Ray Jezek’s Blog

I just saw this video over on Channel9 about this year’s PDC and what the big “theme” is going to be this year.  In the past we’ve had such themes as the .NET PDC and the Longhorn PDC.  This year they are dubbing it the “Software + Services PDC”.  Doesn’t really roll of the tongue but they are promising some major paradigm shifts and some “industry changing” announcements.  Should be a pretty interesting time in LA this fall.

My favorite part of the video was the part about “the goods” they will be giving out this year:

“Plus……we’re announcing the very special gift that all PDC attendees will receive:  a 160GB external USB2 hard drive with all of the bits!”

I’ve embedded the video below:

Countdown to PDC 2008: This is the Software + Services PDC, Plus a Hard Drive Chock Full o’Bits is a PDC Attendee’s Dream Come True!

.NET, Programming conference, PDC, software + services, the goods

This summer I was introduced to a game on Facebook called Scramble. Essentially it’s Boggle but played in a web browser. I was immediately hooked on this game and started playing it regularly. One day as I was playing the game and wondered if I could write a program that could automate my playing this game. Surely software could play this game WAY more efficiently and accurately than I could right?

So I opened up my trusty IDE and started plugging away at trying to make a program smart enough to play Scramble better than I could. Seems like it should be easy enough with the bar set so low.

About a day later I had a very basic Scramble solver which could take a string of letters as input and then spit out a list of possible answers. While there some interesting things about writing a basic Scramble solver (these are very simple to make), I wanted something a little more automated. I also wanted something that didn’t just flat out cheat and win but would act more human to be less noticeable. About a week later I had it finished, my automated Scramble application affectionately called DeScramble.

It was a pretty fun summer project and I plan on spending the next several blog posts talking about the way it works and some of the things I learned as well as some of the challenges. I am also going to try and put together a video so everyone can see it in action.

So stay tuned.

.NET, DeScramble, Programming automation, cheat, DeScramble, Facebook, Programming, Scramble

Back in the early days of DVRs you had 2 choices; TiVO and ReplayTV.  Well it’s no mystery which company won the DVR war but for those of us that made the technologically superior choice, we can still reap a few benefits from our “obsolete” device.

My boss and I are ReplayTV users who are now using Windows Media Center for our main DVR.  About 3-4 months ago we were dreaming of a way to somehow integrate the 2 technologies.  Wouldn’t it be great to be able to leverage the Replay to record shows but then have those shows show up on the Media Center?

Yep.  It sure would.  And so Replay2DVRMS was born.

Replay2DVRMS is a tool used to convert ReplayTV files to the Windows Media Center file format (dvr-ms). This allows ReplayTV owners to continue to record TV shows on their device but access them through the Window Media Center interface.  In order to accomplish this, users must download the TV shows off of their ReplayTV device using the tool DVArchive.  DVArchive will create 2 files for each TV show it downloads; an mpeg file which contains the TV show and an XML file that contains all of the show’s metadata. Replay2DVRMS can then be used to convert the Replay show to a dvr-ms file and retain all of the original show’s metadata.  The program usage is as follows:

Replay2DVRMS source [destination] [-d]

Where source is a ReplayTV mpeg file or a folder containing ReplayTV mpeg file(s) and destination is the name of the file or folder to output the dvr-ms file(s) to.  If no destination is given the program will just write the output file to the source location.  If the ReplayTV xml file is not found for the source file the program will still convert the file, but the show’s information will not be copied into the dvr-ms file.  If the -d flag is specified the program will delete the source file after the conversion is complete.

Once the files are converted they can be copied to the Media Center’s “Recorded TV” folder which will allow the shows to display in the Recorded TV section of the Media Center interface.

This entire process can be automated to provide seamless integration between the ReplayTV and Windows Media Center.  Automating the process can be accomplished in just a few steps:

1. Use DVArchive’s scheduling functionality to automatically download shows each day to a folder on your machine (for instance: c:\ReplayShows\).
2. Setup a scheduled job in windows to run the following command: Replay2DVRMS “c:\ReplayShows\” “c:\Recorded TV\”.

Assuming c:\Recorded TV\ was the folder your Media Center was storing its TV shows this would be all you needed to do to automatically see shows recorded on your Replay alongside those recorded on your Media Center.

HUGE thanks goes out to andy vt for his todvrms tool which is at the heart of Replay2DVRMS doing all of the hard work. He also graciously helped me work out a few kinks in getting the Replay files to convert correctly.

Please note: this program requires the .NET Framework version 3.5 be installed on your computer.

Programming, Replay2DVRMS dvr-ms, mpeg, Replay2DVRMS, ReplayTV, todvrms, video conversion, Windows Media Center

I am in the process of moving my wife’s blog over to WordPress from Xanga and ran into some errors trying to use the RSS importer that comes with WordPress.  The error I was getting was “Importing post…Couldn’t get post ID”.  So I did what any good husband would do and cracked open the rss.php importer script to see what the problem was.  After a little investigation i found out what was causing the error. 

The import script was parsing the xml for the title and the description by looking for the tokens <title> and <description> respectively.  The problem is that Xanga’s RSS writes out its title and description tags with a few extra attributes so they look like this:
<title xmlns:cf=”http://www.microsoft.com/schemas/rss/core/2005” cf:type=”text”>. 

So after doing a little find/replace to make the title tag just say <title> and the description tag to just say <description> the importer worked like a charm!

Misc rss, wordpress, xanaga

Well I’ve decided to try and start blogging again.  I have been working on a pretty wide variety of things lately and I started thinking I should be writing some of this stuff down… so here I am… resurrected after 2 years of silence.  I have also moved my blog to my own domain and migrated over to WordPress from CS.  Hopefully everything moved over OK and not too much is broken… but I don’t know how much that really matters since those posts are so old now.

Misc blogging