Brandon Sharitt's Blog

Why yes, I am bored today. Link here.

Even though Boxee is technically list as “alpha” quality software, I decided to go ahead and give it a spin since these days alpha seems to be the new beta, and I’m okay running beta software. So I installed the software on a shiny new Ubuntu install on my wife’s old laptop and tried it out. On the bright side, nearly everything worked well out of the box, but the first thing that struck me was how slow and sluggish the whole interface was. Now the computer it’s installed on was no speed demon, but it’s been able to run MythTV and Windows Media Center(actually came preinstalled with this) with no problems. Right away I was disappointed that Hulu wasn’t working today, especially since that was the biggest draw to Boxee for me. Not getting discouraged, I decided to head over the CBS “channel” where full episodes of the classic Star Trek are available. Unfortunately, Boxee doesn’t seem to do any meaningful buffering and the video stuttered and skipped through the few minutes and waited and kept watching. Again, I wasn’t going to discouraged that easily and went to the WB channel to watch so B5 clips, but again with the skipping and stuttering. At this point I decided that the Boxee team just had some more work to do on their internet video, since these internet video sites usually work quite well on this same internet connection.

Next I decided that internet video was just icing on the cake, and what I really wanted was to be able to play the music and videos on my file server on my TV and its associated sound system, so I decided to watch some Darkwing Duck I had. Surely Boxee could do that. With great backends like Gstreamer, Xine, and MPlayer, anyone could hack together an interface for a TV, the hard part’s been done. When it comes to videos, I was sorely disappointed. The videos skipped forward without warning and the sound wouldn’t stay in sync. Just to make sure, I played the same videos on regular media players on the same PC and they played great. By this point I decided to give up for now, but I might try Boxee again in a few months to see how things are coming along.

With Boxee a bust, I needed something else. Sure, there’s the ubiquitous MythTV, but since I don’t need another PVR, it seems like a bit much. Fortunately I stumbled across Fludendo’s Elisa Media Center conviently in the Ubuntu repositories. It’s not as feature packed as Boxee, but it does at handle what it claims to do, and quite well I might add. Basically, Elisa is a Linux clone of Apple’s Frontrow software. Like Frontrow, Elisa is rather bare and basic, but it does put your music, videos, and pictures on your TV without a lot of fuss or overhead. One bright spot is that Elisa does have a plugins API that might extend it nicely, and there are already a couple useful ones like YouTube. This will probably be something I’ll be looking at working with if I ever get the time. The only problem with Elisa that it required a bit of manual tweaking to get the remote to work, but it was pretty easily found in the documentation. Overall I’m happy with Elisa, but I would have liked the online videos of Boxee.

You may have already heard the sad news, but GeoCities is finally getting put down. I know, I know, I too was surprised to hear that GeoCities was still alive. While I don’t use it anymore, it was I got a lot of my early experience building on the web. So my missing it will be out of nostalgia more than anything. I still miss my old site, Starbase 362, which was basically an online Star Trek encyclopedia(way before wikis), but I supposed I, along with the rest of the internet, have moved on and should let GeoCities rest in peace.

Summer is my favorite time to do any reading so I can sit out side in the warm weather and relax with a beer or eight. Now that’s it’s getting that time of year again, and I’m looking to put together a rough reading list. Last summer is was mostly political book, and the year before that it was science(mostly physics). This year I was to change pace a little bit and read some scifi. While I consider myself to be a big scifi fan when it comes to movies and TV, I actually haven’t done much reading in the genre. Most of my reading has been various Star Trek and Star Wars novels and half of Dune, and of course the works of Douglas Adams several times might be able to technically be counted(maybe I should count my book on string theory as scifi too?).

Aside from finishing Dune, what would the suggestions of the internet? I’m pretty open, so may classics that have held up well and some new stuff too. The only things I would rather avoid are books in the Star Trek, Star Wars, and other similar “big” universes. Any suggestions would be appreciate, just leave me a comment or drop me and e-mail.

ARMY OFDARKNESS.

My sister-in-law sent a laptop home with my wife hoping I would fix it since it was a used laptop and they didn’t know the password. I was expecting and easy fix, just resetting a Windows XP password. Unfortunatly when I saw the laptop, it was a 2 inch thick IBM ThinkPad 380D. If your not familiar with the ThinkPad 380D, it is a laptop manufactured in 1997 with a 150 MHz processor and 32MB of RAM, and this one has been upgraded to Windows 98. This thing makes my phone look like a supercomputer in comparison. Of course the “login” problem was with that difficult to bypass Windows 95/98 passwords where the work around is to click cancel(hint: if a login prompt gives you cancel option and you don’t know the password, go ahead and try it). Now I just really have to hope they didn’t actually pay someone money for this thing. I might be able to salavage it with a really lightweight linux distro, but they didn’t much care for Ubuntu, thought I did neglect that whole training thing. I could possible install Windows 2000, but even that would run like a dog. I’ll probably just give it back and try not to laugh too much in front of them.

I know I’ve said this at least 38 times before, but this time I mean it. I’m going to start updating my blog again. No really, I mean it. Sure I work a lot, I’m going back to school, trying to brush up on my programming so I can get a new job and have a wife and kid, but I’m sure I’ll find time. The trick is this time I’m not going to try to write big posts with actual conetent that I never finish writing, therefore never post them. Mindless dribble and posting random links/pictures are much easier to write.