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.

[/software] permanent link

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.

[/software] permanent link

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.

[/software/ubuntu] permanent link

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

[/software/solaris] permanent link

Another smpatch error

For the record, if you update your Solaris 10 machine from a GA install and then run smpatch analyze (or smpatch update) and get:

# smpatch analyze
Failure: Unknown host (getupdates.sun.com) connecting to https://getupdates.sun.com/solaris/

Run 'updatemanager' to register your machine with Sun Update Connection.

For security patches, it's still free (for now). Otherwise, you need to pony up for their service plans.

Why they didn't test this and give a useful error message is beyond me.

Lame.

[/software/solaris] permanent link