Sweet Home Alabama
Posted on May 1, 2011
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Alabama was hit hard this week with the the second largest tornado outbreak in US history. I have friends all over this great state and even some that live in Tuscaloosa. My sister taught PE students at Eastwood Middle school a few years back. Students that went to Alberta Elementary go to Eastwood when they graduate from the elementary school. The tornado flattened that elementary school.
The tornado also came extremely close to the apartments that my sister lived at: Yorktown Commons. But the thing is, Tuscaloosa isn’t the only place that was hit hard. I can’t name all of the towns and places that were hit hard because there are so many. As I’m writing this, my apartment complex in Decatur, AL is still out of power. I’m in Anniston, AL because my family has power here. Driving back home, damage was apparent everywhere. On 67 near Cullman, AL I saw a couple of destroyed houses, down lines, and plenty of snapped trees. I have friends in Glencoe that watched one of the storms roll over the hills behind their house head toward Silver Lakes. That community was destroyed. I have a friend that lives in Huntsville that has some pretty bad roof damage, but some of his neighbors weren’t so lucky.
For all I know it could have been this storm that I captured a photo of from my apartment in Decatur. (There were at least 2 storms, if not 3 that tracked across a similar path).
The fact of the matter is, Alabama was hit hard. Keep Alabama in your thoughts and prayers. This is my home. I’ve never seen anything like this before, and hope to never see it again. Being without power is being lucky from this storm, because it has claimed so much from so many of us.
Give Camp Birmingham
Posted on January 29, 2011
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Recently I went to Give Camp in Birmingham. It’s an event sponsored by Microsoft for developers to join together to help non-profits and charities. Developers spend the weekend developing software or creating web sites that the organization needs. It was a lot of fun and here is a promotional video.
Give Camp Birmingham | Promo from Hampton Road Studios on Vimeo.
Tags: Charity, Give Camp, Video
Mono Zeroconf on Windows
Posted on January 29, 2011
Filed Under Tech | 2 Comments
If you know anything about my classroom control system that I built, you know that the project requires Bonjour. This is the technology Apple uses to help you share your music on a network. Computers discover one another by publishing their address on a multicast port. Because the port is multicast the information gets sent to all computers on the network (you must have a multicast router). I used a library in java called Bonaha that abstracted away a lot of the complexities of Apple’s Bonjour SDK.
I wanted a way to do the same thing in .NET because, well frankly I’d like to make my classroom control system a more cohesive piece of software and not the kludge that it is (in 2 different languages Java and .NET and pieced together with Elmer’s Glue©).
The obvious choice to keep up with the network state is Mono.Zeroconf. It’s a project that’s separate from the main Mono repository itself. I expected this software to work out of the gate. It may work fine on Linux using the Avahi provider; but with the Bonjour Provider on Windows I had to do some modifications of the source to get it to run. Luckily there were others online that had already found the problems for me (but the forum posts were in 2 different places and a little difficult to find.), so for your convenience I am combining those bits of information in this blog post.
First you’ll need to do as Frankenspank suggested on this StackOverflow post. You’ll need to change the UPort Setter in Service.cs file (in the Bonjour Provider Project) to be:
this.port = (ushort) IPAddress.HostToNetworkOrder((short) value);
Next you’ll need to change the OnResolveReply method in the BrowseService.cs file (again in the Bonjour Provider Project).
You’ll need to change the second if statement from
if (AddressProtocol == AddressProtocol.Any || AddressProtocol == AddressProtocol.IPv6)
to
if (AddressProtocol == AddressProtocol.IPv6)
Tags: .NET, Apple, Bonjour, CCS, Java, Mono, Windows, Zeroconf
Favorite Christmas Movie
Posted on December 12, 2010
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I recently asked on Facebook about your favorite Christmas movie. Mine is “It’s A Wonderful Life”. Here is a little video about it from the guys over at HISHE (How it should have ended).
Media Monkey PS3 Media Server Plugin
Posted on December 4, 2010
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You may have heard me talk about Media Monkey before. If not, it is my favorite music player. It’s based on the winamp engine but is very powerful for handling mp3 tags, converting music formats, monitor and import music (great for amazon mp3 stuff) and has integration with a few online stores. There is a free version, but the gold version is only 40 bucks and well worth it if you want a great way to manage your music.
You may also be aware that PS3 Media Server is a pretty awesome way to get media content onto a ps3 or other upnp/dlna device. PS3 Media Server’s music streaming is very limited. It just shows the music in a folder structure. I did a quick google search and found exactly what I was looking for. Someone has written a plugin to access your media monkey library via the PS3 Media Server. I now have access to my media monkey library on my ps3 (playlists included!).
Details can be found here.
ThinkUp
Posted on September 26, 2010
Filed Under Blogging | Leave a Comment
So you may have noticed I was having “Twitter Weekly Updates” on this blog. I was using a plugin for WordPress called TwitterTools to do that. I wanted to archive my tweets because I noticed that I tweet more than I blog and it is a more accurate account of what is going on with my life at this point in time. However, I didn’t like how it got in the way of my real blog posts.
I recently listened to this TWIT episode, and learned about ThinkUp. It’s a project that Gina Trapani is involved with. It lets you archive tweets, graph followings, see a conversation view of tweets, and a lot cooler stuff. Check it out at http://thinkupapp.com/.
Here’s a nice fun screenshot:
Tags: archiving, blogging, facebook, social networking, twitter
New Chevy Equinox
Posted on September 6, 2010
Filed Under Personal | Leave a Comment
I bought a new Cardinal Red Metallic Chevy Equinox on Friday. It’s a 2011 LT1 equipped with OnStar, XM Radio, Bluetooth, Remote Start, and USB Port! It’s a pretty sweet ride. Anyway, this prompted me to ask Facebook what should I name my SUV? I’m obviously an Alabama fan. One person suggested Tide, another Bear, and another Crimson. This gave me an idea of looking up baby names related to UA. Believe it or not someone actually named their child Crimson Tide Redd. Then I stumbled over this and really laughed. I’m leaning toward naming it Ivory (elephant tusk).
Pictures are coming soon.
Tags: car, naming, Personal, suv, vehicle
Lots of Weddings and Babies
Posted on July 30, 2010
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So recently I’ve been going to a lot of weddings. First it was my good friend Josh’s wedding. Then the following Wednesday morning my sister gave birth to her son Seth Dwayne Skinner (see photos section of BryanPrice.info). So I visited with her and her husband Wed-Sun of that week. Last weekend a mutual friend of me and my father got married (and he got me to video tape it… gotta edit that video soon too). And this weekend I’m going to another friend’s wedding. So out of the past month, there has been 1 weekend that didn’t involve weddings or children.
That’s semi-depressing being single. But at least I have something to do I guess.
Tags: Baby, Personal, wedding
You’ve Been Pink Flagged
Posted on June 26, 2010
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So I was the best man at my friend Josh’s wedding. And we had pink ties. We also had pink handkerchiefs that we didn’t use. I came up with the great idea that we should use them as a “Too Feminine Violation”. Yes, I’m talking about throwing a pink flag. So be ware, I may throw the pink flag on you and ask you for your man card if you do something too feminine. But we rocked those pink ties like true men! Congratulation Josh and Jenna!
Tags: manhood, pink, ties, violation, wedding
The Great City of Huntsville (a history)
Posted on June 22, 2010
Filed Under Northern Alabama | Leave a Comment
A friend of mine at work sent me this.
A Brief History of Huntsville by Matthew Pierce
Huntsville was founded a long time ago by someone who is now dead. In the beginning, the city was called Twickenham. This was before Bridge Street, so it was not a good time to be a resident. Later on the town was renamed Huntsville, because, come on, Twickenham. The name “Huntsville” was taken from an Indian word that roughly translates to, “We’re getting out of here, there’s a tornado coming.”
Huntsville was an important part of the Civil War. Confederate forces willingly surrendered the town to the Yankees, who did not know about the tornadoes. The rebels thought this was very funny. Several Yankees were sucked up and landed on Monte Sano, where they remain to this day. They are called Presbyterians.
The first mayor of Huntsville was Wernher Von Braun, who was a scientist who invented the vacuum cleaner. Von Braun came to Huntsville and started inventing rockets, presumably to blow up the tornadoes. He never did figure out how to do this, so he gave up and invented Space Camp. He was very good at inventing things.
Starting in the 1960s, Huntsville was subjected to another invasion. Only this time it wasn’t Yankees who were invading, but engineers. These engineers were mostly short men, and all of them drove very fast cars. No one really understood what they did for a living, but they all had lots of money. The engineers are still here today, because engineers never really die — they just keep inventing ways to stay alive.
In the 1980s Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco formed a minor league baseball team called the Huntsville Stars. The Stars played at Joe Davis stadium, where they excelled at making it all the way to the Southern League Championship and then losing. Back then McGwire and Canseco were not using steroids, probably because they were too busy eating the ice cream at the concession stand that comes in the little plastic helmets, which is excellent.
The most famous person in Huntsville is Dan Satterfield, who is a television meteorologist and loud person. He is the arch nemesis of the tornado. Whenever it begins to rain in, say, western Kansas, Satterfield immediately interrupts television programming to broadcast warnings for the next seven hours straight. Many tornadoes have gone away sad because Dan Satterfield ruined their sneak attacks.
Today Huntsville has a bright future, and not just because it has more restaurants than people. It is a modern city on the cusp of research and technology. It is a crossroads, where the spirit of the Old South meets the expression of the arts. It is a bustling, thriving community where diversity and tradition mingle.
Basically, it is a city that prides itself on not being Birmingham.
Tags: history, huntsville, parody
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