so now I can view TV and recordings, and play music across the network. I had to change the backend setup to serve from the ip address instead of 'localhost', and I also changed bind-address in /etc/mysql/my.conf to use the ip address. I'm not sure if I had to change mysql, but I assume so. I've also edited fstab to mount my media over the network so that the path on the frontend machine is exactly the same as on the backend (this was recommended in the post I found about setting the remote frontend up): //mythtv/media /home/paul/media/ cifs credentials=/etc/samba/user,noexec 0 0 My /etc/samba/smb.conf has a corresponding entry to share the directory: [media] path = /home/paul/media available = yes browsable = yes public = yes writable = no

I didn't notice until now, but nuvexport has stopped working since my upgrade to 8.10. I found the solution here, but I needed to add the Intrepid Medibuntu repository first. The full solution: sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/intrepid.list --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get purge ffmpeg sudo apt-get install libavcodec-unstripped-51 libavdevice-unstripped-52 libavformat-unstripped-52 libavutil-unstripped-49 libpostproc-unstripped-51 libswscale-unstripped-0 ffmpeg sudo apt-get install mytharchive nuvexport

The files Mythtv records are saved with a timestamp as a file name, making it pretty hard to figure out which file is which. To easily identify the files, you can use mythrename.pl - I couldn't find it in my Mythbuntu installation, so I had to download it from http://svn.mythtv.org/svn/trunk/mythtv/contrib/user_jobs/ . It ran okay, without any dependency problems. This post has some useful comments on how to run it. The idea is that you can schedule it with cron to run at regular intervals so as to stay current. I'm running it so it doesn't actually rename the original files, but it makes sensibly named symbolic links to the originals: mythrename.pl --format "\%T/\%Y-\%m-\%d \%H\%i \%- \%T \%-\%S" --link /home/paul/TVShows For help with the options, see the wiki page or run with the --help option.

Last November I upgraded my desktop PC. Recently I've repurposed it as a media center running MythTV (and also for print serving/file serving etc). The hardware is as follows: Sonata III 500 W case Gigabyte GA965P-S3 motherboard Core2 Duo E6550 CPU Gigabyte 8400GS Nvidia video card WinFast DTV1000 digital tuner card 320MB SATA disk Kingston 1Gig DDR2 800MHz memory Since then, I've added a 1Terabyte SATA disk - prices keep coming down every week. You can get a 1T disk for just over AUD200 now. I installed MythBuntu 8.04 and found it a very simple process. I had to configure it for TwinView (Clone) so I've got the same output on my TV as I have on the LCD monitor. Then I had to get sound via the SPDIF optical output. To do this you have to: Unmute the ICE958 channel via alsamixer Configure MythTV to use ALSA:SPDIF and AC3 + DTS to SPDIF passthrough I also had to change my video player command to 'mplayer -ao alsa:device=spdif -fs -zoom -quiet so -vo xv...