I just got off the phone with the RMV. After being on hold for about 30 minutes (annoying, but not a huge deal) I explained my problem to the woman who came on the line: that I gave them a California C & M1 license (passenger cars and motorcycles) and received a Massachusetts D license (passenger cars only) in return. She said she’ll pull my application, double-check that I did, indeed have a California motorcycle license and that my application was properly filled out to reflect that (both true) and then add the motorcycle endorsement to my license free of charge. Took about 5 minutes of actually talking to a person and hopefully things will be fixed soon. Sadly it will apparently take until Wednesday before her request for my application paperwork goes through, but whatever, I can deal with that.

A couple of weeks ago, Memorial Day Weekend actually, Jessi and I finally got a TV. I had been planning on a 42″ Olevia 720p display with no tuner, because it was an incredibly good deal on Newegg, but then I found an even better deal at Best Buy, and was able to get a 42″ Insignia 1080p display with a tuner for just about $100 more. So we’ve now got a 42″ 1080p TV hooked up to some cheap rabbit ears I picked up at Radio Shack. It’s pretty awesome just for the irony factor of that alone, but with those cheap rabbit ears we’re able to pick up a good 20 digital stations, about half of which are in HD as well as a number of analog stations. So we’ll be able to watch, for example, the Olympics in all their HD glory without the need for cable or satellite.

As I’ve mentioned before, my intention has been to set up some sort of HTPC to manage the content for the TV. I went back and forth before deciding on ElGato’s EyeTV on a Mac Mini over MythTV on a PC, but in the meantime I didn’t really want to spend the $500+ on a mini, so I set up an old gaming PC I built a couple years ago and hooked it up to the VGA input on the TV. At first, just to try and get things going quickly I installed Ubuntu on it. This proved to not really work at all. Ubuntu could see, but not use the integrated sound card on my motherboard, and video without sound isn’t very fun. I probably could have fixed that with a little tweaking, but there was a bigger problem: my 5-ish year old Athlon 64 3000+ just didn’t appear to be up to the task of playing HD video. I decided to give it a real test: a 1080p rip of the BluRay version of The Fifth Element in a matroska container using H.264 encoding. Basically, it just didn’t work at all. So I decided to scrap that idea and just set it up with MythTV for now so we can at least watch TV with basic PVR options.

I threw an Gentoo on it, and got MythTV running (with sound!) and started planning out the new system to replace it. Then I figured, what the hell, my entirely system from the kernel to mplayer has been compiled from source and optimized for the Athlon 64 architecture, I might as well give the HD video another shot. Amazingly, mplayer opened the 1080p matroska video and played it. Success! It did have some issues with the audio going out of sync, but some command line flags fixed that (’-cache 8192 -autosync 1′ is what ended up working). So, it appears, a 1.8 GHz single core Athlon 64 can decode 1080p H.264 in real time! This discovery vastly dropped the minimum hardware requirements, and thus the cost, of a MythTV based HTPC so I decided to give that option another look. A bit of research later, and I was able to spec out a full HTPC with HDMI output and all that good stuff for just about $200.

It’s hard to argue with those numbers, so it looks like I will be going with a MythTV solution after all. I’ll be using a 2.2 GHz dual-core Athlon 64 X2, which my experiment suggests will be more than adequate for what I need and, of course, powering it all with a fully optimized Gentoo install. I’m going to keep the old gaming PC running as my backend for all the storage so I don’t need to cram too much into the tiny little case I’m getting for the HTPC, and trying to figure out the final design for that system is proving to be an interesting problem in it’s own right, but I’ll write more about that later in what I’m sure will be a fascinating exposition on the relative merits of various advanced filesystems and the several different UNIX-like operating systems that love them.

Anyone who pays attention to Apple news is, I’m sure, aware of their recent announcement of Snow Leopard, the successor to Leopard, which will be coming out in about a year. They’re also probably aware that Apple is advertising this release primarily as a code refactoring that will add stability, optimization, and ‘no new features’. Since that announcement there have been any number of blog posts explaining how there actually will be some significant new features, they’re just mainly under the hood enhancements that the average user wouldn’t actually be aware of. RoughlyDrafted has an excellent post explicating what some of those features are, so I’m not going to rehash that discussion. I do, however, want to address one of the points made, specifically that ‘ZFS isn’t going to replace HFS+ outright in Snow Leopard, and has limited relevance today to desktop and laptop users, particularly those who never move beyond the single disk drive installed in their system’. I disagree.

This statement is partly true in that most people, especially those with only a single HDD, won’t benefit from ZFS‘ pooling and the various benefits that come from that (such as RAID-Z). But I still think it’s inclusion in OS X will be a coup for the average user as well. Specifically, the use of ZFS means that silent data corruption will be a thing of the past thanks to copy on write and full data checksumming. Also, the advantages that ZFS’ snapshots will bring to TimeMachine will greatly enhance it’s usability, speed, and effectiveness for anyone with an external hard drive, network hard drive, or Time Capsule. On top of that, there are, in fact, a few benefits of ZFS pooling for those with just a single hard drive. In particular, filesystem level compression will allow the user (or, more likely, Apple) to designate certain folders to be their own filesystems that are automatically compressed to to provide a) more efficient use of space and b) faster access. This won’t help much with your music and video files, but it should do a lot to greatly reduce the size and increase the access speed of the configuration and preferences files in your Library (mine is currently 3.24 GB uncompressed). I don’t imagine it would be difficult for Apple to update OS X so that /Library, /System/Library, and /Users/*/Library are all their own filesystems with compression turned on. And even if they don’t a savvy user could do this themselves if they really wanted to.

ZFS will also be a boon to those who might want to create their own home server. A niche market for now, perhaps, but the ability to just keep adding new USB or FireWire (or eSATA?) hard drives to their computer and have that storage space just seamlessly added into their storage capacity will make it significantly easier to manage.

I, for one, think that ZFS is probably the best news related to Snow Leopard that I’ve heard. I’ve already been using ZFS in both Leopard (you can download an update from the ADC that gives you full read/write access to ZFS) and FreeBSD and loving every minute of it. I just wish Sun would release it under the GPL so it could be included in Linux as well…

After two years and far too many visits to multiple RMV offices I now finally have a Massachusetts driver’s license. A CLASS D driver’s license. The forms I submitted as well as the California license they took from me both clearly specified that not only am I qualified and certified for, but was applying for a CLASS D AND M license. Of course it’s well beyond business hours now, so I’ll have to wait until Monday morning before I can even attempt to rectify this situation in a way that doesn’t involve me having to pay money to take tests I’ve already passed.

And here I was all ready to start maybe being possibly very slightly less hostile toward the Massachusetts state government in all its various and sundry forms.

As I mentioned in my last post, I recently migraded my dy/dx tech website to a different hosting company. If you’ve really been paying attention, you may recall that not too long ago I had gotten a Media Temple hosting account with the plans on migrating all of the sites I host, both my own and clients’ to it only to discover that setting up Django on a Media Temple (dv) account is far more trouble than it’s worth. My estimation of that hasn’t changed, in fact I actually cancelled my Media Temple account a few weeks ago after the last client I had hosted there was moved off to another host. My experiences with WebFaction have been so positive (exploding data centers notwithstanding), that I have instead migrated everything to their servers. Well, not everything yet. This blog is still hosted on DreamHost for the time being (though I plan on moving it to a WebFaction hosted WordPress blog in the very near future before eventually migrating it to a Django based solution as I’ve mentioned before).

The hosting hassles referred to in the title, thankfully, have nothing to do with the actual hosting companies I’m dealing with, and are instead due to a foolish mistake on my part: when I switched my domain to WebFaction, I forgot that I had custom MX records enabling the use of my hosted google apps for my domain. As a result, as the new DNS information started propagating, people stopped being able to send me email. Fortunatly, it was an easy fix to just change the MX records with WebFaction, and I don’t think I missed any important emails, but if anyone out there got a bounceback when sending me an email, that’s why.

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to announce a big new project. Not because I haven’t had any, but because everything I’ve been working on lately has been so large that nothing is quite ready to go live yet. But finally, I get to announce a big project that I recently finished: the Becoming MOBOS video blog. As I’m sure many of you from the Boston area are aware, there is a new Mandarin Oriental that’s been under construction down by the Pru. They hired me to create an internal video blog for them. Unfortunately, since it’s internal, I can’t link to it, but the screenshot to the right links to a full-size, albeit redacted, image. It’s a WordPress based blog using a verstion of WPelements.com’s MassiveNews theme customized by your truly. I also used FlowPlayer to provide the Flash video playback capabilities. All in all, I think it turned out to be a pretty slick site.

That’s not the only news, however. In preparation for announcing the Becoming MOBOS site I’ve been doing a little work sprucing up my own website. So I also get to announce a new version of the dy/dx tech website (I also changed hosts for it, so you may need to wait for the DNS to propagate if you’re still seeing the old site). The overall look of the site is the same as before, but I’ve removed some rather pointless elements such as the Google Map that used to be on the front page. In it’s place is now a slideshow of screenshots from my portfolio, which I think is a much better use of the space. The majority of the changes, however, are under the hood. As you may recall, I redeveloped the site using Django a while ago. Since then I’ve spent a lot more time with Django and know a lot more about it, so I completely redeveloped the site (using the newforms-admin branch and was able to make a lot of improvements to the code, and basically leave it better positioned to integrate more features in the future. Among other things, I plan on migrating this blog to a Django-based solution and integrating it into the dy/dx tech website to some extent. I’ve been working heavily with Django for the past several months, and I just keep liking it more and more. It makes every part of my job so much more enjoyable and, in a lot of cases, faster. Be on the lookout for another project going live in the next couple weeks: this one will be Django-based and will be very public, and, I predict, very popular.

Finally, after five failed attempts, I’ve managed to get my California license converted to a Massachusetts one. On Friday Jessi, who’s been using her Illinois license for the past 4 years in MA, and I drove up to the RMV in Lowell (we’d had enough with the one in Boston) and actually managed to get our licenses converted. At the moment we’ve only got temporary ones, but soon I should, for the first time in my life, have a license that actually has my current address on it! Now I just have to hope that my new Massachusetts license retains my motorcycle endorsement, because the temporary license they gave me has no indication of that. I’m not going to be very happy if, after all that, I only have a half-functional license. Especially if they want to try and make me take the motorcycle test again.

Currently I’ve got two projects hosted on WebFaction servers. So far, I really like them. As managed hosts go, they’re probably the best I’ve worked with, and they certainly make life very easy when building Django powered sites.

Today I got an email from one of the clients whose project is hosted on WebFaction saying that their site is down. So I checked it out, and while I was able to access it, it was extremely slow, to the point where a less forgiving browser/LAN setup might cause it to time out. So I fired off a support ticket to WebFaction, and within a couple minutes, not only was the site back up to speed, but I was provided with a very good explanation for why my server was having problems.

Apparently there was an explosion at one of WebFaction’s data centers this weekend. It took out power to the data center, but fortunately no one was hurt and none of the servers were damaged. Obviously, there have been some interruptions in service for the servers in that data center (which includes both of my WebFaction projects), but they’ve already gotten a significant number of the servers back online (though only one of mine).

Amazingly, this is actually the second time I’ve had a server taken out by an explosion at a data center. The first time was with a hosted Microsoft Exchange server with a hosting company in London.

It really sucks having sites down, especially critical ones (fortunately only one of the projects I have hosted with them is critical, and it’s the one that’s back up already), but as reasons for downtime go, you have to admit that an explosion is a pretty good one.