I’ve been toying with the idea of setting up a MythTV box on and off for a while, and with family members complaining about the difficulties of getting a VCR programmed for the correct time, the allure of a DVR where you could just point it at a show in the program schedule and say “record this” was getting high. Just before Christmas, I ran across a new startup company selling preconfigured dual-tuner Home Theater PC boxes with Ubuntu and MythTV preinstalled on them, and for a pretty decent price, so I wound up purchasing a Hannibal Duece+ from them. I got the machine a couple weeks ago, and have had a lot of fun fine-tuning it. Having a web interface on the box to point your browser at it and view the program schedule and schedule recordings is a kick, too. The machines are still a little rough around the edges with the initial configuration, but TVEase is showing a lot of promise, with an active forum and a definite open source attitude about how to configure the machines for new customers. The only current drawback is the deathgrip the cable industry has over the digital channels – trying to get off-the-shelf hardware that supports CableCARD® is a bit of a joke currently. If you’re in the market for a DVR, and aren’t married to all the high-numbered channels, I’d definitely recommend picking up one of these things.
The results are in
Wow, that was fast. They said they’d have the results of the RHCE exam posted sometime in the next 3 business days (which would mean sometime next week), but I had an email waiting for me when I got home tonight with the results. I passed. So I’m now officially a Red Hat Certified Engineer.
Geeklog to WordPress converter
I’ve been intending to convert my blog from Geeklog to WordPress for probably the better part of a year. I’m a stickler for preventing dataloss though, and I really wanted to keep all my old blog posts. I searched the web on and off for a month or two looking for a way to convert the data, and the best I could find was the RSS import in WordPress. Unfortunately, the RSS export in Geeklog sucks rocks, and even hacking on it a bit, I couldn’t get all the data out in one piece.
So I finally gave up searching and wrote my own WordPress import module for Geeklog that would copy and translate the data directly from one database to the other. It’s heavily based on the existing importer for TextPattern that’s included with the current WordPress distributions. It imports categories, users, posts, and comments. It also stores the Geeklog Story ID (sid) into the post metadata, for use in making the old permalinks keep working. I have an article.php stub you can drop into your wordpress directory that takes the Geeklog permalinks and redirects to the new WordPress ones.
I’m posting this here so the next person who has to convert a Geeklog to a WordPress can save themselves a bunch of trouble. :) It’s all been posted to WordPress’ Trac system. If you make use of it and make any improvements to it while you’re at it, feel free to add them to that bug.
Hello WordPress!
So I finally managed to get my blog converted to WordPress. 🙂
It’s much easier to post here than it was to Geeklog (what I was using before), which means I should be posting more frequently now. I have it set up so the feed URLs and the permalinks from the old blog should redirect to the new permalinks, so hopefully nothing was lost.
I may screw with the theme a bit before it settles down, so if you’re reading this in a web browser, don’t be surprised if the look changes when you come back 🙂
Office cleanup
This is the main reason for my vacation this week. 🙂 I have about 6 years worth of junk that has travelled with me from place to place over the years, and every attempt to clean it in a short time period usually ends up in a bunch of stuff getting disposed of, a bunch of it getting sorted and filed, and a bunch sorted but not filed (which then winds up back in my way again), and boxes of stuff still not touched because I didn’t finish cleaning it all.
And then, because internally, I’m pretty much a perfectionist, the new stuff winds up getting added to the pile, because the sorted/filed places it was all supposed to go never got finished/caught up, so it all gets added to the pile for the next time I get back to working on it.
So here’s what my office looks like right now. My goal is by the end of this week to get this organized that I can actually use it as a workplace again.
Whether I get to it or not is still up in the air. Also on my plate this week is an ISP move. The ISP that hosts my personal website (and this blog, and the mail for bugzilla.org) is moving this week, and I volunteered to help them move. They’re the victim of an upstream network provider that’s eliminating their presence in the geographic area, so it’s either move or die. Personally, I don’t want to see my website die. 🙂 Unfortunately this was also the only network provider with business-class service there (southeastern Tennessee), so it’s a physical move to a new colo facility (and thus new servers) as well, not just changing the IP addresses. Fortunately, the main chunk of the services is only two servers, and they get a lot more bandwidth at the new provider. 🙂