I had a productive evening yesterday. I had a reply from the author of the ZapDVB digital TV recording software. He welcomed my offer of help in improving the English language text displayed by the software, so I did some editing of the language file and sent it back to him. He says that a new version is being worked on.

I've made a few recordings with ZapDVB, but they take up a lot of space at around 2GB/hour. I had thought about converting to DVDs, but as my new DVD player can do DIVX I thought I could use that instead. As mentioned earlier I was playing with mencoder to do this. My first attempt produced a file that played on the PC, but was rejected by the DVD player. I managed to find some options that worked. Playback on the TV is a bit blocky, but may be acceptable. It's mostly going to be stuff for the kids and they are not as picky as me about picture quality.

I've been having some thoughts about using some sort of Jabber bot to do some remote administration tasks, e.g. notifying me of comments on this site. I've had a look before to find an example that I could use as a basis. My latest find was gozerbot. It's written in Python and already has a comprehensive set of plug-ins. With a little help from their IRC channel I got it working on my PC. I need to investigate further into how to write my own plug-ins.

It's amazing what you can achieve if you don't spend all evening reading slashdot ;)

American Catholics are up in arms about a NYC gallery proposing to display a chocolate model of Jesus on the cross over Easter. The Catholic League has a great rant about it. I wonder if they get as angry about all the tacky Jesus and Mary plastic sculptures and pictures you see so much of in Catholic countries.

We will be celebrating Easter with some tasty pagan rebirth symbols.

Comments seem to be working and some are getting blocked by the filter. With help from my friendly server admin I now have the ability to remove unwanted comments.

My comments are not working at the moment. I am trying to get the comment spam plug-ins working, but something is wrong. It's making use of the Akismet service, but gets a time-out when it tries to verify my key.

For reference, here are the steps I have taken so far to make comments work:

• Copied the comments.py plus the akismet and check-javascript files to my plug-ins directory
• Added comments, akismetcomments and check_javascript to my config.py plugins list. The latter 2 were not there before today
• Registered at Wordpress to get an API key and included that in my config.py
• Copied comments.js to my web directory. Although the comments said it could be in with the plugins that didn't work
• Updated my story template to include the comment count
• Set permissions to allow apache to write to the comments directory

I'm making enquiries on the mailing list and may also try the IRC channel.

These days I keep very few bookmarks in Firefox. There are a few there for sites I visit every day. The rest are in del.icio.us so I can access them wherever I am. Even for sites I do have in bookmarks I quite often access them by just pressing F6 and start typing the URL. One problem with this is that my history has quite a few URLs that I have mistyped. I used to think you could only get rid of them by clearing the whole history, but I recently read that pressing Shift-Del would clear one. Not only that, but it works on web forms too for text that Firefox remembers for you.

I've had some issues with my right hand due to using the mouse so much, so I prefer to use the keyboard when I can. Lots more shortcuts for Firefox here. I should try and learn a few more, taking account of the differences on Windows and Linux. If I am using the mouse I like to use mouse gestures as this reduces the number of clicks required. There's a few gestures I use, but again I ought to learn some more.

The general problem with all these shortcuts is that you don't always realise that they are there unless you read the documentation, and who does that? Another recent revelation was KDE's Katapult. I now use that a lot for launching certain applications.

The new comments system has already attracted a few posts from friends. Some have even been kind enough to test my anti-spam measures with some witty texts. Unfortunately they do not seem to be blocked, so maybe I need more set-up. This has also revealed a small problem. I don't have rights to delete comments as they are written to files whose owner is apache. It would seem that what I need is a password-protected web page that allows me to select comments for deletion as that should have the same rights. I shall look into how that could work. Pyblosxom doesn't really have any web interface for controlling it. You have to make use of SSH and FTP to update files. I could also do with something to allow me to monitor comments as they come in. There is email notification that I ought to try.

I gained a new toy today. It's an ancient (1999?) Toshiba T8100 laptop with a screaming PIII/600 CPU and a massive 128MB of memory. Hey, it was free. I have plans to use it as a media player on my network for streaming radio and possibly video. It's got Windows 2000 on it that I may keep for now as it would do for my Windows-only jobs of programming the home automation and the multi-remote. I'll still be trying out an Ubuntu live CD on it to see how it handles it. I suspect that something lighter, like Xubuntu may be more suited.

My Logitech Harmony 655 multi-remote is a great gadget. It allows us to get away with using a single remote most of the time. To set it up you have to log into their web site and configure everything, then the site downloads a file which is transferred via USB to the device using an application installed on the PC. Unfortunately this application is not available for Linux so I have to make use of a Windows machine.

I was trying to set it up for my new DVD player yesterday when I found that I couldn't get into the screen that lets me re-program the buttons. I sent them a bug report. Later that afternoon I had a reply to say it was fixed. This was on a Sunday! They had fixed it, but something else had gone awry and I had lost some other settings somehow. I've reported that too. I also inquired about whether there will ever be a Linux version of the software.

The most serious problem I have had with this device is that the up/down buttons for changing volume and channel have become very intermittent. This would seem to be a hardware issue that I may be able to resolve by opening it up, but for now I have just added those functions to the programmable buttons alongside the screen.

As of now this site can accept comments. I needed a little help from Ryan on the Pyblosxom mailing list, then I sorted the rest by checking the log files. I've installed some anti-comment spam measures. We will see how effective those are.

I should have checked the stats before pondering how the PS3 would do on F@H. 15,000 PS3s are managing more TeraFLOPS than around 200,000 PCs of various types. Impressive. We shall see if the enthusiasm lasts. There's discussion in various places about how energy efficient the PS3 is compared to some PC platforms and it seems it's not as good as far as gaining F@H points. There are people out there who have large numbers of dedicates machines running this sort of project. I just saw an example of one whose electricity bill is nearly triple mine. I can't afford that and would find it hard to justify unless I knew the electricity was from a renewable source. Maybe when I build my own wind farm I'll set up some PCs to use the excess power. Meanwhile, my puny box will be turned off each night.

I've been having some problems with Folding@home on my home PC. Apart from it taking weeks to process a work unit due to not being on all the time and just being generally slow, I've had several units crash out, so wasting several days of processing. I've not found a workaround, so for now I'm putting this PC back on distibuted.net. It has no benefit to medical science, and I'm not totally sure about it's benefits to anyone else, but at least my PC is contributing to something. I hate to see a processor idle.

I changed my start-up script to swap things over, but when I rebooted I ended up at a console. It took me a while to sort it. It seems that it was actually due to an update I had run earlier which had not completed properly. Running 'apt-get -f install' fixed it.

distributed.net has achieved a few things. It has cracked a few encryption challenges and has calculated some optimum Golomb rulers, but the latest challenge seems ambitious. They have been working on the RC5-72 encryption challenge for a few years and, at current rates, will take another 1000 years to cover all the keyspace. Of course the key may be found in the first 1% and computers will get faster, but I think this already shows how hard a task it is. I think they have less contributors than in the past as many have moved to other projects. Looking at their stats on the platforms in use, it's amazing to see the variety. There are even some old Amigas still processing.

Maybe I'll look at Folding@home again when I have a faster, probably dual core, PC. The F@H client is gaining the ability to exploit all cores without the user having to set up multiple instances. Dnet has had that for several years, as I found when I ran it on an old dual CPU server. It will be intesting to see the results when Sony release the F@H client for the PS3.

I've been looking for a while for a way to convert programmes I've recorded from Freeview to a more compact format. I was thinking of DVD, but as my player can do Divx that may be suitable. I remember when that first appeared and the fun we had converting DVDs. I ran some tests with mencoder and that looks promising, even if it lacks a GUI. I was going to convert a programme from last night for the wife to take to work, but Channel 4 changed the schedule at the last minute.

Minor excitement in the garden today when a sparrowhawk took out a dove. I missed the kill and it flew off before I could get my camera.

I'm not really into politics. When I get a vote I generally go for the 'greenest' party. In our area there is rarely a Green candidate and the Tories have a large majority, so it's only going to be a protest vote anyway.

Our MP is Tory Alistair Burt. I don't know much about him, but I suscribed to his feed on TheyWorkForYou to see what he speaks about in the Commons. His latest was to close for the opposition in a long debate on the Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade. I'm not going to read the whole thing, but he declares his status as a council member of the Evangelical Alliance. If there's something that scares me more than a Tory, it's a Tory who thinks God is on his side. Obviously I think it's great that the UK gave up slavery, but from what I read in the Radio Times about a programme I didn't watch, William Wilberforce pushed for it to save the souls of the British rather than to save the Africans. It also said that he considered it more important to convert India to Christianity. I'm sure he was a good person, as are most Christians, but I do wonder about their motives sometimes. I've not read up on the history of slavery, but I have the impression that lots of Christians managed to justify having their own slaves, but then the Bible does not condemn the practice.

What I have gained from this is a secondary, redundant, reason not to vote for Mr Burt.