I've been reading about the MythTV homebrew PVR project for a while. Basically you can turn a spare PC into a home media center - but because it's Linux you can get a plethora of plugins.

Over the past couple of months I've got together the PC:
1. nVIDIA GEForce FX5200 PCI graphics card with Tv out. Donated by Dave - cheers
2. Compaq Deskpro EN - PIII 1GHz, 250Gb HDD, 512Mb RAM. £20 from Tony - cheers.
3. GalaxyTV PCI Capture card - had this for ages.
4. Techno Trend DVB Digital Satellite PCI Card - £23 on ebay

I tried a couple of distros recently namely Mandriva and FedoraCore6 but for one reason or other I didn't like the approach - I wanted a dedicated PVR, not a desktop or server OS running as a PVR. I stumbled across MythDora 4.0 - basically Fedora Core 6 with MythTv and masses of home media drivers and tools.

First install didn't go so well because the X server didn't start (nVidia driver problem) and I misread the pop up which on the second install actually automatically fixed the problem itself - great.

MythDora does actually come with an nVidia tailored xorg.conf file located here:
/storage/misc/extras/xorg.conf.NVIDIA
... I used this almost unedited to replace my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file.

I finished the setup on the monitor and then pluged the tv out and audio cables into the TV and it worked a treat. I stuck a DVD in the DVD drive as a test and it played full screen on my TV - perfect quality. I even ripped the DVD to disk.


Internet Radio test - MythTv comes with a great internet radio interface, I browsed though the guide and started listening to ChronixRadio.com


There's also MythWeb which will come into play once I've got a TV Guide setup, here's a Firefox screenshot:

... scheduling recordings from anywhere!

What's left to do?
1. Hook up the TV aerial and tune in
2. Hook up to the satellite dish and tune in
3. Set up the TV guide
4. I've also seen a couple of scripts on the web that will convert recordings into MP4's optimised for small screens - ideal for my iPod Video.

We've not being putting many pictures on Izabella's website recently because it take aaaaaaaaages to rotate and rezise them all.

I heard you could do this by bulk in Photoshop - but I don't have Photoshop, what I do have is imagemagick.org's convert command and TCL.

The convert command comes with most Linux distros now and it's certainly available on my Mandriva webserver machine, one really powerful feature is auto-orient which knows if a digital photo graph was taken in potrait and requires rotation.

I added the TCL script to crontab, set to run every 5 minutes:
*/5 * * * * tclsh /home/sreadman/imgresize/convert.tcl /var/www/html/izabel/wp-content/uploads/2007 450

The additional parameter of 450 is the width of the picture, the rotation is done first and then the width is changed to 450 - this ensures that potrait and landscape pictures have the same width.

Note: If you got a set of images already rotated and want to start using this script, change the gstrMode and run the script. This will simply set the width and not attempt to rotate the image again.

Here's the TCL script:


set gstrStartDir [lindex $argv 0]
set gintImgWidth [lindex $argv 1]

set gstrOrigDir "originals"

#Anything but "normal" means the images will be resized to have a width of argv 1
#but they will not be auto-orientated
#Use "none-normal" for running against a directory that's already been rotated/orientated
set gstrMode "normal"

proc Convert {astrImgFile astrOrigDir} {

set intConversions 0
set strImgName [file tail $astrImgFile]
set strImgDir [file dirname $astrImgFile]
set strImgExtn [file extension $astrImgFile]
set strDatTime [clock format [file mtime $astrImgFile] -format {%a %b %e %H:%M:%S %Z %Y}]
set strOrigFile [file join $astrOrigDir $strImgName]
set strTempFile [file join $strImgDir "temp-$strImgName"]
set strTempFile2 [file join $strImgDir "temp2-$strImgName"]

if {[file exists $strOrigFile]} {
#puts "'$astrImgFile' already converted to '$strOrigFile'"
} else {

puts -nonewline "Converting '$astrImgFile'..."

if {[string match $::gstrMode "normal"]} {
#Copy the original file to the "originals" directory
file copy $astrImgFile $strOrigFile

#Orientate the image to a temp
exec convert $astrImgFile -auto-orient $strTempFile

file delete $astrImgFile

#Ensure that the with of the image is 450px regardless of the orienation
exec convert $strTempFile -resize $::gintImgWidth $astrImgFile

file delete $strTempFile
} else {
exec convert $astrImgFile -resize $::gintImgWidth $astrImgFile
}

incr intConversions

puts "done"
}

return $intConversions
}

proc ProcessDir { astrWorkingDir } {

set intConversions 0
set lstSubDirs ""

foreach strSubDir [glob -nocomplain -directory $astrWorkingDir -types {d} -- *] {

if {[file tail $strSubDir] == $::gstrOrigDir} {
#Ignore
} else {
lappend lstSubDirs $strSubDir
}

}

foreach strFile [glob -nocomplain -directory $astrWorkingDir -types {f w} -- * ] {

set strExtn [string tolower [file extension $strFile]]

switch -exact -- $strExtn {
".jpg" -
".jpeg" -
".gif" {
#Create a dir for the original images
set strOrigDir [file join $astrWorkingDir $::gstrOrigDir]
if {! [file exists $strOrigDir]} {
exec mkdir $strOrigDir
}
incr intConversions [Convert $strFile $strOrigDir]
}
default {
#Ignore
}
}

}

if {$intConversions > 0} {
puts "Processed '$astrWorkingDir' with $intConversions files resized"
}

#Recurse into the subdirectories
foreach strDir $lstSubDirs {
ProcessDir $strDir
}
}

ProcessDir $gstrStartDir



Here's a screen grab of me watching TV on my colleague Eric's fathers Slingbox which is connected to cable in America:



This is pretty cool and allows Eric to keep up with the baseball back home in the U.S.

During a training exercise some months ago - I did a 25 user test against this webserver.

The results can be viewed here:
www.sar.cx/loadrunner/www-sar-cx-report.html

This graph gave me the best indication of the users experience on the site:


It shows that around ~90% of the users (test scripts) had a response time of <4 seconds.

LoadRunner measures time to last byte - so I can assume that the user had a useable/readable web page well before 4 seconds.

Okay so I've got my new CVS server up and running and I've got the pserver method working when logged on to the server machine locally:

[sreadman@milhouse temp]$ cvs -d :pserver:sreadman@localhost:/usr/local/cvsroot login
Logging in to :pserver:sreadman@localhost:2401/usr/local/cvsroot
CVS password:
[sreadman@milhouse temp]$ cvs -d :pserver:sreadman@localhost:/usr/local/cvsroot checkout test_project
cvs checkout: Updating test_project
U test_project/test.tcl
[sreadman@milhouse temp]$ ls -l
total 1
drwxrwxr-x 3 sreadman sreadman 1024 Aug 16 11:48 test_project/
[sreadman@milhouse temp]$

I cannot get it to work on a remote machine over an SSH forwarded port.
I've got putty set up to forward port 2401. To test this on a remote machine I connected to the CVS server via SSH and tried to use WinCVS and Eclipse to checkout the file. Neither worked:

WinCVS:
cvs -d :pserver:sreadman@127.0.0.1:2401:/usr/local/cvsroot login
Logging in to :pserver:sreadman@127.0.0.1:2401:/usr/local/cvsroot
cvs [login aborted]: /usr/local/cvsroot: no such repository
***** CVS exited normally with code 1 *****

Eclipse
Could not connect to :pserver:sreadman@localhost:2401/usr/local/cvsroot: I/O exception occurred: Connection refused: /usr/local/cvsroot: no such repository
Connection refused: /usr/local/cvsroot: no such repository

One of the classic tests for the cvs pserver it to 'telnet localhost 2401 type something and hit enter. I got the correct response below:

Server Test:
[sreadman@milhouse temp]$ telnet localhost 2401
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to milhouse (127.0.0.1).
Escape character is '^]'.
foo
cvs [pserver aborted]: bad auth protocol start: foo
Connection closed by foreign host.

Remote Test:
C:>telnet localhost 2401

cvs [server aborted]: bad auth protocol start: foo
error

Connection to host lost.
C:>

So the cvs pserver connection works (via telnet) both locally on the server and on a remote machine, but I cannot log in via Eclipse or WinCVS.

This is really annoying - it could be either a security (SELinux/iptables) or file permissions problem.