11/09/2001 Seven years on and my how the world has changed

Seven years today! It's not a day many people will forget. It stands out in my mind due to a member of my team being in New York while it happened. This was my experience:

I was a program manager for a telco/cable company in the UK. I had a team of project managers and engineers building a huge IP network throughout the UK, with PoPs in Europe and the US. On the 11th of September 2001, I was attending a PRINCE2 course (Projects in Controlled Environments) and it was really tough going. I was doing a practice exam and of course had my phone switched off. When I got out of the exam I had a voice mail from one of my project managers, sounding very concerned about Ziya. Ziya was a very talented and experienced IP engineer (the Sultan of Cisco he was known as), who we had sent to New York to build a data PoP in a Level3 facility, and hook it up to a peering point just across the road from the twin towers.
Matt (project manager) said that he had been talking to Ziya and there was some serious shit going down in New York - jet fighters swooping between buildings and the like. They were then cut off - we found out later that the cell phone network in New York had crashed (or been turned off - still not sure about that).
I went through to reception, where there was a big TV and saw what was going on - wow!!
We all tried repeatedly to get through to Ziya, directed to voicemail every time. We contacted Ziya's wife, but she had no news either.
I had a very anxious evening, unable to concentrate on my course work or anything else for that matter. You can imagine my releif when Ziya called me later that night.
He had been working at the Port Authority building (on 34th St I think) and realised that something was happening. When his phone went dead he thought "that's it! I'm out of here". He threw his tools into our cabinet in the colo, picked up his laptop and followed the throng of people heading off Manhattan Island. Not bothering with his gear in the hotel, he walked off the island (no trains were running and all the roads were full of people not vehicles) and found a bus station in Jersey. He bought a bus ticket for Chicago where he had some relatives, and a phone card. He called his wife and then me. Ziya said to me "you know Rob, I do look a bit like an Arab", being of Pakastani descent, yes he did, but it was not something I had ever considered before. Ziya later told me that that bus ride was one of the most scary and tense journeys he had ever taken - nobody spoke, everyone was glancing sideways.
We got Ziya back in the UK about a week later, and it was hugs and tears all round!

On a slightly lighter note, Ziya also had some issues on his further travels - riots in Moscow; Ziya was there for a job interview, plane crashes in Queens (New York again); Ziya and another engineer were in New York .
In the end, the running joke around the office was: find out where Ziya is going and go somewhere else!

I would be interested to hear of anyone elses experiences or tales from that tragedy.

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If you are in Auckland this evening, the guest speaker is Ghanum Taylor of The Hyperfactory, one of the pioneers of mobile applications and winner of the original Wireless Data Forum Mobile Application Competition of which I was a judge, back in the day.

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When I first started fiddling around with Mythbuntu I (like everyone else) needed to know how to get the video off the myth host into something less annoying than the nupplevideo format it records in. (if you are using a BT analogue capture card, that is)

Searching lead me to apt-get install nuvexport.  Nuvexport is a set of scripts that does a nice job of converting the nuv files into xvid, mpeg2 and other formats. (no H264/MP4 the last time I checked).

So now my host records Family Guy each night, then converts said episode into a 300mb xvid @ 1meg/s CBR which I then re-rip using PSPVideo9 into an MP4 to watch on my PSP at lunchtime.  Video quality is excellent, audio is listenable (I'm doing the MP4 ripping at the lowest quality so it fits on to my memory card 'cause I'm too cheap to buy a bigger one and I *REALLY* want to keep the demo of God of War on it). PSPV9 takes about five min to rerip. Handy bit of s/w.

When using nuvexport with mythbuntu you first need to have enabled the Win32 codecs using mythbuntusetup, then use apt to install nuvexport.

Running nuvexport by hand works like a treat - I found that once I added it to the user jobs as nuvexport-xvid (to select xvid output by script name) the export jobs would bomb out.  Reading through the export logs found that certain lines in the scripts try to write to the screen and as they are running in the background they can't and get pissy and stop.  Rem'ing the offending lines out of the nuvexport scripts resolved this so now the user jobs work fine.  DVD export works OK, just takes ages.  Then again, as the myth host is a dual-cpu PIII 700 converting 36min of Family Guy to xvid takes about 4.5 hours to complete.

The next step is to buy a Hauppauge Nova-S card and stick that in the host - then I'll have mpeg2 written to the drive instead of nuv files, and I'll be able to go directly to PSP without having to go through the xvid stage first.

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All this just to get C4 reception in Lyttelton. And to watch Family Guy again. (Without exceeding my ISP data cap...)

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