Category: Computers

I’ve been racking my brain for months and months trying to decide what I want to do about implementing a “media server” on my HD television. Basically, I want a centralized place for my music, movies and photos.

Using mplayer on my Ubuntu server, I’ve been ripping my DVDs to the server’s hard drive. Since I’m ripping them at full quality, I don’t have to re-encode them, so getting through my whole library of 250 DVDs won’t take all that long. (About 20 mintues per movie.) My music library is also on that server. My photos however are on my MacBook, organized by iPhoto – so that’s a complication.

Using the Ubuntu Server:
I could plug my Ubuntu server into my television, but that would mean that I’d have to transfer my photos off my MacBook, and install a media center-esque windows manager on Ubuntu. I could then remotely control VLC using my iPhone. That idea had promise, but to be honest it sounded like too much work.

Buy an Apple TV:
I could buy an Apple TV, with it’s great interface and ease of use, but it’s basically just a streaming device. It would need to stream from my MacBook, and that’s not where the bulk of my media is stored.

Use MacBook, Front Row:
Eureka! That’s the ticket! Since the MacBook is a fully functioning computer (obviously), with the super handy “Front Row” media center software on it, playing movies, listening to music, and looking at photos will be a breeze! I bought a DVI to HDMI cable to go from my MacBook to the TV. (Adapters and an HDMI switch were also required.) The MacBook’s audio out goes to my surround sound system. Currently, the MacBook is accessing my movies and music on the Ubuntu server via a Samba share (that’s where I pointed my iTunes Library settings to), but in the near future I plan on moving all that stuff to a large external hard drive that can plug right into the MacBook, taking wireless network latency out of the picture. The bonus here is that I came across a great new program called Understudy which is a plugin for Front Row that allows you to access Hulu and Netflix via the Front Row interface. So, last night I watched 3 back-to-back episodes of 30 Rock – Season 1 from Netflix in full screen on my television. It’s pretty bad-ass. Understudy is still a little buggy since it’s still an immature program, but subscribe to their RSS feed, and you’ll get notified every time they cut a new release with bug fixes. I can control Front Row with the IR remote control that came with my MacBook, or I can use my iPhone as a Front Row remote with the help of an app called RowMote or Front Remote.

So basically, for about $45, the price of cables, I’ve turned my MacBook into a media center machine. Not too shabby. 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You know when you browse to a Web page, and for some reason the page takes forever to load even though it’s not that complicated of a site? Well, more times than not, that lag is caused by an ad on the site taking forever to load. For example, you might go to coolstuff.com, but there’s an add on the site that’s hosted at annoyingad.com. Before coolstuff.com can be displayed, all the appropriate demographic, and statistical data used for specialized advertising must be sent to annoyingad.com along with simply loading the ad itself.

So here’s my message to online advertisers and the websites that use them. Do you know what that lag makes me do? Hit the “Stop” button in my browser, and browse somewhere else. If your ads make the end user experience annoying, your site’s not going to get the number of page views you’re hoping for. So, the thing on your site who’s sole purpose is to make money is actually costing you money and readership. Don’t load your pages down with ads. Too many sites out there don’t know where the advertisement/site responsiveness tipping point is, and many of them have crossed it.

Performance testing would be a good idea, BTW – and I happen to know a guy who could do that for you. 😉

Today at work I was informed that my work laptop was “spamming” the network and bringing down cell relays. The network traffic sniffer identified the offending traffic as “Apple TV” related. So after some digging in iTunes (which I have installed only for Outlook calendar syncing with my iPhone) we disabled the “Look for Apple TVs” option, the “Look for Shared Libraries” option, the “Look for AirTunes ” option, and the “Look for iPhone and iTouch Remotes” option. As you can guess all that “looking” creates a lot of broadcast network traffic. So, if you don’t want a stressed Network Engineer coming to your desk at work wonding what you’re doing to his network, I recommend that you disable the Bonjour service all together.

Go to Start-> All Programs -> Administrative Tools -> Services, select “Bonjour Service”, right-click, go to “Properties”, set the “Startup type” to “disabled” and then click the “Stop” button. Trust me, your friendly neighborhood Network Engineer will thank you for it.

This post is for my QA brethren. At my current job I have been introduced to a great free screen capture tool called Jing which allows you perform screen captures, crop them, annotate them, draw on them, and then upload the image as a jpeg to Screencast where it’s hosted. (Jing also does video too, but I won’t get into that here.)

What’s so great about that you ask? Well, you know how difficult it can be to describe exactly what you’ve seen during testing, especially if your talking about UI elements. “Is it a title bar? A menu bar? A window group? Oh hell, here’s a screenshot.” What’s great about Jing is that you don’t have to fill up your defect repository database with images. If you have a large testing team, all those uploaded screen shots can start taking their toll on drive space, and may even slow down your defect tracking tool. (Bugzilla for instance.)

When using Jing the image is uploaded, and then the URL to the hosted image is placed in your clipboard. You can then simply paste the URL into the description field of your defect. This allows the developer on the receiving end of the defect to just click the link, and see the screenshot you took.

Now the downside to this is that your company might not like screenshots of its intellectual property being stored on an external server. Something that might give your employer a “warm fuzzy” is the fact that ScreenCast takes your company’s ownership of the content you uploaded very seriously and has processes in place to report violations of your company’s copyrights. (The service agreement also states that you retain all ownership rights of the content you upload.)

So if you need a good screen capture tool give Jing a shot.

We recently changed Chrissy’s shop’s domain name, and it wreaked ravok on their website’s WordPress installation. I pointed the domain to the right path on the web server, but the blog’s settings were wrong in the MySQL database. (All the dynamic links were pointing to the old domain name, including the links to the admin interface.) After some futzing around, I found the necessary tables, columns, and values that needed changing. If you ever change a domain name out from under your WordPress installation, make the following changes to the WordPress DB…

In the MySQL CLI:

update wp_options set option_value=”YOUR BLOG URL HERE” where option_name=”siteurl”;

update wp_options set option_value=”YOUR BLOG URL HERE” where option_name=”home”;

Well, I got laid off from StrikeIron today due to cut-backs. So, if anybody knows of any open positions for a QA Engineer with LoadRunner and Linux expertise let me know!

Why I Switched – One Dork’s Story