slaingod

So my new open source project is mostly finished. This project is intended to help deal with the morass of naming issues encountered when managing movies on your hard drive, bringing some sanity to the process. Zeeb allows you to intelligently indicate which parts of a filename it should use to look up that movie on IMDB, which parts of the filename it should remove, and which it should save and leave in as saved parts in the final filename(typically things like 720p, 1080p, DTS, Director’s Cut, etc. that indicate some important aspect of the movie or format). Other aspects of managing these files are covered as well, such as renaming external subtitles, and the creation of a .url link that allows you to double click to visit the IMDB page for that movie.

Zeeb was a fun weekend project. The name was chosen for its similarity to another unfinished project I am working on, called Veed (for video feed). I chose to use Adobe AIR as the basis for this project, because I have a lot of recent experience with Adobe Flex for web-based projects, and it just makes the UI aspects that much easier, since I can leverage skills and techniques I have learned from that experience. This also allows the application to run on multiple platforms, those supported by Adobe AIR (OSX and Windows tested, Linux has not been tested). I am somewhat of a holdout on the OSX front: I have a Macbook but I use Windows primarily. I have another blog post about why I haven’t made that particular switch yet (mostly because I build my own computers, and don’t have faith in hackintosh to support all my devices). But my friends and coworkers almost uniformly use OSX, so I wanted something they could use as well.

Anyway, check it out if you get a chance:

Zeeb @ SourceForge

The license is Public Domain, which means you can do anything you want with it…sell it, use parts of it in your project without attribution, etc.

I recently updated to the Droid…on the day it was released (11/06/2009). Lo and behold, Verizon decided it was in my best interest to make my new monthly charges retroactive to the beginning of my monthly pay period, to the tune of an extra $12.

America’s Choice 450 Refund 10/29 - 11/28 -39.99 Nationwide Basic 900 10/29 - 11/28 59.99 Email & Web for SMARTPHONE 10/29 - 11/28 29.99

I recently acquired a new Motorola Droid phone, based on the Android OS. So far I love it. I’m not saying it is the best phone in the world, but it does what I need and has a lot of potential for growth.

The main cons of the phone hardware itself:

• The screen is almost too sensitive, especially around the special buttons at the bottom. It is sometimes too easy to press buttons inadvertently. This is particularly the case when typing with the hardware keyboard, as I have accidentally discarded emails I was typing with a slight brush and no recourse.
• Camera could be better, though this may be a firmware/software update thing.
• The power cable is somewht awkwardly placed, though for a reason. It is well placed for the Media Doc accessory which is pretty darn cool. But I use my phone to read ebooks so it is a slight annoyance there.

Other than that, the Droid hardware is rock solid.

As far as Android goes: It is still clearly a work in progress, but it is very good already. Here are my main issues with it:

• It MUST get a ‘selective permissions per app’ option, so that I can disable all the over-reaching app that try to read my contacts, get my phone identity, or want ‘full network access’ unnecessarily. This is the new identity fraud and information gathering vector of the future and Google REALLY needs to get on top of this. Even the ‘My Verizon’ app is getting in on the fun: Version 1.0 just needed network access (since it is basically just a web widget to their website). Now 2.0 all of a sudden needs to be able to ‘read my browser history and bookmarks’? That is just someone’s idea of data collection gone awry. At the very least, if they are requesting these permissions the SDK should require them to provide a text explanation of WHY they want them if they are legitimate to the working of the app, like ‘Full Network Access: So AdMob can provide advertising services.’ Basically this would be my primary reason to root my device, to install custom software to manage this.
• A full featured firewall…along the lines of above and for the similar reasons.
• Market needs a bookmark/save for later functionality. App update needs an ‘ignore this update’ or ‘never update’ function.
• The lock screen needs a delay like: Don’t show the lock screen if the phone has been idle for only 10 minutes.
• Enable multitouch already…if that means you need to license it from Apple for $10 and I have to pay extra…go for it.
• Bluetooth file transfer of files from a desktop. Obviously this is disabled because of tethering, though I’m not sure how this would make a difference since technically I could just use my wireless to download a file then transfer it with a cable.
• VPN support for old school group authentication.

Beyond that my main complaint lies with FBReader, the main free ebook reader. It is lacking some critical features I need, like highlighting.

So I am using a 5 year old piece of crap Samsung flip-phone right now, that cuts out on audio all the time. I basically just use it for text messaging. My previous phone, the Verizon/Audiovox XV6700 was still doing just fine, but the USB connector broke, and though I had done some soldering on it to get it to charge again, that too eventually failed.

So I am looking into getting a new smartphone, but I am having a hard time finding the right one. My primary uses are for reading ebooks, and texting. This means that getting the best display possible and a QWERTY keyboard are high priorities. A screen keyboard might be able to suffice, but isn’t ideal.

So there are 4 major smartphone OS’s that I can look at: Windows Mobile, iPhone, Palm’s webOS, and Google’s Android. I have experience with Windows Mobile, but I am well aware of its limitations, as I have done some development for it. The other 3 are basically on par with each other in that they are modern, being actively innovated and updated, and have better development possibilities.

The real limiting factor for me is that I really want to get an AMOLED display, which is the new hotness, top-of-the-line display technology. Samsung seems to be the major provider for devices using these screens. So right away iPhone and Palm are out, since their phones do not have these displays and other manufacturer’s can’t make them for them. If either of these did have an AMOLED display option, I would grab one immediately.

That leaves Android and Windows Mobile. Android again would be the preferable choice, but to-date their phone designs have been horrendous. New phones are ‘on the way’ but they either lack the AMOLED display, or they lack a keyboard.

The Samsung i7500 looks decent, but is missing the keyboard. And is most likely never going to be released by a US carrier…the bane of all decent cell phones.

Finally there is the rumored Samsung Omnia Pro, which will have AMOLED and QWERTY… but runs Windows Mobile…sigh.

I guess I can just get a hold-over phone sans contract and just wait another year til AMOLED is on the Palm/iPhone. Makes me sad though.

So I had timing bug when working on a project, where I wanted to launch a PopupManage popup to allow the user to change their password if a flashvar was set. The flashvar would be set in response to a link click from the user’s email.

The problem is that no matter what I tried I couldn’t get my popup to center if it was called from an event fired in the Application.applicationCompelete event handler. Basically, I have PopupManager.centerPopUp(this) in the creation complete event handler of the Popup up component, but for whatever reasons, the Application’s screen height and width were still set at zero at this stage, presumably because the screen hadn’t been drawn yet. I tried adding a callLater around the centerPopup call, but that didn’t work.

The fix was to put the callLater around the initial dispatchEvent call in the applicationComplete handler. This provided enough of a delay for the screen to be set properly.

                 if(parameters['password_reset_code'] && parameters['password_reset_code'] != '') {
                        callLater(function():void {
                            var pw_reset_evt:GenericEvent = new GenericEvent("PASSWORD_RESET_CODE", parameters['password_reset_code']);
                            dispatchEvent(pw_reset_evt);
                        });
                    }

There really should be a ‘callIn’ method as well as the ‘callLater’ method. callIn would take a time in seconds or milliseconds to delay before calling the code, and would wrap the whole dynamic Timer object handling.

GenericEvent is just an Event wrapper with a ‘data’ field.

package com.vitrue.shared.events {

    import flash.events.Event;

    public class GenericEvent extends Event {

        public static var EVENT_PREFIX:String = "GenericEvent";

        public var eventType:String;
        public var data:*;

        public function GenericEvent(type:String, data:Object) {
            eventType = type;
            super(EVENT_PREFIX + type);
            this.data = data;
        }

        public static function EVENT(type:String):String {
            return EVENT_PREFIX + type;
        }

    }
}               

So I’ve found my favorite place to farm for the main leatherworking materials, borean leather and arctic fur, in the lastest upgrade to World of Warcraft. Unfortunately, it seems like the best places are those where not having done some of the quests that cause phasing. In particular, I had heard that Valley of Echoes in Ice Crown had some fast respawn monsters if you hadn’t done the main quest lines there. But alas, I had already completed those, so I read that the Sons of Hodir cave in Storm Peaks had a lot Jormunger snakes and Bears. However I found the respawn rate to be lacking on these…but that may only be because I haven’t completed the quest lines for the Brunnhildar female Viking village.

What I did discover is my new favorite Borean Leather farming spot. So to reiterate, I haven’t done any of the quests in Storm Peaks, so I am in the ‘Phase 1’ where the Brunnhildar Warbears and Warmaiden riders are sent to battle the elite giants and wolves in the valley. The Brunnhildar Warbears spawn as fast as you kill them, as it seems there is a minimum number of monsters that need to be alive to keep the battle in the valley properly sustained. You can just kill the Warbears, as the Warmaidens die when they are dismounted by the bear dying.

You can manage the rate at which they come to a certain extent by choosing where you kill them: back up if they come to fast so it takes longer between kills for them to respawn and run out to where you are. You want to be positioned sort of near the cave entrance, but a little closer to the village. If things pile up too quickly, just move to the cliff wall near the cave so that a few of them pass to join the battle with the giants, rather than attacking you.

Best thing is, IMO, the Warbears don’t drop loot, they are just skinnable, so your bags don’t constantly get filled with garbage items you have to vendor or discard. Just like the boars at Oronok’s Farm in Shadow Moon Valley for Knothide Leather. And because you are in a different phase than most everyone else who has done the quest line, you are basically able to farm unmolested by other toons on PVP servers.

So recently started dealing with Hpricot…what a mess, even tho this is supposed to be the end all be all of Ruby HTML parsers. My main issue is a complete lack of useful documentation. I ended up having to use some_element.methods.inspect to see what the hell my options were with a particular element, where I found the etags, which was what I needed to find.

Of course I wouldn’t have needed etags if Hpricot had an option to do case insensitive searches…like when I need to parse a document for the META info, I shouldn’t need to look for ‘meta’, ‘META’, ‘Meta’ and any other flavors that someone might have typed in. I know the ‘spec’ says this is the way it is supposed to work (case sensitive), but an HTML parser in particular needs to live in the real world.

Here is a method you can call like:

doc = normalize_hpricot(Hpricot(my_html))

 #deal with hpricot case sensitivity
    def normalize_hpricot(element)
    element.children.each do |child|

      if child.respond_to?(:etag=)
        child.etag = child.etag.downcase if child.etag
      end
      if child.respond_to?(:raw_attributes=)
        attribs = {}

        begin
        child.raw_attributes.each_pair do |key,value|
          attribs[key.downcase] = value if value
        end
        child.raw_attributes = attribs
          rescue
          end
      end
      normalize_hpricot(child) if child.respond_to?(:children) and child.children
    end
    return element
  end

This code was taken from http://davidsmalley.com/2008/4/24/hpricot-case-sensitivity and fixed to work and to not make everything lower case, just the tag names and the attribute names from the html tags.

okay, so maybe that was a little dramatic for a title. Along the lines of my discussion of searching for the perfect shopping cart, this is the fruitless culmination of my grand search for a game controller that has a thumbball (i.e. trackball manipulated with your thumb) in the place of the traditional analog right stick. Sadly any mention of this idea on message boards tends to bring out the ‘sky is falling’ people who think that will ruin first-person shooters on the console. To be honest I could care less what they think, as it’s more of an issue of playability for me rather than just trying to get that little extra edge. I have what you would call I guess mild RSS, in that I can’t really use a mouse at all for more than a few minutes at a time without causing tremendous pain to my wrists. I basically worked around this through the years by using various other methods of input. It is pretty amazing that once you step away from the standard mouse concept that there really are a crapton of other options out there, at least for basic computer usage. But there is one glaring exception to this: the inability of any company to bring a game controller with a trackball to the market. The sad part is that, for those of use who care, we would pay almost any price for a solution. I have even looked into building one myself, as I do have some small experience with electronics.

So this is a documentation of my own journey of trying to find an acceptable substitute in this lack of market satisfaction.

so let’s back up. I’m not a huge gamer though I do get obsessed with a game on occasion. And I’ll play through a game from start to finish in a few days time once a month or so. But at the moment I’m really having a hard time finding a usable controller configuration for my needs. A few years ago was a little more into playing first-person shooters I had a game controller called the Panther XL, which combined a trackball and a joystick. It actually worked pretty well, where the trackball was used to manipulate where you are aiming, and the joystick was used for movement and firing. Sadly the Panther XL suffered from poor quality and tended to break frequently. It also really didn’t solve the whole pain problem I was suffering from as you tended to be flexing your wrists to a certain degree to reach the trackball properly. and most computers don’t come with game ports anymore.

Fast forward a few years, and panther XL no longer exists. my initial spelunking came across a site discussing the exact product I’m looking for, along with links to a promising product that fit the bill perfectly along with cool pics, but unfortunately has yet to make it to market, and probably never will. this product was called the paradox or reflex game controller from a company/person called BodieLobus. It seems they were accepting pre-orders for a year but have since returned any monies for the pre-orders.

I came across a number of other products before finding the fragFX controller from a company called Splitfish. they had mockups of another controller called the glideFX, which was also along the same lines except the controller was split into two parts with the trackball being on the right portion of the controller and left analog stick and D. pad being on the left. This product looked promising as well as there were mentions that it would be available over the summer of 2008, but when I contacted them by e-mail recently they said the product was essentially shelved for now.

I still haven’t come up with a final solution yet, but I just purchased a 3D Connexion/Logitech SpaceExplorer (there are special community-provided gaming drivers in the forums) trying to fit part of the bill. I was able to find a deal on it at Dell, for like $190 delivered, and I plan on using it for things other than gaming. Essentially my goal would be to use that in some sort of handheld trackball for a first-person shooter games. At least on a PC. For the console I might be able to use the same setup in combination with an XCM XFPS keyboard/mouse converter for the PS3.

UPDATE: So I got my 3d SpaceExplorer but I also ordered an AlphaGrip iGrip, realizing that I don’t really need an analog left stick for FPS, though it is nice. I also got an XBOX360 when Dell had a $50 off sale for the Pro model ($270 delivered with tax, 2 games, 60GB). The AlphaGrip will be used with PC FPS’ for now, once it comes in, as there are plenty of those, and the AlphaGrip would probably require the XCM XFPS for most PS3 and all XBOX360 games. Will let you know how it works out.

Other links and products you may find interesting if your needs are slightly different from mine:

Zalman FPS FG1000 Mouse

Cheap handheld trackballs

There are some decent ones like those in these pictures that could be useful in combination with a Joystick/keyboard/space explorer or space navigator.

Doing it yourself DIY - Build Your Own Helpful Links:

Touchpad replacement of RIght Analog Stick

Adding a trackball to a ps3 controller

Great Parts place

DIY SIXAXIS Airplane model

BenHeckendon Links:

Put the PS3 guts into an XBOX 360 controller

Completely customizable controller

That’s it for now! I will let you all know how it works out!

So whenever I prepare to buy something I tend to agonize over every little decision. search engines are great, but you really have to know what exactly are looking for to find what you need. Otherwise you end up spending hours and hours searching through the same pages over and over. That’s basically what I did for about a week recently. I needed a new shopping cart as the one I had was beginning to show its age. It was big, wide, too wide to fit through most New York City grocery aisles, rattled and shook, and it felt like the wheels were always about to come off, until they finally did.

So in my grand tradition of hunting and gathering in cyberspace started searching for pretty much every combination of “cart, grocery, shopping, aluminum, casters, foldable, collapsible, etc.”. I finally came across my first contender, the polder aluminum cart pictured below. It really seemed to have a lot of features are looking for, such as being narrow, having rubber wheels, and being lightweight. But the reality was far far removed from those perceptions. This is arguably the worst product I have ever used for its intended purpose. Where to begin? First, the handle is too short and too close to the cart so you can’t really walk or pull it without it blocking your feet. Second, the wheels are barely held on by tiny little plastic clips, which the instructions didn’t even properly indicate how to use. The front wheels were also entirely too small intended to catch on tiny little sidewalk cracks, almost causing a pitch head over heels every few feet. Finally, the cart that I received a manufacturing issue where the brake would engage every few feet, making the card essentially useless without modification. Before realizing all the other issues the cart had, I had taken a Dremel to the brake, thereby removing any chance I had of returning it.

So $60 later I was back to the drawing board. Armed with my new knowledge and my desire not to waste my existing purchase entirely, I struck upon the idea of finding a much sturdier handtruck style cart and then attaching the light weight aluminum foldable basket portion of the cart from hell. I finally found something usable at handtrucks.com(I know, who knew!) in their folding hand trucks section.

there were some other products that might have sufficed, but I went with the high-end Wesco folding aluminum handtruck for about $100. This car is pretty amazing and it collapses up into a pretty small area for discreet storage. It has awesome rubber tires, can hold 150+ pounds, and it is very lightweight. Once I received this, it was now time to turn part-time cart. At this point I took a hacksaw, and cut off the arms and wheels of the crappy Polder cart leaving just the foldable basket. Now it was just a matter of being able to attach the basket to the handtruck and a quick release manner. in the pictures below you’ll see that I use reusable zip ties, but I have since moved on to using Velcro Velstrap (2 inch wide by 3 foot cut to size ) as my quick release mechanism, which I found at CyberGuys for around $10 delivered.

Below you can see the final product of my efforts minus the Velcro with some added foam grip for the handle. this bad boy doesn’t grab some attention on the street, as easily the most maneuverable cart in the store. It is lacking the second set of wheels so does require a little more effort to manage when fully loaded, but all in all it is a huge improvement and should last for a really long time, and the handtruck will find other uses besides just holding the basket.

I recently purchased a new Samsung LCD for my main workstation. It’s a little smaller than my last, weighing in at 40 inches versus 42 for my old monitor which is now downstairs. The big new thing about this monitor compared other LCDs is that it has LEDs for backlighting rather than the typical florescent tube. This means it runs cooler but more importantly has much better black levels. And I can confirm that they really are pretty awesome. You really do notice it on titles playing and fade in on intros like the Lord of the Rings.

There is one crippling flaw in this TV though: the lack of DPMS, otherwise known as Display Power Management Something, which is what your computer uses to turn off the monitor when it goes to sleep or when your screensaver turns on, etc. That in today’s age a TV that can be connected to a computer does not have this functionality is a travesty. For power savings and environmental concerns alone this should be in every TV/monitor sold today, but the various revisions of the Energy Star requirements continue to let HDTV’s that aren’t marketed as computer capable to slip through the cracks. It is the one horrific blemish on an otherwise stellar monitor.

I did a great deal on it though, only paying $1400 delivered. The new models were coming out but none of the new models delivers LEDs for backlighting at the size that I need. Plus the one great thing that started all this was that my old monitor had a slight but noticeable dark line running down the middle that was driving me batshit.