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MySky HDi: 2 months later

October 23rd, 2008

So we’ve had MySky HDi for about 2 months now. Overall I’m very glad we went ahead with it.

Some observations:

There is a decent amount of HD content on the movie and sports channels.
TV3 looks really good in HD
The recording and series link functionality is good, but lacking in some areas. For example you can’t series link an NRL game to book all of them, you have to book each one each weekend.
The decoder is heat sensitive. We’ve had about 4 hard locks due to heat that were only solved by unplugging the power and letting the box cool. It is now in a better ventilated area and has been stable. We’ll see what the summer heat does.
720p looks better than 1080i, I think. I spent at least an hour flickign between the two but could not pick a winner. For the moment I’m sticking with 720p.
The remote is MASSIVE but comfortable and easy to use.
The new decoder is super responsive when flickign through channels/planner etc. The normal sky decoder is a pain to use now.
You have to enter 3 digit channel names. Still a pain. e.g. 0-0-1 for TV1 etc.
It’s kind of annoying not being able to access your recordings externally. For example I’d like to copy some NRL games to DVD for storing but I can’t. As such they’ll probably get deleted by someone to make space for some E! channel crap.
Adult Content Control is well handled. You can record an R16+ (or whatever you configure) program without entering a PIN but it prompts for the PIN for playback.

As I said before, still very glad I went for MySky HDi. Have yet to find any info on getting the USB/Ethernet connections going, but I am not holding my breath.

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Google Chrome: Kinda Cool

September 3rd, 2008

So Google finally came out with a browser. Step 2 on their world domination plans is complete.

I have to say I like it so far. The uncomplicated interface is wonderful. There is no title bar which seems to make a huge difference. Most of my screen real estate is used by the web pages I’m visiting, which is as it should be. The general look is clean and cheerful, it makes IE8 look a tad cluttered.

Pages load quickly, but it’s been a while since I’ve had anything to complain about in that regard. Javascript performance is supposedly improved but again, I can’t remember the last time I had issues with the speed of Javascript rendering.

Tabs are sandboxed/jailed which is a good idea in theory. It remains to be seen how secure their implementation really is. I’ve yet to make use of their phishing/blacklist features. I’d be interested to know how these lists are maintained and how open to poisining they are, much as DNSBLs are for mail. This feature can be turned off.

Task Manager (I wonder is Microsoft will complain about the name) shows all your browser tabs and processes along with their associated CPU/Network/Memory usage. Handy.

Google Chrome Task Manager

Where does Chrome fall down? The usual suspects. NTLM proxy authentication. Getting prompted for my credentials going through the proxy is not acceptable. Manageability. As with firefox there is no easy way for an administrator to lock down/configure Chrome using policies. Through from the looks of things Chrome uses IE’s proxy settings, so that should help in that regard. I imagine the other settings are stored in either the registry or config files so it’s scripts ahoy. Finally, deployment. The installation is performed by running a 500k installer which pulls down the app and installs it, not really workable in an enterprise environment. To be fair this is a beta and I don’t see google targeting the enterprise space at this early stage but fixing these 3 things would go a long way to easing acceptance in the workplace.

It is also a very simple browser. The options tab is no-nonsense, with a grand total of 3 tabs and not a lot of settings. In using and looking at it I haven’t really been comparing it to IE and Firefox as much as I have in using either of those products.

Using Google Chrome you get the impression that there is more to this browser launch than we all think. The minor, but significant changes they have made to the UI hint at a move towards making the browser more of the focal point. To put it another way by removing the title bar and increasing screen real estate the Google Chrome browser has more presence that your average application window. If you are using Google Docs/Gmail/Calendar etc then the browser you use effectively becomes your OS. We have already seen linux distros which use Firefox as the Desktop, I think Google Chrome is going to be doing much the same thing in the future.

Overall, a clean, lightweight, no-nonsense browser that has quite happily replaced IE8 on my home PC as my main browser.

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Diablo 2 Update

August 27th, 2008

So I finished Diablo II on Normal. Baal dies rather easily. I had more trouble with his last set of minions than with him.

Level 34 Paladin. Hammerdin Build. It was great fun but I can honestly say I won’t be playing through Nightmare with this character. I went with what was said to be a really powerful build but it really dull to play.

Maybe I’ll start again. I’ve played a Necromancer and Paladin so far. Maybe a barbarian will be fun.

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NFS for Mediaportal / GB-PVR on Windows XP/2003

August 27th, 2008

In my reading I have come across several places that claim that NFS offers much better throughput for streaming video content than traditional SMB. I have a Mediaportal (http://www.team-mediaportal.com) PC at home which usffers from occasional stuttering so I thought I’d give it a go.

A quick google for Windows NFS Server brings up a load of crap. There are a number of commercial NFS server packages for windows which all cost money. There are also the occassional free ones about too, but these seem to be either horrendously bad or written for Windows 95. What you really want is Microsoft Windows Services for Unix, which can be had from here.

At 200 off meg it’s not a small download, so be prepared. Once downloaded extract it and start your install. For the Mediaportal/GP PVR client you will want to install the NFS Client only, for your box holding all the media you will want to install the NFS server and prerequisites. Now the fun part.

For authentication purposes you can either copy the /etc/passwd and /etc/group files from an existing linux box to your PCs or you can setup NIS. NIS is basically the central authentication functions of AD for linux. Seeing as I have a linux VM I decided to go down that route as I couldn’t be bothered with copying files all over the place.

So on my debian VM I did the following:

apt-get install nis, select NIS domain name (can be whatever). (I had to ctrl-c out of it as it hung at starting)
edit /etc/defaults/nis, change NISSERVER=MASTER and CLIENT=FALSE
/usr/lib/yp/ypinit -m
/etc/init.d/nis stop

(there is a much better written and more comprehensive guide at here.)

With that done, go back to your windows boxes. When prompted say use a NIS server. Finish setup.

You will now have a new Start Menu Entry for Windows Services for Unix. Open this up and go to User Mapping. What you need to do here is map a Windows Username to a Unix/Linux UID. For example, I have a linux user (wasabi2k) which I map to MEDIABOX\Jeff. I create that mapping on MEDIABOX. I then create a mapping between wasabi2k and WASABI2K\Jeff on my main PC (WASABI2K) which has all my media. So as far as NFS is concerned when I access the NFS share on WASABI2K from MEDIABOX I am Linux UID 1000 (wasabi2k), which has permissions for that share.

Now that you have mapped some users you can share some folders with NFS on the PC that you installed the NFS server on. Right click on a folder in explorer and you will see a new NFS Sharing tab. The default permissions give Read-Only access, which is perfect for what we want.

Once shared, go back to your client and map a drive, except use the format server:/share. For example my movies are at wasabi2k:/movies (as opposed to \\wasabi2k\movies). When you first access/map a drive it will tell you who you are authenticated as and ask if you wish to continue with that user or change.

So after about half an hour I managed to get my PCs talking NFS. I setup my shares in MediaPortal and it worked straight away. Is there any difference in performance? Well.. I’d like to say yes but I haven’t really noticed. It doesn’t seem to skip anymore which is great but I’ve only tested it for about an hour. At the end of the day it was actually just fun setting up something different on a Windows box.

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SQL, dates and DBCC useroptions

August 22nd, 2008

I am currently working on a server consolidation project for a customer. The usual story, customer sets up a VMWare environment, loves it, then proceeds to create a new server whenever someone has a good idea for an application. End result, 1000 staff, 500 servers, ridiculous licensing and support costs.

Our job is to consolidate these servers, which is a tough call. Servers include SQL, IIS, various applications (Projectwise, Knowledge Exchange, Provision etc). The server I am writing about happened to be SQL.

I have a fair bit of experience with SQL. I learnt a lot about RDBMS’ in my high school years playing with PHP/MySQL. I then transferred a lot of those concepts over to MS SQL in my previous jobs, but I have never had any formal training with SQL, hence my vagueness on some concepts.

We successfully moved the database in question to our new consolidation server. Nothing fancy, SQL 2000 SP4 to SQL 2000 SP4. The application was updated, which involved some ehavy editing of a large excel spreadsheet then rewriting a small VB6 utility which uploads excel checklists to a share on a server (which was hard coded in the app, now reads from an ini file). New SQL agent jobs were created in place of the old ones, insane DTS tasks (30+ steps) were updated and all went well. Until month end.

One of the SQL Agent jobs starts a stored procedure which sums data and generates averages into other tables, which is then used for reporting. Come the first of the month the nice monthly totals of around 50-70 a month were replaced with 2000 items for January 08 and 0 for the rest of the year. Oh dear.

The stored procedure which did all this in fact runs 6 more stored procedures, all of which do some pretty funky LEFT OUTER JOINs and all sorts of things that were well beyond my command of SQL. I spent a considerable amount of time going through everything I knew to try and understand the problem. Luckily we still had the old server and database (and several backups) so there was no risk of data loss.

I eventually found that there were several views in the database which worked fine on the old server but not on the new one, where they generated errors relating to conversions generating invalid values for field types (The conversion of char data type to smalldatetime data type resulted in an out-of-range smalldatetime value). Google suggested incorrect regional settings, which were dutifuly checked. Then I came across the following webpage: http://www.sqlteam.com/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=74074 which put me onto the right track.

Executing “DBCC useroptions” on the old server showed the language of the user as British English and dateformat at dmy. Executing it on the new server showed English and mdy. I used sp_configure to set both to British English for the account used to run the stored procedure and voila, all my reports came back beautifully.

Some further reading suggests that hitting issues like this is usually the result of sloppy or lazy coding on the behalf of the original coder. The issue here appeared to be that the date fields were being compared to another table which contained obviously human entered “readable” dates and from this a specific date code generated. To do this the original date was first stripped of the time portion (no problem) then converted to a string, manipulated and compared, then converted back to a datetime field. Overall a nightmare to try and figure out.

End of the day the app is all working again. 1 down, 499 to go.

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MySky HDi – pretty awesome

August 16th, 2008

A couple of months ago we finally made the move from crappy old CRT TV to a nice new Sony Bravia V Series 42″ LCD. We got a good deal and with 12 months interest free it was hard not to.

I was very happy with my new TV, especially as it had a VGA input for my Media PC that sits in the lounge. Downloaded episodes of Lost and The Office looked great. I was dissapointed however with how standard definition Sky TV looked. It was by all means watchable but nothing fantastic. It was frustrating as I had a very nice TV with no HD content to play on it!

After much deliberation (we don’t really need it, etc) I decided to order the new My Sky HDi. Here in NZ you can either pay a one of $600 for the decoder (which you then still don’t own) or $15 a month. There is then an additional $10 a month for the HD ‘ticket’ that allows you watch HD content. We went for the $15 a month rental option, as we didn’t have a spare $600 around to spend on a decoder we wouldn’t own (and that $600 isn’t refundable if you cancel, if my information is correct).

We managed to take $25 off our sky bill by cancelling Rialto (which we don’t REALLY watch) and Arts Channel (which Sky sneakily added to our account 3 years ago without asking us). So net result was that our Sky bill stays the same.

We had the installer come in Thursday last week (there was a 1 month delay between ordering and installation). My fiance was here for the install and said the installer was very passionate and knowledgable about the technology. Only took about half an hour. Sky also provides a 1m HDMI cable with installation.

All I can say is wow. I started watching standard definition content (TV1). It looks much better than before. I believe this largely due to the HDMI connection vs standard Composite connections, but colours are brighter and the picture is much sharper.

Then I flicked over to a Sky Sports rugby show that was in HD. There was a player on screen talking and the detail was phenomenal. I could tell he hadn’t shaved that morning, you could see the beads of sweat on his face and the whole picture was absolutely crystal sharp. Having never really seen HD content I was absolutely amazed. More tellingly my fiance even noticed the difference. I am looking forward to Saturday night and the NRL in HD.

An HD movie yielded similar results. Taking half a day off work on Friday (due to illness, honestly) I spent the day watching HD movies. 6th day (OK movie) has a scene where they fly into the mountains. The snow capped peaks look spectacular. Deja Vu, with its explosions was again sharp, clear and colourful.

Update: On the technical side, the Sky box can output 720p or 1080i. It will by default automatically detect what can be displayed and choose that. I’ve been using 720p and I’m happy.

On to audio. HD content is broadcast with Dolby Digital 5.1 and/or DTS depending on the source content (again if my information is correct, I have been unable to test as I explain). The MySky HDi decoder has connectors for both Optical Digital Out and Coaxial Digital Out. I purchased a Coax digital audio cable and connected it to my home theatre box, but I am unable to get Dolby Digital output working on my receiver. At this stage I am blaming the home theatre receiver as it is getting old and doing some pretty weird things these days. I have changed the MySky decoder to output MPEG audio over the Digital Out and it works, but it isn’t 5.1. The way I see it I’ve now got a good excuse to look at buying a new home theatre setup.

The MySky HDi decoder also has PVR capabilities. Not a lot to say here. You can book shows to record. If they are a series you can activate ‘Series Link’ which will record all episodes in a series. Tou can also record one show and watch another, or record 2 shows and watch a RECORDED show (contrary to the TV ad where the daughter watches ‘the Netball’ without mentioning that it is recorded). The unit apparently has a 250GB hard drive. I’ve recorded Deja Vu (HD) and 2 SD NRL games and I’m currently at 10% usage which makes sense. The unit can be set up to warn you when disk space is low and prompt to delete some content, or to automatically delete old content to make space.

Watching recorded content is done from the Planner screen. Which shows all recorded content, shows that are going to record and if they are recording, viewed or recorded. When viewing a program you can specify how far in you wish to start playback. Once in however you have to Fast Forward and Rewind as you would a DVD, which is immensely annoying. Any PVR software (Mediaportal, GB-PVR) will show you a playback bar and let you move along it. Not so here. Definitely an area that can be improved. There is also no ad skipping, which is unsurprising but annoying.

Other TV viewing features include Live Pause and Live Rewind, which I guess could be useful but to be honest I’ve yet to use them.

On to the remote. It is much larger than the standard Sky remote, mostly due to bigger buttons and the addition of the recording/playback options. Buttons are firm and it fits nicely into your hand. A minor annoyance is having to put in 3 number channels to quickly switch. e.g. 0-3-0 for Sky Sport. Pushing 3-0 will get you nowhere.

In general operation the new decoder is much faster than our old one, checking channel listings, swapping channels and the like are all far faster than before which is great. The info screen (you get to it using i now, rather than ?) also shows the current show and the one following, rather than only the current show. You can still browse through channel/program listings as you could before.

So overall, I am immensely happy with my new MySky HDi and I certainly think it is worth an extra NZ$25 a month. I will be very interested to see what features get added over the next 12 months, as the decoder has a currently unused USB and Ethernet port.

More Details: http://www.myskyhdi.co.nz/

Connectors on the Back:

1 x HD Component Video Out (Y/Pb/Pr)
1 x Composite Video Out
1 x RCA Audio Out (L/R)

1 x VCR SCART (Fixed Audio)
1 x TV SCART
1 x SVIDEO Out
1 x HDMI Out

1 x Coax Digital Audio Out
1 x Optical Audio Out

1 x RJ11 Telephone Connection
1 x RJ45 Ethernet Connection (unused)
1 x USB Connection (unused)

4 x Satellite BNC Connectors

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Diablo 2 is awesome… even 8 years later

July 11th, 2008

The recent announcement of Diablo III has spawned a resurgence of interest in it’s predecessor this week, at least amongst those people that had stopped playing it (you’d be surprised how many still do).

Funnily enough I recently installed Diablo II on my work laptop for something to do when I’m bored. Having integrated intel video meant that pretty much any source games (HL2, TF2) were not going to happen (I tried, it was horrible) which left me with Quake 3 CPMA/RA3, which is always a blast but can get pretty boring after a while.

Diablo II fits the bill nicely. It’s system requirements called for a P2 233 (gasp) and a video card with DirectX 7 support. I installed it (and after some searching, the expansion) and patched it up. In reading the patch notes I see that Blizzard removed the requirement to have the CD in the drive in one of the previous patches. Hurrah, I’m not being treated like a criminal!

I remember playing Diablo II with my LAN group when I was near the end of high school. Many a weekend were spent in someone’s garage with mice furiously clicking away killing hoardes of monsters. The shared achievement of bringing down Diablo, Mephisto and Baal were awesome. As were the arguments over loot (No WOW style BOE/BOP and rolling here ladies, wonder that D3 will do there) and who got what gems to transmute etc. Good times.

I had a level 34 Necromancer which I imported into my new game, but decided I’d rather try something new. I’ve always played support characters in most of the games I played (Shaman in Wow, healer/buffer in NWN) so I went for the Paladin as a change. They have a sword and shield and auras. I started hacking away in short order.

For those that have never seen or played a Diablo game (both of you) its isometric, there are lots of monsters and you run around and kill them. Each click of your mouse is either a cast of a spell or a swing of a weapon, hence the frenzied clicking. In no time I was back into it, hammering away, getting loot, casting Town Portal, identifying magic items.

Then it was 2 hours later and I really needed to get some sleep.

This is the first game I have played in years that has engaged me so. With the exception of WoW (see previous post) Diablo II is the most addictive game I’ve played. You very quickly fall into the “one more dungeon level”, “just need to find the waypoint for this area”, “just need to finish this quest” mentality that leads to many late nights. Randomly generated dungeons and areas mean you spend a lot of time exploring (and killing hoardes of monsters) especially if, like me, you don’t like leaving parts of the map unexplored.

And all that is before you get involved in decking out a character. I am following a guide for a specific type of Paladin and the guide has recommendations for gear. Suffice to say that most of the good stuff starts appearing in Nightmare, after you’ve already completed the game once. You can spend hours and hours grinding for an item, due to the fact that the item you want is probably one item in a loot table of thousands.

But you can quite happily ignore all that stuff and just plug away for an hour or so every few days, kill some monsters and have fun.

I mentioned before that I used to play Diablo II at LANs. That’s because it has LAN Co-op in the box. Difficulty scales based on the number of players. Something so simple makes this game absolutely spectacular in comparison with most of the stuff out there. How many new games have come out with little or no Co-Op? I enjoy a good Deathmatch/Capture as much as the next guy but I don’t think I’m alone in saying that Co-Op is a feature that has been sorely missed in recent years.

I also tried to play Sacred when it came out. Many called it the spiritual successor to Diablo. In my time with Diablo so far I have experienced exactly no issues. All the quests work, all the monsters died, my character hasn’t been corrupted or broken. Sacred on the other hand broke in spectacular fashion on a regular basis. Resulting in uncompletable quests (including the main storyline breaking), game crashes and character corruption. I acknowledge that the scope of Sacred was a tad more epic, but if Blizzard did it 2000, why can’t Sacred do it more than 5 years later?

Blizzard seem to have a nack for creating incredible games with deep and exciting lore to accompany them. WoW is the most visible of these, with it’s many races, hundreds of quests, thousands of items and millions of subscribers. The Diablo universe is no less developed, with plenty of back story and a plot that actually seems to be important while you are playing. Not to mention the fact that Hell/Demon/Heaven/Angel imagery is awesome, especially when realised as spectacularly as Blizzard’s art team seem to do on a regular basis. Tyrael, with his “wings” of light still stands out as one of the coolest characters in a game ever.

So there we have it. Diablo 2 is still awesome, 8 years after its release. All I need to do is track down those old LAN buddies, install Hamachi and relive the glory days of my youth.

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WoW: An ex Addict speaks

February 19th, 2008

I used to play WoW a lot. Not crazy korean lots but a lot by most people’s standards. At the peak there I was hitting 40 hours a week plus, with weekly raiding, pvp and prepping for raiding. It was all about getting that last set item/newer weapons etc.

I made some amazing friends while I was playing WoW. People I would happily have stay at my home or go out for a beer with.

I also put on a lot of weight and lost any semblance of physical fitness.

I quit about a year ago now. I started a new relationship shortly before that which took over a lot of the time I would normally spend playing. As soon as you start cutting down your play time your relationships in game tend to suffer. If you don’t spend the time grinding for pots/gold for raids you won’t get into those raids. I was in a fairly priveleged position as an established guild member when this happened so I didn’t get this straight away. By this time most of the guild had done BWL to death and we were having limited success in AQ40, so most people were in a holding pattern, making Alts, PVPing etc.

Burning Crusade came out around this time and changed everything. Very quickly the hardcore people roared ahead, hit 70, got greens that put that tier 2 set that took months to accumulate to shame.

Those of us who had returned to casual play quickly fell behind. It sucked not learning instances with those friends who you learnt MC and UBS with. PUGing burnt after having the privelege of being in a guild where there were always people available.

My friends in game hit 70 when I was still at 63, I had a flatmate who I did most of my levelling with but it was largely a solo journey. I hit 65 and entered Nagrand.

While completing the STV style, kill 40 of these, then 40 of these quests I was ganked by a level 70 rogue who essentially stunlocked me to death. This happened 4 times. I hearthed, closed wow, went to the website and closed my account.

Cancelled

I haven’t played since and it has been a year. I miss it occasionally. The sense of purpose and cooperation you got raiding was amazing. I don’t miss the drama. I really miss the time I spent with some really good friends in game.

I still get riled up when people say games like WoW are anti-social. People don’t seem to understand that even though you’re sitting in front of a computer you are interacting with hundreds if not thousands of people at the same time.

I’ve put my time into my relationship, my health and my work. I’m 10kg lighter.

As I’ve already said I miss it occasionally, but quitting WoW was one of the best things I ever did.

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Personalised Plates

February 19th, 2008

I was given a personalised plate for my 18th Birthday. At the time a plate cost around $400.

Over the next few years I sold the car it was on so the plates got taken off. While in storage they got munted. I have a new car so thought I’d put them on there. I rang plates who put me on to 0800 REMAKE. I asked how much it would cost to get them reprinted.

$21.

I received my shiny new plates a few days later and found that the $21 was for the LTSA registration changes, not for the plate reprinting. So if your plates are stuffed you get them replaced for nothing.

Awesome customer service in my book.

On checking the plates website I see that new personalised plates are now a whopping $700. I know it’s a diminishing resource but jesus.

Anyway, my new car looks awesome with my new plates on them, so I’m a happy monkey.

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Petrol Stations are bastards

November 13th, 2007

This is going to be a big, long, childish whine fest.

I went to fill my car up with Petrol the other day. I was in a rush. It was a Saturday. The Petrol Station just up the road from me was reasonably busy.

I rocked up, saw the the EFTPOS at Pump was broken (again…) so I put the nozzle into my car, hit fill and waited.

and waited.

Apparently the attendants at my local petrol station, who I visit weekly, decided that I had to Pre Pay before I could get any petrol because I might just fill up and leave. I left that petrol station and went down the road where I filled up then paid.

I can totally understand the need for it. I’m sure there are cocks out there that do steal gas. But I am tired of being treated like a fucking criminal every time I go to fill up.

Had this happened at 10PM, I would have been annoyed, but not this pissed off. Had this been at a Petrol station I had never been to I would have been less aggravated. But the fact that I went to my local station, in a nice car wearing a suit FFS and they decided I was a risk?

So now I drive an extra 3kms to get my gas from another petrol station. I don’t believe this will make any difference to my local petrol station but at least I can fill up first, then pay and not get treated like a low life.

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