Dan Homolka

Occasionally when a new camera body is launched, it is *essential* that you buy it. I need to upgrade my D80 to a D3 or a D300

On the other hand, perhaps I should just wait for the next one, as that one is bound to be better…
… detailed specifications of the soon to be launched Nikon D90.

For you Canon guys, don’t feel left out… this guy seems to have some excellent contacts within Canon too, and scooped this, on the forthcoming Canon 400D replacement.

I managed to thoroughly annoy myself recently.

I have a horrible tendency to leave things to the last minute, as most of you who know me will concur. This has several major downsides:

• it means that I exist mostly in a state of mild panic (this does however seem to work quite well for me )
• it annoys my wife immensely as she prefers to panic up-front and everything needs to be done yesterday
• I occasionally miss “stuff” - and this is what happened recently - and this annoys me as it makes me feel as though I have failed, which is, of course, the case. I hate that!

On the upside lastminute-itis:

• means that you have to practice being patient, which is very useful for dealing with many things that life throws at you
• forces you to learn to make decisions quickly and effectively; frankly the ability to execute (as it is know in management speak) is worth way more than it’s weight in gold, platinum, or even Inkjet Printer Ink

As far as patience goes… I’m convinced that it is a recessive genetic trait.

It seems that is possible to learn to be a little bit more patient than you are by default, but fundamentally you either have it or you don’t!
Why recessive? Is it just me (turning into a grumpy old man), or has the whole world become fundamentally *LESS* patient than it used to be? Which would seem to me to indicate a recessive genetic trait. But what would I know about genetics… it’s not my area of expertise…

… I’ve been prodded into action, i.e. actually blogging again by Malcolm.

Malcolm is now blogging here: http://malcyates.wordpress.com/

Roger Whittaker, word inventor extraordinaire:

http://disruptive.org.uk/2008/01/03/smuvelious_2.html

I could have sworn that there was a link to the RSS feed for this blog on the front page… it seems to have gone walkabout, so in case you are *that* interested, you can subscribe to this:

http://danhomolka.wordpress.com/feed/

I’ll put it back at the bottom of the page

Dan.

Finally I’ve joined the digital SLR revolution

Courtesy of an early birthday present, I am now the proud owner of a Nikon D80

I seem to struggle to maintain my “post-it note” technical database, all those handy configuration hints/URLs that are invaluable to setting up technology…

…in order to eliminate the frustration of having to look stuff up that I know “I have somewhere”, I’m digitizing it, bit by bit. Feel free to have a look, and see if there’s something useful there for you.

Main “How-To” page.

A guide to Setting up a PXE Boot Environment with openSUSE Linux.

On reflection, this would be a handy place to stash all of those paper instruction manuals that go astray. Maybe that’s a project for another day.

It seems there have been a few more departures from Novell in recent weeks.

“Reverend” Ted Haeger - a leading light in Novell & Linux Advocacy. I met with him briefly whilst at Novell, on one of his many flying visits to the UK, he certainly left an impression on me!

My good friend Roger, also pointed out that Robert Love - one of the key Linux desktop developers, and ex-primate, is also on his way to pastures new.

And some re-organization of the Linux structure within the company:

Novell dissolves its Linux Impact Team. To find out where some of the ex-LIT folks are, a website has been set-up to track them http://www.ex-lit.org/

For completeness sake, I should name-check a couple of S.u.S.E “alumni” sites:

http://www.exsuse.de/

http://www.goodbye-dots.de/

I’m sure Novell will survive without these guys, but, as always, it will be a different place.

Mike Ramsey (former TiVo CEO), told the Sunday Herald in an interview that TiVo may be planning a return to the UK market. Although, rather than supply it’s own hardware, as it did initially (the Thomson Scenium - still to be seen on the front page of the UK TiVo website http://www.tivo.co.uk/) the intent seems to be to embed TiVo software into Freeview set-top boxes.

Ironically, TiVo’s biggest direct competitor in the UK is likely to be Sky, with it’s Sky+ PVR hardware and service. TiVo originally licensed their technology to Sky, however Sky chose not to use the TiVo software in their set top boxes. Not to mention the fact that on power-up my (UK) TiVo advertise the fact that it is “recommended by Sky”.

I am a fan of TiVo, having had a Thomson Scenium since 2003, and I’m dreading the day it dies. The TiVo user-interface is beautifully resolved… simple and easy enough for my kids to use, yet sophisticated enough to do things such as smart capture of complete seasons of shows (Season Pass feature). From what I’ve heard from folk who have tried both TiVo and Sky+, it seems that the TiVo UI seems to be superior to that offered by Sky.

At the time I bought my TiVo, I had some very clear aims, in terms of getting a cost effective system that just worked, straight out of the box, which TiVo does, well. Doing it all again now, for a number of reasons, I would more than likely go down a different path, and create a system based on the open source project MythTV. One of the reasons is that the maturity of the MythTV project today allows for a smooth installation, and it “just works”, as long as you stick to known supported hardware. Ultimately a system based on MythTV is far more powerful and flexible than a TiVo ever can be, despite the fact that, at least originally, TiVo supported the “pimping” of their hardware. For example my own TiVo (long since out of warranty) has had a hard-disk upgrade to a total of 240Gb, and a marvellous caching controller/network card, which allows a web interface (TiVoWeb) to be used to control the TiVo remotely, very handy.

This brings me to one of the other reasons why I would likely prefer a MythTV solution. Initially TiVo (the company) was quite hacker friendly, encouraging people to play with the hardware, to see what could be done. In fact the original UK TiVo was a PowerPC based Linux system, source code modifications all available, natch, as per the requirements of GPL v2.

However, beginning with the Series 2 TiVo generation (never officially available in the UK), TiVo hardware required all software to be digitally signed before it would run on the TiVo. This process has since become known as “Tivoization“. As with all heated debates, there are two sides to the story, with some prominent supporters and detractors to this apparent restriction of use of GPL’d software.

I can sympathize with TiVo, as, clearly they are subsidizing the cost of the hardware, and could feel that they have a legitimate claim to restrict how that hardware is used, after all they are selling an appliance - i.e. a hardware/software/service combination. TiVo must be able to make money from this! I would prefer it if TiVo stayed in business to provide me with the EPG service that I signed up for when I purchased my TiVo.

The flip side to this, is of course, if you use/bundle software that is made available under a particular license, in this case GPL v2, then you should abide by both it’s spirit & letter. My former employer Novell, has recently been thrust into some uncomfortable lime-light due to it’s agreement with Microsoft; which included a component including some form of patent protection/cross-licensing for customers of Novell’s SUSE Linux product . A deal, ostensibly about improving the (Novell & Microsoft) customer experience, which all the customers I spoke to were extremely pleased with, incurred the justifiable wrath of much of the Free Software Community. The deal with Micorosft even cost Novell a couple of good people, including lead Samba developer, and all round nice guy Jeremy Allison.

I am not a lawyer. My understanding is thatGPL v3 will seek to address issues such as Tivoization, and possibly outlaw parts of the agreement between Novell and Microsoft, but I digress.

I hope that TiVo does come back to the UK.

[From the TVSquad Blog: http://www.tvsquad.com/2007/04/22/tivo-could-return-to-the-uk/]

[Also, from HDTiVo Blog: http://hdtivo.wordpress.com/2007/04/21/107/]

I’ve probably broken some cardinal rule of blogging by back-dating a post…

… but in case you’re interested there’s a new “first” post, scroll all the way to the bottom!