Not Much To Update

I spent Saturday morning fishing some wire between to adjacent rooms while my 6 year old daughter was running around with a Clone Trooper helmet shooting me with a dartgun. I pulled 3 runs of Cat-5e and now wonder if I should have pulled some RG-6 while I was at it. I also spent some time thinking about how to implement deadbolt sensors as the kids never lock the doors when they come in the house.

Since we just cut the cord to our landline, this article caught my eye. Having watched the financial meltdown before the cracks really appeared (thanks to the early heads up by Minyanville), I can see a telco bailout coming.

Ubuntu or Windows 2000?

This weekend, I was re-purposing an old PC (a Celeron 2600, a former automation server) as a PC for the kids. It has a gig of RAM, 160 GB hard drive and an ancient GeForce2 GTS based video card. I had a few choices of OS - Vista, some flavor of Linux or Windows 2000. Vista would be too much for this hardware, but Linux should be good, right? Wrong. I tried the latest Ubuntu, but it felt like I installed Vista on it. The machine was so bogged down. Even browsing was slow. The graphics were laggy and xorg used a lot of CPU. I downloaded and installed the latest Nvidia drivers (at least I think I installed them correctly), but everything felt slow-mo. I tried Xubuntu since it has a lighter window manager, but not much better. Puppy Linux was peppier but I really needed Shockwave for the kids. I took out the trusty Win2k disk, loaded it up and scrounged up all the drivers off the net. I disabled a bunch of extra services. Very snappy. Even the graphics were smooth. I forgot how light Win2k is. I think this will do just fine for the kids.

Canceled Landline

I canceled our landline today. I should have done it a while ago, but was lazy. Ever since we got the Sprint AirRave, our cell coverage is perfect so we've used the landline even less. It's ridiculous that the lowest priced service is almost $8 and the taxes and fees nearly doubles the bill! I don't think I'll miss it much. I got tired of the dumba** carpet cleaning morons violating the do not call list with the automated dialers and recorded messages. I have been contemplating Ooma, but I'm just going to wait a bit.

XP SP3 RDP Crashes

Finally got around to installing SP3 on my automation server and was rudely greeted by a crash and reboot when I tried to RDP onto the machine. Reading the minidump confirmed RDP was somehow to blame. A quick Google revealed there's some incompatibility with some ATI (and Nvidia) graphics drivers and SP3's remote desktop. I installed the latest ATI drivers from AMD's site. We'll see what happens.

Update 5/5/09: Nope that didn't fix it. It still crashes when I RDP to it.
Update 6/9/09: It appears to have something to do with RDP color depth. 15 bits will cause a fatal, but keeping it 16 bits or higher doesn't.

Thin Client Deployed

After many trials and failures, I've got the T5700 running the way I want. The hardest part is installing what I wanted with only 256MB of flash disk while running 256MB RAM.

The first thing I needed to do was wipe the flash disk and reinstall XPe. I followed this guide here to do that, remove unneeded apps and get admin access.

Installing Perl was an adventure. I used the zip version (not MSI) of ActivePerl to install it. That way I could go step by step through the installer.bat file and figure out what broke. One problem I kept having was running out of RAM while the installer ran. I killed pretty much every unnecessary process I could even explorer.exe until I ran into an error that said "Can't open nul: No such file or directory." After some Googling, I found out the XPe install doesn't have a NULL driver. I stumbled onto this old post that seemed to address my issue, but like the poster, I couldn't get the registry script to run. Eventually, I figured out it was a permission problem. Once I got that squared away, I was able to get ActivePerl installed. I ran PPM to install the Win32::MultiMedia package, copied my gameport script over, ran it but it didn't work. It still couldn't see the gameport.

After trying a number of different things, including accessing winmm.dll from Perl, I was about to give up. Then I read this post that mentioned installing DirectX on the T5700. Turns out there was compact DirectX 9.0C install for the T5700. Read the install instructions, changed the TMP and TEMP environment variables and it installed perfectly. Fired up the script and it worked!

However, it didn't appear that the XPe supports DCOM, so I had to come up with a different way of getting the data back to the server. I went back to xPL, using the command line xPL sender and calling that from my Perl script whenever an input changed. Good enough.

Next I tried to install a webcam on it, but the Logitech drivers just didn't seem to work right. I have a QuickCam Express and a QuickCam Messenger and neither would come up. So I scrapped that until I can try some different cameras.

So finally it's deployed - my little digital input over IP project. It only has 3 contact closure inputs connected to the Super JoyBox 8 (which can have up to 16). Now, I can relax and figure out what other things I can monitor with it.

Waiting for Thin Client

My thin client is sitting on a FedEx truck somewhere out for delivery. As I spent more time looking into it, it appears that .NET will not fit onto the thin client. That scratches my new gameport app as it was built with .NET and the xPL library is also .NET. I started looking at Perl and the Win32::MultiMedia::Joystick package. I wrote some code last night to test it out and it can do what I want. The only problem will be Perl fitting on the internal flash disk. Hopefully, I'll be able to install it and other apps on a USB flash disk.

The next part will be making the Perl script connect to the network. Rather than use xPL, I'm going to try to use DCOM to connect directly to starCOMUltra. I've got the Perl side figured out. I just need to get the thin client and see if DCOM will work on it.

I should add that there's always the possibility of getting a bigger internal flash drive, but I want to make do with what I have lying around.

xPLGamePort2 Released

I've released xPLGamePort2 which doesn't require DirectX to be installed. Can't wait to try it out on the thin client, which is due to arrive Friday. It's identical in functionality to the original version. More details here.

Working on New xPLGameport App

With the HP T5700 thin client on the way, I decided to rewrite my xPLGameport app to better fit into the compact memory requirements. My current version requires DirectX and that may or may not installable on the T5700 with 256MB of flash. So I've put together a version that uses the joystick hooks in winmm.dll and it's currently running. I've got a few days to test it before the thin client arrives.

Not Much Going On

I haven't been doing a whole lot lately. Part of that is a little HA burnout from my manic March. Part of that is a little disappointment over SageTV and the smushed screen. That's been finally resolved after beta updates of the server and the HD Theater firmware.

I did make the decision to turn off HAL Deluxe. It's always been a resource pig occasionally prone to 100% CPU attacks. The lack of voice mail functionality due to it crapping itself after a Windows update didn't help. And my failed experiment with microphone VR put another nail in the coffin.

Of course, turning off HAL comes with great benefits - lots of free memory and more stability. My two HALi apps also get turned off as well. The extra resources is letting me play with SageTV on my HA server. I moved the 1.5TB disk from the DVR machine to the HA server, migrated my SageTV settings over and have been running for a couple days. It's not a CPU pig but it is as fat as HAL. I've seen it well over 200MB and that has me thinking of bumping the HA server memory from 2GB to 4GB. The DVR machine will probably move over to our other house as the machines there are a little slow.

Finally, I snagged an HP T5700 (256MB RAM & flash) thin client off eBay 60 bucks (less 14% Live cashback and 1% FatCash). I'm going to see if I can use these as little xPL boxes. I want to distribute them around the house where I don't have enough wiring to support all the inputs I want to add to the system. For example, I want to move 3 current switches from DS10a's to a gameport (and add a few more contact closures). I don't have enough wiring there to get those outputs to the wiring closet nor is there enough wiring to put a gameport there using Cat-5 USB extenders. I thought about USB over IP devices but they cost twice as much as a thin client and obviously have much less functionality.

xPL EG Plugin Update

Did some code clean up on the plugin a week ago. The sendxPL task now only takes 1 argument for the xPL command. Latest plugin here.

To Cacti or Not To Cacti

I spent a few hours Saturday playing around with Cacti. It's a front end to RRDTool, which I already use to generate charts. It was easy to get up & running as I'm already using PHP, MySQL and Apache on my server. After only a few hours adding devices and setting up graphs, I decided it wasn't for me. I'm already very comfortable writing my own Perl scripts and using Net-SNMP to extract the statistics and build the graphs I want. Cacti adds a couple layers on top of that, and to me, the interface takes too many clicks to get what I want. Plus, I don't plan on using it to graph my 1Wire temps or SpeedFan stats - it'd just be yet another interface to go through.

Use OpenDNS to Thwart Conficker

You should have heard about Conficker by now. One way to help mitigate its effects is to use OpenDNS for your DNS servers. I've been a big fan of OpenDNS for years and this is yet another reason to use it.