Mike's Musings » blogging

Weekend of Code

Mike — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 11:39:06 +0000

I found that for me this weekend is going to be a bit of a quiet affair so rather than sitting around all day doing not very much I decided that I’d try to be productive. It’s been a while since I sat down and done any meaningful amount of coding for myself so I thought that is where I’d start, my next question was what do I want to write? I then remembered that I’m not overly fond of most of the music players that I’ve tried on Windows, the closest so far to something I find acceptable is iTunes. With that I had it: my goal for this weekend would be to write (or at least make a dent in writing) a music player that I would like.

Alright, that’s all fine and dandy to say but what does that actually mean? Brainstorming it I came up with seven key features that I want in my media player:

Only plays music, doesn’t try to do anything else.
Watch folders.
Filter on album, artist, title.
Filter a filter.
Ability to queue songs while on shuffle.
Playlists.
A similar interface to iTunes.

While watching Justice League: The New Frontier tonight I made a bit of start by making some rough UI mock-ups in Balsamiq.

To implement this I’m planning on using C# and WPF, I haven’t had a good chance to play around with WPF or some of the new Windows 7 features that are available so I figured this would be as good a time as any. Finally my other goal with this project is an attempt to get me back into blogging, to that end I will hopefully be making a post at the end of each day summarizing what I’ve done – possibly with some screenshots. Until then I should be posting some updates to my twitter feed.

REST API Test Utility

Mike — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 10:54:27 +0000

One of the things I enjoy most about being a programmer is the fact that when you can’t find a tool to do what you want you can write it yourself. Generally I’ve found that these applications tend to be quite simple and stick to the unix philosophy of ‘do one thing and do it well’ which as a software developer I think is a good philosophy to live by. The most recent occurrence of this happening to me was at work not to long ago where we are currently writing a REST API I needed an application to make a HTTP call to a URL. After about 5 minutes of looking around the web I couldn’t find anything, at that point I had the choice of either continuing to search for an appropriate tool or I could write my own. As you might have guessed I wrote my own, it took about 10 minutes to implement the basics of what was needed.

Over the next couple of weeks the tool continued to evolve to better fit the specifics of the project we we’re working on, but in the back of my mind I kept going back to how other people must have this problem as well. Eventually I decided to re-implement the core of my tool. Having finished the re-implementation a couple of weeks ago I’m finally getting around to releasing it to the public under the GPL, below are the links to download the 0.1 release.

[download id="1"]
[download id="2"]

For those of you who would like to grab the latest source and stay current with any updates (which may be buggy broken code) you can check out the subversion repository which is available at the following URL:

http://mlowen.com/svn/ratu/trunk

In other news I have signed on to be a contributor to lounge media a blog about digital media in the home, hopefully I should have a post up there soon – once I figure out a good subject to start on.

Stats Addiction

Mike — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 02:06:24 +0000

So I think I’m becoming addicted to statistics, for those of you who have either been reading my blog for a while or have gone back through the archives you will have noticed that it wasn’t until recently that I started posting frequently. I’m going to come out and say that I think that this is because I’m now collecting statistics about visitors to this site. I recently installed StatPress Reloaded largely out of curiosity to see what sort of data I could get from it. I made a couple of posts here and there to see what sort of traffic I got, from there it has turned almost into a craving to see the graph peek after each post like a junkie seeking their next hit.

I find it odd that my motivation to blog wasn’t triggered by the urge to show off the work which I have been doing, but instead it’s by a group of coloured boxes that vary in height and I wonder slightly what that says about me. Whatever that does say about the kind of person I am it has the good side effect of I’m now doing more work on my personal projects, due to the more work I do the more material I have to blog about. It has thrown up a couple of interesting facts that I wasn’t expecting as well such as – currently I get over 4 times more referrals from Windows Live search than what I get from Google (which was perhaps the biggest surprise), that some of the most requested pages don’t actually exist and it’s mostly Canadians that are requesting them (I’ll let you draw your own conclusions there).