Meetings and Classes
I'm a day late with this one, but yesterday was very unspectacular, so there wasn't to write about anyway. We had a company-wide meeting, which took up some time. All of that went well, but it really cut into what could be accomplished for the day.

Afterward I started implementing the bootstrap and RDFS rule classes for Drools. They're now mostly finished with the exception of actually connecting to a database session to execute queries. This needs to be done, but I'm considering if there is something else I can wrap them over, so I can run a test case separately from a real database. The day moved a little slowly, so I didn't get any further with this by the end of the day.

TV
I spent some time last night trying to watch streaming video from my Linux box to my new PowerBook. It was a resounding failure.

There are a couple of options I can try. Since I'm running MythTV on the Linux server I thought I could try running the client on the the PowerBook. This needs QT and other libraries. So I decided to use Fink, since this supposedly removed the burden of getting the software properly configured for a Mac environment. Only Fink failed the build for QT. I've moved onto the "unstable" installation for Fink in the hope that this might have the problem resolved (now isn't that ironic?). It's trying to install as I type.

The other alternative is to use VLC. This would seem good, except that I can't make it work as a server. The documentation for streaming DVB with VLS talks about the need for a .dvbrc file, which I don't have. Examples of this file are apparently in dvblib, but this is not a package I've been able to find (linuxtv talks about a new project called dvblib2, but this has nothing in it yet). I've also looked on the net, but the closest I've found to an example dvblib file have been posts in which people show individual lines from their file, and these are always set up for DVB-S.

Tuxzap has options which talk about making VLC compatible files, but all of the lines in the resulting file start with the channel name, causing VLS to fail. The only option I think I have now is to read the source code which reads .dvbrc, but I have no desire to do that at the moment.

I got much closer using dvbstream and VLC as a client. However, while a network connection was established the streaming still didn't work. The best I could get was a green screen. Maybe I should just write to a pipe, and pick it up with NFS?

It'll be nice if I can get TV showing up on the PowerBook. Even just a few years ago, who'd have thought that we could watch TV coming in through radio waves? ;-)