This is as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

In response to the deep psychological case-study that is "Beards of Python", I present the Python ur-developer, which is what you get if you average them all together. Next time you find yourself annoyed that urlparse doesn't handle daap:// URLs properly, or find yourself thankful that Python 3.0 is fixing some of your problems, this is the guy to blame or buy beer for. Which of your friends does he most look like?

So, there I was in the pub in Dublin, attending OSS Barcamp. Enjoying a beer or six (including Coopers Sparkling Ale, at Jan Schmidt's recommendation, which bills itself as "the ale by which all others should be measured", which is frankly a bit of a reach), and chatting to lots of people. The question "is this your first time in Dublin?" came up a lot, and since it is my first time in Dublin, the question got a nod and "but I've spent a lot of time in Cork", because that's where my family's from. Mostly it gets the nod-and-smile I'm-not-really-interested reaction, unsurprisingly, and then we get into an argument about emacs or something. One chap, though, said: oh, really? I'm from near Cork. Where exactly? Fermoy, says I. You're kidding! comes the response. This chap grew up there, it turns out. And not only that, but...he knows well my cousins Ricky and Ted and Sean, Sean is his sister's landlord, and his mum plays bridge with my great-aunt Annette. My dad's always said that I couldn't walk 100 yards down the high street in Fermoy without running into someone I was related to. I didn't realise the six-degrees-of-friendship thing would extend as far as pubs in Dublin. It's a small world after all.

I have a reasonably large collection of music and movies. In my lounge, there's a big computer with a 1TB drive in it, which is where all the movies and music live. It's running MythTV, and plugged into the television. Upstairs, there's a second MythTV box, a front-end only, which I use for watching TV in bed. My laptop runs Banshee, and can see the music and films through gvfs and SSH to the main MythTV box. This all works fine. But it's annoying. I don't really like MythTV's interface much. Creating playlists in Banshee is great and easy, but those playlists don't appear in MythTV. I have to import new music twice, once into Banshee and once into Myth. I want to be able to do it all from one place, and have it all work. So: what should I do? I'm happy to change almost everything about the setup, with the one hard-and-fast requirement that every component needs to run on Ubuntu, and I'd much rather run stuff that's packaged for Ubuntu. I'd prefer to use Gnome apps and GStreamer apps where possible, but if I have to step away from that I'll think about it. I've had various thoughts about this; I don't know whether any of these are realistic, and I'd happily hear your thoughts on any of these or on anything else that I haven't mentioned:

1. Make MythTV a UPnP server, keep Myth on the main machine and the upstairs frontend, and use a UPnP client on my laptop. Flaws with this: I don't know whether UPnP does playlists, I don't know whether you can edit a playlist over UPnP, Banshee doesn't have UPnP support afaik, Rhythmbox does but doesn't play videos.
2. Investigate the mythtv:// source in GStreamer and build a Banshee plugin for it. Downside: I'm not very good with Mono stuff, so writing a Banshee plugin is hard. Rhythmbox would be easier (I'm fine with Python), but again, Rhythmbox doesn't do videos
3. Use Elisa on the server instead of MythTV. Flaws: not sure how this helps the edit-playlists-on-my-laptop problem; see above issues about UPnP; Elisa doesn't actually work very well, or it didn't last time I tried it (it was very slow, and the UI is slickish but doesn't actually seem much easier than Myth); Elisa doesn't record stuff off DVB (although I could keep mythbackend running, but how would I configure it?)
4. something else I haven't thought of

Lazyweb, tell me what to do...

In honour of Tom's migration from Blosxom to Wordpress (thus joining the rest of us here in the twenty-first century), and in recognition of how I owe him a present and all, I've decided to alleviate his pain. You see, because Tom's a nutcase, he had all the dates displayed on his previous Blosxom weblog in the Latin form, using a Perl program to convert dates to Roman that he developed. Clever and elegant. Pointless, natch, but he seemed to enjoy it. However, the move to Wordpress has broken that, because Wordpress isn't written in Perl, it's written in PHP. So Perl plugins don't work for it. So, I have taken it upon myself to convert his Perl Roman date converter to a Wordpress PHP plugin. Download the Wordpress Roman Dates plugin here. Install by dropping into your wp-content/plugins folder and naming it romandates.php. Nota bene primus (since we're doing Latin stuff): this isn't very idiomatic PHP; it's a direct conversion from the (not very idiomatic either) Perl original Nota bene secundus: this would have been impossible for anyone who wasn't me, because Tom didn't actually publish the source of his Perl program. But I'm his sysadmin, heh heh heh.