Ship Some Code

For those of you watching the blog for a new release of MythGrowl, it’s finally here. I have moved the project to Sourceforge, got it a website, checked the code into SVN etc.

The new version has Sparkle support and some new features you will hopefully like. I could go on about how great I think the new version is but the easiest thing is probably just for you to head over to:

http://mythgrowl.sourceforge.net

Download it, and try it for yourself. The site also has details on obtaining the source code, reporting bugs etc.

Major credits goto Paul William for thinking up great new ideas for features to add to improve MythGrowl.

A number of people have emailed me and said that my so called universal binary doesn’t actually work on PPC Macs. I am looking into this and will hopefully release a version shortly that works on both PPC and Intel.

Have fun!

I found a couple of problems with MythGrowl, it would often crash after being run for more that 3 hours due to some very hard to debug multi-threading problems. I have it all sorted now, so if you downloaded and were running MythGrowl 0.1 or 0.2 be sure to upgrade and run 0.3 which is available at the same download link as before in the post below.

For those interested, I was using the curl library for Cocoa to retrieve the Mythbackend status page in its own thread. Turns out the use of libcurl was totally unnecessary as versions of MAC OS X greater than 10.2 support the NSURLConnection API which provides a much more clean and simple way to retrieve data from a URL. So I have also been able to reduce the size of the application and source by removing the threading library I was using and eliminating libcurl.

Overall a very satisfactory fix.

I’ve just finished writing MythGrowl - a fairly simple MAC OS X application that generates Growl notifications when your MythTV backend starts and stops recording or watching a show. You simply specify the IP address or hostname of your MythTV backend server and it will start notifying you. The application (universal binary) is available below.

Update: This is no longer the place to download MythGrowl. It has moved to http://mythgrowl.sourceforge.net/ Download the latest version there!

	Download now

Complete source code can be downloaded here
I’m releasing MythGrowl under the GPL.

You have to promise to check for regular updates and report any bugs. I plan to implement the Sparkle update system in the next release.

Screenshots:

About a year ago I wrote a Linux alternative in Python to the Gmail Notifier released by Google using the libgmail library. It took off rather well for a while but Google kept changing things about the way Gmail worked meaning I had to constantly update the libgmail library. Since then many others have got involved with the project and recently Juan Grande re-wrote most of the code to use the Gmail Atom library meaning the project has become fairly stable and reliable as a day to day tool. The greatest part now though is that someone has built a Gmail Notifier package for Ubuntu Breezy that can be apt-get installed if you have the universe source package line in your sources.list uncommented. So if you run Ubutu Breezy, try:

sudo apt-get install gmail-notify

The Gmail notifier project site can be found here
and the Ubuntu package page for the app can be found here

So I’ve been playing with MythTV recently. I brought a nice looking mini-itx case left over from a stalled robotics project, a 120GB HDD and borrowed a Winfast 2000 tuner card and stuck them together. Lesson learnt: MythTV is a waste of time on anything under 2GHz (my mini-itx was an early EPIA-V 1GHz). You really can’t have fast enough hardware when it comes to stuff like this. I ended up setting up an XP2400+ box as a mythbackend server in the garage and using the mini-itx as just a frontend that connected to the TV in the lounge, but thats a story for another post. I can tell you that it cost a small fortune to get it working reliably and unless you’re serious about it, stick with with your VCR - it might suck, but believe me, it’s cheaper.