1. Use make install or pkg_add(1) to install the package.
2. Start the MediaTomb server manually as user root with the following command:
   /usr/pkg/share/examples/rc.d/mediatomb start
   Wait about 5 seconds and stop the server with this command afterwards:
   /usr/pkg/share/examples/rc.d/mediatomb stop
   The server should have created a configuration file located under /var/mediatomb/config.xml. Please use your favourite editor to make the changes suggested below.
3. Change <accounts enabled=”no” …> to <accounts enabled=”yes” …> and add a password to the account definition one line below. This will protect the web user interface by password and stop unauthorized users from browsing your file systems.
4. You can define a name for your media server by changing the <name>MediaTomb</name> line.
5. If you want to use a firewall to restrict access to MediaTomb you need to put a fixed port number above 49152 into the <ports>0</ports> line. MediaTomb will otherwise choose a port number dynamically.
6. Change the <protocolInfo extend=”no”/> to <protocolInfo extend=”yes”/> to enable support for protocol extensions required by the Playstation 3.
7. Further down in the mappings section you will find an entry to enable DivX support for the PS3. Uncommenting that line isn’t really necessary to watch DivX files. But it will enable shiny DivX icons for all .avi files in the PS3’s video menu.
8. Start the server again and and look at the logfile /var/log/mediatomb.log. You should find two lines likes these at the end of the logfile:
   2008-11-11 01:02:03 INFO: MediaTomb Web UI can be reached by following this link:
2008-11-11 01:02:03 INFO: http://192.0.2.1:49152/
   Please visit this URL with a web browser and login into the web user interface using the account mediatomb and the password you defined previously.
9. Use the Filesystem option of the web user interface to select directories with media content (audio or video) that should be exported to the PS3.
10. Finally enable autostart of the server by copying /usr/pkg/share/examples/rc.d/mediatomb to /etc/rc.d and adding mediatomb=YES to /etc/rc.conf.

You should now be able to enjoy your audio and video files on your Playstation 3.

1. Decent analog video (preferably via a SCART connector) and digitial audio output.
2. An HDMI connector for future use.
3. Support for popular video file formats like DivX and MP4.
4. Doesn’t require a proprietary server software.
5. A good WAF.

But I was wrong. I couldn’t find any streaming video client that met these demands in over a year. When I recently learned that Sony’s Playstation 3 (PS3) supports DivX in newer versions of its firmware my interest was sparked. After a bit of research I found a number of facts in favour of the PS3:

1. The PS3 supports UPnP AV and works fine with MediaTomb, an open source UPnP MediaServer.
2. The PS3 has all the video and audio connectors that I wanted.
3. As the PS3 can also play DVDs it could replace my DVD player. That would not only avoid an increase in the number of devices in the sitting room but also prevent a shortage of SCART ports on the TV.
4. The case of the PS3 is well designed and shiny.
5. In addition to all that the PS3 is also a powerful game console and a Blu-ray Disc player. And I was keen to play Assassin’s Creed anyway.

Based on the above evaluation I came up with a profound business case which was approved by the secretary of domestic affairs straight away (the WAF was even better than anticipated). I bought a Playstation 3 online the next day.

The concert was brilliant, just as I expected. Brian May’s mastery of the guitar is just breathtaking. Roger Taylor is looking a bit older than he used to but his abilities as a drummer haven’t been affected at all. He even played the famous bassline from Under Pressure on an electronic bass guitar using his drumsticks. And while nobody can replace the late Freddie Mercury the new lead singer Paul Rodgers is an excellent musician.

Besides some great songs from the new album the The Cosmos Rocks they played the classics that people love. There is nothing like celebrating We Will Rock You with thousands of others or singing We Are the Champions at the top of your lungs.

Silke and I are both hoping that this wasn’t the last Queen + Paul Rodgers concert that we have lived to see.

1. A hardware problem.
2. A broken device driver.

As running the Apple Hardware Test didn’t reveal any problem I decided to re-install Leopard from scratch to get rid of broken drivers. The virtual networking driver bundled with Microsoft’s Virtual PC was number one on my list of suspects.

Installing Leopard worked like a charm. Time Machine allowed me to restore all the applications and data that I wanted to keep from my external backup hard disk. And I didn’t experience a single kernel panic ever since.

Yesterday when it was time for the weekly backups of all our machines … well of most of them … I wondered whether I managed to fix another problem of my Power Mac G5: the broken front FireWire port. Time Machine had never worked properly if the hard disk was connected to the front port. Accessing the hard disk resulted in a lot of input/output errors and the backup finally failed. I even brought my Mac to the local Apple shop for a repair which didn’t fix the problem unfortunately. Could the mysterious broken driver have interfered with the FireWire driver as well?

I connected the hard disk to the front FireWire port and started a job that tried to read all the files on the volume. The job completed after two hours without a single input/output error. Encouraged by this success I started a Time Machine backup run. To my delight it finished without problems too.

It seems that the time it took to re-install the machine was well invested and I managed to exorcise whatever was causing these problems.

On Saturday we visited the York Minster, the impressive church on the northern fringe of the city centre. There was no way to get a complete photo so a partial will have to do.

The next morning we toured the National Railway Museum. There are a lot of famous trains on display in the museum including Queen Victoria’s carriage and the Mallard, the allegedly fastest steam locomotive of the world.

Hungry and a bit tired from exploring the museum for hours we had a really nice lunch break in Bettys Café Tea Rooms. After another walk through the city centre we set out to drive home -  and just in time as it started raining.

After visiting the Hadrian: Empire and Conflict exhibition in London yesterday we were looking for a nice place to have dinner. Just around the corner from the British Museum we found a greek restaurant called Konaki which we hadn’t noticed before. We took a quick look at the menu and decided to give it a try.

We were lucky and got a table because the restaurant was full about half an hour later. After we tried our food we knew why. Our meals were delicious and the portions generous, just like in the greek restaurants we remembered. I suspect Konaki hasn’t seen us for the last time.

I felt a mixture of anticipation and apprehension when we arrived at the Goldener Hahn. But after sighting the first familiar faces I began to relax. The first pleasant realisation was that I’m not the only who got older. I actually still have more hair and less grey hair than some of my former schoolmates. And while a lot of them have gained weight I lost one or two kilos in the last 20 years.

Mario and I spent the rest of the evening talking to as many schoolmates as we could. Unfortunately not all the people I would have liked to meet attended the party. But most of the people I didn’t really need to see again weren’t there either. The hardest part was to remember everybody’s name.

During the evening I realized that I knew next to nothing about the girls on my high school. Well, considering that I was a fairly overweight geek with a lot of spots back then I shouldn’t have been surprised.

Alltogether it was a really nice event. I hope there will be another reunion in a few years.

Unfortunately it also breaks the development environment, and not for the first time. The update included new shared libraries e.g. version 0.11.8 of pixman. The related libtool archives however were not updated. As a result linking with one of the affected libraries fails because libtool tries to use an old version which no longer exists. Even after installing the latest version of Xcode (3.1.1) the problem remains.

Apple really needs to come up with a way to keep the development environment in sync with security updates.

Since yesterday evening my Mac is using LDAP again after I managed to fix the LDAP server. But it is good to know that I can use NIS as backup solution.