Friday 22 June 2007

IPTV - so much confusion

IPTV seems to be raising it's head more and more.
Confusion reigns!!!!!!!

Telco view: Triple or quad play = way to raise ARPU and retention rate
TV industry view: just a broadcast medium

Customer view: VOD or broadcast TV perhaps even internet on tv

Does multicast fit in?
Does IPv6 fit in?
Answer to both of above = yes.

I think I need to put a huge summary somewhere.

Or perhaps point them to IPTV magazine and totaltele and vendors like erricsson and alcatel and microsoft.

My research work since 1998 could be a useful starting point!
http://www.ctie.monash.edu.au/EMERGE/multimedia/

And IPv6 and multicast integration with quicktime darwin streaming server = DSS and IPv6 enabled clients is also relevant.
http://www.ctie.monash.edu.au/DSS-IPv6

I'd really like some stuff from thomson as well since they actually make set top boxes for iptv for many standards (microsoft, standards based .....) . Bits of thomson are near by to monash clayton.

Thursday 17 May 2007

old games on xp - hardware acceleration woes

Remember:
Old games (2002 fisher price rescue heroes by knowledge adventure for example) use macromedia director and the projector (basically the whole game) will crash on start up after flashing black screen IFF you turn on full graphics card hardware acceleration!!!!!!!!

Moving it one or two notches to the left fixes it!!!!!!!!

Alternative approach apparently is to install using windows compatibility mode (either NT or 95/98) - I wonder if you can set the runtime to use windows compatibility mode or if it only works on install?

EG: This one fails!!!
fisher price rescue heroes Lava Landslide
Windows 98/ME/2000, Pentium II 266 MHz, 64 MB RAM, 24X CD-ROM, 16-bit color 640X480.

Monday 7 May 2007

deepdan blog and google

How does google choose which blogs to include in search?

It appears that you have to explicitly link to the blog to get google to include it in it's search.

So today I did that on my ancient http://users.monash.edu.au/~dan/
Which was first started while sitting in front of a decstation (no doubt fawlty1)

So, now the race is on, to see how often users.monash is cached by google and if this blog shows up.
Cached http://users.monash.edu.au/~dan/ has april13 date today, I wonder what the cycle is?

Wednesday 21 March 2007

ldap in mozilla and IPv6

The bug has existed for so long:
ipv6 enabled on winxp
thunderbird, mozilla etc address book hangs because the ldap connection tries to create IPv6 socket to IPv4 address.

So easy to fix, why hasn't it happened?
I'd fix it for them, but haven't followed it through.
I note some statements about IPv6 support in latest mozilla stuff, but so far no fix.

The ldap directory service attempts to
connect to the ipv6 socket ::ffff:xx.xx.xx.xx instead of the ipv4 socket
xx.xx.xx.xx

This is consistent with the last few years and on the thunderbird 3.0a1 that I
just downloaded/installed it still fails in the same way on a dual hosted ipv4
ipv6 machine.
Logging ldap:5 only produces the following:
0[274310]: nsLDAPOperation::SimpleBind(): called; bindName = '';
2348[278d2d0]: nsLDAPConnection::Run() entered

channel deepening port phillip bay victoria

The newspaper reports today that the SEES will give the go ahead for channel deepening and dredging in port phillip bay, victoria.

As the SDFV secretary, I expected to see some prior notice - but we haven't received any thing through official channels.

What's the dredging going to mean for me?
Well it may interfere with some winter diving.
It's unlikely to interfere with summer diving (beach tourism too big for them to interfere with).
Long term should make no difference and if their predictions of fewer larger ships coming in are correct that means less ships to dodge while drift diving.

Alternatively it may absolutely ruin the ecology of port phillip bay - but the EES , SEES and monitoring process is meant to prevent that.
What's it going to cost POMC if they do stuff the bay? Is there an eco-bond?

Have to wait for the report I guess.

OSX 10.4.9 upgrade loginwindow crash

Mac OSX 10.4.9 upgrade led to loginwindow crash.
Repeatedly put you back at login window after you type your password in.
Safe boot made no difference.
This is a new intel powerbook pro model - from about jan07.

crashreporter showed loginwindow crashing.

Solution: Remove users keychain file!!!!!
Tried all the other things first though - you know: remove user preferences, delete user Caches
delete System/Caches and System/Library/Caches

This seems to have been a problem that nobody else has identified - may be unique to this box.
Was set up by using the import/migration from a powerpc based unit during system set up.


Perhaps this should go on macfixit or macintouch or apple proper.

Wednesday 14 February 2007

deepdan

"This act of worship is called `deepdan', and the entire lake is illuminated" by candles.
So that could be why I can't get deepdan username on some systems like yahoo.

deepdan started as a name for me in forums back in the mid 80's to early 90's.
At the time I was considered a deep (air) diver.
Now the trimix community dives much deeper but I keep deepdan out of amusement.
I still prefer that 27-55m range though.
Which is where some of the best diving locally is.

Friday 9 February 2007

viplus

Why do scuba tanks fail viplus?
Passed in 2001 failed in 2007
Chances are the tanks sat around and probably had no more than 10-20 fills.

Then again, what do I care? my one failed and was replaced (for a fee) ages ago with one that doesn't need viplus.

Wednesday 17 January 2007

expire on mammoth

for a in $(ls /home) ; do echo $a; chage -l $a | grep 2007 ; done

And then change the end date of some of them using
usermod -e 2008-02-20 ttngu35

distribute_passwd+group+shadow+gshadow

Why press "i" during mammoth boot up?

Why Oh Why?

redhat 9 system - swap partition on /dev/sda1 is commented out in /etc/fstab.

After major power fail, boot fails unless i is pressed for Interactive startup.

It hangs after enabling local filesystem quotas ...OK.
Which should have 'enabling swap space' as the next line showing on the console in a successful boot sequence.

So: is it related to having no swap partition/file?
Is it something else entirely?
sun cobalt lx50