The TiVoHD is a much different device from the Series 1 TiVo I received 7 years ago. The Series 1 was intended to be connected to your cable box as a pure DVR addition.  The TiVoHD becomes your cable box and your Internet/TV media center.  It’s hard to compare them since they are very different devices.

The Verizon FiOS cable box with DVR is a lot closer, and the TiVo is worse in some ways:

• you don’t get On Demand or Verizon’s pay per view: This is working with Comcast now if you live in the Boston area.  I shed no tears for pay per view, but On Demand had a lot of free content.
• the TiVo interface is almost unacceptably slow: When you press a button on the remote, it takes anywhere from a half second to a full second for the device to register it.  To make matters worse, with a Dolby receiver, the TiVo sometimes doesn’t make a confirmation sound.  This problem makes the device feel cheap and hard to use.  I’m amazed that they released it without solving this problem.  Other people think so too.
• entering text using the remote (for searches) is much, much harder:  Verizon had the ability to use the letter substitutions on the number keys to enter text.  So 228 matched CAT and BAT, but searching was easier and faster.
• the guide doesn’t show which shows will be recorded already: this didn’t work reliably on the Verizon DVR, but it was nice to look through the list of shows and see that The Daily Show was going to be recorded.

It’s better in a number of ways too: the channel guides are much much nicer; scheduling shows is easier and more understandable; fewer bugs; the TV picture seems better somehow (maybe a better MPEG decoder?); easier to use; expandable storage; ability to record shows to DVD or VCR; closed caption support; a better remote; swivel search; and Guru Guides which help you find interesting things to watch.

But the most interesting thing about the new TiVoHD happens when you give it a broadband connection.  TiVo seems to be trying to make their device a full media center.  You can listen to Internet radio stations, (on your stereo!) log into online photo sites and view them on your TV, purchase and play movies from Amazon, etc., etc.  It will also allow you to download recorded shows and movies to your computer, (and then to your iPod, etc) stream photos and music from your computer, and transfer videos from your computer to your TiVo.

And finally, TiVo has released an API to design new applications and do cool and interesting things. And here again things fall down.  There are some developers creating interesting things, but development seems to be slowing or stopping.  A grand community doesn’t seem to have formed.  In fact, the forum is fairly quiet.  Obvious ideas like Youtube videos, Facebook monitors, or networked games aren’t even being discussed.

So, what’s going on?  Is TiVo too hard to obtain now?  Is there not enough of an audience?  Are the hackers all using the open source equivalents?   Is it too hard to install and use third-party software?  Or is this just a community management or advertising problem?  Or am I missing a vibrant community of people? Does it cost too much for developers?  (The monthly price seems to be much cheaper than renting the Verizon box…)

So after UPS (and I hate UPS) screwed up the TiVo delivery (and Amazon refunded 10% of the purchase price to ease the pain of that) I had to reschedule the technician visit.  That Friday, I reschedule for next Friday, which was the first possible day available.  *grumble*

On Monday, the technician showed up, of course.  So we sent him away, and I called Verizon again.  They showed no record of the cancellation or the reschedule.  So I scheduled Friday again, which was hard since Friday was actually full now.

Today, of course, no technician is coming.  I just called.  No record of my call.

Now, it’s scheduled for Wednesday the 6th.  But they gave me a confirmation # this time, so I guess it’s really true.

But, at least I’m not as bad off as this guy.

Then, UPS got involved.  Check out the shipping history of this package:

This is a UPS screw up.  It happens sometimes, right?  Nothing to worry about.  I’ve seen their ads where you can fix problems and they’ll help out!  So I call them and detail the problem.  I need the shipment before Monday. (the customer service rep mentions the package won’t arrive until the end of day on Monday)

“I need this before Monday, can you change it to Saturday delivery?”

“No, it’s on a truck right now with 5000 other packages.  We can’t pull just one package off, we don’t know where it is.”

“I need this before Monday.  This is your error, I paid for delivery to be on Friday, what can you do?”

“Call Amazon and have them pay for a package intercept back to them.  When it arrives (!) have them ship it again next day air with Saturday delivery.”

So, they can’t find the package unless Amazon (I can’t do it) pays them to find it.  In which case they can get it back to Amazon in time to reship it to me at GREAT expense for Saturday delivery.  Yes, that’s the case, although the original delivery charge would be refunded.

Awesome.

I hate you, UPS.

(Yes, I called Amazon to suggest this insane scheme, and they refused for some strange reason.)

None of those things were actually enough to make me blog, for some reason.  But finally something got my attention.

We hired a baby sitter  take care of  Josh, the above mentioned 6 month old since Amy and I are both working.  She’s very nice and arrives on time, and seems great with both boys.  But today she was late.  On a whim, I looked out the window and saw her car trying to get up our 100 foot driveway.  (Which is icy and snow covered even through our neighbor spent a ton of time clearing it after the snowstorm — which I also didn’t blog about.)

I threw on clothes and ran outside to get her salt so her car could get up the driveway, but she met me at the door.

“My car is on fire!”

Well, it really was.  Lots of smoke — both white and black.  Flames.  Melting things.

I called the fire department.  I got everyone out of the house.  The fire trucks arrived 2 minutes later.

The car didn’t explode.

I didn’t think to get pictures until the car was towed away.  I’m not sure why.

That said, I have a Google Calendar that I want to view in Evolution (if just for the nice reminders) but I don’t want to make public, and I can’t use the private URL. I need Evolution to authenticate to Google, and download the calendar. If you can use a private URL, there is already a good solution.

To that end, I made a terrible, horrible, no good patch to allow Evolution to authenticate to Google so I can download my calendar. The trick is to pre-auth with Google, get the auth token from the result, and store it in GConf. From there, the patch will make evolution-data-server recognize Google Calendar URLs and send the auth token in a special header.

Before I get to the patch, here are the problems:

• Seriously, it’s an ugly patch
• You have to recompile evolution-data-server
• Adding an auth token to GConf?! What are you, nuts?
• Evolution may not be able to understand the appointments set by Google’s calendar
• The calendar only updates every once in a while
• You can’t edit the calendar in Evolution

Here’s how to make it work:

First authenticate with Google to get your auth token:

curl -D - https://www.google.com/accounts/ClientLogin -d accountType=HOSTED_OR_GOOGLE \
-d Email='username%40domain' -d Passwd='password'  \
-d service=cl -d source=evolution-testing-0.0.0

Replace username with your email username. Replace domain with your email domain — this will usually be gmail.com. Then replace password with your google password.

This will return three lines, the last one will look like this: Auth=DQAAAGgA…dk3fA5N

Then run:

gconftool-2 --type string -s /apps/evolution/calendar/gauth authstring

You’ll need to replace authstring with the 180+ character string returned by the previous command.

You should only have to do the above once. Or whenever the auth string
expires which seems to be very rare, if at all.

Then quit Evolution and kill the data server with this command:

evolution --force-shutdown

Start evolution after applying this patch.

Go to the calendar component and add:

webcal://www.google.com/calendar/ical/username@domain/private/full.ics

as a web calendar. You’ll need to replace username with your email username and domain with your email domain, usually gmail.com. You’ll need to check “Use Secure Connection” and I recommend that you cache the calendar locally.

Happily it works for me until the real solution is available.

I think it still needs a little bit more work, so I’ve written up a specification for Gmail’s conversation feature.

Of course, once you do all that, it always turns out that someone else has written something similar already and for the same reason.

• the board decided to release gnome 2.20 as gnome 3.0
• we are migration gnome desktop to web 2.0 on google
• they are passing the power to a supreme chancellor
  • to start the clone war
    • jeff has passed to the dark side
• GNOME will become the default environment for Macintosh
• GNOME will be the successor of the vista GUI
• The HIG was a huge mistake and we’re switching the button order back
• we are going back to the old gnome stone logo
• we’re releasing GTK+ 3.0
  • with support for Qt as a scripting language?
    • QScript, actually
• there won’t be widgets anymore, the whole desktop is a large interactive SVG
• GNOME switches to windows as the target platform
• all applications are now required to have notification area icons
• all applications will now be 50% transparent by default
• all applications should be inside an applet
• we’re adopting the ms office 2007 ribbon everywhere
• we migrate our documentation system to .doc
• We’re changing our name for trademark reasons to “Dwarf”
• we are changing our name to GMAE because it’s a DOUBLE ACRO-BACKRO-NYM
• Nautilus is getting support for animated desktop backgrounds
• Eazel comes back to life, as well as Eazel services

Edit 4/19 @ 2:15 pm ET: Oh my.  Some of the comments are great!

The Bonsai project helpfully wrote a nice perl script which emails check in information in a machine readable format. To use it:

1. Check out the CVSROOT module on your CVS server
2. Copy the perl script into that directory
3. Add the line: ALL $CVSROOT/CVSROOT/dolog.pl -r /cvs cvs-watch@stage1.example.com to CVSROOT/loginfo
   1. where /cvs is whatever your cvs path is and stage1.example.com is your staging server
4. Add the dolog.pl script, and check in the file and the change to loginfo.

It’s simple to make the staging server respond to these emails.

1. Edit your /etc/aliases file and add: cvs-watch: "|cvs-robot"
2. Check out your CVS module in the appropriate place
3. Create /etc/smrsh/cvs-robot

So what goes in the cvs-robot script?

#!/bin/shexport CVSROOT=':pserver:anonymous@cvs.example.com:/cvs'cd /var

touch /tmp/checkin-errors.log

grep 'www' | grep '. HEAD .' | cut -d" " -f3- | xargs -r cvs update -P -d &> /tmp/checkin-errors.log

This file is only an example. You’ll obviously have a different CVSROOT, and you’ll likely have checked out into a different place than /var. Your module might not be ‘www’ and your branch might not be HEAD. Edit as appropriate.

Bugs

So what doesn’t work? Well, if you add a new directory, this script fails. I’m not sure why. You’ll need to log onto stage1 and do an update manually to get new directories. Luckily, adding a directory is usually rare.

The update is checked out using the root account. I’m not sure what the security concerns are about doing that, and it’s possible you may have permissions issues. You can create a simple wrapper script that calls the real update command:

#!/bin/shsudo -u apache /etc/smrsh/cvs-robot-real

• It didn’t work in Internet Explorer. (Not too surprising since I don’t have access to a Windows machine for testing.)
• It was a little ugly. (Okay, no one said that, but I think it was implied.)
• The hidden sections would display for a moment before being hidden.
• It wasn’t keyboard accessible.
• I had a typo in the script.
• The hiding animation wasn’t the same speed as the twisty animation.

So I’ve tried again with some good ideas from the SWAT tooklit. You can try the script.aculo.us animated version or the plain non-animated version. You can also simply download the whole thing as a tar file to play with.

To use this on your own, you need to include the twisty.js file in your code:

<script type="text/javascript" src="twisty.js"></script>

You should also include the two external style sheets:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="twisty.css" type="text/css" media="screen"></link>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="twisty-print.css" type="text/css" media="print"></link>

You no longer need any changes to your <body> tag.

To define a twisty, use this template:

<div class="collapsible"><a href="javascript:toggleTwisty('uniqueid');">The Section Title<img class="twisty" src="twisty-down.gif"></a>
<div id="uniqueid">
<div>
Section Content
</div>
</div>
</div>

If you want the section to default to hidden, simpy add this code to the end of the above code snippet. (after the last </div>)

<script type="text/javascript">
hideTwisty('uniqueid');
</script>

Hopefully, this version works better.