This blog is not a busy one, but it seems to attract at least a little traffic via search engines.  Here’s the latest of my infrequent analyses of my web server logs, brought to you by our good friends at awstats…  but before I begin I’d like to humbly apologise to anyone whose search has brought them to this blog item: this item is a content-free zone if ever there was one!

For the first two months of the year, not very much.  Someone who searched for “mediawatch today tonight knife flight” found me in January, and in February someone (hopefully) found my experience with setting up S/Key authentication in OpenSSH useful.

March was interesting.  We went from on average 7 searches hitting us to, in March, 42 distinct keyphrases.  There seem to be as many people as upset as I am about Linksys and the IE-only web management interface on the SRW2024, with a number of searches finding that, but the standout would be people looking for Caller ID sources in FreePBX.  Again, I hope that folk found my post at least a little useful — this is the kind of feedback that makes me think I need to make these things I write available.

April saw another huge jump: 93 distinct keyphrases — on average three a day (if that’s a meaningful distillation).  Trixbox was the most common search word, and Caller ID lookup was again popular.  Problems with kwlan also brought people here, which is surprising as I don’t recall using kwlan let along blogging about it…  Top search phrase for the month though was “xbmc ethernet into wall bypass router”; not sure what this person was trying to do, but it sounds tough.

May saw 102 keyphrases, and again permutations of “ldap caller id trixbox” were plentiful.  Top two were “trixbox ldap” and “freepbx ldap” –  I really need to get some material out there.

To round out the review, I’d like to mention some of the more unusual searches that found their way here:

* “places to get married qld dicki beach” — good luck with the nuptials!

* “how does cifs work hummer” — err, okay… every Hummer needs a CIFS server, I’m sure

* “angiogram recovery time” — I hope it went well…

* “vic s blog” — I see Karl Malden: “Ask for it by NAME.” (gee, does that show my age?)

* “wedding transport services sunshine coast hummer” — the Hummer is back!

* “bacula volume frustrated” — yep, Bacula can be frustrating; stick with it though, it’s good gear!

* “bluetooth in hsv grange” — I have NO idea how that got here!

* “wedding venues dickie beach” — not sure how these wedding nights are going to run if these folks can’t spell Dicky…  :)

* “laporte telephone voicemail system virus” — at a guess, someone’s looking for something Leo might have said about a virus that spreads through voicemail…  only the Great GoogleBot could find a way to send that to me!

One thing is clear to me though — I spend a bit too much time blathering on about things I’d like to do, or haven’t gotten round to doing, or whatever…  I know when I’m looking for stuff I hate getting sent to some waffly blog that tells me nothing.  So from now on there’ll be more content, or at least references to where I keep more tech stuff.  Who knows, even a separate tech blog.

Thanks for reading, and if you’re a visitor who’s found this site via the wonders of the modern search engine: perhaps it’s exercising Zen Navigation (As described by Dirk Gently in Douglas Adams’ “The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul”)… the art of navigating by finding someone who looks like they know where they’re going, and following them…  in doing so, you rarely end up where you wanted to go, but often end up where you have to be!

Our rainwater tank installation was completed today.  Two 2000L slimline tanks to help us do our bit for water usage.  The installation was fantastic, the installer even re-hung a gate that we had to relocate due to the position of the tanks.  Now all we need is some rain…

A little tale of “you never know until you try”.  I have been wondering for ages what to do about having to separate media serving solutions in the house — XBMC on the hacked XBoxes for doing music and transcoded movies, and MythTV for TV shows.  I wasn’t exactly losing sleep over it, but I couldn’t help thinking that at some stage I would have to switch to one system for everything if the concept was going to gain wider acceptance with other members of the household.  :)

I had played with the MythTV frontend for XBMC a few times, but each time there seemed to be something wrong with it.  Either dodgy config, Samba problems, or insufficient bandwidth over the wireless.  So I figured that conversion to MythTV and plugins like MythVideo and MythMusic would be in my future.

Then, I realised something wonderful.  All the files I was creating on MythTV had an extension “.mpg”.  On a whim, I set up ccxstream (the XBMSP streaming server) on the MythTV box (sometimes it’s good to run Gentoo for this stuff) and pointed my XBMC at it.

It played.  IT PLAYED!!!  XBMC saw that it was MPEG2 (and good) and Just Played It.

Now I’m sure many readers are looking for a virtual wet fish to poke me in the eye with.  I don’t know why I never thought to try it before, especially after I set the “Transcode” option on all my recordings in MythTV.  But with Mythrename set up to give the recordings sensible filenames, I’m happy — most importantly so is Susan, who took the opportunity to watch some of the episodes of her soap using the XBox.

There still is the issue of XBMC freezing occasionally (nothing to do with the MPEG2 stuff from MythTV as it does it with MP4s too, probably something thermal), and the nagging question mark over network bandwidth, but I get the feeling that my mythical killer home entertainment platform is within my grasp.