September, 2008

So Nero and TiVo have announced a new hardware / software package called LiquidTV that allows you to use your PC as your TiVo. Thats pretty cool. My question though is how does this partnership make sense in relation to the DirecTV & TiVo partnership?

Why should I have to buy a special hardware box from DirecTV when I can just use my PC? Assuming that by using my PC I'll have more control (legitimately or not) over the content that TiVo records, I can't see a reason to use their locked down box.

There will be support for exporting some recorded content to a PSP is awesome. I have one and I'd love to watch some movies on it while traveling without having to buy those stupid Sony UMD discs.

One drawback, having a PC in the living room really won't thrill the wife. So if I can combine this with some type of wireless capability so that I can stream the downloaded content from wherever the PC sits to my flat screen upstairs that would be the ultimate awesome. My XBox 360 can probably do this through Microsoft Media Center capability. Guess I'll have to do a little research.

More details on LiquidTV on Gizmodo:

http://gizmodo.com/5056132/nero-liquidtv-software-builds-a-whole-tivo-in...

Even though they played much better today through the first three quarters, they buckled again. Much like last season where they only ever played good football for two or three quarters, they returned to that form this week.

Up by a point after two quarters, the offense turtled in the second half. Run on first down, run on second down, pass, punt. I guess Linehan thought 14 points was enough to beat the Bills. In most NFL games this is not true and it proved to be true today as well.

Someone please tell me why, down by 14 on a third-and-1, they run a pitch play? Steven Jackson is a straight ahead runner, he hasn't been getting to the edge all season.

Scott Linehan is a terrible coach. He never makes good adjustments in the second half. Opponents seem to be able to make adjustments to whatever the Rams had been doing well in the first half. Why don't the Rams? It has to be about the coaching, or lack thereof.

Now the announcers are saying that the team pictures were canceled last week. One has to wonder if this is an omen of the firing(s) that every Rams fan is hoping for. Why take a team picture with a soon to be fired head coach and GM?

One can only hope...

I have been looking for a way to get an archive list of blog posts, sort of like what you see form some of the popular blog systems like WordPress or BlogSpot.

The Drupal Archive module gets close. It displays a calendar (that is always open) with links to content lists for that day. It's close, but not nearly as convenient as clicking a single link for a year & month.

There aren't any other modules that provide this function out of the box so I had to turn elsewhere. Then I found the Views module. For those who don't know, Views is a way of dynamically building lists and other groups of content for display in pages or blocks. You can filter the query for any content attribute, e.g. user, owner, tag, and content type. Combine that last one with CCK and you get some really powerful dynamic content management.

In a matter of about 15 minutes I had exactly what I wanted. An archive of blog content rolled up by month and year with number of blog entries in parentheses. You can see the block over on the right side bar.

As you may or may not know, I am a Rams fan. Yes, the St. Louis Rams. Yes, they still play in the NFL.

(Are you done laughing yet? Okay.)

I don't know why I'm saying this or even what it could possibly accomplish. I guess it's sort of like a confession, I feel better just admitting it.

I hope you are enjoying your NFL team's performance this year. You probably are if you're not a Rams, Lions, Chiefs, or Raiders fan. The Dolphins even got a win! Aaaaaaah, catharsis. Yes, that's it. This is the part where you can feel better about yourself knowing just how much tragedy I am enduring.

That's exactly what the Rams franchise is now, a tragedy. From the heights of their Super Bowl win in 2000 to the lows of 2008, a tragedy of epic proportions. Created by the inept management of absentee president John Shaw and the incompetent Jay Zygmunt.

My only hope: New owner Chip Rosenbloom grows a pair and axes Jay Zygmunt and Scott Linehan. Sooner rather than later. I'll probably have to endure watching the Bills shellacking my poor Rams next Sunday before Linehan gets the axe however. Hopefully I can be a gracious loser in front of the Wife.

So I spent tonight updating my Drupal installation for the site.

I learned, again, how to:

1. Back up my Mysql database using mysqldump. I could just do this using my DreamHost phpMyAdmin console, but I like to know how to do things command line.

2. Write a Unix Bourne shell script. Including how to check whether or not the caller supplied a command line argument.