Stupid Error 32512
For a while my brother's been having a problem with his MythTV setup -
the mythfilldatabase script won't run the associated
tv_grab_au script when run automatically, but will work just
fine when run manually. In the logs it says:
FAILED: xmltv returned error code 32512.Now, after a bit of searching I have finally found that 32512 is a magic code from the C
system(3) call, which basically
does a "sh -c (system call and arguments)". If
sh can't find the file you've specified in the
system() call, it returns 127, which is shifted into the
upper eight bits of a 16-bit smallint (as far as I can make out, the
lower eight bits are reserved for informing the caller that the system
call was aborted due to a signal - e.g. a segmentation fault).After a lot more searching, and a good deal of abuse on the #mythtv-users channel on freenode.org, I finally found some information about shell exit codes, and it turns out that 127 is "command not found". In other words, mythfilldatabase at that point is trying to call the tv_grab_au grabber and not finding it. On my brother's machine, this is because sh under root does not get the path /usr/local/bin, which is where the grabber is stored.
(It works on my machine because I run it from a script which picks a random time, and includes /usr/local/bin in the path.
So there are two solutions, as I see it:
1) Put tv_grab_au in /usr/bin/.
2) Run mythfilldatabase from cron using a script which includes /usr/local/bin in the path.
Given the bollocking I got in #mythtv-users for suggesting
something so crude and hackish (in the words of Marcus Brown, mzb_d800)
as cron, I guess I'll have to go with option 1. But here's
hoping that this blog entry helps someone else out there - almost every
post on the mythtv-users email list that mentions 32512 never mentions
a solution...
posted at: 11:40 | path: /tech | permanent link to this entry
Kangaroos saved, who cares about anything else?
Once again the kangaroo cull at the old Belconnen naval signalling base
has stalled again, with the animal liberation protesters calling it a
victory. The pity is that these people are really protesting about the
wrong thing.
On the one hand, they're protesting about the culling of 400 kangaroos. I wonder if they have realised that ACT Forestry has a license to cull 4,000 kangaroos - ten times that number - per year in the national parks. If I remember rightly, ACT Parks also has a license to cull 3,000 on other public land. So killing 400 as a once-off cull is hardly the great tragedy that it's being painted as.
On the other hand, there are animals and plants on that land that are highly endangered and under threat from the kangaroos. There's not only the Perunga Grasshopper and the Mouthless Moth in that area, but a rare species of grasslands flower that is being eaten by the kangaroos. While I'm a bit disappointed that the Liberals have chosen to make this one of those "if we were governing this wouldn't happen" issues, they're totally right - everyone's getting all upset because cute furry animals are going to die. And it looks like the Liberals are only making a fuss because Defence is flip-flopping, not because anything else might face extinction as a result of overgrazing by the kangaroos.
I got this information from a friend who wrote the policy on land care and kangaroo culling in the ACT. So I can't quote chapter and verse, because the conversation was informal and I didn't take notes. But I do think that the "animal liberationists" are way out of line. Don't get me wrong - generally I would like to avoid the kangaroos being killed at all. But to blow this out of proportion shows exactly the kind of loony-fringe unreasoning stupidity that these groups accuse their enemies of and that does their own credibility the most damage. And if you've got any species that is overrunning its ability to survive on the land, it's going to die off some way or other. Killing them quickly is far more humane than letting them starve, whether on a block in the ACT or elsewhere in NSW.
If only the human race would learn this and seriously consider
population control of itself.
posted at: 11:17 | path: /society | permanent link to this entry
All posts licensed under the CC-BY-NC license. Author Paul Wayper.