Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Boy, this is important science

In a world where messages can travel at the speed of light in many different forms (e-mail, voice, even video) it's nice to see somebody wasting time using technology to advance the age-old methods...
Pigeons!

In other news, can anybody help with this Channel9 post?

Sunday, February 25, 2007

Samples of my work

I have a page put together now that shows some of the work I've done:
http://www.greatwhitedata.com/samples.php

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

ACTUAL TECH CONTENT!!!

Ok... what have I been up to lately? I've been working on DataMatch, adding an e-mail server to my linux box, and my very own PVR. Let's start with that.

Joel Gott offered a while ago on his blog an article for a 'Poor Man's Tivo'. Well... I got to thinking, and looking... and found this:
http://www.byopvr.com/Sections+index-req-viewarticle-artid-10-page-1.html

This entails using your own computer at the desk, and networking/streaming the signal to a Hauppauge MediaMVP. I spent $45 on an Avermedia 150 Plus, which has coaxial input for cable and one for FM. Most important, it has an on-board MPEG2 encoder. This saves your PC horsepower. I can work while it records. (Not that there is much to record during the day when I work.)

The only problem I've run into is the hard drive. I have 120Gb SATA, but failed to set it up as RAID. So, as it get's filled, it gets slow... very slow. (Plus, I run SQL server and Visual Studio on this box, and they hog RAM.) The motherboard I bought has stopped taking both chips of RAM, so I only have 512, shared with the on-board video card... so, lot's of swap space communication to the hard drive.

I haven't gotten the Media MVP yet, but I've been playing with GBPVR. Awesome!!!

Here's some of the plug-ins I've used for that:
Weather... Gives you a weather channel on your screen. (I have uber-basic cable, so no weather channel included.)
UbuRadio... sucks streams from Radio Stations all over the web. I can listen to CT stations from PA, if they broadcast online as well as FM.
YouTube... this one I've been leary of, until I realized Searching for indonesiatom or monkeygluver (two of my cousins) isn't so hard. So, when I get the mvp, I can watch their YouTube videos on my TV.

Of course I can record TV shows and Movies... watching them I have ComSkip so I don't have to watch the commercials. They are recorded as MPEG2 (remember the on-board encoder?) so I can open them in Nero, and edit out the commercials, then burn them to DVD.

All-in-all, it's pretty nice. I still can't have my wife's PC hook up as a client.... but I think that's my Motorola/Vonage router being stupid...

I guess I spoke about other stuff... I'll have to through that in another post... You'll like the DataMatch stuff... I created a report engine and designer I can include in the software... FREE!