Smithology

I’ll make this review short so it’ll be easy for you. Go and get this book and read it. It’s awesome.

Want to know more? Well there’s this blogger in the far future who’s grown up on a world that is actually a giant space ship which has been traveling for thousands of years and has found a planet inhabited by intelligent giant bat people. Are you on your way to the bookshop yet?

Ok get this: the bat people are at that stage where humans were at just before The Great War. So the humans from outer-space have a problem because they don’t want to accidentally start a war right? So they have to be careful but they have all their own politics and economy and stuff to worry about.

The kind of book you feel really disappointed about finishing because you want to just keep learning the world.

I have no financial interest in this book BTW. I just liked it.

books

It seems like every book and movie I see lately is about alternative realities – the illusion that is life etc… I interrupted my reading of Glasshouse in order to chomp through Harry Potter and returned to finish it this week.

How can I explain this book? It’s like the future but they are simulating the past so it’s set in the modern day but it’s all slightly wrong and warped because in the future, they have forgotten most of what it was like to live now. Little things like how you have to stay in the one body for your whole life and can’t just assemble any body you feel like, e.g. one with four arms. Little things like how we have money and an economy etc… Little things like gender. Little things like death.

So the book is about all those things. It’s about sociology and social engineering. The protagonist Robin is a recent outpatient of a memory erasure clinic, he/she/it volunteers to be a part of a study that is simulating 20th century life in order to try and understand what it was like. But all is not what it seems. And Robin is not who he seems either!

I enjoyed this book for it’s originality but found that I couldn’t get very attached to the characters. Part of this was on purpose to highlight the alien-ness of the post-human characters as they tried to come to terms with everyday life. It’s like a reversal of most science fiction – instead of the ordinary going into some fantastic world, it was the fantastic world having an adventure in what is ordinary to us. Reminiscent of the Star Trek movie where the Enterprise travels to the 20th century to borrow a whale.

Probably one of the funniest bits is where one of the characters recommends that every dad should be the mother of their children for the first few years: literally. (think about it: they live in a world where they can change bodies on a whim)

If you feel like reading a book that is like Happy Days with a bit of Total Recall then this is for you.

books

I’ve never been a drug taker but while I’m on the DVD binge, I have also had a look at A Scanner Darkly. I heard about this film on a movie review podcast somewhere and I’m not sure if it even went to the cinemas here. It is a live action film that has been digitally altered so that it renders with the feel of a graphic novel allowing for all kinds of cool artistic special effects. This is handy because the film is about drugs and there are numerous drug induced hallucinations portrayed in it. The film has our favorite gen-x movie icons: Keanu Reaves and Winnona Ryder. Robert Downey Jnr’s part has the best lines though.

This film is set in the near future where 20% of the population has become addicted to a drug called “Substance D”. Being about drugs, the film is a little hard to follow and it took me a long time to figure out what the hell was going on and then the film ended. Basically most of the characters are just whacked on drugs for most of the film. There is a lot of comedy and some very funny dialog as the party of fools lurch from paranoid crazy scene to paranoid crazy scene but there are also a few really confronting and sad scenes: e.g. when one of the characters almost chokes to death and his friend just watches the whole thing calmly.

The film was based on a short story by Philip K. Dick who I’ve never heard of but apparently he was a big name in the sci-fi biz. The features on the DVD have an interview with him where he talks about his disgust with the American Government (in the sixties and seventies) for how they had him under surveillance for no reason other than he had a few quirky ideas. Apparently he had a few screws loose. This paranoia comes through in the story but I don’t want to totally spoil it as it’s the only part of the film which is decipherable on the first watch (I watched it twice and followed it better the second time).

The film is worth watching if only to marvel at the way the animation is done. I don’t know why but the part of the film that affected me most was right at the end before the credits where a long list of dedications scrolls up the screen – they are all friends of Philip K. Dick’s that were lost to drug use: permanent brain damage, drug induced schizophrenia, epilepsy, suicide, various organ failures – the author even lists himself and some of his family. It’s then that you realise the seriousness of the story. He manages to both capture the uninhibited fun of drug taking and the loss of humanity.

Uncategorized, movies

What’s more important? Reality or how we make sense of it? That question seems to be at the heart of many films and the most recent I’ve seen of this meme is Pan’s Labyrinth. I heard a lot about this film when it was in the cinemas so I was keen to have a look at it when I wondered into the local DVD shop and saw it on the shelf.

Pan’s didn’t meet my expectations. I was told that it was deep and confronting and scary. I didn’t find it scary, I thought the ‘evilness’ of the characters was predictable and one dimensional. As I’ve already said, the idea of the imagination reinterpreting reality has been done before – even in big blockbusters: Don Juan? Never Ending Story?

However, there was something about this film different to what I was expecting. It was really mythical in an Iron John kind of way. The movie is based around fairy tails and I think this is what some people I’d heard raving about the film were trying to express. It seems to have all these deep symbols that tug at some part of you but you can’t resolve them into focus. It mixes up a whole bunch of symbols and creatures that seem to represent things: mystery, greed, sickness, lust, fear, hatred, power, sacrifice, innocence etc… And then there is a response to each of these things in the story from a number of characters.

Our protagonist is a pre-teenage girl obsessed with fairy tails, traveling with her pregnant and ill mother to meet her new step father who is a commander of an army. She has vivid experiences of a fantasy world and as she journeys her fairy tails come to life: she seems to be expressing her inner world and also “coming of age”. At the same time, events around her are escalating as her fascist step-father ups the ante in his ethnic cleansing.

I enjoyed the film in the end because I’m a real sucker for this kind of “re framing reality” thing. I suppose because it seems to be a helpful way of reconciling a spiritual framework in a rationalist world. Like Don Juan, we are left questioning whether it is better to “live in the real world” or to experience life through a lens that brings out a greater meaning to it.

movies

A little while ago our VCR broke and I decided that I might try out this new PVR craze. I have an old Pentium III 550MHz with 256MB RAM running Gentoo and it has been functioning as a personal webserver for the last few years.

I’ve taken some notes here so that I can remember what I did and also to add any gotchas that I came across on my particular system.

The first thing I needed to do was get the PC on the wireless LAN so that I could hide it behind the TV and not have a blue cable running all over the house. I had a Linksys DWL-122 USB wireless adapter handy. With a little googling I discovered it is a prism2 chipset which means it needs the linux-wlan-ng drivers. I followed this guide for gentoo and got the drivers going. Getting the connection to come up at boot was not straight forward. I added the prism2_usb to /etc/modules.autoload/kernel-2.6 for starters. I added the gateway and IP address settings to /etc/conf.d/net. That was easy. I tried a few times to get the init script to work but gave up and instead copied the net.eth0 init script to net.wlan0 and modified it so that the iface_start function looks like this:

iface_start() {
modprobe prism2_usb prism2_doreset=1
wlanctl-ng wlan0 lnxreq_ifstate ifstate=enable
wlanctl-ng wlan0 lnxreq_ifstate ifstate=enable
wlanctl-ng wlan0 lnxreq_autojoin ssid="MySSID"
authtype=opensystem

Those commands should hook up the wireless stuff before the network configuration gets going. The first command runs twice because sometimes it fails. I also find that on the occasional reboot, the USB device gets in a weird state and won’t come good (even with reboots) until I unplug it. It was a bit of a time waster because I was booting new kernels at the time and thought that the new settings had created a conflict.

I chose the Hauppauge PVR 350 because it has onboard mpeg2 encoding and decoding which I thought would help my old CPU to cope. The Pentium III plays DivX ok but sometimes gets choppy. I also bought a big HD (Seagate IDE 320GB) as I was running out of room. Once I had those installed, I found this guide for MythTV and Gentoo which I followed closely with a few excursions off the side as documented below.

When configuring the kernel I also needed to setup the IVTV drivers. I followed this guide. The IVTV drivers require a whole bunch of stuff to be turned on in the kernel so that they work. I use ‘make menuconfig’ and it’s not always obvious which menu items the kernel defines map to but you can check them by choosing the ‘help’ button in menuconfig.

In addition to the ones in the MythTV guide, I chose the following options:

Multimedia devices  --->
  <M> Video For Linux
    [ ]   Enable Video For Linux API 1 (DEPRECATED)
    [*]   Enable Video For Linux API 1 compatible Layer
     Video Capture Adapters  --->
        <M> Conexant 2388x (bt878 successor) support
        Encoders/decoders and other helper chips  --->
            <M> Micronas MSP34xx audio decoders
            <M> Wolfson Microelectronics WM8775 audio ADC with input mixer
            <M> Philips SAA7113/4/5 video decoders
            <M> Conexant CX2584x audio/video decoders
            <M> Conexant CX2341x MPEG encoders
            <M> Philips SAA7127/9 digital video encoders
Graphics support  --->
  <*> Support for frame buffer devices
  [*]   VESA VGA graphics support
  <*>   Trident support

For a window manager, I already had TWM compiled but I’m not sure this is the best choice. The title bar doesn’t disappear when MythTV is running and I get weirdness when using the IVTV mpeg2 output encoding which I suspect is due to TWM.

The lircd setup went smoothly however, I found that the second part where you map remote control buttons to MythTV didn’t work. I chose to use a ~/.mythtv/lircrc file but the one I downloaded only mapped a few buttons. My remote is the grey and black type and it has seperate channel buttons to the arrow buttons. Here is my lircrc file with better mappings.

The cool thing about the IR receiver is that it’s on a wire so you can hide the computer and just have the IR receiver poking out front somewhere. It is quite small and black.

For XMLTV I used tv_grab_au_reg which is a xmltv grabber for Australia and signed up to the OzTiVo wiki which is a requirement for dowloading the data. There are instructions on the tv_grab_au_reg page to get it going with MythTV. I found that I had to add all my channels to the .xmltv config file like this:

<channel display="ABC" tvguide="ABC-Qld"/>
<channel display="7" tvguide="Seven-Bris"/>
<channel display="NINE" tvguide="Nine-Qld"/>
<channel display="Ten" tvguide="Ten-Qld"/>
<channel display="SBS" tvguide="SBS-Qld"/>
<channel display="Briz 31" tvguide="BRIZ"/>

Initially when I added the channels to MythTV I did an autoscan. I had to do it a few times using the back button to get all the channels. Doubling up here didn’t seem to matter. However when I went to mythfilldatabase, it added new channels from the XMLTV file into MythTV. To get around this, I deleted all my channels, did the scan again and then edited each one so that it had the correct callsign and XMLTVID (the callsigns are ABC,SEVEN,NINE,TEN,SBS and BRI31). That way when I ran mythfilldatabase it didn’t add new channels but did the right thing. I still have database entries for programs that don’t link back to channels since I deleted the channels (which means programs are listed twice on some screens) but I expect this will go away once I move past that data.

For TV Output, I followed the instructions for PAL IVTV on Gentoo. These were pretty spot on but failed to mention that your need to set TV in your ServerLayout in xorg.conf and also modprobe the ivtv-fb module. As soon as you modprobe that module, the output of console will go to TV out of the PVR card which results in a helpful blank looking screen on your monitor and may cause a bit of panic. Anyway, once you modprobe that, the /proc/fb thing starts working. I added ivtv-fb to /etc/modules.autoload/kernel-2.6 too.

Now I am at the stage of learning to use MythTV. I’ve already recorded some stuff and watched a bit of teev. It is all pretty awesome. I’m still not 100% on the TV out thing – I had to make a setting to the offset so I can see one edge of the image. I have no trouble playing back recordings but the video can get very choppy when I’m watching live TV at times. I am going to try and get the whole thing going in framebuffer mode without X and see if I can get the onboard mpeg2 output decoding going too. That should give better performance. If I get around to it, I’ll post some more info about it on this blog.

UPDATE: See some photos here. I have installed a heap of myth plugins. They are pretty straightforward. Mythweather and mythnews didn’t do much. Mythmusic and mythgallery work pretty well – mythgallery is not so good on an iPhoto gallery as iPhoto tucks everything into little subdirectories everywhere.

[tags]gentoo, hauppauge, lirc, mythtv, pvr, pvr 350, tv, tv out, tv_grab_au, xmltv[/tags]

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