The Johnson Blog

Ramblings of a geek with a few hobbies…

  • iTunes is iAnnoying

    Too bad the iPhone makes you get sucked into the world if iTunes – because it sucks.  I knew this going in, but it still isn’t fun when the limitations smack you in the face.

    The limitation of which I speak is its inability to detect new files in its directories, automatically update its library database, and make it available for syncing and playing.  I spent a while fumbling around the UI looking for the option to turn it on, only to be ultimately disappointed by a few google searches. 

    My initial plan was to take home movie clips (btw, MediaCoder is pretty handy..) and drop them into a directory managed by iTunes so they’d automatically get sent to the phone, but now I was going to have to add additional steps of manually adding the new videos each time they get created.  That’s just too much work and I’m too lazy.

    I ran across an app or two that would do this updating for you, but instead decided to go a different route – creating a podcast that iTunes would auto-update and sync to the phone.  Tuesday night I whipped up an ASP.NET request handler (IHttpHandler) to generate feeds based on directory contents.  So now I’ve got the auto-updating capability I was initially looking for: after I create the video, I just drop it into a directory accessible by my webserver and iTunes will pick it up the next time it requests the feed.  As an added bonus, David now has a podcast for family and friends 🙂

    Some more details on the code below the break.

    (more…)

  • Walker

    http://www.motionbox.com/external/hd_player/type=hd,video_uid=1199d9bd1019e39a

  • Box

     

    Need I say more?

  • Ammo and… backups?

    OK, just a few more words about my data backups.

    Last week I ordered a few Army Surplus, 30 Caliber Ammo Cans, they arrived today.  What the heck are these for, you ask?

    Well I thought they could make a great way to transport and store the hard drives I’m going to be rotating off-site.  So tonight I got to work with a knife and some dense foam, to create what should be a pretty sturdy (and water-resistant!) hard drive case.

    And here it is, with a spare drive not quite halfway pushed in.  The foam cutting was crude, and it may not be pretty, but I like it.

    The cans are $4 apiece + shipping.

  • Hippo Comes to Life

    David has accumulated plenty of coats and jackets, the the point that it seems like they’re everywhere.  Last weekend I thought it would be fun to make something to hang them from.  Well, since David enjoys hippos….

    I started off drawing the little guy in PhotoShop Elements with my tablet…

    (wow, enough dust in there? sheesh)

    Printed, cut it out, traced it onto a piece of wood…

    A few minutes of jigsaw work and it’s ready for some paint!  Notice the wooden version lost a tail – it was just too thin for my skills and tools to be able to cut.  After the paint I’ll be putting it atop another piece of wood along with some coat hooks.

    It was fun and took just over an hour from drawing to cut-out.

     

  • iPhone

    My 2.5 year-long haitus from being connected on-the-go is over.  I finally took the plunge and switched from Sprint to AT&T and bought an iPhone (8GB).  Sprint has provided great service over the past 5+ years, but their phone selection has been lacking.  Sorry, Sprint, the HTC Touch Pro and/or Diamond just don’t compare.

  • Backups and my first foray into PowerShell

    First, some background.

    Last week I received the final pieces of my backup strategy, a pair of 500 GB hard drives that I will be rotating periodically to some undisclosed location that isn’t my house.  Right now, my fileserver makes backups and sticks them on a mirrored RAID array.  These drives are simply to hold extra copies of these backup files in the event of something Very Bad(tm) happening to our house.

    Since it will be leaving my house, I decided I wanted to make sure the data was wrapped up in a nice blanket of encryption goodness.  For ease of use, I have an eSATA docking station that allows the drives to be ‘hot-swapped’ – and for further convenience I’m attaching it to my desktop instead of the server so that it will be harder to forget to rotate the drives out (in the basement = out of sight, out of mind).

    So all of this presented an opportunity to learn the relatively-new command line environment, Microsoft PowerShell. 

    The scripts (feel free to download) do the following:

    1. Mount my hard drives as encrypted TrueCrypt volumes, using a keyfile.  Now anything written to the drives are wrapped in that nice encryption blanket I mentioned earlier.  Mmm… scrambled bits and blankets.
    2. Checks the amount of space available in the target directory and deletes the necessary number of old backups to make sufficient room for the new backup copies.
    3. Calls on RoboCopy (included in Windows Vista) to do the actual file copying.  Note that in my testing, I found RoboCopy to be 3-4 times as fast as xcopy across the network.
    4. Sends off a completion email
    5. Dismounts the encrypted volume

    Since this was my first use of PowerShell, I’m sure there is a lot of room for improvement and that I’ve only just scratched the surface.  That said, I learned enough about PowerShell that I’m going to keep pushing to learn more.

    A few things I like:

    • It was very easy to use several diffferent MS technologies from the one script.  I seemlessly use .NET objects, COM objects, and even pull in some WMI interaction to get the job done.
    • Finally having regular expressions available as first-class citizens in scripts – a.la perl and others.  No absolute need to explicitly fire up the .NET regex classes all the time, even though that’s definitely possible and useful too.
    • Finally not having to rely on essentially screen-scraping command outputs. Yay for objects!
    • Writing custom cmdlets in C# is pretty straightforward.  I started down this route to make my own Start-Backup cmdlet, but decided against it since I specifically wanted to learn PS scripting and not just write the solution in C#.

    A few things I dislike:

    • using -lt and -gt (and similar) instead of “<” and “>” for comparisons and equality.  It just feels wrong.
    • Lack of an official language reference – I couldn’t believe one wasn’t available, and this left me in the dark and learning by trial by error on some key behaviors of powershell (like function return values, for instance).  The “documentation pack” has a crappy quick-reference/cheat-sheet sort of thing, but not a real spec.
    • How hard it was to track down the PowerShell SDK – note: you have to download the Windows SDK and blindly choose a few installation options to get the SDK installed.
    • I made the PowerShell crash a few times.  That shouldn’t be able to happen.

  • The Feed Store

    Today I had lunch at a restaurant I have never eaten at before – The Feed Store, in downtown Springfield.  Was it good? Meh.  The sandwhich I had wasn’t anything that I couldn’t make at home, I’ll leave it at that.

    What did turn me off was their lack of adherance to what I’ll call Restaurant Protocol.  I’ll explain.  A friend and I got in line behind a few other customers and waited our turn.  The first protocol deviation came with the orders being taken in the line and not up at a counter, register, or at the table.   In fact, while the counter did exist, its only purposed seemed to be to barricade the workers into the kitchen.  Poor workers.

    Next, when it was our turn to order, what I did not realize was that “our turn” was supposed to entail knowing what we wanted to eat without having ever been there before, or having looked at a menu.  The waitress looked and sounded confused when we asked for a menu and more time to figure out what to eat.  It felt like we had screwed up some secret Feed Store Handshake.  So she handed us a pair of menus and ackwardly tried to figure out where we should stand while she took the next customer’s order.  It very much felt like this situation had never arisen and they just didn’t know what to do – I mean who goes to a restaurant and not know what they’re going to get!?

    We later place our order, and then she explains how we get our food… get this – we each received a slip of paper with a serial number on it, were told where to sit, and were then instructed to listen for our number to be called, and upon hearing it, raise our hands.  Raise our hands?! Since when are the little numbers that sit on your table insufficient?  No, that would be too normal!  Instead, don’t try to have a conversation while you’re waiting for your food lest you’ll never hear your sacred number being called by the woman at the front of the noisy restaurant.  I failed, and missed my number being called.  Damn you, Feed Store.

    I think the only worse method for distributing the food would be to just pass the plates from table to table until it gets to the person that ordered it – a.la. beer at a baseball game.

    So I give The Feed Store a failing mark.  The food was ok, but you’ve got to stick with the protocol unless your food is amazing; otherwise it will just feel like you’re eating in the Twilight Zone.  I’ll stick to Monty’s, Jimmie John’s, Head West, and even Subway.

  • 11 Months Old

    He’s 11 months old today, kinda crazy.  The rest can be seen in the gallery.

    Quick little story about the backdrop.  I had grand plans of it looking a lot better/different than this.  I started last night  first dying the muslin solid yellow.  Then I tied it into  ball and dyed it tan, producing a nice mixture of the two colors.  Finally, I tied it up again an dropped it into a dark brown dye.  Unfortunately, I didn’t tie the ball tight enough and the dark brown overpowered the other layers – completely ruining the autumn-looking backdrop I wanted.  The end result still looks ok, just not what I had planned 😦

  • Heights and XM Radio

    A couple of months ago I purchased a Terk XM6 XM Radio Antenna because the reception I have been getting in the office has been poor and unpredictable.   Due to some procrastination, the new antenna has been sitting in its packaging waiting to be installed ever since.

    Until today.  This morning I decided it was time to get back up on the 2nd storey roof of my house and replace the now-inactive Wifi antenna with XM.  I’m not a fan of being that high up, particularly on a cold and windy day.  In fact, as I climbed up the ladder and took a look at my target, I came very close to saying screw-it and just mounting the antenna on the side of the house.

    Not to be easily defeated – I pushed ahead and swapped the antennas.  I had to run new cable (RG6 Quad Shield) instead of using the existing, superior cable (LMR400) so that I could get the appropriate connectors attached.  Due to how securely Jay put that other cable up, and how cold it was, I decided I’ll make another trip back up in warmer weather to pull it down 🙂

    So now my office has an XM jack, 100%  (versus maybe 20%, according to the receiver) signal reception, and won’t cut in and out when someone walks through the room!   The project isn’t completely done, however;  I need to order a 2.4Ghz splitter so I can feed the signal to the basement and possibly another room in the house in the future.