KRKeegan

Well it has been a year since I moved my site to Dreamhost.  It has certainly been a turbulent ride. My biggest complaint is that the company is run in a very unprofessional manner.  But there are numerous other problems as well.

The semi good news is that after a year of service I can now report on the uptime provided by Dreamhost.  In the end I received 99.886% uptime.  Which sounds good at first, but in the end this amounts to over 10 hours of downtime.  Nearly half a day!  Luckily, I really only rely on Dreamhost for email, however with their recent suggestion that Dreamhost will no longer offer email, I am a little uneasy about continuing with them.

But, I have a few months of free service creditted to me for all the crap I have put up with.  So I will be researching other hosting options over the next few months.

Full breakdown of the downtime is available after the jump.

Admittedly I have been very annoyed with Dreamhost since they announced that users would no longer be able to use procmail.  I still feel that my complaints are valid.  Dreamhost handled the removal of this feature in a very poor manner.  For a while, it did not seem like they recognized how serious this actually was.  Notably, Josh in a blog entry joked that Dreamhost no longer wanted to host email.

After that post, a firestorm among clients ensued with over 100 comments.  And it seems like they may have taken a few steps back and reconsidered their position.  A later comment by Dallas seems to suggest that Dreamhost is trying to quickly remedy the absence of procmail. 

Sidenote

As a side note, we seem to have been given a slight glimpse into the balance of personalities at the core of Dreamhost.  Josh has always been the more vocal of the two.  But, Josh has also been very unprofessional at times.  In this most recent post, it seems likely that while Josh may be more vocal, Dallas is the professional face of Dreamhost and the person truley in charge. 

How to get procmail Back

Back to the point of this article, after reading the most recent entry I realized that it is possible to still use both procmail and spamassassin.  However, this solution is not elegant.

Associated Press excerpt ------------------------

President Bush stated on Monday that, "[he] understand[s] American's pain at the pump" and has suggested a possible fix for rising gas prices. The Bush administration notorious for suggesting unorthodox solutions to problems, is now advocating a switch to the metric system as a means to solve rising gas prices. Such unconventional ideas are not without precedent, in the past the Bush administration has extended Daylight Saving Time, in The Energy Policy Act of 2005, as a means to cut back on oil consumption.

I have noticed a bug in javax.microedition.pim.RepeatRule, when I tried to set a an event to repeat every second sunday of may I would get an event that repeated every second sunday of april. I determined that this was being caused by MONTH_OF_YEAR being deincremented by 1 month after the event was committed.

I worked around the problem by setting the value one month forward. However obviously, this does not work for december. I tried increasing the value of the MONTH_OF_YEAR setting, however java balks at any unknown value. Currently I am unable to set an event to occur on the second sunday in december. If anyone figures out a work around I would be greatful.

RIM has recognized that this is a bug, but who knows when the bug will be fixed. I attached a copy of the email I received from RIM:

As promised I made significant improvements to the Funambol Blackberry Client, while the improvements are geared towards better functionality with ScheduleWorld.com, they should benefit individuals who use other SyncML servers as well.

The Improvements in 3.0.8.4 include:

• Ignore milliseconds in date, fixes duplication on slowsync
• Properly display entities such as quotes and ampersands
• Allday events now show up on week and month view
• Multiday Allday events are no longer short one day
• All day events no longer duplicate on SlowSync
• Accept basic ISO 8061 dates
• Fixed error message that popped up whenever sending an email
• Removed configuration section relating to email since Schedule World does not support email
• Altered default settings in configuration to match Schedule World settings
• Added AutoSync Feature - The client will query the server for changes every X hours.

You can no longer create a shell account with a custom SpamAssassin install on Dreamhost anymore.

Why am I so upset about this? Because this was one of my main reasons for using Dreamhost. A custom install of SpamAssassin(SA) allows me to use custom rulesets, ClamAssassin(Virus Checker), DCC, pyzor, Razor, and much more. Without a custom install I am left with the default Junk Mail filterig provided by Dreamhost. This Junk Mail filter is based on an UNCUSTOMIZABLE install of a very old version of SA. The end result is a poor Spam Filter.

And honestly a poor Spam Filter is basically worthless.

1. Dreamhost Advertised a Custom SpamAssassin Install when I Puchased my one year Contract.

Yup, in fact they still promiss it on their Hosting Features page. They also provided instructions and support for how to use it here, here, and here. Additionally, they have provided continual service for this over the years. You will note that each of those pages contains a warning that this feature is no longer available. I had to fight to get that warning admitted to the wiki, more on that later.

At no point did Dreamhost ever say that procmail support may be deleted at anytime. Nor did they give any indication that procmail support would be revoked at any point in time.

Those of us without a Blackberry Enterprise Server cannot automatically synchronize our calendar and contacts with our PC without directly pluging the Blackberry directly into the PC with a USB cable. This is where Funambol and ScheduleWorld come in. ScheduleWorld is a SyncML server, basically a Calendar and Contacts server. Funambol is an open source SyncML client for the blackberry. By using both of these programs you can sync your calendar and contacts to your PC over the air, without directly connecting your Blackberry to your PC. There are numerous tutorials for how to set this sytem up so I won't waste your time discussing it here.

However, the Funambol ScheduleWorld setup has had one main issue for over a year. The problem stems from the fact that Funambol also allows for the synchronization of email while ScheduleWorld does not. Funambol allows users to unselect mail from synchronization. But even with mail unchecked Funambol still does some check of the mail which causes an error. Currently users will get the following error when sending an email:

Sorry you can't synchronize "mail", because the name of 
the Remote Mail in the Funambol configuration panel 
mismatches the corresponding name on the server.

Users then had to select "resend" to force their email to send. Needless to say the whole process was very annoying. Funambol is an open source project so I decided to take a look.

RIM has never fully supported IMAP servers in their Blackberry Internet Service(BIS) formerly Blackberry Web Client(BWC). Notably BIS does not recognize the NAMESPACE command from IMAP servers. The vast majority of IMAP servers place all user folders in a single parent folder(usually INBOX) therefore the Sent and Trash folders are actually INBOX.Sent and INBOX.Trash. Unfortunately BIS only recognizes Sent and Trash in the base directory.

This script sits between the BIS and your IMAP server. The proxy then makes INBOX.Sent and INBOX.Trash appear to be Sent and Trash. This enables BIS to save a copy of your sent emails into INBOX.Sent properly and a copy of deleted emails into INBOX.Trash properly.

Additionally this script allows you to use a non standard folder as your inbox as well.

TiVo Central Online is pretty cool, it allows you to program your TiVo to record an upcoming show or season pass from the interent. I wanted to be able to access TiVo Central anywhere I went, unfortunately TiVo Central is not available for Mobile devices. So I decided to whip up a quick PHP script to parse TCO and repaginate it into a mobile friendly html site. This is all accomplished in 480 lines of php code. The script allows for searching of upcoming shows by title, description, or cast members. After searching you can select the specific showing and record it using a one time or season pass recording. Additionally the script allows access to all advanced recording options and will send you an email to confirm the recording.

I have always been a fan of the Gallery program. You can see my pictures here

. I have also sporadically used Picasa2 from Google. While I thought Picasa2 was a nice free product, I never really had much use for it. However recently a few new features in Picasa2 have gotten my attention.

Notably Picasa2 allows for an XML export of an album, this export can even be directly uploaded by FTP to a web server. (Tools->Expiremental->Publish via FTP . . . then select XML as the page type). Then I found out that one of the modules available for gallery2 allows for a direct import of Picasa2 XML pages. Picasa Module. I tried it out and it worked as promised.

However, I found one error. If you do not enter a caption Picassa will automatically copy the itemName into the itemCaption field. Personally if I don't enter a caption on a photo, I would prefer it remain un-captioned. So I hacked the module to fix this issue.

I want to have plants on my balcony, but I knew I would be incapable of watering the plants everyday. Clearly I needed an automatic watering system, however, I live on the 5th floor and have no access to water on my patio.

I saw an automatic watering system like this. But it was just too much money and it didn't hold nearly enough water. So, I decided to make my own watering system that could hold a lot more water. I was able to make a 5 gallon system for less than $30.

I am back from Australia! And I only have minor injuries!

You can check out my pictures here.

I will do my best to sum up what I did:

Day 1: Amazingly I didn't have jet lag, or at least very little.  Today we drove to the Grampians, a large national park outside Melbourne.  We spent most of today climbing.  And then camped that night.

Day 2: Today we woke up to really annoying birds.  After that we took a really cool hike and then did a quick climb.  Sean and I ran to the airport to catch a flight to Sydney.

Day 3: I spent the day touring Sydney.  I did all the touristy stuff.  And then Sean and I went out to a authentic Australia BBQ dinner.

Day 4: Took the ferry to Manly today.  And hung out over there.  The ferry is a really good way to get a great view of the city and the surroundings.

Day 5: Spent the morning at the beach.  Today was an amazing day at the beach, this is when I really realized that Sean is living in paradise.  Then that night I caught a flight with Ehren to New Zealand.

I have received a number of questions about how pyTivo handles aspect ratios.  Aspect ratios are a very convoluted subject as you will see.  I make no attempt to explain everything, at the end of this page you will see a link to a much longer page that does a better explanation than me.

This is meant to be a quick and dirty explanation of how pyTivo handles Aspect Ratios.

Quick Tutorial on Aspect Ratios By no means is any of this guaranteed to be accurate. This only represents what I believe to be true, if I am making a mistake that causes an error in pyTivo please point it out to me.

There are two types of aspect ratios:
Frame Aspect Ratio
This is simply the ratio of what the file looks like when it plays on your TV which can be determined by:
Width displayed on TV: Height displayed on TV. TiVo accepts files in 16:9 or 4:3 format.

Pixel Aspect Ratio
This is the annoying one. This refers to the shape of the pixels themselves. For example a 1:1 pixel aspect ratio means a perfect square pixel.

Most computer files are saved in 1:1 Pixel Aspect Ratio(PAR) however that is where it ends.  TV, DVD, Film is all distorted to some other PAR.  Infortunately there is no way for us to know when pyTivo opens a file what the PAR is.  For the most part since pyTivo is using computer files it assumes that most files are 1:1.  And then if the file fits an exact dimension of a known non 1:1 PAR pyTivo will use that dimension.

Oh but we are not done. . .

Both pyTivo and TiVoDotNet suffer the same problem with transfers.  The result is that files which are transfered but not watched are deleted instantly as soon as they finish.  The problem is caused by how we transfer files. 

When TiVo asks for a XviD file from pyTivo TiVo asks for the file size of the file before it starts transfering.  This of course raises an issue, since pyTivo is transcoding the file realtime pyTivo has no idea how large he file will be when the transcoding is done.  I have tried numerous settings and I can't figure out a command to force FFMpeg to an exact bit rate.  So we usually estimate the file size.

There is also an additional problem with file size estimation.  Estimating the file size too small will cause files to be clipped at the end.  Estimating the file to large may cause TiVo to unnecessarily delete other videos to make room for a file that is not that large.  Also, when a user reached the end of the video TiVo would display an error stating that the transfer had unexpectedly ended even though we have reached the end of the video.

However if pyTivo estimates the file even 1 bit too large(pyTivo never gets it exact, we always have a 2% buffer to prevent the under size issue) TiVo will continue asking for bytes that dont exist.  This really messes with TiVo.  So our temporary hack was to return a 404 error when TiVo asked for the overage of the file.  However this doesn't appear to be perfect, most of us suffer the early deletion problem discussed above.

So I spent a weekend on this and solved the issue!!

?All I can say is wow, this is one of the coolest pieces of software.? Let me explain what it is. TiVo has long since allowed you to transfer previously recorded TiVo shows back to TiVo.? They also allow you to transfer non-TiVo shows as long as they are in TiVo format.? However, TiVo format is MPEG2 and has specific size and fps requirements.? Unfortunately no one stores videos on their home computer in MPEG2, mostly because they take up 5-10 times the space of a XviD video.

While I was browsing around the TiVo Community forum?i discovered TiVo.net.? This program ingeniously takes just about any video and transcodes it to MPEG2 on the fly and serves it up to TiVo.? Now I run a linux box as my server and TiVo.net is written in C#, however they recommended a program called mono, that will enable a linux machine to run C#.? It worked, but I kinda found TiVo.net to be a little bulky and prone to crashing.? Not the type of program that I can just put on a headless linux box and forget about.

So I kept looking for a better solution.? What I found was amazing.