The Latest Toy

A conversation about new toys with a coworker the other day prompted me to give Comcast a call to inquire about DVR service. I was very pleased to learn that Comcast is offering DVR in my area. All of my friends tell me how great TiVo is, however I have one big problem with it. TiVo does not offer an HDTV model for cable service. The only way I would be able to record high definition programming would be with DVR service provided by Comcast, or switch to DirecTV with TiVo. Since I have no other method of obtaining broadband other than cable, I had no other choice than to wait for Comcast DVR. Well, it's finally here!

Comcast is using the Motorola DCT6412 for DVR service in the Davie area. I suspect they are probably using this model for all of South Florida. It is a very nice piece of equipment, and perhaps the best feature is that it has two tuners. This allows you to record two programs at once. It has a 120GB hard drive which allows for approximately 60 hours of standard definition recordings, or approximately 15 hours of high definition programming. It has the same "Season Pass" functionality that TiVo provides. It does lack the ability to rate programming so that the recorder can record miscellaneous programming that the user might enjoy. I think it is worth giving that up for the ability to record high definition programming.

Trip to the Peach Bowl

Sheila and I will be heading up to Atlanta for the Peach Bowl this year with my buddy George Hanna, his brother Alan, and some friends of theirs. We're really looking forward to spending New Year's there.

New Gallery

I've been experimenting with the latest Alpha release of Gallery. Even though it's Alpha, it's MUCH better than the old version. With multiple photo/sub-gallery selection with thumbnails, it makes organizing the photos much easier. I created a bunch of sub-galleries for the trip to Colombia to organize them better. Check out the new gallery at http://jsierra.net/gallery2. I'm looking forward to the full release of Gallery 2.0. For now, I'll keep both galleries on the site.

Pictures of Colombia

Well, I've got Gallery back up and running and I've started posting the pictures from our trip. Enjoy!

jsierra.net Back Online

Well, I finally got jsierra.net back online. It's late, so I'm not even going to try installing gallery tonight. I was talking to Bwana the other day about different Linux distros and he mentioned he had been trying out Ubuntu. I also spoke to Alex about Debian, which he seemed to be quite pleased with. I decided to give Ubuntu a try since it's based on Debian. So far I'm quite pleased with it, but I did have one major pain getting SFTP to work with Blogger. It took me forever to figure out, but I'm glad I finally did.

Every time I tried to log in I got this error:

005 Unable to connect to SFTP server: Auth fail

After pulling out some hair and switching sshd to run in debug mode, I eventually found the solution here. I searched for some of the debug output being generated when Blogger was trying to log into my machine, and that's how I came across a page that led me to this particular thread. Apparently when Blogger SFTPs, it tunnels clear text passwords. So I had to change the PasswordAuthentication option to yes instead of no. Voila! Blogger could finally publish to jsierra.net.

More Problems for jsierra.net

Well, I continue to make things worse. In trying to upgrade Apache, I've hosed package dependencies and now Apache won't even start. I still haven't been able to create a good full backup either. I'll probably do a full re-install tonight. For now, I'm hosting the site on blogspot.

Gallery Problems

Well, I'm having problems trying to get Gallery to work right with the remote upload applet and such. This has caused me a lot of grief and I think I'm just going to try to upgrade the whole server. I think the problems may be related to Apache or PHP (or both) being out of date. My system has become a messy mix of compiled programs and installed rpm packages. Lord knows where the conflict lies.

I think the best thing will be for me to upgrade jsierra.net altogether. I've downloaded the Fedora Core 3, and I think I'm going to try it out. I'm hoping I can complete the upgrade during one evening some time this week. Hopefully it doesn't give me any trouble and I don't end up killing jsierra.net. I'm (hopefully correctly) backing up jsierra.net in case there are any problems with the upgrade. Stay tuned...