Tuesday, 02 February 2010, 7:34:41 EST Perm Link

Here is a tip for people using Windows 7 without any system sounds. If you turn off system sounds, then a system beep will still sound for certain events. For example, if you are typing in an instant messenger window and try to backspace without any text to erase. This is very annoying to me. When I disable system sounds I don't want any sound effects for system events.

Solution:

1. Right click "Computer" (in the Start Menu or on the desktop) and choose properties.
2. Click "Advanced system settings."
3. Click the "Hardware" tab.
4. Click "Device Manager."
5. Select "Show hidden devices" from the "View" menu.
6. Expand the "Non-Plug and Play Drivers" node.
7. Double click "Beep" in the expanded list.
8. Click the "Driver" tab.
9. Click the "Stop" button.
10. Select "Disabled" from the "Type" box.

Now, you will no longer have to suffer that annoying system beep.

Tuesday, 19 January 2010, 8:03:31 EST Perm Link

Sunday's release of my TVRage feed script was a bit buggy. Not surprisingly, the bug stemmed from the source TVRage data. Yet another problem with the TVRage feed is that it changes the "publication date" every time the feed is requested. I really can't think of a good reason for that feed to use a new publication date every minute of the day, but that is what it does. So, when I based the times in my new feed on the publication date of the source feed it caused Google Reader (and probably any other reader) to see every article as new every time the feed was refreshed.

I have made a slight change to my script that should rectify this problem. I now alter the publication date from the source feed to one second after midnight of the current day. Get the new version from my code page.

Sunday, 17 January 2010, 15:24:13 EST Perm Link

A while back I wrote about using Google Reader. At the time, I had not noticed a problem with it. But after few weeks I realized that it wasn't showing any new items for my TVRage feeds. After much investigation I learned that Reader cache's articles based on the GUID associated with the article in the feed source. That makes sense. Google is, after all, reading a LOT of feeds every day. They can drastically speed up their service if they cache common articles.

But there is a problem. TVRage's feeds are broken. A quick inspection showed me that the articles in TVRage's feeds do not include GUIDs. So then I validated feed and learned that even the date formats are wrong. In other words, their feeds are completely broken. It's a wonder they work at all.

Some time previously I had posted to TVRage's forums in a thread asking for multiple country support in the feeds. That thread never got updated with any information regarding the RSS feeds. So it stood to reason that the issues I am describing now would not get fixed very quickly if I reported them. Therefore I hacked together a couple of PHP scripts specific to my personal feeds.

My scripts have been working quite well for my own use for quite some time. Today, I release a single script that you can use yourself for all of your TVRage feeds. You can download the script from my code page. The included "README" details how to configure and use the script. If it's not clear, you will need your own web server, with PHP support, to host the script.

** Update 18 January **
Articles are showing up as new every time Google refreshes its cache. Don't download this script yet (unless you want to fix the bug for me).

** Update 19 January **
See article 341 for information on a potentially working version of this script.