Ship Some Code

It was announced today that the American Political drama NBCs ‘The West Wing’ will be taken off the air after its steady decline in viewers from 17.2 million at its peak to around 8 million since the departure of writer Aaron Sorkin at the end of the forth season. The final episode will screen on May 14 and marks the end of an era for all involved with the show and viewers worldwide.

John Spencer, who played the key role of White House chief of staff Leo McGarry died of a heart attack on December 16th, however the decision to axe the show had been made shortly before then. Ever since Sorkins departure from the show, I noticed John Wells seemed to struggle with the direction it was headed. After dealing with the plot written by Aaron Sorkin in which the presidents daughter is kidnapped, John Wells (ER) is left with a very intense storyline to continue with, but after that the show seemed to begin to struggle with washouts like ‘Access’
which I think would have to mark an all time low in the gradual worsening of episodes. I think most viewers would agree that ‘The West Wing’ was truly in its prime in the first, second third and forth seasons although a frantic attempt has been made in the 6th and 7th seasons to revive the show with a lot of out of the West Wing action on the campaign trails of 7 candidates to replace the term limited President Josiah Bartlet.

It has been a great show and the search for a brilliantly acted, witty, moving and informative drama on American politics is sure to continue for a very long time before anything like ‘The West Wing’ screens again.

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.