Since motivation is a bit low for KDE, i thought it was a good idea to solve some other little annoyenses in the software land.

First in row was my Mythtv setup. I discovered I used the repositories from stable, testing, unstable, experimental and some external repro’s. So it was a big mess. And it did not even work right. I was not impressed by the default debian packages. It seems that for a project like this a specialised distro or team of packagers is needed to let all the package interact correctly with eachother. So I picked MythDora for the reinstall. Which worked quite good. After the general tweaking of the tv-card, vide-card, remote control, the lcd-display, etc, it seems to get in shape again. Really nice is the connection to internetstreams, like it links to all programs on uitzendinggemist.nl (a site for when you have missed a broacastand want to see it after it has been aired). It’s based on Fedora Core 6 and that takes a bit of efford to get used to. Yum.

Online Backup is very popular nowadays for small/medium sized companies. As we have good Internet connections in the country – most of them are flat-fee – it is tempting to store your data off-site in this cheap way (companies usually don’t use much internet in the evening/night). The only reasonable open source solution I have found is BoxBackup. It works awesome. One of the best features is that it can monitor files on the disk and when it stopped changing for an hour, it makes the backup. This way you dont have to rely on a certain time at night to make a snapshot (which always seem a wrong moment when you need it), it spreads the traffic throughout the day and you don’t get 1000 backups just because you are debugging a script for a day. The only missing part on the software is a web interface to give to customers so they can restore files themselfes. Once that is available, it will breakthrough.

Asterisk is a Open Source PBX, most of you know that. It is very, very powerfull and you can so great things with it. Only the management of it is really annoying. The text based configuration is so complicated that you can easily spent numerous days before gettint it to work. So I wanted a GUI for it. Via some experiments with for example VoiceOne, I ended up with DeStar. I cought them on the right moment on IRC, so they could help me with the setup. The webinterface they provide for Asterisk is ok, but getting it right even with the right tools can be a challenge. I discovered some bugs and a missing setting which they have fixed in the meanwhile.

For my work I work a lot with remote desktop and vnc. Mostly in combination with ssh tunnels. Generally annoyed by krdc and the boring task of making tunnels, I decided to look around a bit. Someone in #mailody pointed me to KRD. Which is actually a KDE application which can work with tunnels, and support rdesktop and vnc connections. After discovering that the tunnels were wrong for both protocols – and fixing them — open source rules — – I’m now a happy remotedekstop man again.

It’s good to look at other software now and then. It gives you new ideas and pleasant surprises. I think I will fix some more of my annoyences before hacking again on Mailody. I want to wait a bit anyhow, a not saving KWallet, no clear idea’s how ssl connections will be handled in KDE and /me strugling with the model/view setup for Mailody does not really motivate.