The disaster that is unfolding in New Orleans has left me without words. I came across this blog entry that has done an excellent job of bringing together images from various sources and pinpoints the locations of the levee breaches.
I’m a programmer by trade. As such, I find myself visiting several different web sites just to get my daily fill of programming-related news stories. To help me out (and to experiment with Movable Type’s XML-RPC interfaces), I put together PsychicProgrammer.com. It uses RSS feeds from popular programming news sites to populate a Movable Type blog using XML-RPC. Feel free to try it out.
Google Talk. That’s all anyone seems to be talking about online these last few days. What’s the big deal? I must admit that I was drawn in to the hype, and even managed to get my Trillian IM client to connect the day before Google went live. (For those of you still having problems connecting with Trillian, check out Google’s extremely helpful article.
Does it live up to the hype? I’m not exactly sure what everyone was expecting. It does exactly as advertised. It’s an IM client that allows voice chatting. But doesn’t AIM allow you to do the same thing? The biggest difference, in my oppinion, is that Google’s solution is supposedly based on open standards. Well, except for the exciting part – VoIP. But they promise to release specifications “soon”. It must be the open standards that everyone’s excited about, because the actual delivered feature set falls short of just about every other IM service out there.
What will the open standards mean? I’m sure that some PHB at Google thinks that it will mean the end of telephony as we know it. Who knows. Skype has been at this for a little while now, but I don’t think that Skype has seriously eroded any incumbent telco’s profit margin.
I am a great advocate of Nasa TV. Unfortunately, it’s not available through any conventional means up here in Canada. I did some research and discovered that the Nasa TV signal is available in the Dish Networks satellite signal, even if you’re not a subscriber. This is a Free To Air signal. This isn’t stealing satellite service or anything like that. This is a legal way to receive the Nasa TV signal for us up here in Canada.
The first step is a satellite dish. I used a spare Bell Expressvu dish I had lying around. Bell used to have a cottage program whereby they would ship a free dish to your summer cottage so you could take your receiver on holiday with you – that’s how I acquired a spare dish. The dish needs to be mounted and aligned to the 119 degree slot.
The next step is to get receiver working. I took a spare ex-subbed model 2700 Bell Expressvu receiver and card. Other models will probably work, but make sure that it’s a model that both Bell and Dish use, otherwise it won’t get the firmware update described below. I used a receiver that used to be subscribed to my Bell account. You will definitely need a card in the receiver for this hack to work, but I don’t know if it has to have been subscribed or not. Use the receiver to align the dish to 119 degrees. It won’t lock on (because it doesn’t recognize 119 as a Bell satellite) but you will see the signal strength and satelllite name. Adjust the dish for maximum signal.
Once the receiver has been used to align the dish, we need to get Dish Network firmware into the receiver. To do this, build yourself a JTAG programmer for the 2700 receiver. It’s a lot simpler than it sounds – a 25 pin connector and some resistors. Plans can be found here.
Once you have your JTAG interface built, you will need a software package called Jkeys. Use this program, together with your JTAG interface, to erase sector SA5. If you’re not using a model 2700 receiver, the sector number will be different. Please check around the Internet to find the appropriate sector to erase for your model. Once you’ve erased this sector, power down the 2700 and leave it connected to the dish. After about 15 minutes, the receiver will have downloaded Dish firmware.
Congratulations. Your new Dish receiver will now receive Nasa TV (as well as a couple of promotional Dish channels).
I have had this set up and working for about a month without any problems. Your results may vary. Of course, any modifications you make to your hardware is at your own risk.
I’ve finally done it. I’ve broken away from work for almost a whole week, and I’m going on vacation. There’ll be no broadband, no TV, and plenty of mosquitoes. At least there’s 1X coverage…
Telus, my ISP and one of my work’s upstream providers, is currently in the middle of a bitter dispute with it’s workers over a contract. Today, they decide that a website that is maintained by supporters of the union involved in the dispute is a security threat, and they block access to the site for all of the Telus network. This means all ADSL, dialup, and leased line customers can no longer access the website. The story is just starting to make the media. No doubt there’ll be many more stories come Monday.
I’m not one to take sides in a union dispute like this, but it’s my opinion that Telus has overstepped it’s bounds by censoring this website for “security reasons”. How about blocking sites like this for security reasons? Sounds a little more dangerous than a forum for disgruntled union members to voice off about their employer.
I recently upgraded my cell phone to the Audiovox PPC6600. What a nice piece of equipment. I can ssh, remote dektop and Citrix in to all my servers from just about anywhere.
Everybody who knows me knows how much I love Lego. I found a mouse mod that is perfect for me. Check it out.
After discovering that the Movable Type templates from my older blog weren’t 100% compatible with the new version, I started digging around to find out what I would need to modify in my old templates to keep the same look. It ended up being a bit more difficult than I had expected, so I just dropped in a default template for now. One interesting page I did find, however, was this one. It’s a little older, but it gives a great description and visualization of the different areas of a Movable Type page.
No sooner did I blog my successful upgrade to Movable Type version 3.17, then I discovered a problem. MT would continually ask me to log in. I searched the MT forums, and eventually found that there was a known issue in 3.16 if the blog was in the root directory. The suggested workaround was to move the blog to a subdirectory on the web server. The forum went on to say that version 3.17 fixes the problem. Well, in my case, it didn’t fix the problem. After spending a whole bunch of time trying to debug (and discovering that mt.cgi wasn’t even sending me a cookie when I logged in), I decided to take the plunge and upgrade to the 3.2 beta. At least it’s fixed my login problems…