Streaming Video to the TV

Yesterday, I installed kissdx on my Ubuntu server. Thanks to this nice little server application I am now able too stream my music and videos direct to my Kiss DP-558 from my computer.

It is quite easy to set up, the only mess was that I have to change the following lines in the Makefile:
# remove -liconv below if your system has libiconv built in
$(CC) -o $@ $(OBJS) -ldvdread -liconv -ljpeg -lm

to:
# remove -liconv below if your system has libiconv built in
$(CC) -o $@ $(OBJS) -ldvdread -ljpeg -lm

Then I just changed some paths in the kissdx.conf-file and started with:
kissdx -c kissdx.conf

I walked to my TV and let my DP-558 search for a PC-link server. Then I looked at Road Runner.

Python and Java

Since I do Python programming at my spare time and Java programming, including a bunch of other Java technologies such as JSP, JSTL etc, at work. These articles were very interesting to read even if they are 2½ years old:

• Python is not Java
• Java is not Python, either
• Python interfaces is not Java interfaces

Storm

Canonical have today released Storm, a object-relational mapper for Python. Simple described is it a glue between Pythons Object-Oriented language and SQL-databases table-relational language. After I read the tutorial, I think its quite easy to use and will simplify the use of databases from Python a lot. I hope it will enter an Ubuntu repository soon.

GConf

I know this is a tool/functionality that many old *nix-guys hate, but I think it has some good potential. The function I miss so far is the ability to store default and mandatory values in an LDAP-directory or in a SQL-database. I have heard that it is designed to handle other backends, but it had never been implemented.

Today I stumbled up on this good article about GConf, its worth reading if you want to know more about tweaking your gnome.

gvfsfind @ freshmeat

gvfsfind can now be found on freshmeat.net. I have also published my bzr/bazaar-repository.

find is an amazing tool, but it can't use Gnome-vfs

I use the find command line utility nearly every day. It is amazing to manipulate large directory hierarchy with files. Unfortunately, I have missed the possibility to do like this:
find ftp://ftp.sunet.se/ -type f -exec gnomevfs-copy {} . \;
The example above is of course stupid since it will take for ever and fill my hard drive but you get the idea. I need the similar functionality to copy video-files from my PVR, Kiss DP-558, to my Ubuntu server.

This weekend I decided to solve the problem, so I created gvfsfind. The prefix gvfs since it is based on gnome-vfs. The tool has a help that I hope can get you to start using it. Just start it with the flag -h.
This example prints all directories on the ftp-site:
gvfsfind.py ftp://video.foo.org --type d --print
To copy all files ending with .vob from the host skipper to the local host:
gvfsfind.py ssh://skipper/srv/movie --type f --name ".*\.vob" --exec "gnomevfs-copy %u ."
Create all directories on the remote host skipper on the localhost:
gvfsfind ssh://skipper/ --type d --exec mkdir %d
Then copy all the files to the local host:
gvfsfind ssh://skipper/ --type f --exec gnomevfs-copy %u %d/%f

For now I license the software in GPL version 2. It will probably change when I have read version three.

Please note that you must access remote hosts anonymously or using cryptographic keys.