Updated Atom Feed to 1.0

I use Blosxom on this blog and have an Atom feed.

Unfortunately, it seems that everyone else in the universe stopped using Blosxom and moved to something that requires MySQL or PHP which are non-starters for me.

So, I read this Moving from Atom 0.3 to 1.0 post and combined it with Feed Validator to update Blosxom's atom plugin.

My version of atomfeed Blosxom plugin for Atom 1.0 is here. Feel free to have at it.

The only issue is that the Feed Validator complains that the updated tag isn't early enough in the document. Besides being kind of bogus (XML can't define an ordering on the elements), there's just no way to do it easily in Blosxom without going through the stories twice. Close enough.

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Identifying new information on the Web

Mark says:

Better yet, there are some things happening that will enable traditional
websites to identify new information on their sites and ping that to us. This
way if WidgetsInc comes out with a new Dallas Mavericks Widget, they can
update their widgetsinc.com website and we will have it covered. It will
show up in Dallas Mavericks topic Im tracking.

Huh. I'm wondering if he's talking about something similar to Google Sitemaps.

Some Google folks approached dev@httpd about integrating that with httpd and we emitted a collective shrug.

I've always had a fundamental problem with a pull-oriented notification system, so I understand the rationale behind wanting a push-oriented system. However, my concern with Sitemaps is that it is too static and requires too much work on the part of the content maintainers. (Their bundled system only works for static sites, not dynamic ones - which is largely impractical for the types of sites they are really interested in having notifications for, IMHO.)

Rohit's dissertation went into detail about how a WATCH method could be implemented as a registration mechanism for a push-oriented system. But, the downfall with his approach was that it required maintaining a persistent connection - which is highly impractical but circumvents a registration/notification database. (It should be noted that, I believe, this WATCH approach was the core of the KnowNow system.)

As with most things, I favor Roy's MONITOR approach that he's talked about for Waka. Issue a MONITOR request to a URL and the server will issue a request to a specified URL whenever the source URL has changed. Now, if only we could get Roy to finish that prototype and unleash it upon the world.

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Queen + Paul Rodgers rocked the Bowl.

I must admit that I was skeptical about Paul Rodgers and this whole Queen + Paul Rodgers before going to the show tonight at the Hollywood Bowl. After all, it's been 23 years since Queen last performed in LA and almost 15 years since Freddie died (yikes!).

No longer. Wow. What a phenomenal show. A good mix of ages in the crowd with the majority being people who were in attendance when they were there last; but not an insubstantial number of folks who were born after A Night at the Opera was released.

I just didn't give Rodgers enough credit. As my friend (who was as skeptical if not more so) said, "Gee, Paul did more hits on his own than I thought." Well, duh.

Freddie is the lead vocals of Queen with his wonderful voice and it was scary to think how bad it could be if they picked the wrong person. Brian and Roger knew what they were getting: as good a talent as could be found. I was wrong, they were right.

Paul was good in that he didn't try to be Freddie - he is a similar outgoing/showhound personality (and that's what needed in this group to make it work on-stage). At the same time, he's different and didn't try to imitate Freddie in his mannerisms. Still, he pretty much nailed the vocals.

It didn't hurt that Brian and Roger were in top form with both their playing and vocals. (You tend to forget how much Brian and Roger sang; perhaps they emphasized their songs a bit more too.) A few times they both commented how much they wished Freddie was there with them. As much as we all miss him, they probably do so way more.

Early on, they did Fat Bottomed Girls and Another One Bites The Dust. Yay.

Brian did an acoustic '39 which was great to hear. Brian also did (I believe) Love Of My Life on electric guitar and asked the rest of us to sing along. "Freddie's not here to sing this one, so you'll have to make do with me. Feel free to jump in!" We did.

I kidded my friend when Roger did I'm In Love With My Car. Radio Ga-Ga was fun.

Some nice pics of the band on their early visit to Japan were projected on-screen as Roger sang These Are The Days Of Our Lives. I'm sure it is much more meaningful today than when they first wrote it. And, boy, they sure were younger then. (Fittingly, they are off to Japan now to finish off this tour.)

Slash came out and joined up for Paul's Can't Get Enough of Your Love. Needless to say, Brian and Slash made a kick-butt guitar combo.

Towards the end, they did Bohemian Rhapsody - with Freddie doing the vocals via cuts from his performances as video montages/clips of Freddie were projected on the screens. Brian and Roger played the instruments live. Rodgers didn't sing most of the verses here (a few though), but yielded mostly to Freddie. Very well done.

Then, they closed with We Will Rock You and We Are The Champions. As you can guess, the vocal part was done by the entire stadium. Woot.

FWIW, tonight's set list (not up yet, but should be soon) looks very similar to the one in Return of The Champions. I'll probably end up buying the DVD soon.

Good times. Good times. Off to sleep now.

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Windows XP MCE, Closed Captions, and Angel tuners

I purchased a Dell Dimension E510 with Windows XP Media Center Edition sporting dual tuners. I ordered it and within two days it was on my door stop. Cool.

After a few days of use, my biggest problem that I have had is that recorded content's closed captioning was out of sync (about two to three seconds before) the audio. This problem doesn't occur with Live TV - only recorded TV.

For someone like me, it's pretty much unwatchable like this. There appear to be many other folks who have reported similar problems with no clear solutions. But, that wasn't about to stop me...

After several hours of searching and tweaking (including switching from the bundled CyberDVD decoder to NVIDIA's PureVideo decoder - yes, NVIDIA's code does work with Dell's Intel video card; not sure if I'll pay for it yet), I finally stumbled upon the driver page for the bundled Emuzed Angel MPEG card.

I updated the driver from 1.0.2.34 (as provided by Dell) to 1.0.2.36 and restarted the machine.

So far, the captions on newly recorded content now appear to be in sync. (Of course, the content I previously recorded is still out of sync.)

Note that I have not had time to try out their beta driver yet.

But, I'm crossing my fingers that the closed captioning problem is fixed.

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Ubuntu Breezy breaks my nut.

As I mentioned on archstudio-dev, Ubuntu Breezy (5.10) breaks nut with our Belkin 550VA.

It'll think there is no power and immediately shutdown the system.

This is apparently due to an upstream bug with nut that will be fixed for the upcoming nut 2.0.3.

In the meantime, here's the general idea behind the fix:

• Fetch the current Testing nut from CVS (the alioth CVS server is slow!)

cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.alioth.debian.org:/cvsroot/nut co -rTesting nut

• ./configure (Match the configure args from Ubuntu)
• cd drivers && make newhidups
• Add to the end of /etc/hotplug/usb/libhid.usermap :

libhidups      0x0003      0x050d   0x0550   ...the rest is the same...

For the lazy (and those who trust me! ha!), fetch:

• newhidups driver
• libhidsups hotplug script
• libhid.usermap

Once you have the bits, installation:

[ tell nut to use the newhidups driver ]
edit /etc/nut/upsd.conf to have driver = 'newhidups'
[ copy the newhidups driver ]
sudo cp /lib/nut/newhidups /lib/nut/newhidups.orig
sudo cp newhidups /lib/nut/newhidups
[ Install the nut hotplug scripts into /etc/hotplug/usb ]
cp scripts/hotplug/libhidups /etc/hotplug/usb
chmod +x /etc/hotplug/usb/lidhidups
cp scripts/hotplug/libhid.usermap /etc/hotplug/usb

Voila. nut 2.0.3 knows a lot more about the Belkin protocol than 1.4 did.

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SMF description for OpenLDAP

I finally got around to writing an smf description for OpenLDAP and a suitable start script.

We have a local LDAP server on this machine and the box also uses the same LDAP server for accounts.

Prior to Solaris 10, this could be easily managed by having slapd start before the LDAP client.

No more in Solaris 10 due to the idiocy of smf. Without this file, the LDAP client will start first and then the whole system will go wonky as the name-service system won't contact the LDAP server. Ouch.

So, download this file and then do:

# svccfg import slapd-smf.xml
# cp slapd.sh /lib/svc/method/slapd
# chmod +x /lib/svc/method/slapd

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