Tuesday, 19 January 2010, 08:03:31 EDT
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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 m ... (view rest)
Sunday, 17 January 2010, 15:24:13 EDT
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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 t ... (view rest)
Wednesday, 15 April 2009, 11:51:22 EDT
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Since I graduated, one of the things I have been doing with my free time is playing World of Warcraft. I have certainly had the free time to play it, and it's a fun game. One of the best things about the game is the ability to alter the user interface, and extend functionality, via user made add-ons.
The default user interface reports your character level progression via a progress bar. This progress bar is broken up into pips, where each pip represents 5% of your level progression. In addition, you are able to earn "bonus" experience if you rest your character in a major city or an inn. This is represented on the progress bar by a blue color. Clearly, this is a very simple method of giving you the information. You are able to turn on a display, in numbers, of how much experience you have earned, and how much is needed for your next level, but it is also limited. So I decided to fix this by writing my own add-on.
I wrote my add-on in late January, and early February. I put off releasing it because of a couple of bugs and a missing feature. Yesterday I decided that the add-on is plen ... (view rest)
Saturday, 15 November 2008, 20:16:25 EDT
For a while now I have wanted to be able to link photographs from my picture gallery in these posts. The gallery software I use, ZenPhoto, has plugins that do this for packages like Wordpress. Except, I don't use Wordpress. This website is a work of my own. So I had to write my own implementation. You can see it in action in this very post. The picture of footprints in concrete is being pulled from my image gallery and displayed here.
While I was at it, I wrote in some rather nifty features. First, I can request the image to be any size by specifying the width and height I want. The script will scale the image before sending it. The script also caches every image it sends so that the scaling only has to be done once. Second, I can move the image around (to a new album, a subalbum, etcetera) and not have to worry about previously posted images breaking. As long as I have the concrete footprints picture in my gallery, no matter where I move it to within the gallery, it will show up in this post. This probably my favorite feature. As my gallery grows, it becomes necessary to reorganize it from time to time. If I had to go back to all the posts in which I've linked to a gallery image, I would have just not bothered linking the pictures. Finally, the script is able to return information about the image in addition to the image itself. This gives me the ability to dynamically link to the image in the gallery. In this post I mere ... (view rest)
Sunday, 14 September 2008, 17:23:47 EDT
Several months ago I built a MythTV computer. Since I built it during spring semester I didn't really have the time to fully configure the machine. So it's been in a usable but needs work state ever since. One of the biggest problems was getting the machine to boot into the MythTV frontend application without requiring a login every time. The GNOME Display Manager would allow me to specify an automatic login, but that only works for the first login. So if I had to quit the MythTV frontend for some reason, GDM would automatically come back up, but then ask for a username and password. SLiM recently (as in 9/7/2008) added support for an automatic login, but it also only works for the first login. This seems to be the way of things for this type of application. They will automatically login a user the first time, but not subsequent times, and there is no way to make the programs quit after one execution.
This situation was unacceptable to me. I needed a login manager that would do three simple things:
Automatically login a chosen user.
Grant the user privileges as defined by PAM.
Quit execution when the X session was quit.
Since I could not find such a simple program, I wrote my own. In my code section you can find the source code to a program "mythlogin".
Why not just execute xinit directly from inittab? As of Linux kernel 2.6.24 it is necessary to establish privileges through PAM in ord ... (view rest)
Monday, 28 March 2005, 12:32:47 EDT
Every day I learn that I don't know anything. Today, OSNews.com actually managed to post something of interest — an interview with a brilliant coder named Jonathan Rentzsch (pronounced "wrench"). The interview covers everything from dude's current top ten most played songs to memory management on multiple processor machines. Rentzsch is twenty-eight years old and knows more about programming than I can hope to know by the time I am thirty-five. I like to think that I am a programmer but people like this make me feel just plain dumb.
That being said, I have been idly reading up on Objective-C and Cocoa. I want to extend my winfo program to do a lot more than it currently does and be pretty at the same time. I also want to write a decent Ogg Vorbis player for OS X since it seems that not a single one exists! When I say idly, I mean when I get bored, and don't want to try and find something else to do, I read a tutorial or two. Thus far, I have gotten to the point were I can write Obj-C c ... (view rest)
Tuesday, 22 March 2005, 12:45:45 EDT
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Some weeks ago I wrote a script for the machine that runs http://ug.dyndns.org/. I had become weary of logging in to the machine and manually checking to see if it needed updates every so often so I wrote a script which would check to see if updates are needed. If updates are needed the script should send me an email telling me which updates the machine needs. Well, today the script sent me an email for the first time so I know now that it works appropriately. I decided, since it works, to touch it up and make it a generic script for use on othe ... (view rest)
Sunday, 21 December 2003, 23:28:37 EDT
I decided to start posting more of the "software development" that I do to this site so I removed the old "Scripts" section and added a new "Miscellaneous" section (I couldn't think of a better title - suggest one if you can). At the moment it contains the one, horribly outdated, script that was in the scripts section and a patch for the kick ass pr0n leeching application Enqueue.
While on the subject of development; you may recall that I started itcouldbe9.com to develop a better forum application. Well, tonight I sat down and basically rewrote everything I had done on it thus far. I decided to standardize on MySQL as the storage mechanism instead of abstracting the database access. I decided to do this because it would have been a severe pain in the ass to do it the other way and continue on in the direction I am heading - using classes. That's right boys and girls, I am stepping away from non-object oriented programming for this project. I think that this project really calls for an object oriented approach to make it as modular as possible. I really do want to make it easy for any developer to go in and rip out sections that do not work for their system and implement custom methods.
Anyway, I just thought you might be interested to know that I have not let that project fall to the way side.
In other news, I ... (view rest)