Building a "Media PC"

I decided to undertake a new mini-project. The goal was to eliminate our satellite television service, and thus save a decent but not huge amount of money each year.

I had taken a half-day from work because of crap weather; I figured that was a good time to try working on this back-burner project. I pieced together a system from old spare parts and installed Windows XP on it (I had a number of systems that I had removed Windows from and installed Linux, so licensing shouldn't be a problem).

We have a Vizio LCD television that had an RGB PC connector and an audio input jack...plugged in all the cables, and it actually worked fairly well as a computer with a giant monitor. I was fairly surprised at this!

Now...TV. The name that came to my mind for streaming television shows was Hulu.com. My son is absolutely in love with the cartoon Voltron now thanks to streaming Hulu to the TV.

The results weren't fantastic, but they weren't totally horrible. We have a 1 megabit download speed over DSL, which is the bottom rung of what Hulu said is needed for streaming their content. What this means in practical terms is that any sustained download...that is, anything that takes more than a minute or two...causes the Hulu stream to pause. Ouch!

Because of the way Hulu has licensed their content from studios they can't allow people to cache more than a few minutes' worth of the shows. They are using some wonderful Adobe Flash feature to prevent you from downloading the entire show for viewing all at once so it doesn't hiccup and burp in mid-viewing.

Because I have a computer, my wife has a computer, my son and daughter have a computer...if any of them are downloading updates, updating iTunes podcasts, or transferring a Pogo.com applet, the Hulu program pauses on us.

Annoying? Yes. I don't mind this inconvenience much because any shows we really liked we bought on DVD as a whole season, but for my family this could be a deal breaker.

I downloaded an alpha version of Boxee, an open source cross-platform video viewer program that apparently has a lot of features (including a free iPod/iPhone application to act as a remote!). It was so very promising...but I can't yet know if it is decent or not because it doesn't work on the media computer I cobbled together. The system has a Rage 128 Pro video card in it; okay enough to use as a basic workstation graphics card, but on launching Boxee all I got was a white screen from which I could only exit using the Windows task key, then telling Boxee to quit from task manager.

I looked around online and it seems that Boxee requires OpenGL 1.4 or higher. The Rage Pro supports, I believe, 1.3 or lower. Since it's a legacy card no longer supported that means no OpenGL updates. That leaves me with having to find a cheap video card to replace this one before I can test Boxee.

I installed iTunes on the old media system as well. I opened sharing on my personal iTunes system and enabled it on the media computer, and it played my music library without any problems and played an open source movie my son loves watching called Big Buck Bunny without any issues as well. So if I buy any TV shows, buy any movies, or download video podcasts then I should be able to see them just fine on the media computer.

I also connected an old webcam and inexpensive omnidirectional microphone to the media system and installed Skype. Our TV is now turned into a giant videophone. Pretty neat when the grandparents call in to talk to their grandson!

So where does that leave me? At the moment, I have to purchase a newer video card, and the streaming of TV programs only works "so so". Anything with iTunes, streamed from another system or on the computer itself, works well. We already have a DVD player so there's no incentive to rip my DVD's to the hard disk.

The computer itself is rather weak on the horsepower scale with a 1.7 GHz P4 and 1 gig of memory and a 40 gig hard disk, but as I mentioned the only problem I've had has been the fault of Hulu's crazy caching issues coupled with our "measly" 1 megabit download speed.

I'll have to see if Boxee improves things with cached downloads, otherwise I might only have a neat gadget for web browsing with a giant monitor. If anyone has suggestions for viewing ad-supported television content from the web I'm open to it!

Women in Technology

I was listening to a podcast today from IT Conversations. Sometimes the featured podcast topics really get me to thinking; this particular one was about women in open source by Kirrily Robert.

She discusses the fact that women are a minority in open source, and technology in general. What I took away from her discussion was that basically the entrenched male-dominated field of technology is inherently sexist and unwelcoming to new (female) partners in development. She draws a parallel between women entering the tech community to a man getting a manicure at a salon. They just don't feel that they fit in.

Additionally, 80-some percent of men in the field aren't even aware of sexism in their community.

That got me to thinking about how technology draws a unique kind of individual in the first place. We tend to be less than sociable. We work in a meritocracy. We are managed with many similarities in technique to those used to manage a herd of cats. People who truly belong in technology tend to be...well, not normal. I've heard it said that a large percentage of people in IT and programming tend to have much in common with those suffering from (or enjoying) Asperger traits.

I don't think it's that the technology community keeps women in particular out. I think that broadly speaking there are a number of traits that the average woman isn't comfortable with. This is a broad statement and I'm acknowledging that there are many very talented and capable female workers in IT and programming fields. You might assume I'm being sexist; it may sound it, but while I'm characterizing it as a female trait, I think there are plenty of people of both genders for whom this is true. I think that on average this is true of a greater percentage of women than men, and if that makes this sexist, then so be it.

This field tends to be a meritocracy. Part of that means you defend yourself and your ideas; whoever makes the best argument "wins". It means arguing. It means pointing out when the guy in the next cubicle is an idiot, and why you believe that. It means that things get nasty sometimes, and respect isn't handed out with a title so much as it's found crawling through the technology trenches. And many people...perhaps a disproportionate number of women compared to men...aren't comfortable in that environment.

So when Ms. Roberts is complaining that the entrenched male-dominated IT people need to make things more friendly and welcoming, I cringe. We get our standing the same way as everyone else in our field...we fought for it. We checked our thin skins at the door. Is she saying that we need to go out of our way to coddle someone who can't stand on his or her own merits of their ideas?

I think that we generally don't care if you have mammary glands or not. If you're capable of performing the job you will be fine. There are those that may be excessively rude or crude; when limits hit a point of disruption, then sure, step in and do something about it. But for the most part I think that man or woman can earn a place within a team; for people who like things like Dungeons and Dragons and science fiction, being a woman isn't a problem to accept. We may think it's novel since it's not common to have females in the IT department, but it's like finding someone with a mint-condition first edition D&D rule book or Leonard Nimoy's autograph. It's novel. Novelties wear off.

It's very possible that my views are biased. I'm male. I can't really help that. I am wired a little differently so I see the world a little differently. If you have had experiences to the contrary, please share in the comments!

Personally I disagree with Kirrily's assertions. I think the community naturally appeals to the antisocial and people with Aspergian tendencies, and part of the meritocracy involves behaviors that on average women tend to not be comfortable participating in. Any attempt to veer away from a formula where you're in your position because you deserve that position will only bring resentment. But like I said...if you have views or experiences to contribute, please share them!