Freevo and Porn

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On the tech front: I forgot whether or not I discussed my Freevo box in this particular forum–I know I chatted about it with a number of people including substitute and citizenx. Anyway, it is basically a Tivo, only built with Open Source technology. It was not to difficult at all to set up, but it might be a little tricky for the average Linux newbee. It required recompiling the kernel (which I tend to do anyway when I set up a new Debian box), installing a different window manager (EvilWM, which has no window chrome and will run apps at fullscreen), setting up the Gnome Display Manager to automatically log in the freevo user and start the Freevo app, and modifying a few scripts to shut down the machine when the Freevo app exits normally. Also, this particular box had hard drive difficulties. The normal HD rotation was about nine million decibels. I thought it was a bad fan (one in the case next to the HD), so replaced the case because I wanted a smaller one anyway, but the problem still persisted.

It looks like I volunteered myself to pick through the Freevo code and update the documentation and Wiki. It has been about two years since I touch Python, but I was writing some pretty hard-core heavy-duty code at the time (network daemons to serve up high-speed, low-latency media files after consulting various security ACLs). The whole thing (as Substitute will remember, who also worked at that company) was supposed to be a prototype in Python and rewritten in C — it wasn’t. But that is a story for another time.

Dream Journal: I had a few disjointed dream fragments last night. One piece involved Kate and I going all over the place trying to find kittens to adopt, but nobody had any anywhere. Another involved having to fix and maintain code that an old friend had written (A.J. — or Two’s Compliment — from back in the Interzone days). He had some pretty well maintained documentation, but it was all hand-written and interspersed with full-color anime (mostly tentacle) porn. Of course, being in a business environment, I could not leave the documentation lying around because people were obviously going to focus on the porn and not the text, which made for uncomfortable times. There was some other stuff, too, but I can not remember much of it. I do remember waking up with a song fragment: “I–am–going–to–have–to–kill–you” sung to the tune of a Christmas song, as if it were to be followed with “fa la la, fa la la, la la la.”

Posted in: Dear Diary Dreams

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