Fixed problem with MyMoves for WHS on Extenders

I have been using My Movies for a while now.  I am using the Windows Home Server version.  My Movies for Windows Home server allows you to keep all of your movies on the server, and play them back in Windows Media Center.  This has been working great.  I have been having problems with playing the movies on the Media Center Extenders

The first problem is that the cover art doesn't appear.  Then when attempting to play the movie, an error would appear that the file could not be found.

This thread on the My Movies forum describes the steps needed to fix the thumbnails on the extender.  I found a similar solution that fixed the video files.  I RDP'd into the Home Server and then went into the "Sharing & Security" setting of the share that has the movie files.  In that setting page I made sure that both "Anonymous Users" and "Everyone" has read access to that share.  Once I did that, everything works great.

spec.dock

I have been wanting to get better integration with my iPhone in my car.  Normally I would just connect my iPhone to the line-in jack of my radio.  The problem with this is that, if I want to skip songs, I need to wake the iPhone, enter the password, then select the skip track button.  This is pretty dangerous while trying to drive.  So I have been interested in getting a solution where I can use the controls on my head unit to control playback from the iPhone.  In addition to controling the iPhone, I wanted a solution that would look stock in the car.

2point5 is a company that specialized in custom installs of iPhone and iPods.  They took this experience and now sell docks that are custom made for various cars.  In addition to the docks, they also bundle the needed adapters for the various manufacturers' radios.

I bought the spec.dock package HONFGV2IPKG. This package includes the USASpec PA15-HON2.  This adapter can be connected to either radio's XM or CD changer interface.  When connected to the XM interface, song meta data is shown on the radio's display. Unfortunately, the XM interface doesn't work with the Honda headunit that has navigation, so the CD changer adapter was used.

I like the way the dock fits into the car.  It really looks good.  Also the integration with the radio controls works very well.  I would recommend the spec.dock. Here is an album with some photos of the install.

Blog Comments using Google Friend Connect

I am thinking about disabling comments on this blog, but also adding Google Friend Connect's Wall gadget.  This would enable:

• Offload the spam filtering from my server


• Reduce the chance of security holes, as less user input would allowed on my server


• Enable cross site conversations,


• Enable the users to archive their comments

But there are some downsides to this

• Requires a browser to have JavaScript enabled to leave a comment


• Potentially slows the page loads, as requests have to go to additional servers.


• For posts that already have comments, the comments that had been previously added will not appear the same as the new comments.

Has anyone else done this?  If so, how well does it work?  Or should I just stick to LifeType's internal comments?

Exporting Tags in Windows Live Gallery

Before moving to iPhoto I was using Windows Live Gallery to manage my photos.  One reason that I liked Windows Live Gallery over the older versions of iPhoto is that it had face detection.  This allowed me to identify people in my photos.

Another reason that I liked Windows Live Gallery, is that it has native flickr support.  Since I do use flickr, this reduced the number of tools that were need to handle my photos.

Unfortunately, the integration between Windows Live Gallery's people tagging an flickr support is missing something.  When I usethe flickr web interface, I tag photos with a tag for each person that is in the photo.  Since Windows Live Gallery supports taging photos with the names of the subject people, and arbirtary other tags.  When you upload photos to flickr, the string tags get added as tags on flickr, but no flickr tags get added for the people identified in the photos. It would be great if I can enable Windows Live Gallery to create a flickr tag for every person identified in a photo.

iPhoto '09 has the same features that WIndows Live Gallery had.  Now that I am using it I will tests to see if Apple has implemented the functionality that I have described.

Annoyance with Windows Media Center and WHS Power Pack 2

The recently released Power Pack 2 adds better integration with Windows Media Center to Windows Home Server.  Now you can specify shares to be "Windows Media Center shares", where you don't have to specify permissions or make sure that the Media Center is running as a user that exists on the WHS.

In addition to Music, Videos and Pictures, Power Pack 2 adds the notion of a "Recorded TV" share.  dvr-ms files that are places on this share will automatically appear in the Recorded TV secion of Widows media Center.  I was pretty exicited about this, as this would allow us to archive TV shows and watch them later, but without wasting disk space on the Media Center.  For example, we copied 25 eposides of Six Feet Under to the WHS.

But there appears to be a problem with this integration.  Some time when I look at Windows Media Center, the files that are located in the "Recorded TV"  share on the Home Serve do not appear.  Only the files that are local to the computer will appear.  If I double click on one of the files that reside on the Home Server, on the media center, the it then appears in Media Center UI.

If I reboot the Media Center PC or let it sit for a day or so, the TV shows do come back.  It seems that there is something that is causing the Media Center to loose references to the content that is not local, but something does start a scan for new content.  I need to figure out how I can force that scan.

RSS feeds for KLIV podcasts

I am a fan of KLIV, which is a local radio station in Silicon Valley.  Last year they started offering "podcasts", but didn't have any rss feeds for the shows.  The only way to listen to the shows was to either play the files in a browser or manually download them and add it to your music player. 

I decided to write a perl script that would parse the html of those pages, and generate a rss feed that includes those enclosures.  So far this script works with  most of the podcasts.  I am sure with a little bit of tweaking, the others will work as well.

Here is the script. Here is an example of using it:

./klivrss.pl http://kliv.com/pages/1215474.php /tmp/file.rss

I have put up a page that contains links to the rss feeds that I have generated.

 I hope that KLIV adds builtin support for rss, as the feeds will be more up to data, and there would less chance of things breaking when the html changes.

subversion over ssh

This post has a description on how to use subversion over ssh.  This makes it easy to have a place to check in files for projects that I am working on, where the repository is hosted offsite. 

It is a lot easier to use subversion this way, instead of using a subversion server, as I don't have to run another server or open another port in my firewall.  Though this does require me to have a ssh user account for everyone who would access this repository, and permissions need to be set appropriately on the repository.