AVES in OTT

Last Thursday night my digital tuner box arrived in the mail. I got home on Thursday night and hooked it all up and it worked great. I can't get a lot of channels, but I can get CBC, CBC-French, and SunTV all in HD. Since this past weekend was the NHL All-Star weekend I was looking forward to checking out the game in OTA HD quality.

Saturday morning I was watching TV and doing stuff around the house and everything was good. Then around mid-morning I turned on the TV and... nothing happened. The power light was flashing on and off but it wouldn't turn on. After doing a bit of research, it seems like this is sort of like a "check engine" light and it means something is wrong with the set. About 90% of the people on the web with the same TV said that they either had to get some connections re-soldered or the IC Controller needed to be replaced. At $450, that didn't sound good.

I went over a bunch of options (including taking a bat to the TV in frustration) and decided that I should get someone to look at the TV before I go out and buy a new one. So on a recommendation from my friend Mike (he had them come out to perform some warranty work on his TV) I called the guys at Audio Video Engineering Services here in Ottawa. They said it would be no problem to come to the house and it would only be a $45 charge to perform the diagnostics. Not too bad... especially if it could save me from spending much more on a new unit.

So today the repair guy came to the house (turned out to be the owner of the company) and checked out the TV. Inside the TV there are 2 circuit board side-by-side and apparently it is quite common for some of the soldering connecting them to come apart. (especially right after people move their TVs around... although I hadn't done that) So after replacing a couple of fuses and doing some re-soldering, the TV is good as new!

So if you're in the Ottawa area and you have a TV that you want someone to look at, I recommend giving the guys at Audio Video Engineering Services (AVES) a call. Really nice guys and they do good work. They've been in the business for over 18 years and its always nice to support the local guys.

Using p2 Composite Repositories

In the Eclipse Ganymede release the p2 repository format (for the default repository types) on the file-system was always growing. This was a problem for our Release Engineering team because we would keep doing builds, and the repositories would grow and grow in size. And what if a build was determined to be bad and it needed to be deleted? All of the artifacts (features, bundles, etc) for all of the builds were merged together and the index file for the repository was huge... it was nearly impossible to do the right thing.

Late in 2008 we released support for "composite repositories". This enables people to create a single repository index file which refers to children which can exist in different locations. This way the user only needs to know a single URI for the location of the repository, but they really have access to multiple repositories.

For example the current layout (for a co-located artifact and metadata repository) is:

   /repo

   /repo/artifacts.xml

   /repo/content.xml

   /repo/features/

   /repo/plugins/

With composite repositories it will be possible to have a layout such as:

   /repo/compositeArtifacts.xml

   /repo/compositeContent.xml

   /repo/I20090113-0800/

   /repo/I20090113-0800/artifacts.xml

   /repo/I20090113-0800/content.xml

   /repo/I20090113-0800/features/

   /repo/I20090113-0800/plugins/

   /repo/3.5M5/

   /repo/3.5M5/artifacts.xml

   /repo/3.5M5/content.xml

   /repo/3.5M5/features/

   /repo/3.5M5/plugins/

As you can see with the new layout, it will be much easier for release engineers to clean up old builds and remove bogus files.

Note that in the above example the child repositories do not have to be physically located as children on the file-system... they can be anywhere. Also note that we plan to provide support for non-local child repositories soon.

Recently we have been working on the creation of Ant tasks to make this support more accessible for release engineers and for easier integration into their build process. As of this week, all of the pieces will be released to make this happen.

More information can be found on the p2 wiki page.

Welcome to K-World

So everyone keeps asking me... how is life going without cable? The answer is surprisingly well actually. I've got a lot more free time to do things around the house and catch up on my reading.

But once in a while it is nice to flip on the tv and just watch something live. Since I have an older HD tv, it is considered "HD Ready" and doesn't have a digital tuner. I've done a bit of research and decided to pick up a KWorld Digital Tuner and give it a try. 

It seems like the main tuner that people buy is the Samsung DTB-H260F but at about $180 USD and seemingly only available in the US, the KWorld one is a better choice for now. It doesn't have as good reviews, but for $100 CDN (incl taxes and shipping) we'll see how it goes.  I'll post a review once I receive it (just ordered it online tonight) and have it up and running.

I figure that in the next year or 2 I'll have to get a new tv anyways and I'll make sure to get that can grab HD over-the-air. There isn't a lot available in Ottawa yet, but at least there is Hockey Night in Canada on CBC. :-)

New NAS

After my little disagreement with Rogers Cable which resulted in canceling my cable, HD, and PVR rental... I have been thinking lately about using a home computer as a PVR and buying a video tuner card for it and recording shows over-the-air. After pricing it out, this looked like a bit expensive since I don't have a computer at home so I would need the works... including a monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc.

So I talked to some friends at work and was recommended the D-Link DNS-323. I went out at lunch yesterday and picked it up (along with a 1TB drive for one of its drive bays) and last night I sat down to set it up. I had a few problems but in the end I got most things working.

First off when I did a network search I wasn't able to see the new drive. Turns out that it just so happened that yesterday was one of those days where I needed to reset my cable modem. (my laptop couldn't see the net either) Ok, no problem.

So I found the drive and went through the intial setup and formatted the drive. Then I went to the support page on the web site and downloaded the new firmware and installed it. Next step was to set up BitTorrent but I couldn't get it working... it would bring up a progress screen and then a dialog saying "Please check hard drive". That didn't sound good. 

After some searching on the web I saw that other people had the same problem and they were able to "solve" it by connecting to the network with another computer. That wasn't an option so after further research I discovered that it was a problem in that the Windows Workgroup for my laptop and the NAS didn't match. I just changed them to be the same and voila, it worked.

Step one was complete. I pushed some data to the drive and was able to stream it to my laptop. Next up was the task of trying to get the XBox 360 to see the drive. I was able to get the 360 to see my laptop but not the NAS. (and I don't want to have to go through a computer)

According to some people who had the same problem, after they upgraded to the new firmware they had to reset the NAS to the factory defaults and then after that their 360 was able to see it ok. I will give that a try tonight and then hopefully it will all "just work".