BB-ZONE

BugStat - Automated Bugzilla Statistics

One thing I was missing fir Bugzilla was the possibility to get bug statsistics by mail on a regular base. I was looking for a prepacked script, thinking someone had to have the urge as well and build something nice. Well, I didn't find anything. Maybe it's to simple or to specialized , I don't know. So I wrote a little Perl scrpt exploiting Bugzilla's XML interface. Maybe somebody finds it usefull, here it is.

Bb April 30 2007

Bodo got a Macbook

After being exclusively on Linux for the last 10+ years I decided to give OS X a try and got a Apple Macbook as replacement for my old Acer Ferrari Notebook. Here is a brief write-up of my experience along with some hints for other who think about doing the switch.

Bb January 03 2007

Going Commercial?

Today I added Google Ads to my homepage in the hope this'll help to support the online fees for this site. Don't be too anrgy with me, but help out by clicking some of the ads. Thank you!

Bb October 25 2006

DVB-T experiences

I recently purchased a Hauppauge WinTV HVR900 hybrid TV stick to check out what all the DVB-T hype is about. It is supported under Linux by the em2880-dvb module which is not (yet) part of the standard kernel. But it's easy enough to get it working and Markus is very helpful in answering questions on his FAQ Page. So after some glitches with the driver were resolved everything works just fine. I didn't try the analog part yet, I'm mainly interested in DVB-T for now.

However I found that the antenna it shipped with didn't receive all available channels and an active (amplified) antenna I tried didn't improve the situation much either. What finally worked is the cheapest of all solutions, an antenna made from a piece of coax cable as described here. Now the reception is fine and I get all channels in my area just fine. If you are located in the Nürnberg/Fürth/Erlangen area as well you can use this channels.conf as reference for your own experiments.

Next I wanted to get streaming over the network to work. The curse of too many computers at home. The easiest app seems to be dvbstream (site down?) by David Chapman, so I settled on this for now. One challange is that it's tuning capabilities are fairly limited when it comes to user comfort. So I wrote a little script that parses channels.conf and tunes dvbstream to the channel specified on the command line. Due to the limited sample I have, there is a bit of guesswork in the script. So if you find that things don't quite work for you, please let me now and I'll see if we can get it working for you as well.

I didn't quite get the result I wanted though. While streaming over the wire works just perfect, it seems like WLAN (802.11g) doesn't provide the enough bandwidth for the stream. Using UDP wors better than RTP but it's still not good enough to watch TV on the laptop. Which is surprising as the stream seems to have less than 500kb/s, which is well below the 54Mb/s 802.11g is supposed to provide.

Bb August 5 2006