Tumultuous MythTV upgrades
News, Technical, Work ·Saturday December 6, 2008 @ 23:38 EST (link)
20081128: Fixed DVD scanning system to use Michael's Movie Mayhem instead of the defunct DVDSpot.com. Works fine; I wish MMM had the runtime on the page, since the lack means an extra request to IMDb to fetch it. But I'm happy I can get all the fields I was using previously, and the cover images. I did some refactoring of the code; it's all very tidy.
20081129: Upgraded PostgreSQL to 8.3 and ported database over. Went to Woodinville library with Honey. Finished my last two peer research paper comments for Accessibility. Fixed IMAP server: /etc/ssl/certs had some dangling links to which courier-authlib objected (and I removed the authpipe library since it couldn't find its program; it wasn't necessary anyway).
20081202: Still have turkey left; had it every day except yesterday, so far. (It ended up lasting us about six days.)
20081203: Finished colloquia reviews for school (4, plus 4 watched and rated but not reviewed). Bit of a rush at the end, oh well, no harm.
20081205: Holiday party. Parked at 6th and Oliver. Left work 1830, arrived about 2000, about 30 minutes to walk to the Space Needle (turns out we could probably have parked closer, but I didn't know how busy it would be); left around 2200 (much faster going home). Honey wasn't wearing very comfortable shoes, so she actually took them off on the way back, although I offered to pick her up at the Needle.
20081206: (Early hours.) Upgraded kernel on cirith-ungol (MythTV box) to 2.6.26-gentoo-r3. A lot of things broke, cascadingly: LVM now wanted baselayout-2, which put a lot of things in the wrong runlevels: networking wasn't included in default, so it didn't get started; checkfs was put in default (instead of boot), so it kept failing to check the root filesystem since it was already mounted and couldn't be remounted read-only. I tried to set the hostname in /etc/conf.d/hostname to localhost to appease Apache, but apparently MythTV stores its configuration by hostname, so to appease both I set the hostname back to cirith-ungol and ensured cirith-ungol was in /etc/hosts (as an alias 127.0.0.1, localhost). I still plan to do an emerge -Duav world… optimistic or foolhardy, I don't know. Time to kick back and watch survivor, I've been at this for five hours.
20081207: More updates to cirith-ungol: some conflicts (had to apply a patch from the Gentoo bug database to xine-lib so it would work with current ImageMagick, due to an API change; other programs depended on the new version, so there was a slot conflict); the LIRC update clobbered the numeric keys for my remote (since it used "One", "Two" etc. rather than "1", "2") but I'd backed it up and just restored my aliases. E2fsprogs and E2fsprogs-lib replaced ss and com_err, so I removed those, and broke wget (so I couldn't install packages any more; it also broke ssh and links). Fortunately Samba was still running and I could download the E2fsprogs packages on another machine and copy them over (to /usr/portage/distfiles).
I also had to apply a linux-headers patch to ivtv-utils (download patch, cd to /usr/portage/media-tv/ivtv-utils/files, apply patch to create a .patch file and patch the .ebuild to use it, and run ebuild <path to .ebuild> manifest to update the manifest file).
Oi… now MythTV comes up with a blank screen. The theme background is there, but no text or selector. Probably freezing rather than a font issue, since the background graphic is there. Eventually turns out that it could have been a number of things, one of which is that WindowMaker was reparenting itself to mythfrontend (!) and then mythfrontend was waiting for it (strace showed it in a wait4 syscall). Stopped that by removing WindowMaker from .xinitrc, but it'll need to come back if I want to use various emulators that need window widgets.
(By the way: this is certainly all a pain in the rear. But it's all diagnosable and fixable. If I was running Windows or another closed system, I'd be completely and utterly screwed.)
… Now mythfrontend can't talk to mythbackend (readStringList/writeStringList errors in the log). That seemed to magically go away. Had some log directory access permission issues; fixed. Also some database permission issues: apparently MythTV can't use an empty password, and if you set one, it acts as if you asked it to kindly make up a completely random password and pass it in.
On books: I'm reading Weis and Hickman's Death Gate Cycle, a heptad of books about a universe sundered into four elemental realms; great series; we got all the books at Duvall Books (used bookstore) or Half Price Books.
Technical Analysis by Kirkpatrick and Dahlquist is an excellent book; very rigorous treatment of the various technical indicators, although it doesn't go much into candlesticks (but there are plenty of other good books for that).
Books finished: Technical Analysis, Fundamentals of the Stock Market, A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity, Elven Star, Fire Sea.DVDs finished: The Untouchables, Girl, Interrupted, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Friends: The Complete First Season, M*A*S*H Season One Collectors Edition.
