Trey’s Blog

Just recently I decided to try enabling Internet Sharing through my Mac Mini to have my Tivo, across the house, access through it’s Internet connection. The reason I wanted to do this was beause my wireless network is currently 802.11b, and transferring files from my Tivo to my computer over wireless takes several hours. Since the Mac Mini is hardwired to the network, I thought I’d take advantage of its unused Wifi card which features 802.11g. I bought a new USB Adapter for my Tivo and began the configuration. Everything seemed to be going okay until I tried to configure the Tivo to see the Mac on the network. It saw 6 of my neighbors, but no Mac. My conclusion is that the Mac’s built-in wireless card is not strong enough to penetrate walls and floors of a moderate size house. If it had an external antenna, it would have likely performed better.

My next step is to buy a new 802.11g router and a new PCMCIA card for my laptop. Once my entire network is on 802.11g, I assume I will have no problems getting files from my Tivo in a timely manner.

This will seem a little odd, but I was talking to my daughter the other day about the people living in our neighborhood and she asked who our neighbors were. She wanted to know if the people down the street were our neighbors. Honestly, I couldn’t come up with a logical answer to that question. Basically I couldn’t figure out what constitutes a neighbor. Most dictionaries state that a neighbor is someone living near or bordering you. Many people just use the word neighbor to describe people living next to them, then others call those same people ‘next door neighbors.’ So are the people down the street our neighbors? We are in a neighborhood after all. What I finally told my daughter was that the people bordering our house were our neighbors, and each house in our neighborhood has neighbors, so the collection of each of these neighbors makes up our neighborhood. So those ‘people down the street’ I mentioned earlier would be our neighbor’s neighbor’s … neighbor. Is that right? I don’t know, but that is what I’m sticking to until I’m convinced otherwise. Let me know what you think.

I’d also like to hear other stories where your children generated abstract thought in you.

In the past 2 weeks, I dove head first into the world of XML with XSL, and now I’ve found myself floating to the top. The fundamental reason for using these two together is to allow the retrieval of data from a data source, output it as XML, then apply the look and feel to it using XSLT and CSS. By keeping the data separate from the design, we are able to adjust the look and feel without bothering with the backend programming or data. When your company requires a Change Management process to publish code, this will be your best friend.

One issue I came across that others had also come across was the confusion of what XSL calls variables. Many programmers such as myself find ourselves upset when we cannot reassign values to these variables, but XSL intended for these variables to behave in the same way that variables do in a math equation. They don’t reassign. They get substituted as the problem is executed. While this seems easy enough to grasp, I still wasn’t happy with the fact that no website I visited offered the solution to what I needed accomplish. All they did was argue why XSL variables made sense or not.

In a loop, I was wanting to trigger a flag (variable) that would tell the program to do something different after that flag was raised. This is easy enough to do in most programming languages, but XSL is special in that way. Though not published anywhere easily found, the way around this is using recursion and passing your values through parameters rather than variables. In other words, you need call the template with a initial value for your flag, then call the template again from within the template with a new set of parameters, which reflect the change you wanted to make (to your flag). I have a sample XSLT here. You see near the end of the days template, I call the template again with new parameter values. I also removed the for-each because with the recursion it is not required for my project. Just make sure you program your recursion to end at a certain point, otherwise all of you programmer friends will laugh at you as your XSL gets caught in an infinite loop. I’ve done that enough that this time, I avoided it. I hope this helps others looking for the answer to how to reassign values when XSL variables won’t take them.

It seems Tivo has outsourced their TivoToGo initiative to the good folks over at Roxio. This is good and bad news for Mac users. The good news is that Tivo has finally addressed the issue of having TivoToGo for Windows, but not for Mac. The bad news is that in order to get TivoToGo for Mac, you have to purchase Toast from Roxio. Though being packaged with Toast,

Tivo Transfer, as they call it, seems loosely integrated with Toast and the only obvious tie it has with it is the burning of your recordings. I think this is a good idea to keep things from getting bloated. Sometimes I want to burn a Tivo recording to DVD, but most times I don’t. The overall interface is very easy to use.

One thing against this offering from Roxio is the fact that TivoDecode Manager just came out last month for no cost to the end user. The would seem more inline with the previous offerings from Tivo since we do pay for a subscription after all. Which should you go with? That depends on what you are looking for. If you need a cheap way to watch you recordings or back them up onto your Mac, stick with TivoDecode Manager, but if you want the ability to make DVDs from your recordings, and have the interface integration with Toast, go with Toast. I’ve personally been using Toast for burning on my Mac, so I’m kind of torn between the two options and might just go for both.

After years of searching Houston for good quality Chicago-style Deep Dish Pizza, I’ve finally found it. Right under my nose along my daily commute, a restaurant popped up 2 weeks ago called Baby Leita’s. I found it in one of the local coupon circulars that come weekly in the mail and noticed it claimed that not every deep dish is Chicago-style. In complete agreement with this statement, I decided to give them a try and see what they were all about. It is family owned and operated by a couple who just moved back here from a long stint in the Windy City. They decided to give to Houston’s west side what can only be found in a select few restaurants here, but is widely available in Chicago.

Most of my experience with this style pizza has been from my trips to Chicago with my wife and family, but I consider myself a fairly knowledgeable pizza consumer. Baby Leita’s only offers the sauce on top version, which is unlike the pizzas I usually grab while up north, but it turned to be very well made. After some research on Wikipedia (behind the scenes), I discovered that there are two schools of thought with Chicago-style Deep Dish. Those with sauce on top and those with sauce inside the pizza. My wife, having been born and raised in Chicago’s north side, is very firm in her belief that deep dish pizza has the sauce inside and not on top, and that sauce on top indicates a stuffed pizza. A stuffed pizza would have the same beginnings as its deep dish brethren, but instead of having the sauce with the toppings, that add another thin layer of crust and put the sauce on top. Despite this, some larger known restaurants in Chicago feature the sauce on top of both and this little joint in Cypress has done it and exceeded expectations. If anyone in the Upper Katy Area, Cypress, or West Houston, TX is looking for good quality Chicago-style Deep Dish, I recommend Baby Leita’s. It is on Barker-Cypress near Highway 290, just in front of the Stonegate neighborhood. Map It!

After Steve Jobs pushed aside the Apple TV, Apple’s version of the Media Center [Extender],  to carry on for 90 minutes about the iPhone, I began to wonder if the Apple TV would do what I need it to do. It boasts streaming from any PC running the latest version of iTunes, but one catch is that iTunes only supports videos encoded with H.264 and some MPEGs. This makes sense for iTunes because its primary job is getting Videos from the iTMS (iTunes Music Store) to the customer’s iPod. However, I don’t purchase my movies through iTunes. I prefer to encode my movies using the XVid or DivX codec. All of my DVD Players support this codec so it makes sense for me. In fact, with a simple codec install for QuickTime, I’m able to watch my videos perfectly using FrontRow on my Mac Mini. This brings me to my question. If my videos work in FrontRow, would they also work on the Apple TV? I’m guessing that the interface on the Apple TV is the next version of FrontRow, which might suggest I could watch my movies assuming they were stored locally on the 40GB internal HDD or an external HDD. Streaming may be a different beast altogether since it seems to ride on the shoulders of iTunes sharing features. I use iTunes to listen to music or look through photos on my Tivo, which tells me it is very capable of sharing across Wifi, but by why will they not add DivX/XVid support for iTunes?

A couple of other issues I have about this device is the lack of an optical drive, to replace DVD Players, and the name itself. I’m aware that it outputs through a TV, but why call it “Apple TV” when no TV Tuner is included. The only TV Shows you can watch on this device are those available for purchase through iTunes.

What does this all mean? I guess if I can get some answers to the above questions, I would likely buy this unit because the $299 sure seems a lot better than the $799 Mac Mini alternative, which provides everything I need including a DVD Player replacement for only $500 more [ouch].

Today I was taking some cute shots of my youngest daughter as she was jumping on the trampoline with her hair full of static, but when I wanted to show my wife the pictures I took, my camera said, “No image” with a error code displaying “Err 02.”  Having never seen this code, I thought the worst.  Will I need to get my camera serviced?  I have a first generation Digital Rebel, so I looked on Canon’s site to find out what that error meant and their site really didn’t help matters.  It simply said, if normal troubleshooting didn’t work for this error code, I would need to have my camera serviced.  Worst case come true?  No.  I decided to try another card and see if it was able to write and read using the camera and it had no issues.  All was good with my camera, but I was still missing those pictures.  Having accepted the loss, I decided to reformat the card using the camera’s interface.  When I went to the format screen in the menu, it showed me that I had 22MB used on the memory which sounds like a small load of pictures, right?  Right!!  The filesystem on the card was corrupt, but using an application on my Mac (also available on Windows) called PhotoRescue, I was able to do just that.  I recovered all of the photos I thought I had lost forever, and actually pulled a photo from a few years ago that I hadn’t seen since then.  This software was very very easy to use and only cost $29, but that cost seemed smalled considering how often this might happen.  I think I was fortunate to go this long without having this issue before.

http://www.datarescue.com/photorescue/