A software engineers guide to the galaxy

PS3 mediacenter update

2011-04-04T22:37:00.002+02:00

See this post PS3 media center finally working with mediatomb
I've ditched mediatomb, it was way to hard to get to work, and manually editing scripts/config files was a hell.

I'm now using ps3mediaserver.
I downloaded the zip file, extracted to a folder, and fired up ./PMS.sh
I had to force it to use eth1 and a specific ip of eth1 to make it work.

It stream almoste all mkv/iso files without problems and ofc divx/xvid.
But in general Sony/PS3 is a crappy DLNA client, my samsung TV works much better and gives much better error messages.

Linux network problems, eth0 stops responding (Solved)

2010-08-09T20:31:00.000+02:00

Turns out the NIC (Network Interface Card) was broken. The kernel upgrades didnt help, some just postponed the crash.
Switching to a new NIC (3Com) solved the problem.

root shanara# lspci | grep Ethernet
00:12.0 Ethernet controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6102 [Rhine-II] (rev 7c)
05:08.0 Ethernet controller: D-Link System Inc DGE-528T Gigabit Ethernet Adapter (rev 10)
05:09.0 Ethernet controller: 3Com Corporation 3cSOHO100-TX Hurricane (rev 30)

Linux network problems, eth0 stops responding

2009-10-14T13:24:00.015+02:00

I finally found a solution for this problem on my linux server.
Since kernel 2.6.25-r7 all kernel upgrades resulted in errors, like this one:

WARNING: at net/sched/sch_generic.c:246 dev_watchdog+0x12d/0x1d5()
Hardware name: System Product Name
NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth2 (8139too): transmit queue 0 timed out

...

[] ? dev_watchdog+0x12d/0x1d5
[] warn_slowpath_common+0x77/0xa4
[] warn_slowpath_fmt+0x64/0x66
[] ? default_wake_function+0xd/0xf
[] ? autoremove_wake_function+0x11/0x38
[] ? enqueue_entity+0x113/0x11b
[] ? __wake_up_common+0x46/0x76
[] ? netdev_drivername+0x43/0x4b
[] dev_watchdog+0x12d/0x1d5

And the network for eth0 would stop working, stopping the device, removing the module and reinserting it did not help.

I've read several places of people having the same problem, like this one:
http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/linux-kernel/2008/6/13/2121634

But none of the posts I found had a working solution. But they did help me solve the problem :o)

If I booted the kernel with the

pci=noapic

option, the kernel would freeze and write an error message like

IRQ #7 DISABLED nobody cared

That gave me a hint that i may had something to do with APIC, maybe a broken apic implementation on the motherboard/bios.

Anyways, i disabled APIC in the bios, and removed the

pci=noapic

option, and that solved it!

So i guess the ASUS K8V-VM motherboard has a broken APIC implementation..
(Or it could be the linux implementation that is faulty, since I never had any problems with this machine while it was running windows)

There she was!

2009-06-26T13:51:00.013+02:00

Nora was born, the 20th of June 2009.
53 cm and 3620 g, a real beauty!

strange c# lambda expression behavior

2008-09-19T11:11:00.003+02:00

Here's a nice one:


public static void Foreach<T>(
this IEnumerable<T> collection,
Action<T> action)
{
 foreach (var item in collection)
     action(item);
}

public static IEnumerable<T> Foreach<T>(
this IEnumerable collection,
Func<Object, T> action)
{
 foreach (var item in collection)
     yield return action(item);
}

var files = Directory.GetFiles(dir, "*.xml");
// #1
files.Foreach(xmlFile => DoSomething(xmlFile));

// #2
files.Foreach(xmlFile => { DoSomething(xmlFile); });

Given that the files array is not empty.

#1 doesn't call DoSomething(), #2 does. Why?

PS3 media center finally working with mediatomb

2008-09-15T23:14:00.009+02:00

Update: See this post ps3 mediacenter update

I finally have media tomb working with dvd/iso images and mkv files.

It took some time to understand the config file (which is a general issue with linux apps), since mediatomb can stream divx movies/mp3 files without transcoding, getting transcoding to work with vlc was trublesome, there are 4 settings that have to match.

First the mime type reported to the ps3 which only seems to accept video/mpeg.

Second the video codec of the transcoded stream, only mpgv seems to be accepted.

Third the audio stream had to be mpga, mp3 doesnt seem to work

Finally the container of the streamed transcoded media which is ps

That's great because i could read that from most tutorials/blogs.

But to get transcoding to actually work the section of mediatomb config file had to map to a profile that will transcode the file eg:

Here is my full config file: config.xml

And my transcode scripts (using vlc)

For mkv files: mediatomb-transcode-video

For dvd/iso images: mediatomb-transcode-video-iso

What a week!?!

2008-09-14T12:05:00.005+02:00

Gee first of my monday was crappy (like all my mondays).
Tuesday i had a breakin in my car, they stole my gps, my ipod and my jacket??.. What a great start of the week!
11:45 it was announced that my boss Niels was fired (Linked in), which totally blows, cuz he was a really great boss!
When i got home i had an email from my server with kernel dump attached. I havent had a kernel dump since last time my server was breached! And guess what some noob tard script kiddie had tried to hack my server!
Anyways it took most of my evening to verify that he didnt succed, pheewww

The rest of the week was spend installing mediatomb on my server for my ps3. It mostly works, i can play mp3 and divx movies. but for some reason mkv movies and jpg images doesnt work :(
And im yet to figure out how to "transcode" iso images of dvd's with vlc.

Memory leaks in .NET

2008-08-28T09:23:00.003+02:00

I'm currently working on creating an ESB solution (like Biz Talk). In the process a memory leak was discovered, I found this site which describes how to use Perfmon to track leaks in .Net code.

After alt of debugging we found that the MSMQ integration in .NET leaks memory when fetching public Queues :(

And we are live!

2008-08-27T18:06:00.002+02:00

That's it i've finally created a blog @ blogger.com
I'm excited to see how well it works!

Update:

Setting up a proftp user and a virtual directory in apache was easy