Updates to TivoWeb / TivoWebPlus

[healeydave]

Despite being fooled to begin with myself, I have let the alter ego thing go for the time being, people that do that get no credit for their real name and it's a lot of work keeping it up so more fool them.

As for pete, I think he's the grumpy alter ego for mike, either that or mike has a disturbing no.1 fan / stalker

[Tcm2007]

p.s.

unnecessarily having to chmod files that could perfectly well have been chmodded in to the right state for the end user by their author

No that's the whole point, the zip format (and WIndows specifically) does not understand Unix file permissions as used by your Tivo so this is impossible.

Wrong. I have installed numerous zip files with Tivo hacks written by Mikerr on to my Tivo but unzipped them on my Windows laptop first before FTP'ng them over and the file permissions do always stay just how they were when he created them.

You really haven't Pete. If you unzip a file to your Windows PC then copy the files over then permissions are lost. It may well be that the permissions didn't matter much in that particular case (it doesn't make any odds for TW modules, for example), but they definitely weren't preserved.

Given your comments to me on TCF today, you really did get out of the wrong side of bed this morning, and seem intent an alienating anyone who might conceivably help you with any problems in the future. I really hope Mike wakes up to you soon and stops doing things just for you, then you really will be in trouble when things go wrong.

[mikerr]

As for pete, I think he's the grumpy alter ego for mike, either that or mike has a disturbing no.1 fan / stalker

No, I only have one account here !

I think with Pete you're either his best buddy, or "the enemy" - no inbetween !

Given your comments to me on TCF today, you really did get out of the wrong side of bed this morning, and seem intent an alienating anyone who might conceivably help you with any problems in the future.

Yes just read that - not the best way to request a hack pete, by first offending all the hackers !

I really hope Mike wakes up to you soon and stops doing things just for you, then you really will be in trouble when things go wrong.

Haven't really done anything just for him - the sp2wishlist script is useful for all latecomers to altepg...

[Pete77]

Despite being fooled to begin with myself, I have let the alter ego thing go for the time being, people that do that get no credit for their real name and it's a lot of work keeping it up so more fool them.

So are you saying that you agree I am probably right in my suspicions regarding the connection between Rachel and Spitfires also assuming that you as moderator of this forum have more of a scientific basis than mere posting style for working this out? Clearly a clever old techie (which Spitfires clearly is despite working hard to outdo me as one of the forum's more cantankerous and irascible personalties) would have no trouble making posts under a couple of different IP addresses.

I can only assume it was a slip that he made that post as Rachel and not Spitfires as he clearly responded to my post to Spitfires about his new Tivoweb hacks and also responded in full Spitfires mode and not as the lady just out of Holloway prison. I have to say that up to that moment when he posted in his alter ego under the wrong id he did have me fooled and I had not connected him with being Rachel.

So far as Mike is concerned what I admire most about him is his clear mission to let people upgrade their Tivos as heavily as possible with as much functionality as possible without expecting that only fellow heavy duty programmers should have that right. Mike's ability to constantly come up with new tweeks for existing Tivo hacks and to create things like auto install utilities for getting new hacks on to the Tivo has also been impressive. Of course after your long quiet period Dave I have been equally impressed with all the work that you have done recently to act as the lead coordinator and enabler of the AltEPG project. As someone clearly lacking in diplomatic skills myself I suppose I ironically prefer the fact that mikerr as a good businessman is a little better able to suffer fools more gladly than some of you other technically clever people. And no I am most definitely not him or any other current member of the Tivoland forum even though my real name may not be Pete.

I am genuinely impressed by anyone who can write stuff in TCL to further enhance the functionality of our Tivos but I am always a little confused by those who seem to feel that they only want the work they have done to be available to others with a very high level of pre-existing PC knowledge rather than simply to anyone who likes recording television on an advanced PVR device. I am therefore regularly further confused by TCM2007 who clearly wrote a great Tivo hack with Endpad but yet dumped his Tivo long ago as an inadequate piece of hardware from yesteryear for the cutting edge needs of one of the creative forces behind T3 magazine yet seems to now hang out here mainly for his love of engaging in sparky debating. He must know that he will never ever reform what he sees as my failings and yet still he feels the need to constantly make posts that he obviously knows will set me off. And he does this as someone who clearly regards himself as being a very intelligent person (as well as one of the staunchest supporters of an unbridled capitalist economic system).

I do remain somewhat amazed that some other clearly clever programming minds like Spitfires don't seem to understand why meddling with almost any operating systems is so very tricky for the ordinary man or if they do realise this they seem jealous of ever providing enough detailed information to let them develop the same level of understanding they already have. So far as chmod 755 and all that is concerned I have found the process for creating and then subsequently expanding Tarballs frighteningly unobvious and all I can tell you is that if have a copy of my whole hack directory structure on my PC hard drive and FTP it back to my Tivo when I get a /var wipe (I had none for four years and then about four of them in six months but none now for nearly a year) it does seem to work and DailyMail, Tivoweb, Highlights and all the old favourites work just as before. I have even checked what the permission settings were of some files I FTP'ed back and they have always been the same as the ones they were meant to be in the original instructions for Tivo installation of that hack or module.

[Pete77]

I think with Pete you're either his best buddy, or "the enemy" - no inbetween !

Not really. I have lots of people in real life or here who I neither strongly like or dislike. Its just that I tend to get engaged in heated argument and/or an elephant never forgets type struggle with those who see themselves as entitled to to be rude and and unpleasant about what they see as being my failings. Also whilst I'm sure I may be as bad myself I find those who take any form of comment on their programming work as being only a stinging criticism when it was not intended that way (merely as a starting point for further improvement) quite hard to live with. That always marked out the difference to me between you and blindlemon/Steve who simply absolutely could not bear or abide to think that someone else was now offering as good or a better service in an area in which he had set himself up as the self proclaimed guru. Whereas you wisely always avoided passing any direct comment on your commercial rival.

Yes just read that - not the best way to request a hack pete, by first offending all the hackers !

I'm sure I didn't mean to offend all Tivo hacking experts in general and it was only Spitfires attitude that we must all be IT geniuses in order to be entitled to make use of the work of Tivo hackers that I had in mind. I certainly didn't have in mind your good self who I always tend to see as the proprietor of "Tivo Hacking Made Easy For The Non IT Expert".

[Tcm2007]

all I can tell you is that if have a copy of my whole hack directory structure on my PC hard drive and FTP it back to my Tivo when I get a /var wipe (I had none for four years and then about four of them in six months but none now for nearly a year) it does seem to work and DailyMail, Tivoweb, Highlights and all the old favourites work just as before. I have even checked what the permission settings were of some files I FTP'ed back and they have always been the same as the ones they were meant to be in the original instructions for Tivo installation of that hack or module.

Some of them won't be. For TW modules it doesn't matter, nor for files directly called by another scripts such as rc.sysinit author. But if you were to try to directly run some of these from BASH it would be another issue - I guess you've been lucky. I doubt symlinks would survive the FTP approach either.

[Pete77]

Some of them won't be. For TW modules it doesn't matter, nor for files directly called by another scripts such as rc.sysinit author. But if you were to try to directly run some of these from BASH it would be another issue - I guess you've been lucky. I doubt symlinks would survive the FTP approach either.

I don't ever actually run anything from bash apart from occasionally restarting Tivoweb itself at the bash prompt when I experience this long term problem with the User Interface menu sometimes going missing in Tivoweb. If that happens I exit Tivoweb 1.9.4 and restart it from bash. My User Interface menu is LJ's upgraded version. Restarting Tivoweb always brings it back. I do seem to have issue with my TivoWebPlus 2.1 any longer running properly. Perhaps that is more permissions sensitive than Tivoweb 1.9.4?

All my other Tivo scripts etc are called by rc.sysinit.author.edit at machine startup and are fully backgrounded in the rc.sysinit.author.edit file commands. Or they are called at regular timed intervals by Cron which calls a script that in turn starts the actual tcl utility.

Is there a standard set of permissions that are good for all /var/hack files to run properly or does it depend on the file? Perhaps you can name a few files where permission settings may make a mission critical difference and what those permissions should be? The only sign I ever seem to get that anything is amiss with my setup is the loss of the User Interface menu and Daily Mail for instance continues to run absolutely flawlessly without fail. Anyhow if I ever get round to a new hard drive (I suspect 1TB and Mode 0 are optimum to dissuade me from hanging on to too many recordings I then never get round to watching) and the AltEPG image I believe that this is set up to prevent your hacks directory from being eliminated by a /var wipeout. So this largely overcomes the problem apart from eventual hard drive failure?

[Tcm2007]

Any file you want to execute has to be set to be executable. (These Linux guys with the impenetrable codes eh?)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chmod

[Rachel]

You clearly are an alter ego of spitfires.

I know him, we go to the same church. He got me interested in computers and tivo.

knowing the intricacies of some outdated mainframe operating system language developed in the 1970s and its more recent spinoff for PCs.

5 seconds with wikipedia told me the background to tar and zip files

[Pete77]

You clearly are an alter ego of spitfires.

I know him, we go to the same church. He got me interested in computers and tivo.

Are you the daughter of Spitfires then or perhaps his new girlfriend?

[FliesOpen]

– Contrarian Warning Sign Number One: The most important indicator of a poster’s Contrarian Troll status is his constant use of subtle and not-so-subtle insults, a technique intended to make people angry. Contrarians will resist the urge to be insulting at first, but as their post count increases, they become more and more abusive of those with whom they disagree. Most often they initiate the insults in the course of what has been a civil, if heated, debate to that point.

http://themartialist.net/?page_id=1831

[Pete77]

http://themartialist.net/?page_id=1831

Is that when they also stop using harmless forum names like ColinYounger and suddenly reveal their true character by using a deliberately shocking forum name like FliesOpen?

[Tcm2007]

You must be very easily shocked.

[johnscott99]

Oddly, I thought people would be talking about Tivoweb and TivoWebPlus on this thread.

Get me!

[swuk]

I've never done this before, but...
User Control Panel -> Friends & Foes -> Manage Foes -> Add new Foes -> enter troll's name -> Submit.
Back to forum... much better.

I'm not suggesting that or asking anyone else to do this. Just relaying what I've done.