Got to the office at 10:00am, still here at 10:30pm. Tired. Need to go home and sleep.
Think I got to the bottom of why the regression test is failing, finally. Also did a ton of cleanup work on the dstate serialization code. Should be much more maintainable and less likely to have crashes on unexpected input.
The bigger problem is I have not yet finished Christmas shopping and it's not clear when I'm going to be able to do it. Very annoying.
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
Exhausted
Was at the office today from 8am to 9:15pm. So tired.
But I did make a good bit of progress, which is a good thing.
Sleeep....
But I did make a good bit of progress, which is a good thing.
Sleeep....
Sunday, December 17, 2006
What happens in Vermont, stays in Vermont
(but nothing ever really happens here)
Today was our last full day in Vermont. Went to the Maple Syrup museum. Toured the Vermont countryside. Saw cows, horses, etc.
We came across the "Fire on the Mountain Glassworks", and Vikki had wanted to look into picking up some home-blown glass for a Christmas gift. Turns up we ended up at Vermont's local bong shop. Have to admit though, these were the nicest hand crafted drug paraphernalia I had seen.
Had a nice dinner and now we're just taking it easy at the lodge. Played some scrabble earlier.
Leaving tomorrow morning. Should get back to New York City late in the evening.
Today was our last full day in Vermont. Went to the Maple Syrup museum. Toured the Vermont countryside. Saw cows, horses, etc.
We came across the "Fire on the Mountain Glassworks", and Vikki had wanted to look into picking up some home-blown glass for a Christmas gift. Turns up we ended up at Vermont's local bong shop. Have to admit though, these were the nicest hand crafted drug paraphernalia I had seen.
Had a nice dinner and now we're just taking it easy at the lodge. Played some scrabble earlier.
Leaving tomorrow morning. Should get back to New York City late in the evening.
Two broken legs
Went snowboarding in Vermont this weekend with Vikki and thank goodness that isn't what happened to me. I never made it off the bunny slope. Succeeded in figuring out how to turn. Not so much luck in stopping.
Having a great time. Will post some pictures I took when I get back Monday.
Having a great time. Will post some pictures I took when I get back Monday.
Thursday, December 14, 2006
Patently annoyed
Found out I was granted another patent, and again my name is spelled wrong.
http://www.google.com/patents?vid=USPAT7111060&id=TbB6AAAAEBAJ&dq=heitmueler&jtp=1
Very annoying.
On the other hand, I love a good pun.
http://www.google.com/patents?vid=USPAT7111060&id=TbB6AAAAEBAJ&dq=heitmueler&jtp=1
Very annoying.
On the other hand, I love a good pun.
Monday, December 11, 2006
Wonders of CPAN modules on Win32
Rediscovered how few people use CPAN modules on Perl for Win32 (or at least how many of them look at the results of 'make test').
Spent the bulk of the afternoon getting Perl modules to compile cleanly in my Win32 perl interpreter. It's necessary so that I can start using workflow functionality. Should be able to send upstream the bulk of the fixes so that I don't have to go through this exercise again the next time I update to a new rev.
Still at the office waiting for Perl 5.8.8 to finish compiling (along with all our dependencies), so I can go home. Fun fun.
Would still like to try to fix the problem that prevents me from using Visual Studio 2005 to compile Perl, since it is preventing me from using the newer (and much better) debugger to work on other issues in the codebase.
Spent the bulk of the afternoon getting Perl modules to compile cleanly in my Win32 perl interpreter. It's necessary so that I can start using workflow functionality. Should be able to send upstream the bulk of the fixes so that I don't have to go through this exercise again the next time I update to a new rev.
Still at the office waiting for Perl 5.8.8 to finish compiling (along with all our dependencies), so I can go home. Fun fun.
Would still like to try to fix the problem that prevents me from using Visual Studio 2005 to compile Perl, since it is preventing me from using the newer (and much better) debugger to work on other issues in the codebase.
Sunday, December 10, 2006
More MythTV work
Did some more work trying to figure out why certain operations in MythTV are so slow.
Turns up it isn't the database after all that makes the program guide so slow. Recorded the SQL operations performed and the page down takes about 20ms of database time. However, the load average is 2.3, so I started looking at general load issues.
Found a couple of very useful things:
By default, MythTV is configured to use the standard "Preferred MPEG Decoder". However, the NVidia chipset supports XvMC, which does the bulk of the decoding in the GPU. Setting the field to "Standard XvMC" dropped the CPU utilization of the X server from 19% to 2%. Will look at the KnoppMyth code that sets up the nVidia driver, and see about configuring this by default.
See the following page for more info:
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/XvMC
Also noticed that the ivtv-env-vbi process was using 8% of the CPU. VBI is used for sending closed captioning information. Since I never need this functionality, I just needed to turn this off in mythtv-setup. Perhaps this shouldn't be on by default.
The mythtv-frontend process is still using 20% of the CPU, but the load average is now 0.60 and a bit more responsive. I figure if I can get to the bottom of why this process is using so much CPU I will probably have the program guide issue licked. My suspicion is it is some sort of rescaling of the video stream (perhaps from 640x480 used in the MPEG up to the display resolution of 800x600)
Also going to wake up in the middle of the night and see if I can find a channel that goes off-air and displays a test pattern. If I can record a test-pattern for a few minutes, I can fix the color calibration problem.
Turns up it isn't the database after all that makes the program guide so slow. Recorded the SQL operations performed and the page down takes about 20ms of database time. However, the load average is 2.3, so I started looking at general load issues.
Found a couple of very useful things:
By default, MythTV is configured to use the standard "Preferred MPEG Decoder". However, the NVidia chipset supports XvMC, which does the bulk of the decoding in the GPU. Setting the field to "Standard XvMC" dropped the CPU utilization of the X server from 19% to 2%. Will look at the KnoppMyth code that sets up the nVidia driver, and see about configuring this by default.
See the following page for more info:
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/XvMC
Also noticed that the ivtv-env-vbi process was using 8% of the CPU. VBI is used for sending closed captioning information. Since I never need this functionality, I just needed to turn this off in mythtv-setup. Perhaps this shouldn't be on by default.
The mythtv-frontend process is still using 20% of the CPU, but the load average is now 0.60 and a bit more responsive. I figure if I can get to the bottom of why this process is using so much CPU I will probably have the program guide issue licked. My suspicion is it is some sort of rescaling of the video stream (perhaps from 640x480 used in the MPEG up to the display resolution of 800x600)
Also going to wake up in the middle of the night and see if I can find a channel that goes off-air and displays a test pattern. If I can record a test-pattern for a few minutes, I can fix the color calibration problem.
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