I took Alan’s advice to move on to reworking my Meeja Box to give me a platform suffciently up-to-date to get MythTV up and running. After a bit of a set back during the install (the Dapper server kernel doesn’t work on EPIA boxes, so I had to use the alternate CD) I got the necessary stuff installed and working within about a day of starting over, so it’s now back to the state it was in before I started the reinstallation. This was mainly due to the copious notes I made the first time around.
But I’m happy with the reinstall. The Dapper kernel includes the drivers and patches I’d had to add into my custom kernel under Sarge and X.org has the Unichrome stuff in it, which did cause a few problems as the driver had many more options than under the old install. Still, worked it all out eventually. Some AVIs that had previously had problems playing back (lots of “VOB not coded” type messages and video pauses) now play back fine. I made more notes, which are here. I’m going to wait for MythTV 0.20 to be released before I worry about installing it. I’ve lived with the “SSH interface” for over a year so I’m sure I can wait a little longer. 
I’ve given up on getting my OpenPGP smart card working, so I thought I’d write this post of ward others off trying the same. Having got no further with the GnuPG mailing list or MUSCLE mailing list, I went and bought a card reader that is known to be supported. However, this still didn’t work on Ubuntu Dapper, with GnuPG trying to use the PC/SC interface the whole time rather than the internal CCID driver. I’m sick of wasting time recomiling pcsclite and GnuPG trying to get things to work. I’ve spent so many hours on this that the time I was hoping to regain by using a smart card to sign e-mails will take until 2025 to get back. I’m going to wait until Edgy Eft is out and try again, but until then my OpenPGP card and two card readers will sit on a shelf gathering dust.
I did a talk for HantsLUG back in June on Wireless Networking on Linux. Normally we video the talks for later release, but the camera started playing up before mine, so we couldn’t record it. (Afterwards we realised we could have recorded the audio separately.) Last night I got around to recording an audio version of the talk which is now available through the LUG website. If you’re interested in the subject, you might want to download it.
As if there weren’t enough in the world, two more Linux-y podcasts have been released this week. Firstly, there’s a podcast about a podcast, released by some of the #lugradio denisens, called hashlugradio. Episode 0 was a recorded Skype conference call, including one participant who was in Amsterdam at the time of the recording. It seems that Skype is a reasonable way to record multiple people for a podcast, just a shame it’s propriatory software. (Are there open alternatives that use IAX or SIP?) The new show is certainly an interesting development in the LUG Radio community, but Jen has written about this first, so I’ll let her words stand. The show reminded me in some ways of the early LUG Radio episodes, although the recording quality was generally better. It’s certainly interesting to hear more arguments on the topics discussed on LUG Radio, but whether the community itself generates sufficient material to warrant inclusion only time will tell.
Secondly there’s the catchily named vKLUGcast from the people at Kent LUG. They are quite clear that this isn’t a podcast, hence the name, but a virtual meeting of Kent LUG that their members can download if they can’t physically make a meeting. Like hashlugradio they record a Skype conference call. There were only two Kent LUGgers able to be involved in the recording, so Alan Pope volunteered to help out and asked if I wanted to join in too. So I did. It was a pretty interesting discussion to be involved in, and enjoyable despite never having done anything like that before. There are definitely some areas in the show that need work: balancing, quality, energy, duration and timing. It’s difficult to know when someone has finished talking when you can’t see them, so there are a few pauses in the show. The Kent guys don’t want to get tied up in post-processing for longer than necessary so the show has a pretty laid back feeling to it. I’d be interested to hear what Kent LUG’s members think of the show and whether more want to be involved in the future.
I’ve been thinking about it since LRL, and I’ve got my GPG policy to a state I’m happy with. It basically defines what I’ll accept as identification and at what level I’ll sign people’s keys. Any comments are welcome, as it’s not set in stone and I’m interested to know what policies other people have, even if they’re not written down like mine!
I decided not to stand for the post of Chairman at this year’s HantsLUG elections about six months ago, and following last weekend’s AGM, I’m no longer in office. Two years is quite a long stint, especially as LUG business usually took up the equivalent of another working day every week, outside of the time spent at meetings. There are lots of things, both technical and personal, that I haven’t got done as result and I now have two years of DIY tasks to catch up on! And we’re having some building work done soon, which needs a lot of co-ordination. Plus I’ve not long been in my new job which is requiring lots of work and longer hours.
I enjoyed most of my time as Chairman and it’s been great to see new activities, in particular the talks at meetings, gaining popularity with both long-term members and new-comers alike. There have also been a few more unusual things to deal with, which caused more organisational hassle. The fire at ECS in October meant an alternative meeting venue had to be found, we “lost” our Basingstoke meeting venue and started meetings in Aldershot at another venue. All this required a lot of work and, despite my best efforts, I wasn’t able to delegate as much work to the Committee as I would have liked. With my enthusiasm waning it made sense to let someone else take over.
I’m not going to drop out of HantsLUG entirely. I have volunteered to continue doing the things that interest me most: maintaining Planet HantsLUG, administrating the marvellous wiki and working on the LUG talk videos. They are all important advocacy tools, demonstrating that HantsLUG is a lively and active group (the wiki) with interesting meetings (the videos) populated by well-rounded people (the planet).
A while ago I started to want to get more out of my blog. I had two or three people e-mail me saying “I’d have commented on this on your blog but it doesn’t have comments….”. I also wanted to have category specific RSS feeds, off-line posts and a number of other things. So I was facing the prospect of spending time implementing these features in my homebrew software that I could easily get elsewhere. Then I remembered that the strength of FLOSS is that you can use other people’s code to save you having to write stuff yourself. So I did. I spent some time writing a list of requirements and it turns out that WordPress has them all, except a spell checker. And that’s in the next release.
Importing the content from my old blog was dead easy - I just generated a massive RSS file containing all my posts and imported it into WordPress. I’ve added a couple of plugins and spent a little time getting used to the software. But in a couple of hours I knew the basics. I spent a day or so rewriting the existing website style as a WordPress theme, but if I’d been satisfied with one of the many off-the-shelf themes, I could have had the thing live in an evening. Even so, about five days after first downloading WordPress to my test server, this site is now running it. There are still some rough edges on the non-WordPress parts of the site, but everything else should be fine.
Sadly, Apache’s redirect directives don’t cope with question marks (a known issue, it seems), so I can’t set up redirects from the old URLs to the new ones. I have set up a redirect on the RSS feed though, which should make life easier for everyone.
So, thanks to Neil Ferguson for giving me his original blog code, which I mutilated beyond all recognition. I’m still using it on the STORM blog, and will probably continue to do so.
For all (any!?!) of you who care, I’ve not really made any progress with my OpenGPG smartcard and the smartcard reader. The smartcard reader is PC/SC compatible, GPG can talk to the smartcard and I set the language on the card. However, other changes like setting my name cause GPG to return an error and pcscd to segfault. I’ve passed this on to the GnuPG users mailing list, but no-one has replied. Since I posted four days ago, it’s looking like no-one can answer even the question of where to look next. If anyone fancies a look, the mailing list post is here. I suspect, however, that the OpenPGP smartcard, its support in GPG and the PC/SC driver isn’t really ready for prime-time.
I’ve also e-mailed ACS to ask them to clarify the licence under which the driver is published, as it is ambiguous at the moment.
