Novellab at Brighton : Website Launched

Just a quick post to let you know that the novellab at the University of Brighton has launched it’s website which can be found at http://novellab.brighton.ac.uk/

Within the site you can find more information about the novellab, people working there, list of publications and links to our current projects:

Point of Regard (PoR) : An open source (GPL2) head and eye tracking software making use of the Polhemus FASTRAK and ISCAN eyetracker hardware

OpenSG Related : Work we have done with OpenSG towards level-of-detail nodes, video as textures (note these are coming very soon)

Keeping mythtv-backend Alive

I’ve a small problem with my mythtv-backend in that it will crash once or twice a week without giving a clue as to the problem, even when running it through gdb.  When restarting, it would work fine again therefore there was the need to detect a crash and restart when it happens.

This is currently been worked on for the next version of Mythbuntu through the use of upstart scripts, however I was needing a soultion before then.  This lead to the development of the script below, which checks to see if it’s running, and restart it if it’s not.

The script is limited in that you need to manually start it after the machine has booted.  I run the script within a screen console (so I can detatch it) using watch to run the script every 60 seconds.

So in screen:

sudo watch -n 60 ./keep-myth-server-alive.sh

The script:

#!/bin/bash

# Copyright (C) 2008
#       David Morris (david.morris@greenacre.no-ip.com)
#
# This program is free software; you can
# redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms
# of the GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation, version 2 or later.
#

if [  `ps -ef | grep -c mythbackend` == ‘1’ ];
then
sudo /etc/init.d/mythtv-backend start

fi