Author: benmeadowcroft

I’m not going to write much today [not that I write much anyway], I am still recovering from partying/dancing to 7am this morning in Madrid and then flying back home to good old England this afternoon. May you have a prosperous New Year!

Yes thats right it sucks. Why do I say this because I want to distribute copies of the music to anyone who can connect to a peer to peer network? Actually no, I’ve never had Kazaa, Gnutella, Morpheus or anything similar installed on my PC, ever. The CD in question is my recently purchased copy of Alicia Keys “songs in A minor”, with accompanying remixes. the main CD can be copied to my hard disk without a problem, the remix CD however is copyprotected and requires a windows PC to run some propietary software, so if your not on a windows PC… Anyway I’m running Windows XP on a 1.6GhZ Intel P4 so it didn’t bother me too much, apart from not being able to listen too it at the same time as my other (legally obtained) tracks on my hard disk. You may be wondering why I don’t just play it on a handy CD player, well the fact is my handy CD player is sitting in the drive of my PC.

Giving in would have been so easy to do. Thats right I would not have put up much of a fight to copy the tracks if the playback on my machine was of reasonable quality, the fact was though it wasn’t. To listen to the tracks without introducing my own remixing in the process actually touching the PC during playback wasn’t allowed, mainly due to the fact that the scroll bar of any active window seemed to at like my very own scratch deck. Obviously not a state of affairs I was happy with. My determination was set, copy the songs on to my hard disk at a reasonably good quality for trouble free playback, something that I feel is my right. So how to defeat the copy protection? Cue the first clue

CDS200.0.4
3.0 build 12a

This little snippet found in a version.txt on the CD indicated that this was protected using Cactus Data Shield copy protection. The brochure for the copy protection scheme used can found on the website of the authoring company. Overall the technology looks quite interesting and seems to work quite well from all accounts. Anyway thats enough of my moaning, have a Good Christmas!

I’ve been busy working on my fourth year project, it is a proof of concept device based around some of the Philips Nexperia technolgy, As part of the process I wrote a small report examining Pie Menus and comparing them with traditional linear menus, listing both the advantages and disadvantages of Pie Menus. The report focuses on the use of Pie Menus as part of the interface to a digital set top box. Pie Menus are something I’ve been interested in for a while so getting the chance to implement them in a proper application is something I am looking forward too.

Real life has been getting a bit hectic with university reports to be written and the like. In the meantime I’ll post a cool quote from the small initiatives newsletter, SIDL.

When they say: “Why doesn’t your site look right on my (choose from the following relic platforms: Commodore VIC-20|Atari 800|Coleco Adam|Apple IIe) running (choose from the following relic clients: Spyglass Mosaic|Prodigy browser|Netscape 1.1N)?”

I wish I could say: Perception is reality. How do you know it doesn’t look exactly the way we wanted, just for you, while the rest of the world is the “graceful degrade”?

Browsing some of my old bookmarks I went from here and then on to here. Turns out today is Bill Gates birthday.

After using mouse gestures for a while and not finding them as well integrated as the implementation found in Opera I decided to try a different approach. The new pie menu add-in I installed seems to be somewhat more intuitive than the mouse gestures, time will tell if it is something I will persevere with or discard like mozilla mouse gestures. The problem I had with the mouse gestures was the interference with text selection, in the end it just frustrated me too much.

So you want to develop and test ASP.net web applications on a Windows XP Home machine. What do you do?

1. Get WebMatrix [if you don’t have it already]
2. Use WebMatrix for a bit until you despair at the crap HTML it turns out.
3. Long for the utility of your favourite Text Editor [TextPad]
4. Despair at having to boot up WebMatrix first just to set the WebMatrix WebServer running from the desired directory and port at the start of every session.
5. Figure out how to improve the situation

Yes I have figured it out [pretty basic really].

1. Find the WebServer.exe in the WebMatrix program folder
2. Create a shortcut to the exe
3. Add parameters for the directory and port number from which you wish to run the server
4. Copy the Shortcut to the “Startup” folder
5. Publish it on your personal website
6. "C:Program FilesMicrosoft ASP.NET Web Matrixv0.5.464WebServer.exe" /port:8080 /path:"C:WebRoot" /vpath="/"

I managed to compile my first non trivial (read “hello World”) C# application today. The lucky application was the opensource news reader Aggie. So how did I do it? Quite simply if truth be told.

Steps to compiling Aggie (or just download thefunctioning application)

• Get the source
• Put it somewhere
• Delete or move AggieCmd.cs (The command line source version)
• Run the compiler, C:>csc /out:aggie.exe /target:winexe *.cs

As a first taste in compilation not too bad (after a few false starts caused by not having compiled C sharp before).

Why not just download the thing? Because I would have missed out on all the hacking I’m going to do with it. Successfully compiling from source was just the first step on my road to C# mastery. One of the main false starts was that I wasn’t sure which files needed to be compiled, including the AggieCmd.cs file caused namespace conflicts when running the compilation (I imagine because it is a substitute for Aggie.cs) anyway a quick look at using the micrososft disassembly tool, IL DASM, showed me what was in both of the files and I quickly realised how the different source files fitted together.

I’ve been doing some thinking recently about the importance of meta data in my upcoming content management system and how best to implement my own meta data scheme. Given that I am interested in providing a RSS feeds something that is interoperable with that would be a good start. One particular focus has been to gain a broader understanding of the dublin core meta data schemes and their applications, An article I came across a while ago now can be found at ArsTechnica, it provides an interesting insight into different layers of metadata.