Computing

Software

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| Software | Linux | Legacy |

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I've been writing software since I was about 10 years old, starting with various flavors of BASIC on our Xerox 820 and Eagle PC-2 and then later QBASIC when it was released with DOS 5.  I eventually moved on to C using the Borland's Turbo C IDE, though I did sometimes still dabble with Aztec C on the Xerox.

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Cinnamon Workspace Switcher Labels

Posted on September 16, 2015.

I've been using Linux Mint for years now.  Like a lot of people, I switched around the time that GNOME and Ubuntu set out to gaslight the world about how everything about their workflows have been wrong for all this time.  I tried GNOME Shell, but with each passing release they stripped more and more useful functionality from it.  Linux Mint kept the GNOME 2 torch lit and eventually offered both MATE (a GNOME 2 fork) and their own Cinnamon (GNOME 3 based) desktop variants.  I liked what Cinnamon had to offer, but it was a bit buggy and I so stuck with MATE instead.

Cinnamon continued to improve and at some point I decided to switch over to it.  I was able to recreate most of my workflows, but one thorn in my side was that at some point they replaced the workspace names in the switcher with these useless numbers.  It was either that or a tiny thumbnail of the desktop.  I use workspaces in a very specific way that helps me keep my trains of thought in order and the naming convention is a big part of that.  Thinking this was just temporary, I modified the JavaScript to bring back the names instead of numbers and kept reapplying the patch every time Cinnamon got upgraded.

Here we are years later and the silly thing is still broken! I sent the patch to dev that made the original change, but they didn't take it because it has a one major flaw: the width of the buttons is hard-coded.  I suspect this is the real reason behind why the simple view only shows the number.  It's tricky to know how to set the width, as it depends on the font being used, DPI, etc.  I assumed there was some "proper" way to do this, but I guess not?

Anyway, I'm posting the patch here in case anyone wants it.  If you want wider/narrower buttons, just change the constant at the top.

• workspace-switcher@cinnamon.org.patch

MythTV 0.26

Posted on March 10, 2013.

I had upgraded my MythTV back and front ends recently from version 0.24 and ran into some annoyances:

• The MediaMonitor has a new dependency on the udisks daemon, even if you don't use the Media Monitor feature.  Without it, Myth had very poor behavior when trying to eject optical media.  The eject option in the menu would just display a dialog saying "No devices to eject." Also, the physical eject button would get disabled after playing the disk even though I could eject it from a terminal with "eject" as the mythtv user.  The fallback in MediaMonitor::ejectOpticalDisk() seems to be useless.
• My carefully-crafted channel lineup for Comcast became non-functional.  This is such a tedious process that i still haven't gotten around to fixing it.  Right now, my digital tuners are recording programs that can't actually be tuned.

Silver lining to the Comcast DTA

Posted on January 24, 2010.

While the merits of Comcast's Digital Transport Adapters are debatable, there is one useful side effect to their existance.  Because the are so cheap, they lack a POD tuner.  This means that the channel tables are broadcast in-band, which in turn means that a normal QAM tuner can find them.  There is a tool called scte65scan that can find these tables using a regular DVB tuner (it also supports the HDHomerun).

Unraveling Comcast digital cable "upgrades"

Posted on January 23, 2010.

At some point we will become another victim of Comcast's digital cable "upgrade" plans.  We've been an analog cable customer of theirs for about 8 years.  The only reason we've stuck with them is because they are the only provider that can give us good ol' NTSC on our coax.  That is the only way to have all of our cable programming on more than one TV without paying extra each month for each.  In addition to the 3 TVs we also use MythTV for our DVR system, which has 3 NTSC and 2 ATSC/QAM tuners.

We are still getting the analog feed, but last week I finally installed the new digital equipment.  Their marketing B.S.  is confusing and intentionally misleading, but here is what I have learned from the experience:

"Extended Cable" customers are being migrated to the "Digital Starter" package.  You get one standard digital cable box, which comes with their "On Demand" feature, and up to two "Digital Transport Adapters".  They give you the impression that the DTAs are to help make up for the loss of analog service on your other TVs, but this isn't really true (more on this later).  After the migration, you will supposedly be left with your primary local stations and a few other useless cable stations like QVC on analog channels 2-17.  The rest are only available as digital QAM channels.

This is where it gets ugly.  A subset of our old cable lineup is available as unencrypted QAM256 channels, but the others are all encrypted.  Some are flagged as encrypted but are actually clear while the rest are fully encrypted.  They also sit on random QAM channels/programs that don't correspond to how they appear in the lineup on the cable box.  Comcast is free to move the channels around and play with the encryption whenever they please because they can just reprogram the cable box and DTAs remotely.  This makes using your own QAM tuner frustrating, especially since you can't receive arbitrary basic cable stations due to encryption (like Discovery Channel in my case).

The DTAs are a joke.  Comcast makes sure that the channel lineup is only a tiny subset of the lineup you are paying for.  They want you to rent real cable boxes, which makes them no better than DirecTV or U-Verse.  The DTA will mainly just tune in your "extra" local digital stations in standard definition, but they do NOT tune in your main local stations.  For example, if you have a local broadcaster on channel 10, they transmit high-def over the air on channel 10.1 and also probably broadcast a few extra programs on channel 10.2 and 10.3 or more.  The DTA will let you view channel 10.2 and 10.3 on your old NTSC TV, but it won't tune the main channel 10! Comcast provides those as standard def analog stations, but the DTA can't tune those and the DTA won't act as a pass-though when it is off like a VCR would (in fact, you can't turn DTAs off at all).  So to watch channel 10, you need an A/B switch on your antenna to switch between the main cable feed and the output of the DTA.  The other stations besides the locals that the DTA will receive are fairly useless (more QVC-like stations, Lifetime, and one or two others I've never heard of).

So unsurprisingly, Comcast continues to offer less for more.  If they provided basic cable stations on unencrypted channels that would be one thing.  The only good news in my eyes is that they offer nothing over what you can get from other communication carriers now.  All I have to do is put an antenna on the roof.

nedit_5.6~cvs20100114-rknize1 released

Posted on January 15, 2010.

Release a new CVS snapshot for nedit, mainly to ease installation on top of the snapshot that comes with Ubuntu 9.10.