I just upgraded my HTPC from some old Ubuntu to Debian Lenny, mostly to get the newest 0.22 version of MythTV. The installation was pretty straightforward except that the channel scanning didn’t work. For this I had to use the scan program to get a channels.conf file to import into MythTV. After that all was fine. Except that I didn’t have any EIT data. And that annoying problem has now been bugging me for over two weeks and hundreds of browsed MythTV forum pages and HOWTOs. Until I today found a solution.
Continue reading ‘Missing EIT in Mythtv 0.22 (Welho, Helsinki)’
This is one of those errors in Rails that just make you go WTF!? The amount of debug information is minimal, and the row that supposedly is the culprit is syntactically correct. Even Google doesn’t really help. I gather that this error can occur in several different contexts and caused by different things, so I’m not trying to provide an all purpose solution to this. The case I’m going to show you is probably quite rare, but it happened to us at work today. I never figured out exactly why Rails chokes in this situation, but I found a way to reproduce the problem and also a solution. The main characters in this drama are the respond_to and render methods, and the main villain is a mysterious invisible parameter.
Continue reading ‘Rails: interning empty string’
I just wrote my first ever AppleScript to solve a problem I’ve had for some time. As I’ve mentioned several times before, I use the MPD music player on my HTPC to play music through my amplifier while controlling playback using my laptop or mobile phone. This works like a charm and I’ve been really satisfied with this setup — until I fell in love with iTunes’ Genius function.
I use iTunes on my MacBook and mainly at work, either listening through my headphones or streaming music to the office speakers using our AirPort Extreme. As my library is rather diverse, I like to use Genius to get an ad hoc playlist of similar songs to avoid the “shuffle all, press next until a good song comes along” selection method. Needless to say, Genius has worked fabulously. However, when I come home and start playing music through MPD, I’m back to the shuffle all hell since I can’t be bothered creating playlists manually.
So this got me thinking: Is there any way I can use iTunes Genius together with MPD? The answer is yes, and the tool I used is AppleScript.
Continue reading ‘Getting iTunes Genius into MPD’