What I’m Working On
Here's what I'm working on. Right now it's just a basic display of feeds from some of my social networks. I'd like to fancy it up a bit at some point, perhaps with some nice jQuery tooltips. I'm using the SimplePie PHP library to fetch the feeds (each one asynchronously). The design is borrowed from Popurls. I know it's not that interesting, but it's fun for me.
ID3 Tag Parsing
I've been working on a project to read and update ID3 tags on my music collection. An ID3 tag is the meta data embedded in mp3 files that contains artist and other information. My initial goal is to batch update the "genre" field in my mp3 files. I've written a simple .Net forms application to do this. I found a really good library created by Novell called TagLib Sharp. The library makes it super easy to read and write ID3 tags.
TagLib.File tagFile = TagLib.File.Create(filePath);
Tag tagId3v2 = tagFile.GetTag(TagTypes.Id3v2);
if (tagId3v2 != null) tagId3v2.Genres = genreArray;
Tag tagId3v1 = tagFile.GetTag(TagTypes.Id3v1);
if (tagId3v1 != null) tagId3v1.Genres = genreArray;
tagFile.Save();
The UI is pretty lame, but it works...
Dr. Dobb’s Journal
I've been subscribing to Dr. Dobb's Journal for at least 10 years. It has always been my favorite technical magazine because of it's diversity of topics and brain-stirring articles. I got a letter in the mail last week saying that they were ceasing production of the full magazine. Instead, they will offer a Dr. Dobb's Report stuffed into issues of InformationWeek. I'll have to spend more time on their web site, as it looks like they have some good content on there.
Kevin Enjoys Things
Ted has been vigorously working on a rad new site called enjoys things. He has been adding new features almost daily for the past few weeks, and it's shaping up nicely. Check what I enjoy and see how cool it is. When I find some room on my front page, I'll add my enjoys things badge.
Learning WPF
Since I'm pretty much stuck in the house due to the snow (and lack of a job), I've decided to learn something new. I've begun writing a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) application. WPF has some insanely cool UI features, including declarative UI effects. My first project is a simple screensaver that pulls photos from Flickr and displays them as a slideshow with cool transition effects. Eventually, I'd like to create a dashboard type application that displays news, weather, email, etc. The dashboard will be more UI intensive, so I'm not quite ready for that. Creating WPF forms is very different than creating traditional Windows forms.
Testing Windows Live Writer
I just installed Windows Live Writer as a tool to publish stories to my web site. It has some promising features, and works with WordPress (yay MS).
I also just installed DropBox because I've been meaning to find a way to create offsite copies of some of our important files. I haven't tried it yet, but I hear good things about it.
Hmm, now that I'm about to publish, I'm wondering if it will handle WordPress tags... it did not.
Fennec Alpha 1 Testing
I installed the mobile version of Firefox, named Fennec, on my Nokia n800 today. It's intolerably slow (but it's alpha, so that can be ignored for now), but has some potentially cool features like tabbed browsing and a "smart" URL bar.
We Like the Dark
Most software engineers prefer to avoid the sun and bright lights. At my office, we keep the lights out and the window shades closed. However, when we do choose to look out the window, this is what we see...
New Look
I found the Aeros wordpress theme, downloaded it, made some modifications, added my photos/movies/music widget, and here it is! I've only tested in Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 7. The font looks a bit strange in IE7... Anyway, I'll be fiddling with it some more over time. Let me know if something doesn't look right in your browser.
I know the sidebar isn't very elegant (especially the photos/movies/music links). I am soooo bad at design. Fooling around with those 3 links took longer than anything else I've done with this update. Every time I tried to get fancy, the layout would go to hell. I have grand ideas - really.
A Working Widget
I have a working tabbed (ajax) media widget. The tabs display media from Flickr, Netflix, and Last.fm. It looks crazy simple, but there's actually a lot of processing and caching code going on. It's about 250 lines of PHP, with some simple jQuery on the front end. (update) Now it's in the side bar to the right.