Tivo isn't sold here in Australia. As such, my inner geek has had to listen with frustration to my US-based colleagues talk about their Tivo's for a couple of years now. Well no longer!

No, Tivo's haven't started selling here. No, Australia hasn't changed from PAL over to NTSC. What has happened is a friend of mine pointed me to OzTivo, a community of volunteers who have done all the hardwork in figuring out how to convert US Tivos over to work with Australian TV, as well as provide Program Guide Data. So, a quick trip to EBay for a second-hand Tivo, and quite a few hours spent following instructions and hacking around with the cover off, my Tivo is up and running. It's certainly not a task for my mum, but if you'd be comfortable installing a new hard drive in your PC and installing and configuring Linux, then you should be able to handle getting your own Tivo up and running.

Thank you OzTivo. You guys rock!

OCL : subSequence

I think I've mentioend before that I've been working on an internal website using ASP.NET and ECO II. Partly because replacing the current site (based on static HTML) is going to make my life a lot easier, but also as I kinda miss coding as a day job, and of course if you want to really learn a new technology like ECO, there's no substitute for actually building and deploying an app into production.

Anyway, one of the things I wanted to do was to display summary lists of items on the main page of the site. You know, recently posted items, important upcoming dates, last 10 posts to the SE mailing list, etc. Most of this is easy, OCL like the following will pull out all Items in reverse order (ie. most newest to oldest).

Item.allInstances->orderdescending(ModifiedTime)

Problem is, I don't want to display all Items, only the most recent items, say, the last 10. Enter the subSequence operator:

Item.allInstances->orderdescending(ModifiedTime)->subSequence(1,10)

With this, I have a list of 10 Items, starting at position 1 in my list of Items ordered by ModifiedTime. Perfect!

State Of Origin III

One of the downsides of travelling for work is that you can almost guarantee that you will be away when there is some event that you want to attend. For example, I haven't managed to be in the country for any State of Origin match for the last 3 years. The first match this year I was in Singapore, but even there, with such a big population of expats, I couldn't find a pub that was showing the game.

However, Wednesday night, for the first time in three years, I'll be in Australia to watch the mighty Maroons smack the snot out of the Blues. One of life's small pleasures :-)