Posts by scottk:
Roku Rocks
I picked up a Roku DVP box last week, it is a little box about the same height and 1/4 the size of your standard DVD/VCR. It handles wired and wireless networking to get the internet. What sparked this is that for awhile I’ve been  thinking we are paying way to much for our cable service that we rarely watch.  In fact the only things that get watched are shows recorded from Sprout/Nick for the kids and Nebraska football games. Most of the content we watch day to day is centered on a file share and circulated to XBMC machines in the house.
So getting the Roku out of the box and hooked up took no time at all, it’s dead simple if you know how to hook up standard TV components. Once in I must say I was disappointed that there isn’t an out of the box solution for reading from our share on the Roku, but I did find a good tutorial on getting MyMedia up and running which adds this functionality. About an hour of work (after finding the tutorial) installing Python and putting the box in developer mode and now I have access to my shared structure. I am having to recode a lot of the previously ripped things from .avi to .mp4 h.264 but found a handy batch script to allow Handbrake to iterate through a whole directory of files and fix them up.
The big wins on the Roku are the Netflix and Amazon Video on Demand services. With Netflix it will pick whatever you’ve dropped into your instant queue and allow you to watch it. This makes Netflix a million times more valuable to us as it’s not tied to ordering DVD’s or streaming them through a laptop and the interface is simple enough the kids could work it. Additionally the Amazon Video on Demand service is amazing. For under $20 I bought a full season of Super Why and did similar for a full season of Blue’s Clues. In the future I can get at the Amazon service behind any flash enabled internet connected device, so all of our laptops and I’m thinking my Android phone once it gets the FroYo update.
The only want I have for this device right now is to see some way for me to get Big10 football games now that the Huskers have moved over. As far as I understand the Big10 network does streaming of broadcasts so I don’t think it will take much for that piece to become a reality.
Roku = Win
re.last.fm
Giving last.fm a try again. My last last.fm usage was December 2008 according to my profile. I’ve been using Pandora for quite a long time and don’t really have any issues with it, I just figure it’s good to check back on the alternatives every once in awhile and see where they are at now. […]
What the smux
We’ve been running into issues where Dell Openmanage doesn’t want to allow snmp in to it’s service in order to gather information. This is normally done via smux which is setup in the snmpd.conf # Allow Systems Management Data Engine SNMP to connect to snmpd using SMUX smuxpeer .1.3.6.1.4.1.674.10892.1 What I’ve come to find out […]
Android 6 months later
It’s six months into my Android time so I thought I’d rattle off the apps I’m still using Twitter App has replaced Twidroid Pandora Default Browser AppMind ColorNote Touchdown Gowalla AndChat WaveSecure Dropbox ES File Explorer I also make extensive use of the camera and post to Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Picasa features
Greenplum vs Hadoop Disk Space
I’ve been spending a whole lot of time calculating Greenplum vs Hadoop disk usage. So here the general equation (MaxAllocFactor * DiskSize * ( #Disk – RaidDisks ) ) / ReplicationFactor MaxAllocFactor = Max recommended allocation. 70% for Greenplum and 75% for Hadoop DiskSize = Size of your drive #Disk = Number of drives RaidDisks […]
The Ops Data Choke
With all this chatter about big database warehouses and driving deep into business data to bring out insights I think it’s also good to take a look one of the other areas that experienced a huge choke on data and has been running into it for decades. There was a lot of talk these past […]
End of Days
Greenplum Days has come to a close and the last two sessions showed they saved the best for last. The Expansion/Fault Tolerance talk was far and away the pinnacle learning session, very much highlighting how 4.0 fixes some of the pain points in 3.3.x version and you can see the foundational building blocks for some […]
Greenplum Days – Day 2
At this point it’s the afternoon of Day 2 of the two day Greenplum Days conference. As a non-C level person I have gotten very little exposure to what the inner workings of Greenplum Chorus is, I have a feeling that isn’t an accident as people of my level would nail Greenplum with a multitude […]
What’s that Greenplum thing
Tomorrow I catch my flight to head to Las Vegas so I can attend Greenplum Days on Monday-Tuesday. I’m pretty excited about this trip even though I will be in Vegas and essentially spending all of my time in a conference. You see the last month or so I’ve been heavily working with the Greenplum […]