Ryan Homan

Well first off I want to thank Matt Schmandt for telling me to try this out. Check out his blog from my blogroll. I set this up for my domain ryanspcservice.com and have pointed my MX record over to google. Google now handles all of my mail for my domain. It goes through google’s spam filtering and gives me all the features of gmail. It also allows me to have up to 100 users on the free version all with individual 2GB inboxes. You can also pay google a flat yearly fee per user for more features and a larger number of users. Along with the mail, I also get a docs and spreadsheets which I can share just within users on my domain or also outside people. I also get an individual start page for my domain and chat within my domain to the other users using google talk. I also get a personal calendar for each user with individual sharing options. So far it is very neat and is a great product for personal or business use with the awesome price of FREE!! I hope they continue to improve on it and I’ll try to post again after I’ve played with it more.

Share This

Since I’m sure about everyone out there that has mythtv has heard that Zap2It Labs is discontinuing the free TV Guide data that we all use. So what are we to-do. I heard that some people were getting together to create a nonprofit organization to provide free listings for personal use. The website was www.easytvdata.org but due to the trademark and copyright infringement possibilities, they have renamed themselves to Schedules Direct. Check out schedulesdirect.org for more info and lets hope that they come up with a solution for us by the September 1st deadline.

Share This

I think I found my favorite game so far for the Wii. It is Tiger Woods and using the motion of the Wii controller, it makes for a very entertaining time if you like golf like me. Let me know what games you like and if you’ve tried Tiger Woods

Share This

I’ve been adding css hover techniques to items a lot and I got tired of doing onmouseover’s in javascript to get the hover effect to work in IE. I ran across a script called whatever.hover which makes it easy with CSS. Just add this script to the header and then define your css hover as shown bolded below. If anyone has any questions or needs help with implementing it, let me know.

Put this in the Header
<!– Additional IE/Win specific style sheet (Conditional Comments) –>
<!–[if IE]><style type=”text/css” media=”projection, screen”>
.classname{
behavior: expression(
this.onmouseover = new Function(”this.className += ‘ classnamehover’;”),
this.onmouseout = new Function(”this.className = this.className.replace(’ classnamehover’, ”);”),
this.style.behavior = null
);
}
/*.classname{
background-color: expression(
!this.js ? (this.js = 1,
this.onmouseover = new Function(”this.className += ‘classnamehover’;”),
this.onmouseout = new Function(”this.className = this.className.replace(’ classnamehover’, ”);”)
) : false);
);
}*/
/*.classname{background-color: expression(
this.onmouseover = new Function(”this.className += ‘ classnamehover’;”),
this.onmouseout = new Function(”this.className = this.className.replace(’classnamehover’, ”);”)
);
}*/
</style><![endif]–>

Put this in the css
.classname{
font-family: Verdana,Helvetica,Sans-Serif;
font-size: xx-small;
font-weight: bold;
padding: 5;
background: silver;
cursor: hand;
}
.classname:hover, .classnamehover {
color: HighlightText;
background: Highlight;
}

HTML
<input type=”button” value=”Submit” class=”classname” style=”width=100″ />

Share This

Sorry, I’ve been very busy at work and on some home projects. I will try to get back to writing something once a week again. So far this month I’ve been building a shed in my back yard and doing some landscaping. I’ve also been working on some new projects at work and will post some of the things about them soon. Have a good 4th of July everyone.

Share This

Just found a useful hack for IE 7 when dealing with page-breaks and I thought it might be useful to someone so here it it. The following page-break code worked fine in IE 6, but broke in IE 7: <p style=”page-break-before: always”></p> I found a post on a forum that said try putting this= <!–[if IE 7]><br style=”height:0; line-height:0″> in after the page-break code to fix it for IE 7. So the ending result was <p style=”page-break-before: always”><!–[if IE 7]><br style=”height:0; line-height:0″><![endif]–></p> which works in both IE 6 & IE 7

Share This

Well this Monday evening, I attempted to upgrade my MythTV box from the gentoo-sources kernel 2.6.17 to 2.6.20 so it would support my new HD-5500 card. Let me state that I started this at about 4:30pm and my shows that I wanted to record started at 8pm (24 and Two and a Half Men). The kernel upgrade started out smoothly and I built everything into it that I needed. I followed Gentoo’s guide to kernel upgrading just to make sure I didn’t miss anything and it went rather smoothly. I knew I would also need to update IVTV to support my kernel. This process was the difficult one.

So after realizing that in grub I called my kernel bzImage instead of kernel like I normally do, I had to update grub to get it to boot, IVTV did not work as expected. I attempted an upgrade to IVTV 10.1 which supports kernels 2.6.20-r1. I then realized that I had just built 2.6.20-r6 so to avoid and issues later, I just rebuilt the kernel using 2.6.20-r1. After booting with the 2.6.20-r1 kernel I tried the install of IVTV again. This time I received the following errors:

* CONFIG_VIDEO_HELPER_CHIPS_AUTO: should not be set. But it is.
* CONFIG_VIDEO_WM8775: is not set when it should be.
* CONFIG_VIDEO_MSP3400: is not set when it should be.
* CONFIG_VIDEO_CX25840: is not set when it should be.
* CONFIG_VIDEO_TUNER: is not set when it should be.
* CONFIG_VIDEO_SAA711X: is not set when it should be.
* CONFIG_VIDEO_CX2341X: is not set when it should be.
* CONFIG_VIDEO_SAA7127: is not set when it should be.
* CONFIG_VIDEO_TVEEPROM: is not set when it should be.

After some quick research, I figured out that in the newer kernels under the device drivers section / multimedia devices / video capture devices, the default setting is Autoselect pertinent encoders/decoders and other helper chip. So I disabled it and went in to individually pick the modules I needed. After several tries, I finally just picked all of them so it would install and went back later to filter through the list.

The list that worked for me was the following.

• <M> Simple audio decoder chips
• <M> Micronas MSP34xx audio decoders
• <M> Wolfson Microelectronics WM8775 audio ADC with input mixer
• <M> BT819A VideoStream decoder
• <M> BT856 VideoStream decoder
• <M> BT866 VideoStream decoder
• <M> Philips SAA7110 video decoder
• <M> Philips SAA7111 video decoder
• <M> Philips SAA7114 video decoder
• <M> Philips SAA7113/4/5 video decoders
• <M> Philips SAA7191 video decoder
• <M> Conexant CX2584x audio/video decoders
• <*> Conexant CX2341x MPEG encoders
• <M> Philips SAA7127/9 digital video encoders
• <M> Philips SAA7185 video encoder

After IVTV installed I rebooted and tried things out. IVTV was recognizing my Hauppauge card, but when trying to view the tuner, all I got was black. At this point, it is about 7:15pm so I’m starting to panic. I did rmmod of IVTV and modprobe IVTV to reload it and try again. When I ran a dmesg, I saw several lines like this at the end of each tuner= i2c hardware 0×00000001 (cx2584x) not found for command 0xc008561c. When searching this error, I found others that had the problem, but no solutions so I decided this post was a good idea. I then tried different versions of IVTV, but the same error messages, so I decided it must be something wrong with my kernel, yet I was unsure. I had looked over my old settings and had everything set. It is now 8:00pm and it is still not working. It actually took me till after 10pm to finally get it. I had actually looked at the answer earlier that night, but didn’t realize it. This page contained the answer for me. I looked at it when building my kernel: On the top screen is what the new kernels need and the bottom is what my 2.6.17 had. Something I looked over on the new kernel was that I had I2C support as built in instead of as a module. After all that work, that solved my problem. Hopefully this helps any of you out there with this issue.

During much of this work, I ended up with kernel 2.6.19 and IVTV 0.9.1 and the problem was solved. I then upgraded to IVTV 10.1 and it still was working so I’m sure I could go back to my 2.6.20 kernel and I probably will here soon.

Share This

Well I’m been running MythTV at home now on a Gentoo linux box for about a year and a half and I’m not sure what I’d do without it. I am simply in love with the DVR features and my favorite part is automatically commercial skipping. My setup is a P4 northwood processor at 2.2 Ghz with 512 Mb of ram. I have 2 160GB hard drives striped for speed and have a DVD burner to burn the shows to DVD with MythArchive.  I have the Hauppauge pvr-500 so I can simultaneously record 2 shows at once. I purchased an HD tv last May and have been just playing all analog content from my cable provider on it. The only HD I watch on it is when some sporting events are on the Over the Air channels. This week I was able to order the linux HD card pcHDTV-5500 from http://www.pchdtv.com/  I will hopefully get it next week and get it installed and working. I will post my results once I complete it.

Share This

Now that I got a Wii, I decided that I was tired of playing Wii Sports all the time and needed something new. My friend Matt Schmandt recommended Gamefly www.gamefly.com  It is a monthly subscription service for games very similiar what Netflix does with DVD’s. I think I am paying $22 a month for 2 games at a time. One large benefit I see is that I can buy the game afterward for about $30-$35 instead of the $50 that they cost at most stores. If you want to signup, please click this link

Share This

Just noticed this morning that the Gentoo Team released the latest installer codenamed “Secret Sauce”. It is a full livecd installer with more hardware support and supports GNOME 2.16.2, KDE 3.5.5, Xfce 4.4, Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.3, OpenOffice.org 2.1.0, and the 2.6.19 Linux kernel while running the livecd. They have even made improvements to the GUI installer so those of you who might have been intimidated by the command line install in 2005 can install it quicker and easier now. I haven’t yet tried it out yet, but I’m currently downloading the image as I write this. I hope to find this release even better than the last and that more people continue to support the Gentoo team.

Share This