Google Chromecast Review

• Date : April 10, 2014
• Categories :
• Tags : Gadgets gizmos ,Reviews ,Chromecast ,Google

With this week’s announcement of the Amazon Fire TV, I thought it would be a good time to review our Chromecast.  Though I don’t see myself purchasing a Fire TV box, as we already have a Roku, there are quite a few comparisons against the Chromecast and the Roku both, so I thought …

PhpStorm Simple Speedup

• Date : April 1, 2014
• Categories :
• Tags : Code ,Php

So, I’ve been working with JetBrains PhpStorm for about 6 months or so now.  Only recently have I started forcing myself to serious work with it.  Part of the reason why I used tabbed terminals …

Cisco/Linksys ATA Exploit?

• Date : November 12, 2013
• Categories :
• Tags :

So I’ve encountered a strange exploit being attempted against the VoIP system I maintain.  Its not actually against the softswitch, though, but rather against the end customer’s ATA.  We first saw this particular exploit three or four months ago, and its a rather strange, but at the same …

Protocol Buffers and multiple inheritance

• Date : November 1, 2013
• Categories :
• Tags : Code ,C ,Protocol buffers

After I posted Google Protocol Buffers Where Have You Been All My Life, I started thinking about the …

Google Protocol Buffers, where have you been all my life?

• Date : October 30, 2013
• Categories :
• Tags : Projects ,C ,Protocol buffers

So two weeks ago I discovered Google’s Protocol Buffers, and I have to ask, where have you been all my life?

The project I was working on requires speed and scalability, both vertically and …

New Myth Frontend - Almost Perfect

• Date : October 30, 2013
• Categories :
• Tags : Mythtv ,Projects ,Mythbuntu

A few months ago we moved into a new place with a much smaller living room, it didn’t have nearly enough room for a full size computer case in the room. So it was time for a new, much smaller frontend for our MythTV setup.

Size, noise, and being able to “hide” it are the primary …

PHP Annotations are a Bad Idea

• Date : October 25, 2013
• Categories :
• Tags : Projects ,Rants ,Php

I’ve been writing code in PHP for a long time now, both for my own projects and as a freelancer.  I’ve seen well written code and truly horrific code and everything in between.  Much of the work I’ve done for my personal projects has been using a framework that I’ve built and …

Migrating from GFS to GlusterFS

• Date : July 12, 2011
• Categories :
• Tags : Projects ,Reviews

This week I started the process of migrating from GFS to GlusterFS.  The hardware running my GFS cluster is older and I decided it was better to replace it than continue maintaining it.

Background Information

Back in 2003 I needed to find a storage solution that was fast, reliable, and …

Linux Soft Phone Roundup

• Marc Lewis
• Date : November 13, 2010
• Categories :
• Tags : Gadgets gizmos ,Reviews

I’ve been working heavily with VoIP for the last couple of years, and every few months I find myself looking at SIP soft phones again. I haven’t really used them at all under Linux in a long time because none of them quite fit my needs or are as good as the ones available under Windows. …

Open Source and other nuggets

• Date : September 16, 2010
• Categories :
• Tags : Ego ,Projects ,Philosophy

The silence for the last few months has been because my life got crazy.  I’ve been spending a lot of time working and what hasn’t been working has been spent in preparation for our new baby.  Yes, thats right, baby.  In 2006 we were told by a fertility doctor that we would likely never …

Moving to MythTV Part 2 - The Frontend

• Date : April 24, 2010
• Categories :
• Tags : Mythtv ,Projects ,Mythbuntu

So, in the last 3 weeks I’ve done a lot with MythTV.  Most notably, I’ve finished the frontend system that is connected to our TV.  There was a lot of trial and error, frustration and an entire system replacement, but its now up and near perfect.

So, a week and a half ago Comcast got …

Moving to MythTV Part 1

• Date : April 4, 2010
• Categories :
• Tags : Mythtv ,Mythbuntu ,Projects

Going to preface this by stating this will be a multi-part blog post, and I have no idea how many parts there will be when I’m all finished.  Oh, and like most other things I write, it will probably be really verbose.  Sorry ‘bout that, its just the way I tend to write.

Remote Desktop on Xubuntu 9.10

• Date : November 25, 2009
• Categories :
• Tags : Projects ,Ubuntu

So I was planning to work from home on the Friday after thanksgiving so I wanted to be able to access my work desktop from home just in case.  Normally I just ssh and use terminals and such, but for some reason I decided I wanted a full desktop.  I use Xubuntu at home and at the office, and there is …

Fedora out, Xubuntu in

• Date : June 21, 2009
• Categories :
• Tags : Reviews

The number of minor annoyances in Fedora 11 turned into a major annoyance.  Last Saturday I wiped Fedora 11 from my home machine and installed Xubntu, which is the Xfce-centric Ubuntu distribution.  I did the same on my office machine on Wednesday.

Overall, I’m quite pleased with Xubuntu and …

Fedora 11 First Impressions

• Date : June 13, 2009
• Categories :
• Tags : Reviews

So this week I did something unprecedented for me.  I downloaded and installed a new Fedora release the same week it was released officially.  After reading a bit about how stable and quick it is for others I decided to take the plunge.  I’ve now installed it on three machines (in this order):

MediaTomb revisited

• Date : April 19, 2009
• Categories :
• Tags : Projects

As I mentioned before, I keep coming back to MediaTomb, playing with it for a few hours and then going back to uShare.  Not this time.  For the …

FUPPES Revisited

• Date : April 15, 2009
• Categories :
• Tags : Projects

So after a bit more Googling, I took another look at FUPPES.  The “release” (SVN-578) seems quite a bit more stable.  The version I was working with is SVN-634, which is the latest from the author’s subversion repository.  It still has the mostly the same pros and cons.  The stable …

UPnP Media Servers

• Date : April 14, 2009
• Categories :
• Tags : Projects

After doing quite a bit of research on media players in 2007, I convinced Jessica to get me a D-Link DSM-520 for Christmas that year. Since then, I’ve made most of our DVD collection and all of our music “on-demand”. Well, sort of.

Things still have a long way to go in the whole …

First update of 2009

• Date : February 22, 2009
• Categories :
• Tags : Ego

Well, the last two years have been…..Interesting.

This is just a quick update to give the site a recent post and start to get back into the whole blogging thing again.  Things have been extremely hectic for the last two years.  Some good things have happened, some bad, but mostly just busy. …

Fedora 9 and KDE4 - I wanted to love them

• Date : May 24, 2008
• Categories :
• Tags : Rants ,Reviews

I’ve been running Linux as my primary desktop since about 1996 (switching from OS/2 when IBM started dropping support for it), and running Linux servers since early 1994 (my first Slackware system was running Linux Kernel 0.99pl15). Over the years I’ve tried many of the various …

Frivolous Litigation

• Date : April 6, 2008
• Categories :
• Tags : Ego

From Wikipedia on Frivolous litigation there is a great quote from Lawyer Danial B. Evans:

[W]hen a judge calls an argument “ridiculous” or “frivolous,” it is absolutely the worst thing the …

Former TV Stars Arrested in Meth Lab

• Marc Lewis
• Date : April 1, 2008
• Categories :
• Tags :

Home Improvement - Nov 4, 2007

• Date : November 5, 2007
• Categories :
• Tags : Projects

Woot! We finished Jessica’s room to the point where we moved her computer into it. We got the floor cleaned up and the baseboards put back on yesterday:

Its somewhat disturbing to note that my wife matches her room. Pink on the …

Pumpkin Carving 2007

• Date : October 31, 2007
• Categories :
• Tags : Ego

So its that time of year again. The air is crisp, the days are much shorter, and the grass in the back yard is covered in leaves from the neighbor’s trees. Tonight shivering street urchins will be knocking at the door in a variety of costumes begging for candy. My candy. Not yours. Can’t …

Home Improvement - Part 2

• Date : September 25, 2007
• Categories :
• Tags : Projects

We got the first coat of paint on the walls on Sunday and the room immediately transformed, still no appropriate adjectives -- Jessica says that her choices for colors escape description. Of course now she wants a theme song, too. Something that speaks to her personality. The Pinky and the Brain …

Halloween 2006, Better Late Than Never

• Date : September 23, 2007
• Categories :
• Tags : Ego

After Jessica saw what I had posted today, we had the following IM conversation:

[11:55:49 AM] <Truffle> there’s a gnome in the first set of pics [11:56:05 AM] <gottafixthat> LOL. Of course there is. [11:56:12 AM] <Truffle> gack! [11:56:18 AM] <gottafixthat> [11:56:20 …

Home Improvement - Part 1

• Date : September 23, 2007
• Categories :
• Tags : Projects

Since we moved into our house back in early 2003, we’ve slowly but surely been redecorating rooms and fixing the place up. We’ve had a few people live with us in that time, and each time, Jessica has always sacrificed her …

Gothic 3 - First Impressions

• Date : November 26, 2006
• Categories :
• Tags : Reviews

After a very long wait, Aspyre has finally released Pirahna Bytes’ Gothic 3 in the states. Jessica and I picked it up last Saturday and have been playing it every evening since then. I would say we’re about 20% of the way through the game at this point, so I thought I would post my first …

Halloween 2006

• Date : November 1, 2006
• Categories :
• Tags : Ego

Its that time of year again! No, not that time, its Halloween! That of course means pumpkin carving. After last year’s marathon session on October 30th, we decided to get an earlier start this year. Got them on last weekend’s …

Still in a time warp

• Date : October 22, 2006
• Categories :
• Tags : Ego

That last post about Gothic II, model trains and Al Lowe’s new game I started back in May. It took me almost 5 months to get back to it. Talk about being in a long term time warp.

There have been a lot of things happening at my company, most of which I can’t talk about publicly because …

Gaming time warp

• Date : October 21, 2006
• Categories :
• Tags : Ego ,Gaming

Talk about out of character for me. A few weeks ago at E3, Al Lowe, one of the greatest video game makers of all time announced that he has created a new company called Continue Reading

And there was much rejoycing. Yay!

• Date : April 26, 2006
• Categories :
• Tags :

Study Shows Coffee OK For HeartFrom the article:  “Coffee lovers can drink up without fear of increasing their risk of heart disease, …