My father, , and I were talking about the November election this weekend and we started talking about how great a John Edwards vs. Dick Cheney debate would be… Thankfully this possibility is now going to happen. I think Edwards is a fantastic choice for Kerry, and I think ultimately he will make a fine president 8 years from January.

First off, before I forget again, my “cousin” Dave mailed me telling me about this product, which seems to fulfill what I was looking for in this post. Still a bit pricey, and I think I’d like it more if it held more than two drives, but still, moving in the right direction.

The trip back to Boston was pretty uneventful yesterday…. We hit some traffic crossing the Tappan Zee because there was a broken down vehicle in the slow lane, but other than that, and a bit of congestion when we first crossed the MA border, things were pretty straightforward. We listened to the audiobook of Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris. I had heard the book was funny for awhile, and planned on reading it, but to be honest, since it was read by the author and was a collection of anecdotes and short stories from his life, I believe the audiobook was a better choice…

This would make a fantastic present. :)

Thursday night and I came down to NJ to hang with my fam for the holidays… We made really good time on the way down and just pretty much hung out once we got here. Friday was spent lazing around until the Firework Extravaganza on the lake… I did get my hair cut finally. Friday night was awesome, watching the town fireworks off the boat is just such a fun time… We had 11 people on the Party Barge Regency Edition, and we all had a blast. And boy, did I get drunk.

Yesterday we just kinda hung out for awhile until around 1pm, and then Corinna joined Dad, Johnny, Chuck, and myself for the Stellafane “Planning Session” on the boat (which really means we were looking for an excuse to get out on the boat). We grabbed lunch on the lake from this pizzeria which wasn’t good but wasn’t awful… We just dropped anchor in Byram Bay and chatted and swam and chilled… It was a great time. Then at night Corinna, Dad, and I went to see Fahrenheit 9/11 (He hadn’t seen it). A packed show, even in a pretty rural part of NJ, and everyone seemed to appreciate it.

Today I’ve just been chilling out, we took Buster for a run up at the Civic Center earlier, his first leash-less romp out in the wilderness. He behaved fine and had a great time. I think tonight we will watch The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra on DVD.

I was thinking that a cool product idea would be an external hard disk housing that connected to the computer via Firewire (400 & 800) and USB (1 & 2) (and maybe even Ethernet?) and inside had a Serial ATA bus and did hardware RAID. So I could have this portable little RAID box that I could bring to different computers as necessary, not having to worry about setting up RAID on each machine, etc. It’d be great to just have a couple hundred gigs lying around that I could access reasonably fast but that was also “safe”.

This is hysterical.

Played some poker tonight, $2/4 Limit Hold’em over in Cambridge… I am finally starting to feel decent about my play… There was one hand I beat myself up over for staying in, but I definitely learned my lesson and played better for the rest of the night. I am still not quite comfortable short handed, but I held my own. I came out up $62.50 for the night.

I am so ridiculously on edge lately… Tonight I feel all nervous and claustrophobic, like i’ve done something terribly wrong (even though I’ve been pretty saintly lately). Eh, I’m sure it will pass, I just hope it’s sooner rather than later.

I have to go to the dentist for lunch tomorrow for an emergency patchup on a small chipped tooth… It’s the same tooth, i think, that I had “emergency” work done on a few weeks ago, when the filling fell out. I probably weakened it somehow before he patched it up, or something.

A bunch of things have happened since Wednesday, although I doubt any of you will find them interesting. Friday night, after work, i went to the dentist to have two ultra-small cavities filled. I didn’t even take any Novocaine, that’s how small they were (not that Novocaine dulls my pain at the dentist, I have been known to still feel much pain after 5-6 novocaine shots; I have been thinking about skipping even at the next serious cavity filling.) He also took some X-rays which show another cavity, so I have to go back again in a month or so to get that patched up too… Neverending cavalcade of dental torture.

Friday was also the 4th Anniversary of my LiveJournal. That’s right, 4 years of meaningless posts like this one.

Saturday just mostly hung around, I’ve been… Not down, but uninspired to do ANYTHING lately… It’s only been the past week, so hopefully it will pass. Corinna made some awesome food last night, so that definitely improved my mood. :)

Tonight we are going to see Fahrenheit 9/11 with the film club. Should be an interesting time!

The Múm concert last night was fantastic…. It was in the courtyard at the MFA, and we went to the later 8:30pm show (there was also a 6pm show). It was just starting to get dark when the show started, and it was so awesome sitting in the grass looking up at the stars, and hearing beautiful music… While the last time I saw them was fantastic because it was in the tiny 608 Club (Don’t look for it, it’s not there anymore), I have to say that the open air definitely wins in the cage match.

I signed up for some SharePoint training this morning, but it was pretty unnecessary for me… I should have just skipped the training and played with the software for awhile. It wasn’t a bad class, it’s just I could have explored my way to that knowledge in about the same amount of time.

There is little to actually review about the TiVo Cachecard, but I will try to do my best here for those interested. Soon after the TiVo’s release, enterprising hackers figured out ways to expand the system’s capabilities. One of the more common modifications is adding additional hard disks (or replacing the hard disks entirely) to increase the recording time of the unit. The problem with this is that as you expand the capacity of your TiVo, you really do start exceeding the design intent. While the TiVo works with gigantic drives, as the number of recorded programs increases so does the amount of time it takes to work with that program database. People with expanded TiVos generally notice delays (sometimes very large) when doing everything from simply viewing the “Now Showing” listings to Adding/Rearranging their Season Passes. The problem is that the TiVo stores this database on it’s disks, which are already being abused by recording and playback of the video streams. This isn’t so much of a problem when the database is small, but as it grows, it slows.

The CacheCard is a expansion card for the factory test connector on Series 1 TiVos. The card has a single DIMM slot that accepts industry standard PC133 512MB SDRAM. When the proper drivers are installed, they create a cache of the entire TiVo program database in that memory, and all read requests for the database now hit off of that cache, instead of the disks. The net effect is that database access time is drastically decreased, by 2-3 times. In addition to the memory slot, the CacheCard also provides a 100BaseTX Ethernet controller (since most “TiVo Hackers” are already using the factory test connector for an EtherNet adapter and the CacheCard would displace that).

Installation was pretty straightforward, but then again I had already installed a TurboNet card in my TiVo a few years ago, so it would be more involved for someone “starting from scratch”. I downloaded the “native” driver installer (that runs directly on the TiVo) and ftp’ed it over to the TiVo. I telnetted in and installed the driver software. I then shutdown the TiVo and took the cover off. I removed my TurboNet card and replaced it with the CacheCard without issue. It’s a real tight fit (even moreso in the DirectTiVos, I understand), and both the DIMM socket and the card connector were both pretty tight, but I squeezed it on there. I connected the network cable to the new card and booted the TiVo. After the gray “Just a bit longer” screen appeared a cool CacheCard screen was displayed. Unfortunately for me, this screen was red and said Error on it. This was real bad news for me.

I tried reseating the RAM and the card itself and tried again, but still no dice. I disconnected the network cable and removed the ram, and tried again, and still no dice. This time I let the TiVo boot completely and did the remote control trickplay to bring up the Unix log files up on the television. I saw that the TiVo wasn’t recognizing the card properly, so I shut things down again. This time I really jammed the hell out of the card and the RAM, really pressing hard on it, and then rebooted again. This time, I got a blue CacheCard screen instead of a red one, and there was a little progress bar showing the caching/verification status.

This initialization process on boot takes quite awhile. It seems to copy the database into memory, then verifies the copy (to make sure there were no copy errors), then it “caches”. I’m not quite sure what it is doing in this step, being that the database had already been copied over, but the net effect is that the boot process now takes about 2-3 minutes from it’s stock .5-1 minute. But that tradeoff is definitely worth it…. When the TiVo was finished booting I brought up the Now Playing menu and it appeared instantly for the first time since I added 80G to the TiVo. I then went to the Season Pass Manager and rearranged the order of two of the passes. When I “committed” the changes, it still took awhile to resolve all the dependencies, but it went much faster than before. As far as the “primary intent” of the CacheCard, it passed with flying colors.

Finally, I wanted to test the network performance of the CacheCard. The first network card for the Tivo was the TivoNet, which provided an ISA slot off of the factory test connector which a 10Mbps NIC was inserted into. The next generation of NICs for the TiVo was the (aforementioned) TurboNet, which was a “native” 10/100 NIC for the TiVo. It offered increased performance (although the top throughput of the card wasn’t anywhere near 100Mbps due to limited bandwidth on the factory test bus). Later the AirNet was introduced, which provided a PC Card slot for an 802.11b Wireless NIC. The CacheCard advertised increased performance over the TurboNet card, which was impressive, but I was skeptical. After pulling a few program streams down off the TiVo last night I can say that their claims are true, the CacheCard NIC is about 20-30% faster than the TurboNet. In addition, since the disks inside the TiVo are now being used less due to the database cache, things like Tivoweb run faster as well.

I think the CacheCard is a very impressive product, and I highly recommend it to anyone who has expanded their Series1 TiVo. It is a pretty easy install and the benefits are clearly tangible. It’s almost a no-brainer.