Usually, for good measure, I download the latest driver for my kernel. Since the update to Dapper Drake kept me at 2.6.15 (upgrade to -28 from -27), I downloaded the 0.4.10 driver.

I also had to rebuild my build environment so that I could recompile and reinstall the driver. I just follow section 5 off of Hyam’s website regarding a MythTV 0.19 install on a Breezy Badger box. It is a little out of date, however, this section is still very relevant.

So, my first thought in creating this environment would be to combine the two together. Surely, someone has already thought of this and has developed a plugin to combine a forum and wordpress together. My google searching first brought me to ZMAng‘s post regarding Integrating a Forum with WordPress. This was a decent start for what I wanted to do.

However, the more I examined the solutions he presented, the more I realized that they really did not fit what I was looking for. I liked the idea of integrating Vanilla with WordPress. The integration was minimal at best, like the other solutions, of basically just integrating the user database. Plus, it was not a plugin, I actually had to go hack the php code around. Who knows what would break the next time I upgraded one of the pieces of software.

I looked at RS Discuss and XDForum. However, neither of them appeared to do what I wanted either. And the RS Disccus author had already given up once on coding the software.

I also looked at bbPress, from the authors of WordPress. I figured that this would be my best shot for what I was looking for. However, even with this, WordPress integration was minimal at best. All of the integration solutions I looked at essentially just integrate the user databases together. There was no actual communication between WordPress and the forums. Nor was there any graphical integration (theming).

So, that brought me to write down what I was really looking for. I was looking for an enviornment where a blog post would automatically be entered into a forum. If someone were to reply either in the forum or in the blog, it would should up in either one. Pings and trackbacks should work the same way. Architectually, it should be the same content instead of duplicating the content between the two. Normal users could make forum topics without it showing up in the blog. Ideally, the forums and comments would be threaded. Also, theming of the forum would follow the blog. In other words, only one theme.

As I did some more searching, I discovered that there some other people out there looking for the same thing as me. I found an interesting post by Darren Stuart entitled Are Blogs the New Forums? It mirrored some of my thinking.

Another tidbit I found was when I was looking at a forum plugin I discovered off of the codex. While I was viewing the comments of Simple Forum, I noticed a very interesting one. A user named Jason (sorry can’t link to the comment) stated:

… For example, what I’d love to see is admins being able to mark a forum post to be displayed as a blog post as well and vice versa, defineable on a per post or per category basis. In this manner you could have a “Simple Forum Announcements” category on your blog associated with the same category/section of your forum in which it would be flagged that topics could only be started by the admin and all posts to that section would be posted in the associated blog category. For such posts, commenting could be redirected to the forums or displayed inline but kept in sync. Is this making sense or just getting confusing? …

This was just what I was thinking. Andy, the author of Simple Forum replied with:

… There is some thought provoking stuff in here some of which I like. Especially the notion of linking a forum to a category. That certainly has a lot of merit and will go on my list straight away. I’m not too sure about the forum as post notion but give me time to think it through! …

I am hoping that Andy runs with the idea. But, this got me thinking again. Maybe I should not be looking at blog software per se. Maybe I should be looking at CMS software. So, after searching for while between the big CMS names (many I have tried in the past), I took a look at Drupal. Drupal has both a forum module and a blog module built in.

I started to play around with it too see how much integration the two had. Looking at them seperately, it appeared that both forums and comments to blogs were threaded in the same manner. This was certainly a step in the right direction. Then I noticed while playing around with posting to the forums that there was checkbox you could click to send the forum post to the front page. Could this be it, what I was looking for? It did indeed post the forum post on the front page. So now I had both a blog post and a forum post on the front of my website. Unfortunately, it appears that there is still a difference between the two. When I clicked on the overall blog link there is no mention of my forum post. I am doubting that any pingin and trackbacks would work as well. So, I took two steps forward and one step back.

Unfortunately (and correct me if I am wrong), it does not appear that there is any readily available software to perform what I am looking for. While I could write up the pseudo code for such a beast, I don’t think that my programming skills are up to task. Nor would I have the time to make such an investment.

So, what was the best way to download files? I set up both ftp and samba. They were both a bit hokey because I really have to rename all of the files so that they make sense. Plus, I am not sure if they are the most efficient ways to transfer files. What I really wanted to do was to browse to the file using MythWeb and then download them from there. Then I can see the descriptions, time recorded, etc. … The only problem was Apache. Most of my files are over 2GB. A one hour show generally is 2.2GB on my box. I always got an error when I tried to download a show. Unfortunately, Apache 2.0 on my Ubuntu box has 32bit issues when dealing with large files. I use Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy) as my Myth box. (For a good resource on setting this up check out this page.)

The solution to my problem was a different web server called Lighttpd.

I really did not want to get rid of my existing stock Apache installation. I suppose, in retrospect, I could have just installed a new version of Apache (which does support greater than 2GB files) from source and run them concurrently. However, I like to make my life more difficult, so I decided to look at Lighttpd. Lighttpd does support greater than 2GB files. The big question was, will it work with MythTV?

So, the first thing I did was see if MythWeb will even run on anything besides Apache. Fortunately for me, someone did write up a Wiki article on it located here. So, I knew it was possible. The question was, could I get it working on my system.

The next step I looked at was what were my options for getting Lighttpd installed on my system. Unfortunately, it did not look like Ubuntu had ported it over yet. There is a version for newer Ubuntu systems, but since mine is about 9 months old, I was out of luck. So, the next thing was to build it from source.

Now, usually these days, building from source is as simple as ./configure;make;make install. However, I really wanted to build a package so I could use apt to manage it. I found one web site that described the process. However, it pointed somewhere else for a patch that no longer existed.

So, I ended up following the instructions on the Lighttpd Trac. I followed the instructions for building it from source for Debian (since Ubuntu is from Debian). The kicker here is to download both the newest version and an older version. This is done so you can copy the debian directory from the older version into the newer version. So, instead of using the standard ./configure… sequence, now I can simply do dpkg-buildpackage. This builds a package which I can then install by typing dpkg -i lighttpd-1.4.VERSION.deb.

So, now I have Lighttpd installed. Now what? Well, first I had to configure it and start it up. All of the config files are located in /etc/lighttpd. Basically, it is one file called lighttpd.conf. So, here is where I started following the directions on the MythWeb Wiki article mentioned above. Note, that I had to use his “hacked” way of doing things. However, because I am running Ubuntu, there are some major differences between what he uses vs. what I use. The first thing that I notice is that he starts talking about fastcgi. Well, I know that my php4 installation does not run via cgi on my existing apache installation. So, I had to figure out what to do about that. This is a simple remedy. You just type apt-get install php4-cgi. This installs the cgi portion of php4.

Now, because I am running Ubuntu, my paths are different. So, my bin-path variable is “/usr/bin/php-cgi” not “/usr/local/bin/php”. Other minor changes I made were changing my server.document-root to “/var/www/mythweb” from the stock variable and changing my port to 81 so it would not conflict with my existing apache installation (if you don’t care, you can put to 80 so that it is standard). Another change I added was to add “mythweb.php” to the list of server.indexfiles. This way, when I when I pointed my browser to http://SERVERNAME:81, my mythweb installation will automatically come up.

Now, if you have followed along with the Wiki and my changes, you should be able to see the MythWeb initial page after you start up the web server. This indicates that Lighttpd and PHP are working and connecting to the database. However, you will notice that you cannot click on any other pages without an error.

To solve this problem requires changing some parameters in the PHP setup. This file is located at /etc/php4/cgi/php.ini. The main change I made was to change the default of cgi.fix_pathinfo from its default of 0 to 1. I also added a blank docroot line (I uncommented it), however, I do not think that this impacted anything. Once, I did this I was now able to click on links and bring up the proper pages. Everything seems to be funtioning correctly.

So, ultimately, we come back to the original problem. Can I download large files via http? So, I clicked on the Recorded Programs link, picked a show I wanted, right clicked on it, selected save the linked file as, hit ok, and yes, it is downloading.

Now, I have a web server sitting on port 81 in addition to my stock Apache sitting on port 80 in which I can download large files. If you don’t need your stock Apache server, I would just disable and move Lighttpd back to port 80.

… preserving knowledge and art …

Keep in mind that Project Gutenberg has been doing this type of activity for some time now. They are more of a community based effort, so I encourage you to support them in what they are doing.

Projects like Project Gutenberg and Google Books are extremely important in preserving knowledge and art from past generations. Unfortunately, with copywrite laws and patent laws these days, who knows if ideas and books and art will be able to be freely shared in the future by our children. We need to preserve what we can.

EDIT:

It appears that Google is doing scans of the books, at least from what little I played around with it. Gutenberg is actually making the books available as text files.

This is a great movie. I finally got my wife to watch this several months ago. I had to convince her it was a love story instead of a “war movie”. Apparently, she has something against war movies. She almost left the room at the beginning of white christmas.

Anyways, I have had a couple of questions. Why would anyone travel from Europe, go to Northern Africa, go back to Europe to get to the US? That part of the plot, I never understood.

Also, how common was it for an American white man and a black man to be travelling around Europe and Africa opening random clubs?

I agree with one of the above posters regarding the Paris flashbacks. I realize it is to set up the contrast between happy Rick and bitter Rick. However, Bogart just looks kinda of goofy trying to appear carefree.

One of the things that I tend to do (especially with older movies), is recognize actors and try to figure out what else I have seen them in. This usually gets me running to imdb.

Claude Rains also plays Prince John in “The Adventures of Robin Hood”.

And I also recognized Peter Lorre from “Arsenic and Old Lace”. He seems to have been type cast as that type of character – sniviling and weak.

Also, I was kind of confused about how cordial the germans were the whole movie. If it was me, I would have arressted Laszlo from the beginning. Obviously, it would have ruined the movie..