Hey All,

I apologize for not having any updates. I’ve been busy with work and haven’t really done any personal projects or coding =(

However, I finally got some free time and I’ve been wanting to fix something that has bugged me for a while now. I have my wonderful HTPC and it’s setup up to use XBMC to play all the media that stored on my fileserver. In the past I’ve always had to press the button on my case to turn the darn thing on. Well I got tired of that and I figured there had to be a way to turn on my computer with the remote. It’s got a USB dongle that stays lit up, so that means it’s powered and the OS is waiting for commands. (BTW I made sure to enable wake on USB in my bios for this to work!)

As the old saying goes, necessity is the mother of all invention, well I needed to become more lazy so I wrote this little script that finds a gyration remote dongle on your USB subsystem and allows for it to be used as a device to wake the system from the S3 (suspend) state. This init script runs on boot to keep the settings persistent after a reboot.

#!/bin/bash
# gyrationWakeFromS3.sh

#
# Author: Robert Navarro 9/11/10
# Contact: crshman[at]gmail.com
#
# This init script finds a usb device by 'device' and makes it so it can be used to wake up a system from the S3 state

# Set /proc/acpi/wakeup to allow USB devices to wake the system
# sudo sh -c "echo USB3 > /proc/acpi/wakeup"

device='Gyration'

# Grab the pci ID for our device
pciID=$(cat /proc/bus/input/devices |grep -A2 -m1 $device |grep S\: |awk -F'/' '{ print $4 }')
#echo $pciID

usbID=$(cat /proc/acpi/wakeup |grep $pciID |awk -F' ' '{ print $1 }')
#echo $usbID

echo $usbID > /proc/acpi/wakeup

Just drop that script into your /etc/init.d/ folder and run the following:

#sudo update-rc.d gyrationWakeFromS3.sh defaults

Whala! You should now have resume support from your Gyration device. A little note here, in the init.d file you can certainly change which device wakes your system by changing the value of the ‘device’ variable.

Drop me a line if you have any questions about this!

Hey All,

I REALLY REALLY apologize for not updating this thing. School has been quite ridiculous for the better part of this year. Nonstop labs and homework, I can’t wait until the end of this quarter…I may actually be able to breath!

So today’s blog post is about a little script that has been working faithfully for me for some time now. However, I have decided to just recently release it to the public. I’m not sure how much exposure it’ll get, but it’s out there now…well almost!

This script is used to organize your digital movie collection (you know, all the rips of your legitimately purchased movies?) I personally think this script is the best thing since sliced bread, but as the author I may be slightly biased… The script will look in your movie directory for an imdb.txt file that contains the imdb URL for that movie (it’ll also look in .nfo files) Once it finds the imdb URL the magic begins! The script pulls the official movie title from imdb along with the release year. The script also grabs posters and backdrops from TMDB to make your collection XBMC friendly. Once armed with this information it moves your movies into the specified directory and renames all the folders with the format: “<Movie Title> (<Release Year>)” The script takes into account special characters that Windows can’t stomach. (Such as :, which gets translated to ; )

As Billy Mays would say….But wait! There’s more!

The script also reads the original source directories for the strings 720p and 1080p. If it finds either of these strings the resultant output folder name will change to:” <Movie Title> (<Release Year>) HD <resolution>” Eventually I’d like to add support for reading the media files themselves and checking what resolution they really are, but for now folder names will have to do.

I am a fan of Asian films, primarily Korean Dramas and Japanese Action flicks. I personally choose to isolate this genre of film from my regular movie set. As such, this script has the added bonus of separating films that it deems are “asian”. (This is user controlled of course!)

Now for the goodies, where do I get it?

You can clone the source (and report bugs) from my codaset project page:

http://codaset.com/phiivo/movie-magic

Hopefully this script benefits some people as it has benefited me. This has saved me loads of time and has help to unify my media collection in a singular format. Once again, sorry for the lack of posts…I’ll try to keep updating this thing as I’ll probably have some more time after this quarter.

Hey All,

So for the past few hours I’ve been reading a fantastic book that Jeff Atwood mentioned at Dev Days LA and also posted about on his blog. He’s a really cool guy and chit chatted briefly <– really briefly about http load balancers. During that conversation he mentioned that he was really a “noob” with hardware and all the underlying stuff, I was shocked and now have a much greater respect for the man. I was thinking he was going to be some snobby I know it all, TOTALLY NOT the case!

Anyways, he recommended Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming and I figured I’d give it a shot. I’ll be honest, I “procured” this book using some unconventional methods, but 2 chapters in….and I bought it. It’s a FANTASTIC overview of what some of the most respected, and quite humble, minds in the programming world have to say. It’s really easy to connect to the different developer interviews and I feel like I’ve learned a few things just reading the first couple of chapters.

One underlying message that I feel from this book is that communication is key for successful programmers. These days you can’t be huddled up in your room coding away on your own, interaction is the way of the future and I think it’s a great thing.

Thanks for the heads up Jeff!

Hey All,

So today I decided to ditch school and participate in Stack Overflow Dev Days 2009. I thought the conference was pretty good and the student price of $10 was amazing! The turn out was a little less than I had anticipated but I suppose that just left more room to spread out for those of us that went. I got there pretty early, 8:15am, checked in and grabbed a seat. They were serving coffee and some muffins.

There was a bit of swag available:

• A Multi-Bit Screwdriver, “…to give to your friends that need to screw something.” ~Joel Spolsky
• Stack Overflow, Server Fault, Super User and Fog Bugz stickers
• Fog Bugz Pamphlets
• For those that got in early (like me =D) “Painless Project Management with FogBugz“
• Dev Days buttons
• Fog Bugz notepads

Stuff I liked:

• The Python talk and dissection of the Google spell check algorithm by Mike Schiraldi of Reddit
  • This presentation was really well layed out, easy to follow and appealed to the geek in me as it ran in xterm on python haha. Pretty slick Mike…
• The jQuery talk by Cody Lindely
  • This presentation would’ve been much better had the Internet worked. That, or had Cody saved all of his work locally to show the audience. I’m sure we would’ve been in for some really trick eye candy. He did however lead me on to two good sites, jsBin and Cody’s jQuery selector demo.
• Most, if not all of Joel’s talks were highly entertaining. He talked about Fog Bugz and all the features that the software has, such as:
  • Not technically a feature, but ya….Fog Bugz 7
  • Fog Bugz Kiln, tight Fog Bugz integration with hg
    • I talked to Joel a little during one of the breaks and sadly support for git is not on the roadmap, and he said it probably won’t ever be….*sad panda*
  • Also not a direct feature, but part of a plugin for Fog Bugz, Balsamiq Mockups I think this app has great potential to interact with prospective clients
• The QT (cute) presentation by Daniel Rocha of Nokia. This presentation really impressed me, he did actual coding (yes typing), compilation and a demo on 3 separate platforms and they all worked flawlessly. Kudos Daniel! This presentation also showed QT’s cross platform power, seamless migrations from one platform to another, that was pretty slick.
• Jeff Atwood’s talk about random junk. I wished his presentation would’ve gone on longer it was pretty entertaining. He’s actually a really nice guy, I talked with him during one of the breaks and he gave me some coding horror stickers =D

Stuff I didn’t like:

• The provided wifi was pretty crappy, I found myself tethered to my cell for most of the day. It was just unmanageable. I would have thought they would have gotten this right, especially after Joel’s writeup on conference wifi.
• A lot of the presentations went backwards in my mind. I think the presenters should show the power of said technology first (get the fancy demos out of the way) and then talk about the code/app/etc. that powered that demo. This probably would’ve worked much better for Rory Blyth and his iPhone presentation. There were a lot of boring coding sessions that didn’t need to take place IMHO, we’re developers and we can figure out syntax on our own….rtfm.

Misc:

• The Google Apps Engine talk by Jason A Cooper of Google would’ve been more captivating if he had spent more time talking about the product/service and less time typing code. Though he did show off some fancy gChat integration stuff that wow-ed the crowd, that was pretty neat.
• The keynote was an interesting take on software design, I really liked what Joel had to say on Simplicity vs Power. It basically came down to: write elegant code so your users don’t have to make lots of decisions. Though I don’t think you should take elegant and make your code a giant unreadable 1 line mess. That’s a total maintenance buzz kill.

Well I think that’s it for now, see you all next year!

Edit–

Oops this post got stuck in “drafts” and was supposed to go out some time ago…I’ll work some magic to the dates 😉

Hey All,

So I guess it’s been a month since my last post, shame shame I know, things are starting to wind down for me. ResNet is coming to an end for me and I get a much needed 1.5 week vacation before school. On the upside, development work has been kicking up in the last few weeks so I’ve been keeping busy with some really cool projects.

I forgot exactly how I found this, probably some link in a link in a link from the Programming subreddit, but I thought it was very comical and some of it fairly true. Unfortunately I see myself as the “The Code Cowboy”, this is something I really want to change in the next few months. I have explored Unit Testing and TDD in the past and realize how powerful it can be when putting all the pieces together, but I have yet to successfully grasp it’s usage in any real application larger than doing simple arithmatic.