Inside the Mind of Sators

Boy, I blew it.

This week I have learned a really hard lesson about not letting my frustration get the best of me.  I have joined the ranks of Kevin Colvin, “theconnor“, and others who have gotten themselves into carreer trouble through Facebook, Twitter, or in my case, their blog.

This weekend I had some unfortunate circumstances happen to me on the road.  Really in retrospect now it seems silly, but at the time I got really fired up about it.  At the time, it seemed like the people who could do anything to resolve it didn’t really care.  Perhaps I didn’t know them well enough…whatever the case, I was wrong.  All of these perceptions on Sunday boiled over and frustration and tension got the best of me, and so I let out what feelings I was having at the time on this here blog.  (Don’t bother trying to find the post…it’s gone.)  Boy, that was another example of where I was wrong to say the least. Not only did I say things I didn’t mean, but I brought up issues that weren’t even relevant or that aren’t even bothering me – seems my frustration was feeding on itself – and thus my demise.

I was sitting on a plane, created the blog, posted to my facebook, and the flight took off.  An hour and a half later when the flight touched down, I came to my senses, deleted it, and took every reference to it down.  Too late.

The people who I thought didn’t care actually did, and those same folks who could have and eventually would have resolved the circumstances in which I had suffered read my fuming blog post.  It is those same individuals who controlled whether I worked for them or not, and after reading my admittingly inappropriate post, decided it best that I not be with them any longer.

I can’t blame them, this is absolutely 100% my fault.  Just when I had started to feel like everything was going well with this gig, I go and shoot myself in the foot.  It’s definitely a wake up call to me – I’ve never done this before, being so blunt online or letting my frustrations and emotions run away.  I wouldn’t recommend it.  Not only was it just plain foolish, but I put in writing things that I didn’t even mean.  I let the emotion of the moment dig my grave.

It’s a sad day, naturally gray skies and starting to rain outside.  Ultimately, I’ve learned a big lesson here at the cost of working with a great band, an awesome crew, and in a fun environment.

I recently had issues reinstalling drivers for my Verizon 1x-EVDO embedded modem in my Lenovo Thinkpad X60, Sierra Wirelsss MC5720 Modem, couldn’t find much help, eventually found one messageboard that helped me out.  Thus, I post my discoveries in hopes to help the next one out there.  Pass it on, right?

So my issue – I reinstalled Windows Vista and was able to get every driver for my system installed without issues from the Lenovo driver website.  However, for the life of me, I couldn’t get Windows to accept the driver location of Lenovo’s recommended driver download for the Sierra modem, thus rendering Access Connections and Verizon’s EZAccess programs useless.  Well here’s how.

Download Sierra Driver: This is the driver file I used, downloaded and used as of this posting.  There may be a more recent version on Lenovo’s website – Sierra Wireless MC5720 Driver – MC5720AC.MSI

Don’t install the MSI file!! Just download it and save it to your desktop.

Use a program such as Universal Extractor to extract all of the contained files from within the MSI file.  .MSI files are essentially a type of .ZIP or .TAR file in that they are a container for multiple files.

Once all of the files are extracted, go to your Device Manager and right-click on the Sierra Wireless MC5720 that is listed under the Unknown Devices and choose Update Driver.

At the prompt, tell Windows to look in the folder of the extracted files from the .MSI file

Success! Once the primary driver is installed, there will be four or five other network device and comm port drivers that can be installed the exact same way.

Feel free to comment on if this works for you or not.  I hope it helps!

This week I began putting together a linux based media center system to replace the DVR using Mythbuntu 8.04 and running MythTV.  Well let the fun begin.  Here’s a listing of gear:

Elitegroup A780GM-A with ATI HD-3200 On-board
AMD A64 X2 4400+ 2.30GHz
2GB Ram
500GB HD
pcHDTV HD-5500 Capture Card (MythTV Wiki)
Mythbuntu 8.04
Cable service provided by Wow Internet and Cable in Schaumburg, IL.

First off, this project is not for the faint of heart.  Get your trial and error shoes on cause it takes a lot of patience to get this working, but it looks so freaking cool.

First problem was getting the right ATI drivers installed with the fglrx driver.  I had success in using version 8.9 of Catalyst and installing is using this guide.  The system still doesn’t like me if both the D-SUB and HDMI connectors are both connected and active at the same time, so I would say pick your preference there.

Getting the display functioning correctly was just the first piece of the pie.  Next, when mythfrontend would load, the screen would be completely distored, pixelated, and a mosiac that was indistinguishable.  Some people worked around this by running mythfrontend setting the –geometry attribute to 1 pixel less than their screen resolution, but this didn’t satisfy me as it ran Myth in a window and not full screen.  With the tip from Robert Barnes on this messageboard, I discovered that if I set a particular environmental variable before running mythfrontend, everthing would look great.  I took it one step farther and now everything is working great.  Here’s the step by step:

sudo apt-get install gedit
sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Add the following to the “Devices” section (Don’t know if this step really changed anything):

Option "TexturedVideo" "on"

Save and close.

sudo gedit /usr/bin/mythfrontend

Insert the following lines at the top of the document:

# Fix for ATI Drivers
export LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=true

Save and exit.  Attempt to run Myth by going to Applications > Multimedia > MythTV FrontEnd

This got me up and going and it fixes having issues upon reboot.

I did have distorted audio which was resolved thanks to my buddy Nathan changing my audio output device from /dev/dsp to /dev/dsp1.

As it stands now, I’m not fully up and going as I can only get my standard definition us-cable-irc channels working and I’m not getting audio over HDMI working yet…but we’re on our way.  Feel free to post any tips/tricks you have learned if you have a similar setup.