internet kaspersky security: /n software discount code

/n software discount code
I usually don't post discount codes (not that I have many anyway, when I receive one I try to spread the love), but this one is good for developers: 20% off /n software Red Carpet subscription.

I use /n software on the Geekzone server for some IP stuff. The company has some cool piece of software and the subscription gives you access to all components for your development environment.

Of course if you buy I get an extra 3 month in my own subscription. So let's go for it. The promotion code to get your 20% off /n software Red Carpet subscription is "66275696471637D604765656B6A7F6E656E236F6E2E6A7".

The current setup - Mediaportal
I think I have gone on about MythTV enough, what about the other major open source media center application, which has many of the features of myth and the added bonus of being Windows-based and hence a lot more familiar territory for most people?

I have run Mediaportal 1.0 for a couple of months now, it's currently at RC2 and has been pretty good. You may have noticed my HTPC system isn't exactly top of the line, a single core and 1GB of RAM means Vista doesn't run very smoothly. MP can be sluggish, I think the remote lag has been fixed, but often loading a channel and setting up a recording can be slow. The worst problems come when recording 2+ shows, especially if some are HD, and watching another at the same time. The show I'm watching will skip or pause, I don't think the hard drive is fully up to the task.

Now plenty of people of these forums already run Mediaportal but there also seem to be plenty running GB-PVR and MCE and to be honest I'm often not sure why. One obvious point is the use of Popcorn hours as a frontend for a GB-PVR server; they look like a sweet quiet, reliable client, but what you are missing out on is full support for all of Freeview HD's audio formats (and hence can watch all the channels), and support for recording multiple channels of a single digital frequency. This is something I do all the time, and to test out my system I once got it recording 5 shows at once, including the HD channels, and it worked fine. I'm sure it could do more, even an HD stream is only around 1.2MB/s, but I got bored. On top of that of course you have support for multiple sources (digital and analogue) and can hence have Prime and FreeviewHD on one system. Again, can't see why you would want to go for Vista MCE instead. Yes it is more stable but I fail to see why so many people have posted at The Green Button complaining about the delays, and possible cancellation, of H.264 support when there is a viable alternative avaliable right now.

This brings me to my point about Mediaportal, its flexibility and feature support, which come from its ability to lean on other software for support. MP doesn't have built-in H.264 decoding, it uses an external codec such as PowerCinema. MP doesn't need drivers for all the TV cards it supports, it uses the provided Windows drivers. And I don't know the technical details but MP also leans on various other parts of the operating system, such as Aero for video performance. This of course gives it a huge advantage over MythTV, which requires all these critical supporting components to be written by volunteers and included in the operating system. Hence, I use it :)

Finally I thought I might add to this blog with what I have been watching. I recently managed to add to my standard fare of The Daily Show and CSI/SVU etc with Friday Night Lights, 8.30pm Friday C4. Set in the heart of Texas; it is about football, God, cheerleaders and football. Very interesting insight into what these small towns revolve around, namely Friday night college football. You thought we take rugby seriously here, we have nothing on the Americans!

Cancel the Bubble FAIL alert: good response from all involved
Well, look at this. I've posted yesterday about some problems with my Flickr PRO account (courtesy of the Premium Services offered by Telecom to its Xtra customers).

The response was great. First friends posted here and in the Geekzone forums about their own account status. I also got some of their status through Twitter.

It seemed it was a single incident - so your accounts should be safe.

I contacted Telecom Help Desk via e-mail and received a reply in less than 45 minutes - very good if you ask me. The answer wasn't quite what I expected though, so I had to contact Flickr directly.

At the same time someone in the Telecom team escalated the issue to the Yahoo! Flickr team.

Sometime this morning my account was reprovisioned with the correct PRO status, while some time later Tara from the Yahoo! Flickr team contacted me to say all was in working order. Tara even posted in our Geekzone forums to confirm this.

Seriously, when the account problem showed up I thought this would be a black hole - having to deal with a third party help desk, account issues, etc. But it all worked well, in a really fast way.

Overall great work from Telecom and the Yahoo! team - and in what I think it's great time.