J.P.'s Blog

It’s been some time since I have posted here.

Since the last time I have posted though, I have been to Palm Springs, Taipei, Las Vegas, been snowed in, and celebrated New Years.

Since Christmas / New Year’s I have been working a lot, but I also have completed some interesting projects at home as well.

First off is that I have re-vamped (only slightly) www.jpmovies.org.

- All the videos are now stored in the Amazon Cloud.

- ALL of the images are now uploaded to Flickr as well and in the same order as they appear in the videos within the sets.

- I am “starting” to work on my slides for 2008. But, given the new camera this summer, 2008 had a LOT of pictures taken and there are 11715 shots to sort through (617 posted to Flickr taken in 2008 alone).

In addition to the 1057 slideshow pictures added to Flickr I mentioned above, I also sat down and Geo-tagged all but around 400 of the pictures I have on Flickr. (2000 something)

- You can browse the whole US here…

- OR try just WA, CA, TN, or the northeast.

After spending many hours searching for every last picture which I ever put in a slideshow and adding it to Flickr, I then realized that I did not even have a local copy anywhere with all the same pictures in one place. Since it’s somewhat of a pain to download each one individually from Flickr, I figured that I would give their api a shot. Its SUPER easy (mostly thanks to FlickrNET). So I wrote a little (ok at the end, with 4 classes, and 3 files, not as little as I imagined) tool to download one or more set’s from your Flickr site to your hard drive. Just select a location and which set’s you want and GO. (Sorry for the image quality, was a mistaken step in mspaint… but I wasn’t going to delete the files so I could get the screenshot again.)

Ok, so with 5 different machines at home and 13 different hard drives between them which have various pictures, audio, etc. on them, I am starting to get desperate to converge on some solution. Many of the drives even have whole copies of its predecessor on it so there can be up to 4-6 copies of some photo album, music album, etc on any given machine, and more across all of the machines. If you wonder why I need so much space… this is part of the reason. This tool won’t solve all my problems, yet, however, at the moment, I just need to find a way to try and merge two drives together. At the heart of the solution is just Md5 hashing. No need to encrypt anything, but I just need to fingerprint it quickly. Each fingerprint is stored in a file and then collated later. The program can either accept one or two directories, and will look for duplicates either in just one root or across two. You can then select which ones you want to keep, hit the button and the rest are deleted. Honestly, with all these apps I keep writing (there are more at work as well), I have gotten much better at understanding callbacks (delegates), threading, objects/structures in programming. Not that I didn’t in theory before, however, practice and theory are much different. I wish our school had taught more programming other than “C”, java, and cold fusion.

I also need to say thanks to Jimmy for this tip on how to get access to admin shares on a Vista machine. I have spent many long nights trying to debug this at home, when one simple bit in the registry made it all work perfectly.

Also, some of you may recall my posts in the past regarding the year-long endeavor I had embarked on in the early days of 2008 to have a Christmas light show going for 2008. Well I did a lot of work on it over the year. Spent a lot of time working on the software as well as hardware. However in the end, it came down to all the travel I mentioned above as well as the crappy weather that we had the last week before Christmas. So 1. I had to install the lights indoors, and 2. They were not as spectacular as I had hoped since I never finished the software that I was working on in time. Oh, and all that hardware that I worked on? The last few weeks before Christmas, I ditched it all and went with a DMX setup using a Velleman VM116 and 2 Chauvet DMX-4 (generic brand) dimmer packs. (Now I have a third as well.) For the Christmas Eve setup that you see above, I was using DMX Control software that was configured to move the channels with the music.

Since then, though, I spent quite a bit of time doing even MORE coding in C# and have started my own control program for the VM116. I had a test program written by New years where I had the code control both a projector as well as all 8 channels (I only had 4 on for the video). The program has an “Effect” base class that you can expand on writing whatever you want using a common delegate to call back to the UI and update the sliders to show what the channels are doing. Of course, there is also a built in object for working with the DMX device itself as well. I also added some common functions such as fades as well so it’s easy to program in different effects such as the ones you see here in this video. At midnight when the countdown hit 0, each channel would then randomly fire like “fireworks” as well.

I am hoping to combine the modules I wrote for my “DMXTool” with the recording and logging framework that I wrote while modifying a light performance tool for next year. But of course, who knows what the year will bring. Honestly there is some great software out there for DMX devices, but so far its rather complicated, so will take some time to learn.

 

I am writing this from the updated Windows Live Writer. Much is the same as it was before. Its got a little bit of a face lift, but it wasn’t exactly ugly before. Still no NATIVE S3 support though. I mean I KNOW that’s the competitor to the new live storage platform (Azure), but come on, lots of people use it. For now, I am still using the S3 Browser plugin. Its “ok” but removes all the image manipulation that live writer supports because you have to upload to S3 first, and then insert the linked image, rather than allowing live writer to manage all the file storage. There is a whole set of functionality in live writer to upload to FTP. They should have a way of adding plugins for different back ends. (With different popular ones by default of course.)

 

I suppose that is all for now. Till next time.

J.P.