virtual-sushi

Predictably, it’s a Hello, World app. Look!

Not much, but a good first step to my first real app - iMExpensive.

Finally giving into the four-year urge to buy a Mac after this month’s refresh, I’ve had no end of troubles. It seems like I happen to have a router from the one range that Macs don’t play well with.

Connecting to my network

Just would not work. For two hours. Two whole hours. I eventually traced it to the MAC filtering on my router. I’m not sure why Macs and MAC filtering can’t go together. Turning off MAC filtering (which I planned to do anyway, in favour of WPA security) sorted the problem out straight away. There are still days where the Mac takes a minute or so to connect, but considering the boot time of a Mac is about 10 seconds, compared to my old PC laptop’s 6 minutes, I’m willing to forgive.

Connecting to MSN

Turns out Netgear DG934PN firmware 1.05.36 has a bug in it which conspires to not allow clients on the network to connect to MSN via anything but sucky, sucky HTTP. The official Windows client is robust enough for me to have never noticed. Adium was not. A painful downgrade experience to 1.05.35 fixed this.

Not without me checking my laptop thoroughly, trying three or four different clients, checking with my ISP…

What’s Left?

Things left to do:

• Figure out where my install of Java went to.
• Figure out how to tag my MP3s automatically and download album art.
• Figure out how to stop looking so damn cool with the pro balanced on my lap.

I’m terrified preg-coms are coming in fashion. Juno was good fun though. Jennifer Garner was sort of creepy (actually, so was Bateman) and Michael Cera was flat and boring but Juno herself was extremely personable (and overly bratty only a few times). The plot was well-paced. There were a few good bits of dialogue in there too, despite Juno and Paulie having absolutely no onscreen chemistry. The soundtrack felt like it was trying a bit hard to be indie, though it remained gentle and unobtrusive.

Cute. Wait for it on DVD.

So I finally got got an iPhone to make the insides of my pocket more stylish. The good and the bad (trust me, there’s no ugly with this toy) after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve not looked forward to many movies in the cinema for a while. The only thing that’s kept me going is the promise of Johnny Depp in Sweeny Todd. Honestly, there aren’t very many good actors out there and out of the few there are, Johnny Depp has got to be one of the best. If he starred in Lord of the Rings, it’d be the best trilogy ever. If he starred in Star Wars it’d be the best trilogy ever. If they hadn’t made the last two films of Pirates of the Caribbean, it’d be the best trilogy ever.

There’s no mistaking what Sweeny Todd is about. Opening credits show it all: Blood and romantic grotesquery. The movie starts off bloody and doesn’t go too far off track. The entire plot formula is simple, but you’ll watch it for the atmosphere. Burton’s rendering of Todd’s London is dirty and macabre and fun. The only thing that let it down for me was the singing. I have a low threshold for people belting out plot lines, and most of the movie is propelled by song lyrics. In fact, it seems like the trailers include pretty much all of spoken words (possibly the studio was worried a musical wouldn’t be so successful?) Still, some brilliant lines, like Todd’s repeated description of London. Brilliant acting too. Extremely Burtonesque, which is a good thing if you like his movies; an awful thing if you don’t.

I’m told that Charlie Wilson’s War has the same writer as The West Wing, and would be ranked alongside a mediocre episode from that series. Knowing that may convince me to give the show a chance. The movie is a based-on-a-true-story (kind of like Fargo was…) retelling of how the first Afghan War was won in secret thanks to the efforts of one Texan senator (played by Tom Hanks). Hanks plays this role well in his typical heart-warming sad-sack style.

One negative is Julia Roberts, who looks a bit like a weird alien and is far too monodimensional. Possibly I’m a bit biased after watching Notting Hill on telly last weekend. The CIA man is an excellent character that gives life to otherwise-dull moments.

The movie manages to maintain a close and personal sense of conspiracy with the main characters trying to effect a change below the radar. I, personally, had some trouble understanding all the words due to the heavy texan drawl employed.

Doesn’t need to be watched on the big screen. Definitely don’t watch it in Odeon’s “premier” seats. One slip and you’ll end up with your knee half way into the back of someone else’s head.

(n.b. There’s a good comparison between the movie and real life located here.)

My LinkStation Pro NAS is great for holding all my files, and really has made a small portion of my life more convenient. The only fly in the ointment is transferring huge files to/from it over my wireless network can take ages. Copying 8 gig of data would, as a relevant example, take me the best part of the rest of my evening. Maybe the USB ports at the back can be put to good use?

The LinkStation can’t be connected to a PC via USB (as far as I can see). It can, however, connect to other USB harddiscs. It does this to expand storage, but also gives us the ability to transfer data via the USB port - which is so much quicker. To do this, we’ll need to connect to the NAS via Telnet (the web interface doesn’t support using USB thumb-drives as a transfer medium), detect and manually mount the USB drive.

First, to telnet in we’ll need to enable Telnet on the NAS:

1. Download ACP Commander from here.
2. Use ACP Commander using the command java -jar acp_commander.jar -t <linkstation_ip>.
3. Telnet in. Look! It’s Linux!
4. The standard username is root, with no password. Note this gives you complete access to the software innards of the NAS. You don’t want to do anything rash, like delete random files, in this mode.
5. Poke about if you’re interested.

Now we need to find out where the USB thumb-drive is (obviously, your thumb-drive needs to be stuck into one of the ports at the back):

1. Run the command dmesg | grep -i "SCSI device". The output will look something like:

# dmesg | grep -i “SCSI device” SCSI device sdb: 16121856 512-byte hdwr sectors (8254 MB) SCSI device sdb: 16121856 512-byte hdwr sectors (8254 MB)

We’re interested in the bit that says sdb. Yours may be different (possibly sda). This is the location of the USB drive in the dev directory.

Okay, to mount it:

1. Create the directory /mnt/usbdrive to create our mount point.
2. Run the command mount -t vfat /dev/sdb /mnt/usbdrive.

The USB drive is now accessible from within Linux on the NAS. You can copy files to and from it using the standard Linux cp command.

Unmounting the USB drive can be done via umount /mnt/usbdrive.

(Thanks to this site, here, for all the info).

If you can’t get syntax highlighting to work in a new Ubuntu install, it’s probably because the standard Vim install in Ubuntu is from the vim-tiny package. This is a cut-down version of Vi that does very little but edit files. If you want full Vi (with syntax highlighting), you need to uninstall the vim-tiny package and install vim-runtime:

1. sudo apt-get update - may as well make sure we’re aware of the latest package updates
2. sudo apt-get remove vim-tiny - we’re going to replace this package. You’ll be asked if you want to uninstall ubuntu-minimal. It’s safe to do this (explanation below).
3. sudo apt-get install vim-runtime - this is quite a big package (20 meg or so).

Now we have the latest version of Vim. The command :syntax on will turn on syntax highlighting. To have it on automatically for yourself, create the file ~/.vimrc and enter the text syntax on. You can also edit /etc/vim/vimrc (as root) and change the appropriate lines to make the settings global instead. You can also set whether the background is dark or light (which affects the colour scheme).

When uninstalling vim-tiny, you’re prompted about the removal of ubuntu-minimal. This is an umbrella package that has lots of dependencies to packages needed for a basic workable Ubuntu install. If you uninstall one of the packages, you’ll need to uninstall the umbrella package too. This doesn’t affect the other dependencies so it should be safe.

As an aside, it seems to work better over Putty too. Happy days!

Why would my local cinema wait until the busiest (probably) movie-watching day of the year — the Thursday after Christmas — to let their prebooked-ticket machines and their credit card machines break down? I hate missing the beginning of a movie more than I hate missing the end, and bits in the middle.

Still, assuming nothing Earth-shattering happens in the first few minutes, like a virus killing everyone on Earth, I Am Legend really is a solid movie that paced itself and ended well. Some good bits with Will Smith showing how lonely being the last man on the planet can be.

The vampires are really quite poor and not terrifying at all. A shame after the atmosphere of tension that is set up every time just before you see one. It’s best to treat them as no more than simple plot devices to drive the core of the movie.

Worth seeing in the cinema or on DVD.

As a side note, this is the first time in years I’ve watched a movie in a crowded cinema hall. A good reminder of how horrible it is. It must be a universal law that if you bring 200 people to one place, there’ll be at least one baby that can’t stop crying, five guys who can’t stop pointing out the obvious in loud voices and two who are incapable of figuring out how to silence their mobile phones.

The recent Xbox360 fall update gives users the option to view DIVX films. If, like me, you have a huge collection of DIVX movies stored on a separate Linux machine, you’ll want to find a way to get the linbox to deliver these movies to your Xbox (trust me, it’s great). The particular tool I’ve used to do this is uShare (part of the GeeXBoX distro - specialising in HTPC implementations).

So, to get started, install uShare. The uShare website (here) gives details on how to do this. Installing uShare using apt-get will set up three files (amongst others) on your Ubuntu machine:

• /usr/bin/ushare - the uShare binary file
• /etc/ushare.conf - the uShare configuration file
• /etc/init.d/ushare - the uShare daemon start/stop script

We can get uShare to start serving our files immediately to the Xbox with the command

uShare -D -x -c /media/directory (where /media/directory is the path to your files).

This isn’t very neat though, so read on if you want to integrate uShare properly with your Ubuntu install.

We now need to make sure uShare knows which files to serve and to make it operate in Xbox 360 compatibility mode. Bring up your text editor (using sudo) and open up /etc/ushare.conf. Change the line ENABLE_XBOX= to USHARE_ENABLE_XBOX=yes. Set USHARE_DIR to the path(s) of the files you want to serve. If you want web access, change the line ENABLE_WEB= to USHARE_ENABLE_WEB=yes and set the USHARE_PORT.

The uShare daemon script also needs to be amended slightly to tell uShare to use the config file we’ve just changed. Using your text editor (again with sudo), open up /etc/init.d/ushare and add a new line under the CONFIGFILE=/etc/ushare.conf that reads USHARE_OPTIONS="-f $CONFIGFILE" (running uShare straight on the command line will automatically open that config file. For some reason, the command used in the script doesn’t. Thanks to [this forum](http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=631213&page=7 for the solution)).

Once this is all done, restart the uShare daemon by running the command

sudo /etc/init.d/ushare restart.

If you load up your Xbox 360 and go into the Videos section under the Media blade, you’ll see your new media server listed as “uShare” (press X to change video source if not). Happy viewing!

Still need to resolve the following issues:

1. uShare does not differentiate between media types, so all my movies are appearing as music as well. Music also isn’t organised into albums.
2. Only the first directory I’ve specified for sharing in the configuration file is being scanned and delivered.

Conclusion - Use uShare if you want to just deliver movies. For delivery of multiple media types, including a large music collection, uShare can’t seem to handle it just yet.