Author: Jake

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Upcoming Events v0.2

This second release of the Upcoming Events plugin has a couple of fixes that people asked for after the first release.

  • Now supports being used as a widget.
  • Should now work in PHP 4 (had received only moderate testing).

This second bullet point will probably excite more people than the first. I’d much appreciate it if those of you that have been having problems getting the plugin to work because you run PHP 4 could try out this release.

The .tar.gz can be downloaded from my site. A zip version is available from Red Alt‘s download page.

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Bugzilla Install for Upcoming Events

I tried living with the trac bug system and it’s just way too limiting. Maybe if you’re the admin it’s configurable enough to live with, but as a normal user I found queries and what-not to be not very robust.

So I made a bugzilla install for my projects. Please file bugs here rather than in trac.

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Upcoming Events v0.1

NOTICE: This is the URL specifically for version 0.1 of this plugin. For all posts related to this plugin, please see the upcoming-events category.

Some of you may have noticed a new section in my sidebar labeled “Upcoming Events” for the past week or so. Up until today, it said it was “Powered by a yet-to-be-released plugin.” Well, today is the day I release it! I set up an account at wp-plugins.org and got everything but the ability to edit the wiki. My intention was to have that page be the “Plugin URI,” but I decided to go ahead and release it now. Once I get the ability to edit the wiki, I’ll be making that the plugin’s main site.

So what does this plugin do? Pretty much what you see in my sidebar. I have a feed from my Google Calendar, a feed for Bugzilla Development, a feed for my Army Drills, and a feed for the Detroit Lions schedule. It takes all of those iCal feeds and comes up with what the next, in my case, 7 events are. This is configurable in that you can choose how many events, days, or weeks to display.

So how do you get your hands on it? Easy, simply download it. Once you’ve done that, extract the archive into your Word Press plugins directory (by default, wp-content/plugins) and activate it using the normal Plugin Activation screen inside the Word Press administrative interface.

Any bugs should be filed using my bugzilla install.

UPDATE 28-Nov-2006: My bugzilla install is now the place to file bugs instead of trac at wp-plugins.org.

UPDATE 29-Nov-2006: New version (0.2) released.

UPDATE 6-Dev-2006: Added notice about the upcoming-events category. Also, version 0.3 is out now

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She’s Here

Many people have mentioned that I haven’t updated this blog in a while… looks like the last time I did was to announce that Laura was pregnant. Well, it’s been long enough since I last posted that Haylee is now here. I’ve got a site created for Haylee with some pictures. Maybe I can post a little sooner in the future :).

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We’re Having a Baby!

Found out almost 1 week ago now that my wife, Laura, is pregnant with our first child. Not sure what else to say at this point, but the child (gender yet to be discovered) is due in late October (28-Oct, but those dates are rarely exact).

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Ringtones for Free?

It takes a little work, but somebody going by the name of Tony posted a cool idea on how to get ringtones for free! Basically, what you do is go to a site that allows downloads of song samples, such as walmart.com, and download the MP3 file. You can then follow the instructions to create either QCP or M4A type ringtones starting at the point where you have an MP3 file.

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MythTV – One problem solved

This one didn’t take too long to figure out. A little time with Google and I found the solution. There’s a little perl script that came with MythTV that will create an XML file that mythfilldatabase can use to put the icon information into the DB. It ended up just being two commands, though there are a few holes (mostly local stations). Anyway, here’s what I had to do (because I installed from an RPM my contrib is at the path below):

$ perl /usr/share/doc/mythtv-0.18.1/contrib/mkiconmap.pl
Answer the questions
$ mythfilldatabase --import-icon-map iconmap.xml --update-icon-map

And just wait for it to run!

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MythTV — Like TiVO w/no subscription!

I had heard about this thing called MythTV a couple of times when looking at posts on Slashdot, mostly when issues regarding TiVO came up, but I had never looked into it until recently. Then my wife mentioned that she kinda wanted a TiVO and that got me started with a more in depth look. From what I could tell, the easiest thing to do was through a Hauppauge WinTV PVR 350 into a semi-decent computer, install linux, then install MythTV. Easy, right?

So I used Froogle to find the cheapest price on a WinTV 350 card that I could. Once it arrived, I followed Jarod Wilson’s giude to installing MythTV on Fedora Core 4. Over the course of the next two days (a lot of the time was spent on waiting for installs and downloads) I got MythTV 90% of the way there. I couldn’t seem to get the sound to work. So I emailed the MythTV users list and discovered that I missed an option in the setup to use the PVR 350 for video out and for sound. Oops.

So now I have a working MythTV installation that allows me to pause live TV and time-shift my viewing. I also have it set up so I can log in from anywhere on the Internet and set the box to record a show. So if I’m at my parent’s house and realize that if I stay any longer I’m gonna miss some show I’ve been wanting to watch, I can just log into my Myth box and set it to record!

I still have a couple of little issues with Myth, but overall I love it. My current issues are (off the top of my head):

  • Channel changing is really slow
  • The fonts in the on screen guide are so small they’re pretty much useless
  • I still need to figure out how to make channel icons work – solved
  • My wireless network card is unreliable (it’s an older 802.11b card that sometimes loses connection)
  • The On Screen Display and the setup menus often place things off the screen where they aren’t really visible
  • The sound output from the PVR 350 can only be used for TV sound. Other things that require sound (such as MP3 playback, games, etc) don’t work without a real sound card
  • I only have a 20GB drive for my /video mount so that limits how much stuff I can record
  • It may be that I just haven’t found the module for it, but there’s an FM tuner in the PVR 350 that I don’t seem to have any support for in MythTV

Some of these are obviously thing I have to solve while others are issues with MythTV and/or the ivtv drivers.

UPDATE 26-Nov-2005: Solved the first problem – got my channel icons!

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Recently discovered Hylafax….

I recently discovered Hylafax, a piece of software that lets you turn a linux box and a fax modem into a fax server. It’s really slick, supporting things like fax printing from windows machines (with a windows client), scheduling, caller id and distintive ring (for incoming calls if your modem supports it). These last two are the ones that have been causing me all the problems. I have a seperate number with a distinctive ring (it comes with the package) and figured I might as well put that to use as a fax number. So I found an old modem that supports both those features (a US Robotics 5686)… at least the box says it does. It took me quite a while to get it to support the distinctive ring. I finally discovered that I had to turn it on (ATS41 = 1) and then save the setting (AT&W0). Once I did that, the modem reported “RING A” for the main number and “RING B” for the second one. Perfect. After that it was easy to tell Hylafax to only answer the second number. What seems to be giving me great fits is the caller ID setting. I found out how to turn it on, but not how to save that setting:

ATZ
OK
AT#CID = 1
OK

RING A

DATE = 1018
TIME = 2021
NMBR = XXXXXXXXXX
NAME = STEENHAGEN JACO

RING A
ATZ
OK
AT#CID?
0

OK

It just goes away as soon as an ATZ gets sent. I’m not sure how to solve that, but I made a newsgroup post hoping that maybe somebody else out there has an answer :).