Joe Chin

Media Browser 2.2.2.0 is out

2010-03-01T15:47:13Z

For the Media Center enthusiasts, like me, I'd like to point out a new version of Media Browser has been released for the public. Except for the pictures and music, Media Browser is how I view most of my videos and podcasts on my PC. While the standard video library on WMC is fine for viewing videos, this plugin improves the interface by a factor of 10 if not 100. Some of the things I take advantage of is the screen previews for TV shows and movies, banners and background.

One of the things I especially like it about it that it automatically downloads all the show data, images, and season artwork. There is very little you have to do. Once Media Browser finds it it scans the filename to retrieve the internet data. This is great for those that don't like the overhead of having to manage your files, like mymovies. And it definitely is more informative than the default mediacenter browser. I've been looking into replacing my PC with a cheaper device, like PS3 or popcorn hour. The thing that keeps me staying is the interface of mediabrowser. Nothing else, I've seen, compares

Don't take my word for it download it yourself and give it a try.

Screenshots of Windows Home Server 2 leaked

2010-01-29T10:33:13Z

I've been watching the Windows Home Server market for a while. It looks to be successful and Microsoft is aiming for version 2. Today, the screenshots of the next edition have been leaked. You can view them here. Some notable changes are the use of the Server 2008 platform (previously Server 2003 R2), 2 editions Premium and Standard, higher system requirements, and inclusion of a full Desktop. It appears there is some media integration but they don't work so it's not confirmed if it will make it into the final release. Unlike the author of the other blog. I don't think its the biggest news since Apple released the iPad.

Happy New Year

2010-01-04T12:04:24Z

I know I'm a little late but I want to wish everyone a Happy New Year. I was celebrating with my son and didn't have time to post on this blog. Because we bought a house and all the expenses of moving into it, there wasn't a lot of available money to go crazy balla' style so I kept it simple: a bit of champagne, a walk to the top of Sacre Coeur, and watching the countdown from home. My son, who didn't take his afternoon nap, didn't have the energy to stay up til midnight. I had to carry him down the mountain. THe following next days were spent trying to get my computer to boot. The hackintosh is failing hard since the last chameleon update and the problem doesn't seem solvable. The quickest option would be to backup our data and build a new install but I'm all out of capacity and need a new hard drive.

Updating redmine and changing from mongrel to passenger

2009-12-29T12:34:23Z

The support server at the office has been using redmine for a few years. When I set it up way back in the days it was configured to use a mongrel cluster behind an apache server. This setup has been great, lately it has started to show it's age. Sometimes a mongrel would get stuck, eventually the others would suffer the same fate, and the server wouldn't process anymore requests. So now that the holiday season is in effect I'm taking advantage of the lighter traffic to update the server. Since this isn't a brand new install I'm taking a different track than most other redmine installs. And I've found upgrading to be more fraught with problems than a clean install. This is a production machine so in addition to normal backups I have to be cautious of breaking shit irreparably. So let's get to work: After logging in the update your gems

gem update --system

Depending on the version of redmine you are using you will need to update your rails accordingly.

bash#: rails --version
Rails 2.2.2

According to the redmine News page 0.9 uses Rails 2.3.5 so now is a good time to update the rest of your gems

gems update

Then download the redmine updates

cd /var/redmine/
svn update

In my case I've made some customization to the code and this sometimes conflicts with the update. You can monitor this by looking for 'C' in the left column while svn update is running. If it isn't done so you should install passenger

gem install passenger

As I mentioned before, redmine was running through a rails mongrel cluster. Now I'm moving it to passenger and apache. After passenger is installed it is time to build it into apache

bash: redmine# passenger-install-apache2-module
Welcome to the Phusion Passenger Apache 2 module insaller, v2.2.8.
This installer will guide you through the entire installation process. It shouldn't take
more than 3 minutes in total.
...

At the end it will ask you to add the module to the apache configuration file. We won't be doing that. Instead we will make a module file and use the a2enmod.

bash:redmine# nano /etc/apache2/mods-available/passenger.load

LoadModule passenger_module /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.2.8/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
PassengerRoot /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.2.8
PassengerRuby /usr/bin/ruby1.8

Ctrl-O and Ctrl-X to save and quite. Then

bash: redmine# a2enmod passenger
Module passenger installed; run /etc/init.d/apache force-reload to enable.

Finally, update your redmine database:

bash: redmine# RAILS_ENV=production rake db:migrate
bash: redmine# RAILS_ENV=production rake db:migrate_plugins

Modify your vhost.conf file to point the DocumentRoot to the redmine/public folder (mine was just pointing to the redmine root) and then run the apache force-reload command. If you have anything like webrick or mongrels running it is alright to terminate them now. Point your browser to your redmine site and bask in your awesomeness :-)

Things I've discovered today

2009-12-21T18:19:06Z

Mono I've downloaded, installed and used the Mono project IDE on my Mac. Compared to the last time I tried it many years ago it's not so bad. I created a small Windows application and the debugger was able to start and display the window. I'm not sure how much support for Windows Forms it provides but this would be to develop cross-platform applications. Favicon from Pics It's a site that you upload a picture and it creates a favicon for your site. I'm not a graphic designer or artist so this is great for taking some photos and graphics I have and make it into something useful. Pictory Magazine An online photo magazine with user submitted photos and stories. Simplebits A blog that I found while googling for something else and has impressed me with the content and usefullness of the posts.

Pics around Paris

2009-12-21T18:18:31Z

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Posted via web from joechin's posterous

One last thing

2009-12-05T13:14:55Z

I finally got off my ass and set the blog back up again. Lot's of security changes and permissions to set and reset. Now I've got the one little headache of fixing my CSS. I've never been able to get it just right when using blogging software like movabletype. I guess the translation from internal system tags to real html tags caused a breakdown because what I wrote was not what got published. This weekend is looking pretty miserable (Paris is cold rainy, and quite depressing this time of year) so I'll take the time to do some home improvement, clean out the media library and play with my blog.

Things have turned around

2009-12-02T18:25:23Z

Well it's taken a little while but I finally took the blog out of storage. Found a new host and now I'm back and blogging. The server has been upgraded from a little duty shared hosting service to a medium duty VPS. Expect to see more as time goes on. It's far from the end my friend.

Virtual Machines are the future

2009-02-05T11:44:02Z

Before the holidays the office got to request new computers. This has been going on for at least a year I think. My boss would say, "let's order new computers", I would work it out with my colleagues and we would decide Apple, Dell, Sony, etc. Someone would check out one of the numerous computer review sites and be impressed by the latest offering from Acer, Apple, Dell, or HP. A budget would be drawn and we would all finagle our dreams into the perfect setup and try to stay under budget (ie. smaller screen for more processor, smaller hard drive for more RAM). Requests would be submitted and we would wait for the partners to approve. Complete silence for months. By now state of the art has passed on, our requested machines would be lowered as new products came in, or by unavailable. So right before Christmas we try one more time. By now I was used to the idea of having my computer forever. It's a Pentium D, quite power hungry, RAM is limited to 3.5GB but it gets the job done. And that's all you can ask for. New Intel Core i7s have arrived and I put in a request for a Dell Studio XPS thinking there's a chance in hell it might actually show up. 2 days before Christmas this little machine is sitting on my desktop. I'm imagining all the simulations I can run, how many virtual machines can run at the same time. This thing is seriously no slouch. I install a trial of VMWare workstation and give it a run. Configuring a Windows 2003 Server to use 4GB of RAM (this is where I notice the problem that Windows can't use more than 3GB of RAM to a virtual machine). Bumped it to the maximum allowable RAM, SCSI drive of 40GB and we are good to go. I was trying to get an application in the VM to use all allowable memory for a mem test. It took a minute to find a good chunk of data. A 12GB dataset on 3 DVDs did the trick. More testing and I can say, yes this application can use more than the 1 or 2GB windows had locked in before.

When to use tables in a web layout....

2009-01-21T11:52:02Z

This site provides a great reference of when and where to use tables instead of css for page layout http://www.shouldisusetablesforlayout.com

98% gets the job done

2008-12-16T09:05:00Z

Well it's been a year and a half since I built the Mediacenter PC. So far everything goes well or mostly well. Hardware has changed in the mean time and my Radeon HD 2400 Pro is 2 generations old. The hard drive feels small with all the TV shows, movies, and music stored on it. And for some reason with very little actually installed Windows Vista has managed to chew through a 40GB partition. Leaving just under 6GB of free space. When I first installed the system it had ran consumed 20GB from a fresh install. This doesn't really bother me but, eventually, strange things start to happen when disk space gets really low. As with all Windows system. The computer gets slower and slower from the accumulated sludge of system updates, software updates, restore points, and fragmentation. The only solution is to do a clean reinstall. But for a device that only does one thing, doing this can be really inconvenient. Even more so by the fact that I'm not the only one using the PC. My son has his cartoons and DVDs, my wife has her TV shows and movies. 98% of the time this setup works normally with no problems. It's just the last 2% that I can't stand. That really make me want to start over. But the family thinks everything is fine and for the foreseeable future that's the way it's going to stay.

µTorrent is out!

2008-11-27T09:45:40Z

My favorite bittorrent client has been released for the Mac. I've just finished downloading and was looking through the screens and configurations. I didn't have a chance to test it yet because I had a download in progress on my current client, Transmission. When I get home later I'll be sure and try it out. Transmission has been doing great, but I always felt the speed of transmission was consistently underwhelming. Maybe it was the clients I connected to but when I ran µTorrent Windows in a XP VM it got the job done in half the time. Plus the memory footprint and filesize was minute compared to just about every other client. I just remembered my previous favorite client was Tomato Torrent. It was nothing more than a window dialogbox showing the progress of the current download. The memory footprint was relatively small, but as you spawned more downloads each one would take up the same amount of memory. This was 2002 and memory was cheap, but even 1GB of RAM cost a little bit of money. So accumulating 8-10 open windows used about 20-40% CPU and 150MB or RAM.

Signed, sealed, sent

2008-10-28T16:33:47Z

After sitting on it for a few weeks I have excercised my rights and voted for the next president of the United States. If you haven't figured it out by now, my demographic fits the profile for someone most likely to vote Barack Obama. For one, I'm a person of color, college educated, in the 18-34 age group, and have views that are considered liberal by American standards. Living in France, I've met liberals and by there standards I'd be considered a true conservative. After witnessing the collapse of the company, too many wars, and the evisceration of the "Bill of Rights" I can not support the current regime. Living in a different country I feel insulated by the current events in the US. Even with the power of digg and my local newspaper website I feel a little less interested in what goes on over "there" a little more each year. But, I have payed attention to the election as have a lot of my friends here. Even though Obama is considered a bit of an elitist in the US, for most Europeans he fits the bill of what a politician should be; highly educated, world travelled, moderate values, and above scandal. From my view of things politicians are quite different here. They have gone to the top universities and grand ecoles, majored in Political Science or Business or some sort of management. After graduating they usually work within the ranks of the political party they hope to lead one day. And the resume history will look like the following: party clerk > civil servant > city mayor > senator > secretary or minister > president or prime minister. Now, I am basing this on what I have observered here (Sarkozy primarily) and this is the way it works in this part of the hemispere. While there is the occassional dark horse who challenges the incumbent parties to lead the nation (eastern europe or former soviet blocs) most proceed like the example I have shown. On the other hand the US is more prone to be influenced by the personality of the candidate rather than the credentials of that candidate. Sarah Palin, for example, went to a university not considered elite, was a TV weather girl and beauty pageant contestant, and then entered the political arena later on. First working in the city council, becoming mayor, and finally becoming governor. She is being considered for the 2nd most powerful position in the world. And according to a lot of people they don't think she is ready for the job. Among Europeans Obama has a 90% approval primarily because he embodies the ideal politician. John McCain is considered too inflammatory and his years of being in the senate has built him a huge pile of scandal and unpopular positions that he can't hide from. His approval here is very low here but about even with Obama in the US. Why is it? One of the big difference between here and there is the US views politicians as representing all of us. Even when we hold unpopular opinions. France,UK, Germany the politicians usually represent the best ideals of the people; eloquent, educated, thoughtful. Which one is correct will never truly be show. Here there is more latent racism and a Senate unwilling to acknowledge or do anything about it. There, there is more blatant racism and the government and media are much quicker to acknowledge it.

26-inches is stoopid huge

2008-10-23T06:48:03Z

After weeks and weeks of waiting the new LCD finally arrived. It was worth the wait. I do wish the website on materiel.net reflected what was in stock. Now I've got a LG W2600HP-BF which has all the bells and whistles of the Dells and HPs of the same size. But it has the real advantage of being S-IPS instead of PVA, or crappy TN panels. Whats the difference you ask? Well go into your local big box and put the $1200 Lacie next to the $200 Acer. It's the difference between seeing the colors of what your monitor is trying to produce instead of seeing what the software is telling the monitor it should be producing. The 19-inch Samsung this monitor replaced looked really washed out and the colors were dead. And 26-inches of monitor desktop is huge when the screen is only a few feet away from your eyes. I remember there was a time I had a TV smaller than this thing. It's being able to see everything at once. Deep down I wish I had bought two. Using the screen at work seems so boring compared to this baby. Like driving a Porsche on the weekends and coming into work on monday to putt around in a Fiesta.

Note: Having food in the fridge gets you girls

2008-10-22T14:08:14Z

I don't know if this is true or not, but having food in your fridge gets you girls. I say knowing how to cook every now and then and having good conversation gets you girls.