Sean’s Obsessions

I haven’t been posting much even though a lot of things have crossed my mind that would be interesting to write about. I’ve been pretty busy with my family and some other projects. Notably, I’m writing a few articles for IBM DeveloperWorks on Unix performance monitoring which I’ll link to here once they […]

I wrote an article for O’Reilly’s Emerging Telephony site called Telecom Terms and Concepts. It’s all about how the existing phone system and VoIP works, how they’re the same, and how they’re different.
On another voice related note, John Lange has started up the Canadian Association of Voice over IP Providers, a sort of lobby/working […]

I’ll be presenting at the local Unix user’s group on the topic of RSS, Greasemonkey, and some other tools I’ve found that make web and email more efficient (in terms of information per unit time). The announcement is below…
The Manitoba UNIX User Group (MUUG) will be holding its next monthly
meeting on Tuesday, January 10. […]

I upgraded my workstation from FC1 to FC4 a couple of weeks ago. While moving stuff around, I bumped my external tape drive and it fell about a foot. Thinking nothing of it, I continued working.
I started to notice that my backups weren’t working. Thinking I might have a bad tape, I […]

Hauppauge dropped their prices on the PVR-350 to $150US, so a few friends and I split the shipping and bought some. A few hours later, my Myth box was up and running, and I’ve been slowly tweaking it. I ran into a few snags, which I’ll explain below.
Previously I had used KnoppMyth, but […]

AMANDA has been my favourite Unix backup solution since I was first introduced in 1998. After rebuilding my workstation (which hosted the tape drive), I started reusing my old tapes. Somehow the tapes got out of order, so I ended up with a weird sequence like 1,2,4,7,11,…
I finally got annoyed enough to do […]

I’ve been wanting to build a PVR with MythTV for a while, and when talking to my friend Barry McKay about it, he said he had a Hauppauge PVR-350 I could borrow. So, I took him up on the offer, and with an old PC I built one.
However, much of the documentation I found […]

I’ve been using AMANDA to back up my systems for ages. After accidentally blowing away a file today, I had to recover. However, for some reason, amrecover told me that I didn’t have an index for that volume, meaning that it had no way of knowing what tape the file would be on.
Checking […]

I’ve experimented with different types of markup language to store small amounts of data, usually for config files, but never found something that quite did what I want. Of course, if I could define what I wanted, I’d be in a better position to find it.
The .ini style of files is all right, and […]

I just got a comment spam on my Random thoughts on GPL and BSD post. Nothing out of the ordinary, except that as I read the comment, it’s close to the topic:

On Wed, 2003-08-20 at 16:58, Matthew Easton wrote:
> Beg to differ. SCO has claimed that the GPL itself is illegal. If […]