Mike Neir's Ramblings

S/PDIF Wishes and HDMI Dreams

Sun, 27 Dec 2009 20:57:15 -0500

One of my long-standing dreams of home ownership has been to have a bitchin' audio/video setup. I've probably had this desire for longer than I've had the desire to be a home owner, now that I think about it. Just for clarification - by "bitchin' audio/video setup," I don't mean some $50,000 custom-made setup that is put into a specially designed room with amphitheater seating positioned on shock-absorbing pylons, or anything like that. While that would certainly be neat, that's not really what I'm looking for.

What I want is a system where I can be enjoying either music or a movie/tv show/whatever in one room, and be able to move to another room and enjoy the same content, seamlessly. Moreover, I want this to be usable by multiple people, simultaneously. Here are the big bullet points for what I am after:

All rooms should be connected to a distribution setup
The distribution setup should send at least one HDMI and at least two S/PDIF signals to each room
HDMI feed should be attached to HD peripherals - DVD player, HD Satellite receiver, XBox360
Optionally, HDMI should be connected to a computer for MythTV/Hulu playback
S/PDIF feeds should be provided by a computer with some sort of remotely controllable music player
Keep A/V equipment as out of sight as possible

Historically speaking, the audio part was more important to me than the video part. Back in my apartment days, I only had one TV/receiver setup that could play back HD content, so moving to different rooms wasn't really feasible. I did, however, have S/PDIF capable receivers in all three rooms of my apartment, so the audio part was quite achievable. I was able to run cables through the HVAC ducting between my office, bedroom, and living room, providing the necessary connections to make things work. However, my signal source left something to be desired. I was using the digital output of a Sound Blaster Live! card, split three ways, to drive the setup. It worked for the most part, but the thrice-split signal was a bit weak in the living room, and it suffered cut-outs when the signal would get too weak.

While not really willing to spend any cash to solve the problem, but very willing to dream, I started looking around for solutions. After poking around for a while, I came across a few possibilities. One device, the Sonifex RB-DDA6S, provided a full S/PDIF splitter/amplifier, but I was pretty turned off by the price. I came across a few other devices that would distribute both HD video and S/PDIF audio. I didn't have much use for the video back then, but times have changed. Now that Erin and I are living in our large new home, the video part of the equation is much larger. We've got multiple HDTVs, multiple content sources to drive them (HD Satellite, DVDs, MythTV, XBox360s) and multiple rooms, so I've started considering video as a larger part of my dream setup.

HDMI is pretty much the only way I would go in terms of video. It yields the best quality, and has the smaller connector when compared with component video + S/PDIF. Being a digital signal, it's harder to simply split it, but there are solutions to that. Earlier on today, while browsing on amazon.com, I came across this bad boy: the Intelix HDMI-2X8. This thing would satisfy pretty much all my needs in terms of video distribution (sans cabling, of course). Two distinct inputs (one HDMI, one DVI plus coaxial/optical S/PDIF), and eight HDMI outputs. That would allow me to feed in the output of the master HD content provider (my Onkyo TX-SR605, connected to the satellite and DVD units), and a computer, and have it display on pretty much any room the house. We've actually got 11 rooms (counting the garage) that we *could* run signal to, so it wouldn't satisfy every need, but it would sure get things started. Seeing as how normal DVI-capable LCDs will display HD video content (sans audio, of course) with a HDMI-to-DVI cable, this could be quite handy.

I think its time for some more pondering on how I would best control this system... More to follow!

Thanks Mrs Veronica!

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 17:55:46 -0500

The Phishing Phairy delivered me good tidings today!

Dear Mr/Mrs

My name is Veronica ,I am the Current CEO of BankInter Branch office in
Madrid Spain, we offer Xmas loans with a minimum interest rate of 1%.
Fill the application form for immediate process.

LOAN APPLICATION FORM

NAME.............
FULL ADDRESS.....
CITY.............
STATE...........
ZIP CODE.........
COUNTRY..........
TEL..............
Sex.............
LOAN AMOUNT NEEDED....
LOAN PURPOSE.........
OCCUPATION..................................
MONTHLY INCOME..........................
LOAN DURATION PERIOD...............................
Other Contact E-mai:

PLEASE NOTE THAT ALL APPLICATION/INQUIRIES SHOULD BE SENT TO
intercustomercareservice@live.com AS THIS ADVERT IS SENT FROM OUR PUBLIC
OFFER CENTER

Thanks
Mrs Veronica

It's good to know I can get a Xmas loan from Mrs Veronica with only 1% interest! Where do I sign up?! Oh wait! I can sign up in my email!

...

Seriously, who falls for this crap?

Floating What?

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 10:32:38 -0500

Update a CentOS 4.4 xen instance to 5.4? Sure thing. I'll just resolve some broken dependencies, and then I'll be on my way...

[root@homeapps ~]
: rpm -Uvh procps-3.2.7-11.1.el5.i386.rpm udev-095-14.21.el5.i386.rpm e2fsprogs-1.39-23.el5.i386.rpm e2fsprogs-libs-1.39-23.el5.i386.rpm --nodeps
warning: procps-3.2.7-11.1.el5.i386.rpm: V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID e8562897
Preparing... ########################################### [100%]
1:e2fsprogs-libs ########################################### [ 25%]
2:procps ########################################### [ 50%]
3:udev ########################################### [ 75%]
4:e2fsprogs ########################################### [100%]
[root@homeapps ~]
: yum update
Floating point exception
[root@homeapps ~]
: ps aux
Floating point exception
[root@homeapps ~]
: top
Floating point exception

Oops.

Good thing I made a backup.

He Breathes

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 22:12:10 -0400

That's the rumor, anyway. I figure I should update this at least once or twice a year, so here goes.

The past few months have been pretty busy, but in a good way (mostly). The largest event has easily been the purchase of a house! It all happened in a whirlwind, with all of the pieces falling together in an eerily easy progression. Home ownership is definitely a change, but it's a good one, no doubt about it. Almost immediately after moving in, I was taken with the (much larger than usual) urge to build things and acquire copious amounts of power and hand tools. Erin has also noticed changes, hers being largely unexpected. In the search for another indoor activity besides Eve, she took up quilting! She's getting into it pretty heavily, and is making a lot of progress in a short amount of time.

Work has been hectic and stressful, which is the norm these days. I still haven't found a comfortable balance between being a boss and getting my own tasks done, and it makes things pretty difficult. I'm making a concerted effort to delegate more, but it's met with only limited success so far. Hopefully that trend doesn't continue.

That's all for now. We'll see if I can get back into the habit of posting, but I can't make any promises!

Sleep Is Good, I Hear

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 11:20:37 -0500

Yet another long while between posts. I suppose anyone that reads here should be used to that by now. There's plenty of stuff worth mentioning here, I suppose, but I rarely have the desire to sit down and type something up.

One thing that has made my life significantly more unpleasant lately is a general inability to get a good night's sleep. For the past two months, at least, I wake up feeling like I slept half the time I did, and its cumulative effects are the pits. My attention span is shorter, I have a harder time remembering things, and on bad days, I just lose topics of conversation in mid-sentence.

Erin is reasonably sure that I have sleep apnea, or something close to it. She's observed shallow breathing followed by fits and starts pretty much every time she's watched for it. From what she sees, I mostly wake up once every 15 minutes or so on the typical night. That would surely explain while I feel like a wet bag of crap every morning these days.

Looks like I need to head to the doctor once again.

Late Night Snow

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 14:50:18 -0500

I generally despise snow these days, except for when it's packable and I can throw it at things. Otherwise, I don't have a lot of use for it. It does make for some pretty scenes, though. This was taken off my balcony last night at about 5AM, with diffuse light from the city nearby. I thought the sky colors were pretty neat.

What I've Been Up To

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 02:42:24 -0500

I can't say I've been exactly busy over the past few months, but I've certainly been occupied by things that keep me from updating this blog. I figure it's past time for an update, so I shall discuss said things in ascending order of awesomeness.

Work - My responsibilities at work keep growing, which is both cool and stressful at the same time. I am now supervising four subordinates and am much more involved with our product development process as a whole. All the while, I'm still doing many of the tasks I've been doing for a long time, along with the endless list of new tasks that come along. The people on my team are quite easy to manage for the most part, but I'm still getting accustomed to worrying about the work flows of four other people, rather than just focusing on my own. I'm sure it's something I'll get better with over time, but I still find myself struggling with it.

EVE Online - A few buddies from work got me into this game over the summer, and it's become something I spend a lot of time on. There are a lot of things about EVE that make it really neat in my eyes (its server technology being one of them), but the one that stands out the most is the fact that the intensity of the game is pretty much what you want it to be. If you want to spend crap loads of time playing, you can surely do that, but if you're low-key, the game allows you to advance your character with very little interaction. It also reminds me of a game I played a lot as a kid - Privateer. A lot of the concepts and pursuits are similar, but instead of it being limited to a rather small single player environment like is present in Privateer, EVE has literally thousands of solar systems to explore, each with planets, moons, asteroids, and other things that you can interact with alongside of tens of thousands of other players from around the world, simultaneously (the most I've seen online was just short of 40,000, this past weekend). I could probably talk about EVE in great length, but suffice it to say that I think it's quite cool.

A Girl - Yep, you read that right. Fortune has smiled upon me and given me the gift of an awesome girlfriend. We shall call her Erin, for that is her name. Erin started up working where I work in the middle of the summer, and our paths crossed for the first time at a party thrown by a coworker. She was instantly taken with me (yes, instantly), but it took me a bit longer to come around. I'm really glad I did though, because this is easily the most healthy and rewarding relationship I've been in. I'm well aware that I have my fair share of quirks, idiosyncracies, and downright annoying behavior. She is very patient with me in those regards, doesn't try to change me in ways that she knows I won't change, and instead does her best to adjust her expectations accordingly. This is a stark contrast to some of my past relationships, and I can't describe how much I appreciate that. I'm doing my best to reciprocate. At this point, the list of things about her that I would change is pretty much non-existent, so it's not too hard for me. :) Long story short, we both make each other very happy, which is pretty damn awesome.

Tales Of The Voting Booth

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 15:48:42 -0500

The American election system is in trouble. Why you ask? The strings holding the pens to the voting booths are attached at the right side, and are much too short! How is a lefty supposed to vote if he can't mark the right areas on the ballot!?

I kid, I kid.

A funny/odd coincidence happened to me after I filled out my ballot. I placed the ballot in the scanner machine, and it registered the number "666", which I assume means that I was the 666th person to vote. Some of the older ladies running the voting area were like "uh oh! 6-6-6!" After I got back to the car, I turned on my iPod, which was on random. The Slayer song "Cult" came on as I was buckling my seat belt, which, oddly enough, has the following lyrics..

I've made my choice. Six six six

While I doubt they were referring to the voting process, the coincidence struck me as funny. I guess that means I'll be voting Slayer in 2012.

Cached

Sun, 26 Oct 2008 21:13:41 -0400

As most people probably can discern by reading the backlog of content entries here, I'm a fan of Memcache. It makes database driven applications crazy fast when used properly, and can be damn simple to integrate if your code is set up properly. I integrated it with the monitoring system I wrote at work a while back to take some of the load off MySQL, and it's worked exceptionally well.

While checking something else out in the monitoring system, I ran a report on the current Memcache status, and was kind of blown away. The system currently consists of 16 servers, 15 of which have memcached running on them, with 512MB allocated on each. That's 7.5GB of cache memory, for those that don't like doing math. I'll let the report speak for itself...

192.168.0.2:11211
uptime: 563.945474537 days
read: 18097.7607219 GB
written: 19537.6376228 GB

192.168.0.3:11211
uptime: 563.944502315 days
read: 18373.8532251 GB
written: 19785.8979402 GB

192.168.0.4:11211
uptime: 429.195578704 days
read: 13156.7254652 GB
written: 14532.1054876 GB

192.168.0.5:11211
uptime: 563.944247685 days
read: 19168.9044306 GB
written: 20775.6700451 GB

192.168.0.6:11211
uptime: 563.944212963 days
read: 18374.297407 GB
written: 19933.5923319 GB

192.168.0.7:11211
uptime: 563.944178241 days
read: 17361.7501419 GB
written: 18974.0357142 GB

192.168.0.8:11211
uptime: 563.942581019 days
read: 17525.4281332 GB
written: 18935.3812126 GB

192.168.0.9:11211
uptime: 317.73099537 days
read: 11330.5213323 GB
written: 12179.3746607 GB

192.168.0.10:11211
uptime: 0.774074074074 days
read: 3.608856056 GB
written: 5.957609009 GB

192.168.0.11:11211
uptime: 270.114976852 days
read: 9460.02688244 GB
written: 10477.9305441 GB

192.168.0.12:11211
uptime: 446.070590278 days
read: 14058.0880373 GB
written: 15349.2392257 GB

192.168.0.13:11211
uptime: 433.269293981 days
read: 13117.9202484 GB
written: 14265.9189342 GB

192.168.0.14:11211
uptime: 288.806412037 days
read: 9547.86924515 GB
written: 10396.3484227 GB

192.168.0.15:11211
uptime: 98.0899074074 days
read: 3658.49374042 GB
written: 4026.71671353 GB

192.168.0.16:11211
uptime: 18.6412731481 days
read: 529.824877851 GB
written: 591.686248784 GB

uptime (total): 5686.35829861 days
bytes read (total): 183.765072745 TB
bytes written (total): 199.767492713 TB

In just the current running processes, there is over 15 years of combined uptime, with 9 memcached processes up for over a year... 183 terabytes of data read from the memcached processes and 199 terabytes written. That's a lot of uptime and a lot of data! I've got a couple of crash-happy servers in the cluster too. Without those, the numbers would be higher.

For those wondering, the write number is higher than the read number because the latest snapshot data is stored into memcache for easy retrieval each time data is collected. The read numbers are part of the snapshot storage process as well, and would also be higher if there was more activity on the web interface.

roflateam

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 02:30:07 -0400

This is great too!