Life of a Southern Programmer » Tech

Youtube Subscriptions in Google Reader and Boxee

Southern Programmer — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 02:48:43 +0000

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

Southern Programmer — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 20:40:12 +0000

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

Agile Development

Southern Programmer — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 23:29:42 +0000

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

Southern Programmer — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 19:06:42 +0000

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

Hammer Time

Southern Programmer — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 17:20:28 +0000

Gotta Love "Hey Okay"

Wow.. The most amazing song ever!

Southern Programmer — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 01:43:47 +0000

A friend of mine (Chrissy) sent me this. It’s a song made from windows XP and 98 sounds. It’s awesome!

Window Sound Music

Infinite While Loop

Southern Programmer — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 20:03:45 +0000

Subverting Vista UAC With a Service

Southern Programmer — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 01:19:17 +0000

This is exactly what I was looking for, it took me forever to find it. And so here it is: code to subvert vista uac with a service! http://www.codeproject.com/KB/vista-security/SubvertingVistaUAC.aspx?display=Print. Please thank me later for giving you a link to this. I needed this to be able to lock the keyboard and mouse in my CCS project on standard user accounts on vista. The only thing. I could have used this code a week ago and saved myself a lot of coding.

UPDATE: The Code does not work for XP, so you still have to find ways to make it work for both. So the design I made before is still a good way to do things. I just need to use this for the keyboard and mouse blocker.

CCS

Southern Programmer — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 23:24:23 +0000

So, I’ve been working on my open source Classroom Control System this month, and I’ve just started to write the installers. If you are familiar with NetOp’s School6 software, you know how powerful a classroom control system can be.

My classroom control system will allow teachers to see what student computers are on and apply actions to any of them. Teachers can rearrange the internal frames that represent the student computers and save the layout as he / she sees fit (useful to easily tell what computer you are controlling). The teacher can remote control a student’s computer via the CCS’s interface. That particular function uses the free program RealVNC. Just think if the teacher’s computer is hooked to a projector. The teacher can ask a student to perform a task for the class, or they can answer the question that the student had for the class. If the room doesn’t have a projector, the teacher can simply use the Broadcast Screen function to broadcast his / her screen to any or all of the student computers.

But there’s more. The teacher can set a whitelist or blacklist for both programs and websites and save the policies under his / her particular profile. You can also do things like Turn Off Monitor, Turn Off Machine, Empty Recycle Bin, Mute Volume, Unmute Volume, and set an open lab.

I’ll make sure to put up a link when I’m finally done.

Dreamhost

Southern Programmer — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 13:38:26 +0000

So I was currently getting my webhosting from Eleven2. I had some problems with outages and some problems with them disabling features on the server causing plugin problems on wordpress and / or drupal. Eleven2 is pretty good hosting, but Dreamhost has them beat by far. Dreamhost has SSH and even SVN. I’m excited to get this new hosting, and even without a refund from Eleven2 for the year I bought, I think it’s worth it (especially because I got the first year under Dreamhost for $22). So if you are looking into getting a new webhost, I would highly recommend Dreamhost.