Montana Harkin

So we moved our media center into the basement and are now using an XBox 360 and a PS3 as our media hubs. The XBox360 works great as a media center extender but we lost access to our videos as the XBox doesn’t handle divx very well.

PS3 Media Server to the rescue.

Download the latest (1.20 beta), Start it up, and point it to our media. Transcoding as needed and everything is working great. From old divx to new mkv at 1080i, everything is kosher.

Now I needed to get everything running as a service.

See http://gist.github.com/455483 for the script. Place it in /etc/init.d/pms if you’re running debian/ubuntu. Might symlink it into /etc/rc2.d if you want it to start up automatically.

Right now it’s still in my home directory, but modify what you need if you want it in /usr/local/bin  YMMV

So when you’re upgrading your ghetto rails app that hasn’t been touched in a couple of years to the new hottness, make sure you check your filters.

Previously, in Rails < 2.0.1 if you returned false in a before filter, it would stop the processing of the action. In Rails >= 2.0.1, before_filters _must_ now redirect or render in order to halt the calling of the controller action.

This can be a large security issue if you are returning false in an authorize component. Make sure to update them to redirect or render a 403.

In our case, we also created a “errors” directory in our views directory to hold our 403.erb view which we now call where we used to return false only.

Previously:

return false

Now:

render ‘errors/403′, :status => 403 and return false

Just some info to hopefully save some time for others. During the installation of the Spore Creature Creator Demo you are prompted to install DirectX 9 (wtf?). I went and started the installation until it came up with this error:

A cabinet file necessary for installation cannot be trusted. Please verify
Cryptographic Services are enabled and the cabinet file certificate is valid.

After searching the web and trying everything under the sun, it came down to deleting the “websetup” folder in the %systemroot%\system32\directx folder. After it was removed I ran the setup again and everything went as planned.

Looks like we are moving to Corvallis. Erin found this nice ’70s house that needs some updating. It is in a nice neighborhood and we should be able to fit in well. Now, to sell our current house!