Last night Becky and I sat down to watch the second episode ( titled “Rewind”) of the Fox show Human Target. The first episode was fun in a cheesy action-thriller sort of way, so we decided to give it a continued try.

Back in high school, I had some friends whose dad was a submarine officer in the US Navy. They said it was unbearable to watch The Hunt for Red October around him because he spent the whole moving groaning at the inaccuracies it portrayed in the submarine. After watching this episode of Human Target, I think I now know how he felt. As an avionics systems engineer, the details of this in-air plot just drove me batty. Allow me to elaborate.

First, the plane is going down for no apparent reason. Yes, there’s a fire down in the fuselage, but that shouldn’t cause complete loss of control.

Second, they’ve gotta put the fire out, and apparently there is more wind flow over the top of the aircraft than the bottom (???? Totally bogus) so the solution is to fly upside down until the increased airflow puts the fire out. Are you kidding me?!? We’re not talking a fighter jet here, we’re talking a large airliner. While there is this rather famous video of Boeing test pilot Tex Johnston doing a barrel roll in a 707, look at how much altitude he loses just turning the thing over! There’s no way the airplane could stay airborne and upside down for long, much less the fifteen minutes or so that it does in this episode.

Third, while they’re flying along upside down, suddenly they can’t flip it back around to right-side-up because the on-board computer locked up. We’ll ignore the detail that they say the “flight management” computer locked up when, in reality, it’s the flight control computer that would help them fly the plane. Once the pilot diagnoses that it’s locked up, somebody asks if they can’t just reboot it. And of course the answer is no, they can’t. By this point I’m yelling at the tv screen. “OF COURSE YOU CAN REBOOT IT YOU IDIOTS! POP THE FREAKING BREAKER AND RESET IT AND YOU’LL REBOOT IN JUST A FEW SECONDS!!!” (Becky is not appreciating me too much at this point.) But apparently NONE OF THEM REALIZE THAT, since they then have to go on to…

Fourth, the amazing computer hacker on board decides she can somehow download the flight management software onto her laptop, patch the laptop into the aircraft system, and use it to control the plane. About the only thing that whole sequence gets right is that there are ethernet-based networks on modern aircraft. But it would be next thing to impossible to hack into the system to download the software, and COMPLETELY IMPOSSIBLE to then patch that laptop into the system. And why was she able to download the software right there in the (upside-down) cabin, but to patch it into the aircraft system, they had to go down to the avionics bay?

Fifth, once they got down to the amazingly-spacious avionics bay, they apparently were able to just unplug a standard RJ45 ethernet jack (and normal-looking ethernet cable) from the aircraft wiring and plug it into the laptop, and SHAZAM! it worked! What they ignore is that standard ethernet wiring and a plastic RJ45 jack would never pass aircraft environmental and vibration testing. All ethernet connections in an avionics system are routed through stout metal screw-on connectors, not secured with wimpy plastic clips.

Well, it’s the world of TV, which means that yes, everything worked out fine inside of an hour, the bad guys were caught, the good guys survived to fight another day, and the hero got in his wisecracks just before the credits rolled. (Oh, and fun side-note: two episodes of Human Target, two appearances by actors who had major roles in Battlestar Galactica. For whatever that’s worth in your geek scoring system.) Next time, I hope they just stay off the airplanes so I don’t have to deal with knowing too much about reality for my hour of entertainment.

So this past weekend I wiped and reloaded my Dell laptop… twice. Long story. Anyhow, each time I had the need to download and install what, for me, is a fairly standard set of free applications – browsers, utilities, communication programs, and the like.

Typically that task takes a while – go visit every program’s website, find the download link, download the program, run through the install dialog, click Next about 4 times, etc. But this time I remembered Lifehacker’s glowing review of Ninite.com and gave it a whirl. And let me just say it here: Ninite does not disappoint.

Ninite is a simple-to-use bulk installer for Windows applications. You hit the Ninite.com home page and select the apps you want to download and install. There are, at present, 68 choices in categories ranging from Browsers, Media, and Imaging to Compression, Developer Tools, and Security. When you’re done making your selections, you hit the “Get Installer” button and a small (500KB-ish) .exe file is downloaded to your machine. Run it, and it will sequentially download and install all of the applications, using the default installer settings.

The two best things I can say about Ninite are that (1) it has a fairly comprehensive list of downloads and (2) it works exactly as advertised. The only apps I needed to download separately were the Adobe Air runtime and my non-free backup software. It likely saved me a couple of hours each time I used it. Worth checking out next time you do a nuke-and-pave.

So we’re getting rid of our Dish. We’ve had cable or satellite TV pretty much ever since we moved into town seven years ago, but now we’re cutting the cable. Now, we’re not giving up television altogether; we’re just switching to a setup that will let us record and playback over-the-air TV, and giving up the paid stuff. There are a couple of sides to this, so I’ll make it a couple of posts. This is the nerd post. You have been forewarned.

The Goal
The Dish DVR we are replacing allowed us to record shows and watch them on either of our two TV locations, one downstairs in the family room, the other our little 13″ standard-def TV in our bedroom. We don’t watch the upstairs one that much, but it is very handy to keep around for times when the girls want to watch a show, and for in the mornings when they’re awake but we want to sleep in some. We didn’t have HD through Dish Network; I really wanted HD. Oh, and I’d really like to still be able to watch some Cubs games. That’s about it.

What We Ended Up With: Downstairs

To go with the 42″ Vizio LCD TV downstairs we invested in a relatively-inexpensive tower PC. It’s got a dual-core Pentium processor, 4GB of RAM (I know, I know, the 32-bit OS won’t use all 4, but that was the stock configuration), a 1TB hard drive, and lots of room to expand. It came with Windows Vista Basic (ick); I upgraded it to Windows 7 RC, and have preordered a regular Win 7 license for it. Add a Windows Media Center remote, and it works pretty smoothly. A little noisier than I’d like, but tolerable. This machine is our primary recording unit.

For an OTA tuner, I got a HDHomeRun networked tuner. If there’s one piece of this system that I’m most happy with, it’s the HDHomeRun. It’s got dual tuners in it. Basically, you plug in your OTA antenna and your ethernet to the back of the tuner, and you’re done. There’s a small piece of software to install, but then Windows Media Center (and EyeTV on the Mac) pick it up with no trouble whatsoever. (Supposedly XBMC in Windows will handle the HDHomeRun, too, but I haven’t been able to get it to work.)

The final component downstairs is an old tower (I forget the specs) running Ubuntu. I mostly use it as a place to save backups; there is just north of 1TB of disk space in it. I’ve also got some recorded TV stored on it which gets served up to the other computers on the network.

What We Ended Up With: Upstairs

Our little friend the Mac Mini moved upstairs. To go with it, I found a Dell 22″ 1920×1080 LCD display on sale cheap. While we do have EyeTV installed, and could record from upstairs, the limited HDD space on the Mini (100GB) has me recording downstairs instead. (Yeah, I could do some fun AppleScripting to move files to a different machine once they are done recording… but that’s more work than I wanted right now.) The Mini is running XBMC for playback, and in the event we want to watch something live upstairs, we switch over to EyeTV. Not as elegant as I’d like, but it works pretty well.

What We Ended Up With: The Headaches

The biggest challenge in this setup is that I’m the idiot who’s running three different OSs among my three computers. Oh, and also running a beta OS on the Windows box. So Windows 7 Media Center records OTA TV into a new file format (.wtv). WTV files aren’t yet supported by the FFmpeg codec, which means XBMC won’t play them. Fortunately, W7 provides a WTV-to-DVRMS converter, and FFmpeg does support DVRMS. So, I’ve got a little nightly batch file that runs to convert all of the day’s WTV recordings to DVRMS and file them off in appropriate directories in the shared library area.

Sooner or later the available toolset will catch up with the Windows 7 WTV format, at which point things like commercial skipping and direct playback in XBMC will be available, smoothing things out a bit. For now, though, we’ve got a workable solution that records the shows we want to watch and lets us watch them in either of our two desired locations, and the ability to get rid of a monthly bill from Dish for a bunch of channels we never watch.

I’ve had a Fever install up and running for 24 hours now, and I’ve gotta compliment Shaun for working through the emailed bug reports – he responded back twice, once to acknowledge my email, and a second to ask if I had any tips on reproducing one of the errors I reported. ( I couldn’t reproduce it either.)

Where I am seeing problems, though, is in the feed updates. I thought it seemed kinda slow today activity-wise, so I just went and opened up Google Reader. Sure enough, GR has nearly 1000 unread items, just from the last 24 hours. I’ve seen maybe 200 or so in Fever today. I spot-checked a couple of feeds, and yeah, they’re missing. For instance, Andrew Sullivan over on theatlantic.com has at least a dozen updates since this morning… but Fever, even though it says it’s refreshing every 15 minutes, doesn’t have anything newer than 16 hours old.

My one fear with host-it-yourself apps like this is that all of the connectivity issues get thrown back upon the user (and webhost) to resolve – i.e. if there’s no other discernible bug, maybe it’s just something with your server. In this case, though, I think there’s something else going on.

Anybody else have any Fever reports, good or bad?

Twitter and the blogs have been abuzz today over Shaun Inman’s newest creation, called Fever. Some of you may be familiar with Shaun’s previous creation, Mint, a really nifty blog stats package that you host yourself. Inman is on familiar ground this time with Fever, creating a spiffy feed reader, full of AJAX-y goodness, suitable for hosting on your own website.

I’ve been a regular Google Reader user for years now, occasionally trying out other readers… there was that fling with Feedlounge, before it went under, and occasional dalliances with NewsGator’s line of readers… but I’ve always gone back to Google Reader. I took a look at Inman’s demo of Fever, though, over on feedafever.com, and knew it was time to give it a try.

Does the world really need another feed reader, anyway?

Creating a new RSS feed reader is no simple task. Taking accepted existing designs and improving on them requires creativity and good ideas about usability. Inman is on the right track here. But aside from the UI design, Inman has created a dual-purpose tool. On one hand, Fever is a traditional feed reader. You subscribe, it updates the feeds, you read. On the other hand, though, Fever is something like your own personal Digg. You can subscribe to all those noisy feeds, those linkdump feeds that occasionally have something interesting in them, and identify them as “Sparks”. Then Fever will aggregate them, pick out the hot topics, and present them to you in a “Hot” category, grouping them around a specific topic or link. This, to me, looks like the really slick part of Fever.

After the jump: my experience with installing Fever, importing my feed list, and some thoughts on usability and performance.

Yesterday afternoon we went over to a friend’s house for her belated 30th birthday party. It was a good time – the carrot cake was tasty; there were friends there we hadn’t seen in quite a while; all in all, just about what a birthday open house ought to be. It seemed, though, that I couldn’t go more than about two minutes without hearing Facebook pop up in a conversation.

Now, mind you, this wasn’t a party entirely populated with geeks. Sure, I was there, but I’m the exception rather than the rule. But let’s review. The invite I got for the party: via Facebook. Several comments from the party with the flavor of “yeah, I saw that on your Facebook”. Comment to the parents with the new baby: “oh, I haven’t seen him yet… except on Facebook”. And it wasn’t just the thirty-somethings; the fifty-something retired friend is quite active there, too. (She’s probably challenging my wife to another game of WordTwist right this very minute.)

Got home from the party, popped out my iPod Touch to check my email. (Couldn’t do it at the party, since our friends have secured their wifi and I didn’t take the time to ask for the password.) Saw that the host of our church small group had added me as a Facebook friend. I kick over to the FB app and confirm him as a friend. Long story short, he needed to call to ask about us hosting small group. He didn’t have my phone number. So, he looked me up on FB, wrote on the Wall to get my attention, then asked my phone number via chat. (He could’ve shortened that a bit if he’d just looked at my Info tab, which has my cell # on it… but oh well.)

I’m starting to think there might be something to this Facebook thing.

So I had planned on waiting to blog about this until it was all live, but, well, this is getting annoying. I’ve been looking into social commenting tools for a while now; Disqus and Intense Debate seem to be the two biggies at the moment. When I realized yesterday that Intense Debate had been purchased by Automattic (the folks behind Wordpress), I figured it was the way to go for my Wordpress blog. So I installed it and tried to get it up and running.

The signup and install are easy enough – create an account on intensedebate.com, then install their Wordpress plugin and activate. At that point IntenseDebate is supposed to sync all my blog comments into their site, and then any further comments will automatically be saved both to my blog and to their site. (This is handy, because if I ever decide I want to get rid of them, I just deactivate the plugin, and all my comments are still in place on my blog.)

The sad part is this: I activated the plugin yesterday about 1300. They warned it might take a few hours to complete the import, and assured me that I would get an email when it was done. In the mean time their plugin is active on my blog, so any new comments are run through the IntenseDebate system and show up fine, but all the previously-posted comments are MIA until they get done importing. It’s now almost 0800, and the status page still says “Queued, waiting for import.”

I’m not sure what course to take at this point. I’ve posted a couple complainy replies on Twitter to @intensedebate, but have heard nothing back. (Not that I expect they must reply, but… well, that’s another post.) I’ll give it a full 24 hours to try to import, after that I’m calling it a big pile of FAIL and deactivating. Maybe I’ll give Disqus a try then after all.

Discovered this one last night: when I tapped the Genius icon to create a Genius playlist out of the currently-playing song, the playlist it created began with a different version of that song. It was repeatable, happened twice.

In detail: I was playing “All the Way Home (live)” from Andrew Peterson’s Appendix M record. I hit the Genius button to create a playlist, and it generated one quite neatly. Unfortunately, rather than starting the playlist with “All the Way Home (live)” from Appendix M, it started the playlist with “All the Way Home” from AP’s Carried Along.

Don’t know quite what’s going on here, but something ain’t quite right with the Genius.

I need a SATA cable to hook up a new (to me) hard drive to the motherboard of a new (to me) computer. It looks something like this:

I found them online from a reputable retailer for $1.99 each. I bought two. The retailer has a First Class USPS shipping option that only cost me $2, so for $6 I have two cables on my way from North Carolina.

I stopped at my local Best Buy over the lunch hour to see what they have, and sure enough, they have a SATA cable in stock. (Probably the only place in town that does.) Their price: $19.99.

I rest my case.

So, it was time for a little blog reorganization. I’d started chrishubbs.com about a year ago, with the intent of posting more regularly there on topics surrounding the church plant. Well, we’re no longer at the church plant, so that doesn’t really make sense. In addition, my old scheme of having a place where my various family members could blog never really came to fruition, because, well, I seem to be the only inveterate blogger of the bunch.

So, my conclusion: time to move things around. So, with the help of my intrepid hosting provider, those of you visiting thehubbs.net/chris or rmfo-blogs.com/cakeboy (yes, I know there is still at least one person with a bookmark to that original location… and I won’t name names, but I’m married to her!), you will now be seamlessly routed to the new chrishubbs.com. All the same content, just a new location.

If you notice anything acting weird, let me know.