Last night I went to Piedmont Park’s Screen on the Green for the showing of “Mommie Dearest.” And while I didn’t stay for the whole movie (I am getting so old, I know), I enjoyed it.

I met Jodi on the lawn in the back with our doggy, Jameson, and we ate Cafe Sampan Chicken (mmmmm) while Jameson tried to attack everyone (don’t know why she does that).

Sticking out in my mind were the old, southern, redneck, gay guys (ahh, Atlanta) sitting near us who kept yelling at people to sit down, and the responses they got back. Sigh. I’m one of those guys who really doesn’t like being confrontational, but one that likes seeing other people be confrontational, and laughing about it. Reminds me of the time I was driving and saw a driver across the intersection get cut off. The driver immediately blasted his horn and then proceeded to stick his middle finger up and lean way forward, cursing in his car. I was sitting at the intersection, and couldn’t help but start laughing, it was just too hilarious how angry this guy was. The woman next to me heard/saw me, and started laughing too, and shook her head.

I think people go around all day with so much stress that they just lay it all out at inappropriate times. Why can’t we all just get along?

In other news, I’m steeped in database schemas, php code, templating engines, and CSS style sheets for large-scale web application development, and writing ASP.NET C# web applications, .NET compact-framework mobile application development in C# — busy every second of the day and loving it!

Let’s hash this out. Here’s my dilemma. I like listening to music everywhere I go - at home, at work, in every room, everywhere. I also like iTunes, the iPod, and the Apple Airport Extreme with AirTunes. I absolutely hate Digital Rights Management (DRM). I have bought many a stuff from iTunes music store, only to find out that my iPod loses the DRM and just won’t play music I have _payed for_, or that any AAC protected files are not playable on my linux laptop or mythtv-server. The worst part is that I would probably buy so much more music if it wasn’t so crippled with DRM. Alas, it is a sad situation, and not one that I would like to comment on much more, so here is my work-around.

At home, Jodi’s powerbook sits in the kitchen. It has iTunes and quite a few songs stored locally on its hard drive. I have my mythtv-server sharing its music through rendezvous and mDNSresponder so that it shows up under shared music. In that share I have my old iTunes collection (including some DRM protected AACs) that will play fine, once authorized on the powerbook.

This solution is nice, but there is no way to make playlists or change ratings on the shared music — since it’s not technically writable. So now, I have an nfs mount that is auto exported on the powerbook, and it can read/write/sync the entire media collection (as /mnt/media) or view it read-only through the share.

Now, I can setup a playlist of all types of media, AAC protected, mp3s, whatever from the local computer, from the mythtv-server, etc., and hit play. I use my Airport Extreme with AirTunes to stream it wirelessly to a closet where I have carefully (over several renovations, mind you) wired 14-gauge 4-wire UL-approved speaker wire all over the house. I have a pair of in-cieling speakers in the kitchen (with a volume control wired in-line), I have a pair of in-wall speakers in the bedroom (with another volume control wired in-line), and 2 more sets of in-ceiling speakers, one in the master bathroom and one in the master closet (with a single volume control to control both since they are pretty close). They are connected to an old AIWA amp with a line-in from the Airport Extreme with AirTunes. Very discreet, very sweet, whole house audio. I even named the iTunes AirTunes speaker “Whole House Audio” so that does exactly what it says.

Now I rock out to my iTunes through out the whole house. I can drop the volume locally through the volume controls if need be, but what if a crappy song comes on. Can I hit next? Can I pause? Only if I bring the powerbook with me, which is not so bad, but what if I’m in the bedroom, almost asleep, and want to turn it off (or on), or walking around the house?

If only there were a way to control iTunes from any where. I’m thinking some type of web-interface served up so that I could use a laptop, or even better, my PocketPC on the wireless LAN….

Well, lo and behold there are some applescripts for controlling iTunes, and someone has built a rudimentary interface with php running on apache on OSX, and boom, there it is: iTunes Web Remote.

There are also some scripts to grab your iTunes library and convert from iTunes to HTML (though I’ve seen an xml export of the iTunes library stored on my old PC, and I’m sure there’s a way to do an xsl transformation on that to html to make it look perty).

So there’s part of the solution. What about the ability to play anywhere? Well, unfortunately, the only streaming media solutions I know of are shoutcast and icecast (which I run on another server and soon to be mythtv-server) which do mp3s, and the Windows Media Encoder 9 (Windows only though — do I even have access to a windows machine?) — also I have heard of aacPlus (which I admit I know nothing about) but am starting to get very interested after reading this.

I almost forgot to mention my Russound 1-zone 2-channel amp that distributes audio to the bedroom, but locally will sense if audio is coming from my second mythtv-bedroom installation (or any local source, like a television), and automatically switch and amplify the local source signal and play it over the same in-wall speakers. Add to that the fact that the screen is a projector on the wall, and you can just drool over the techno-goodness that is my whole-house audio/video system.

Jodi’s master plan is almost complete. We are almost done transforming the condo from 1990s-contractor-spec to an amazing, modern, well-designed space!

The new master bedroom closet systems are here (in boxes) and our finishing guys have completed sealing up and painting all the walls. They did an incredible job, and I’ve got some pictures to prove it.

It’s been rough, working by ourselves, and on a budget to design big, but it’s almost at the point where we can see the light at the end of the long tunnel.

The end result:
- all new limestone flooring (big tiles)
- modern imported Poliform kitchen and cabinetry with integrated Sub-Zero, Miele appliances, including an integrated espresso machine
- fully upgraded bathrooms including Poliform cabinetry, custom Corian countertops and shower
- a full whole house (or should I say condo) audio system with automatic switching to local source on projector in bedroom
…. and of course, much much more….

Where can we go from here? Only up!

In trying to setup SVN webDAV over https on a server, I kept getting permission denied:

[Mon Jun 13 17:49:27 2005] [error] [client 10.0.0.59]
   (20014)Error string not specified yet: Can't open file
    '/home/svnroot/format': Permission denied
[Mon Jun 13 17:49:27 2005] [error] [client 10.0.0.59]
    Could not fetch resource information.  [500, #0]
[Mon Jun 13 17:49:27 2005] [error] [client 10.0.0.59]
    Could not open the requested SVN filesystem  [500, #13]
[Mon Jun 13 17:49:27 2005] [error] [client 10.0.0.59]
    Could not open the requested SVN filesystem  [500, #13]

I thought I would be clever and:

[root@beta ~]# chmod ugo+rwx /home/svnroot

But still no. OK, so it must be SELinux, right? Let’s enable SELinux access to home directories, and reboot. What’s with this SELinux changes requiring a reboot, it’s like windows. There goes my few weeks up-time….

Instead, I FINALLY found this:

http://subversion.tigris.org/faq.html#reposperms

that says to issue:

$ chcon -R -h -t httpd_sys_content_t PATH_TO_REPOSITORY

Do I know what that does? No. Do I care, since my svn is now working after only a few hours? No.

My buddies and I have been on this weird topic of finding multi-million dollar ideas for a while now. You know it’s bad when you realize you are texting your buddies all day, shooting off ideas, and the responses come back with: “that’s a $50,000 VC fund idea, max.” It’s that kind of all-consuming conversation where there is no real “hey how’s it going man, what’s up,” it’s simply: “ok, how about a social networking site that’s ….” Unfortunately, it’s either that or fall into that horrible horrible trap of being the atypical complaining software engineer/programmer/IT-dood who complains about how much everyone else pails in comparison with their coding/understanding/grasp on everything and the entirely predictable “I don’t get paid enough for what I do” rant that I used to be guilty of too, I’ll admit. In fact, that actually gives me an idea….

What does it take to live web 2.0 style? How does one become …err… “one” with the web 2.0 mantra? Let’s just see:

- check multiple e-mail addresses, several g-mail accounts (very web2.0), a yahoo mail, and an old hotmail just for kicks
- have massive amounts of rule-based entries, spamassassin filters, in said e-mail accounts, have a nice little PDA device and/or smartphone that grabs the last few mails from the important ones
- update your blogs regularly. Definitely, very web2.0, to update all your blogs at least 3 times a day. We’re talking, your Wordpress blog on your own dedicated server, your MovableType (and Typepad) blog, your blogspot and blogger blogs, your livejournal diary, your myspace blog, bloglines, yahoo 360!, googleblogs (I made that one up, but by the time I finish this post, I’m sure it will be invented) and make sure you ping and technorati tag the crap out of everyone and everything. Oh, and be sure to flickr blog your breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and everything in between.
- bookmark everything (including this post) with your bookmarklet software of the day using del.icio.us
- blogroll everyone: not only must you blog yourself, but you must also make sure you perform roll call on all your friend’s blogs and their friend’s friend’s blogs, which leads me to my next web2.0 item d’jour:
- social network the crap out of everyone. You must update your profile and send at least a million messages on your Friendster, Orkut, Linkedin, Ryze, mySpace, classmates, and all 50 other social networks you’re in.
- use an API to build an API on top of an API to automate your job, life, and social-life (what’s that?)

Then, and only then, will you be web2.0.

While over at my Mom’s, I happened to notice the Tivo (I bought her) recommending all sorts of wierd things. Let’s just pretend that we don’t know the recommendations are really from paid sponsorships, and that the commercials it automatically downloads are really quite nice. Like I said, pretend….

Here’s my idea. Now that some of my techno-savvy buddies now have mythtv setups, I think it would be quite cool to build a little system that would provide suggestions/recommendations from your friends. Oh No did I just think up another social network peer recommendation friendster linkedin super clone idea!?! Yes, I did.

So here’s how it would work — all it would do would either take your current recordings or scheduled recordings and make basic “search queries” on the titles, times, and maybe channel names (because channel #s are different everywhere). It would then provide a little web service type (rss xml whatever) off your mythweb and let each machine hit each other’s feed. The page to view these suggestions would be just a list of your friend and their suggestions, allowing you to click (thinking about the web interface) the suggestion to perform a search on your current schedule database and schedule the recording if you’d like. They’re just recommendations, after all.

The other idea would be to build some sort of mechanism to actively recommend, by either providing some sort of thumbs up or down rating to recordings ala tivo, but it would be cooler if it could do it semi-automatically. However, I just don’t want all my buddies to know I’m recording Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and the Trading Spaces marathon, followed by American Idol. Also, the mythtv setup in my household (don’t know about yours) has two users, so allowing a simple thumbs up or down wouldn’t work (James complains how after my brothers and I come over to their house and use their Tivo, it starts recording those dern MTV/VH1 shows). No offense Jodi, but I like Law and Order, but not enough to record all 50 episodes that come on per day.

It’s almost there - huh?

I’m sad to see it go, my first car …

http://atlanta.craigslist.org/car/76531456.html