Luke Sheldrick's Blog

So today, I am mostly furious. This is due to a number of things. I’ve had a pretty crap week, and was really looking forward to having a nice long weekend to relax and enjoy myself. I adore spending time with my friends, and they’re a very important part of my life. However…

Yesterday I was in Slough for work, and was planning to go out in Vauxhall in the evening to an event I knew a friends would be at. I txt/IMed a few people earlyish in the day, but didn’t hear anything back. Assuming they weren’t going, on my way back to London, I took the route that would take me straight home, and then settled in for the eve. I then get messages later on to say they were there, at this point I was in no mood to travel back across London. Also spoke to another friend later in the eve, who wasn’t going to go, but knew I wanted to, who turns out to have gone. Would have been nice to let me know? but hey, guess not.

Today I wanted to go around the Tottenham Court Road computer fairs, I’d mentioned it to a friend to see if he wanted to go along, and he was going to let me know if he could make it. Nothing heard back this morning. I was then meant to meet another friend for lunch in the afternoon. She said she was going to finish work at 13:00, and give me a shout, to look to meet around 13:30/14:00. I’d come home back to East London where I live, and she works in anticipation of hearing from her. At 14:30, I was a bit worried as hadn’t heard back from her, so gave her a shout, to be told she now wasn’t coming.

Seriously WTF, do people not have any concept of general courtsey? If I arrange to do something, and I can’t make it, even if I just don’t fancy it, I’ll certainly let the other people know as soon as know. I certainly wouldn’t expect them to have to chase me after the arranged time to see if I could be bothered. My day has been mostly trashed, and my time wasted. All could have been averted if others had just had some forthought. These are by no way isolated incidents, this happens far too often for my liking.

Same goes with people being late, sure shit happens that makes being bang on time difficult. However we all have mobiles today, it’s not like you cant send a call/txt. Nobody is perfect, however people who are prepetually late, really get my back up. I make every effort to be on time for everything, and if I’m not, crikey at least I’ll make sure you know before hand. Being on the tube is no excuse either, I’ll always ensure I send a message before going down to the tube/losing signal.

RARRR!!

P.S: if you read this and think this is about you, I don’t mean this to be directed at or moaning about you, just about today’s society in general. I don’t hold grudges, but maybe just think about someone other than yourself next time?

I use DHCP at home, as most do, for convenience. Last week I changed the router at home to one compatible with DD-WRT as I was setting IPv6 up at home (something I should blog about later). When I set it up, until I migrated the old DHCP config over, everything on the LAN that had static DHCP allocations went a bit crazy. Once that was resolved everything went back to normal… or so I thought.

However I’d noticed that MythTV wasn’t recording anything. When looking through it had listed all of it’s encoders as remote and “currently not connected”, interesting I thought. It looked like somewhere along the line that box had got 192.168.5.6 instead of 192.168.5.5. So it didn’t think it was, well it’s self. Changing the DHCP assignments quickly resolved this.

A week later I noticed whilst programs had been recording, they were all sitting queued in Job Queue. Restarting the backend process nor did restarting the box. So I had a quick look on it’s DB and noticed the recordings were showing as remote, not local as they should be. Delving a bit further I noticed that it was listing the recordings as being recorded on “sidekick.oob.an0key.net” instead of “sidekick”. I’d set the domain on the router, and it was happily distributing via DHCP.

So to resolve my issue, I changed the hostname manually, back to sidekick.

To do this on ubuntu is pretty simple, edit
/etc/hostname
with the desired hostname and then
/etc/init.d/hostname.sh restart
However I was now stuck, with all the recordings showing as being recorded on the ‘remote’ host. The only way to fix this would be to edit the database manually. This is where it the less adventurous may want to stop.

So log on to your MySQL instance, it’ll prompt for MySQL’s root password.
sidekick:~# mysql -p -u root
Use mythtv’s database named mythconverg in my setup.
use mythconverg;
Then print the structure and contents of the jobqueue table.
select * from jobqueue;
This is what I was presented with.
mysql> select * from jobqueue;
+-----+--------+---------------------+---------------------+------+------+-------+--------+---------------------+-------------------------+------+-------------------------+---------------------+
| id | chanid | starttime | inserttime | type | cmds | flags | status | statustime | hostname | args | comment | schedruntime |
+-----+--------+---------------------+---------------------+------+------+-------+--------+---------------------+-------------------------+------+-------------------------+---------------------+
| 284 | 1001 | 2011-02-03 17:11:00 | 2011-02-03 17:15:01 | 256 | 0 | 0 | 272 | 2011-02-03 17:15:53 | sidekick | | Successfully Completed. | 2011-02-03 17:15:01 |
| 283 | 1004 | 2011-02-02 22:00:00 | 2011-02-02 23:05:00 | 256 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 2011-02-03 17:25:24 | sidekick.oob.an0key.net | | | 2011-02-02 23:05:00 |
| 282 | 1001 | 2011-02-02 21:00:00 | 2011-02-02 22:00:01 | 256 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 2011-02-03 17:25:24 | sidekick.oob.an0key.net | | | 2011-02-02 22:00:01 |
| 279 | 1007 | 2011-02-01 21:00:00 | 2011-02-01 22:00:01 | 256 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 2011-02-03 17:25:24 | sidekick.oob.an0key.net | | | 2011-02-01 22:00:01 |

So I can see the that the job ran fine that came in after I changed the hostname. So what I decided to try is to update the hostname, and also the scheduledtime too as it was in the past.
mysql> update jobqueue set
-> status=1,hostname="sidekick",comment="",schedruntime="2011-02-03 17:30:01" where status=1;
So this will update the hostname and schedruntime for anything with status 1 (which means queued). I ran that and restarted mythtv-backend, and all the queue was then worked though.

Job done. Hopefully this may help someone else in a sticky position.

Usually, I’d shrug off being ill, with the occasional rant about the seasonal flu. However January really has taken the biscuit.

The week before Christmas, I had an awful cold (I won’t compensate and call it flu). Luckily I was then fine for a few days over the Christmas break. To then come down with the worst case of flu I think I’ve ever had the week after. Literally a week in bed, was very grim. I suspect that was swine flu.

Have then been fine for a week or so, to then come down with another cold, again with a weasey chest. The cold has now pretty much gone, but I still sound like a burst hoover every time I breath in and out.

So I checked in at the local doctors this morning, to be greeted with a really caring, genuinely nice doctor. I told her what the history, and she had a listen to my chest, and concurred something was not right.

She prescribed me 500mg Amoxicillin, as she believes I’ve had a secondary infection in my chest. This may be causing a bit of a loop. Chest gets better (but weakens immune system) > Influenza takes hold due to weaken immune system > Chest… etc

I’ve never really been a fan of anti-biotics, you read about the super bacteria, that are cropping up all over the place. Some believe these are ‘evolving’ due to the over use of anti-biotics. I’m also not a huge fan of popping a pill at every opportunity. However, not taken any anti-biotics for the first 25 years of my life, I’m sure one dose wont bring on the resident evil stylie zombies… or will it?