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
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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.
Youtube Subscriptions in Google Reader and Boxee
Posted on June 13, 2010
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So I got fed up of not being able to watch my youtube subscriptions in google reader or boxee. If you make an embed video file in the body of the text of a blog post, you can see that video in Google Reader. Well Youtube’s feed for subscriptions http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/user/newsubscriptionvideos doesn’t include an embed. So I did my magic and made it make an embed, I skipped yahoo pipes because, honestly it confuses me too much. I wrote a quick something in php to take care of it. Just hit http://webutils.bryanprice.info/YoutubeSubscriptionEmbed/?user=yourusername replacing “yourusername” with your username and you will have a feed with the embeds that you can pop into google reader. If you want to view your subscriptions in Boxee, take an extra step of running the feed through feedburner make sure you choose the option “i’m a podcaster”. Now add this subscription via the Boxee web interface and now you have your YouTube subscriptions in Boxee!
SageTV Rename
Posted on June 6, 2010
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Many of you may remember that I wrote a script for BeyondTV (BeyondTV Renamer) that utilized a command line tool that someone had written to create an XML file giving detailed information about the given file. My script compared the airdate from this dumped XML file with airdates of matching shows on TVRage.com to rename the files in such a way that XBMC or Boxee could read the file and get the metadata (like show description and images).
Well today I’m releasing a script that I wrote that does something similar for SageTV. Technically speaking, it does not actually rename the file. It creates symlinks to the files named in such a way that XBMC or Boxee can read the files and pickup the metadata. And instead of needing the command line tool, you need the SageTV Web Interface that was written by Neilm. By creating symlinks, it allows for only 1 true copy of the file to exist and for the show to remain in SageTV and in Boxee or XBMC.
Original BeyondTV Renamer | New SageTV Rename
Tags: BeyondTV, BeyondTV Rename, SageTV, SageTV Rename
Agile Development
Posted on April 8, 2010
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So the software company that I work for 3-GIS has decided to start to adopt some agile development practices. This document describes a little bit about why the waterfall process isn’t that great. It’s a primer for “The Daily Scrum” which prepares developers for a “sprint” which is an iteration of work for the team.
http://www.rallydev.com/documents/scrumprimer.pdf.
Use Onenote As A Diary/Journal
Posted on November 30, 2009
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So, I really like Onenote. One of the things that I don’t like about onenote is that I cannot view items in a calendar view (to use it like a journal). But someone apparently thought the same thing. Here’s the link so you can view your onenote entries in a calendar view 
.
Download OneNote Calendar Version 1.0.2680
Tags: calendar, diary, onenote
Hammer Time
Posted on November 30, 2009
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Gotta Love "Hey Okay"
Tags: code, music
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