Nerdbloke

I’ve been out of the programming loop for a little while. It’s time to do some catching up. It looks like these two books could be OK:

Pro C# 2008 and the .NET3.5 platform

Pro ASP.NET 3.5 in C# 2008

I discovered ‘MediaCoder‘ the other day. It’s great. I am using it to transcode all my wma audio files to mp3 format.

Previously I was using VLC and a batch file to do this for me, but using MediaCoder is waaay easier.

VLC with batch file:
@echo off
SET vlcExe="D:\Program Files\VLCPortable\VLCPortable.exe"
FOR /F "delims=" %%I IN ('dir *.wma /a:-d/b/s') DO CALL :processdir "%%~pI" "%%~nI" "%%~fI" "%%~dI"
%vlcExe% --playlist-enqueue vlc:quit
GOTO :EOF

:processdir
SET sOut=:sout=#transcode{acodec=mp3,ab=128,channels=2}:duplicate{dst=std{access=file,mux=raw,dst=”%~4%~1%~2.mp3″}}
%vlcExe% –playlist-enqueue “%~3″ %sOut%

:EOF

With MediaCoder:

1. Select where you want the transcoded files to be saved. ie <Original Folder>
2. Choose what format you want your files in: ie LAME MP3

I found out that every dilbert comic (from 1989 onwards!) has been archived at http://dribibu.xs4all.nl/dilbert.html

I got caught out the other day while making a small web thingy for my daughter. She is learning to recognise 12 words by sight at kindy. So she would not rote learn the words by their position on the piece of paper I whipped up a quick web page that would jumble them up for her. I also recorded her speaking the words so she could click on each word to verify she was pronouncing it correctly.

Anyway, It worked great in Firefox. Not so great in Internet Explorer. It took me a while to figure it out. Eventually it came down to different implementations of the createElement() method.

IE:
var newCell = document.createElement("<td onmouseover=\"this.className='cell_over';\" onmouseout=\"this.className='cell_out';\" onClick=\"play(this)\"></td>");

FireFox:
var newCell = document.createElement("td");
newCell.setAttribute("onmouseover","this.className='cell_over';");
newCell.setAttribute("onmouseout","this.className='cell_out';");
newCell.setAttribute("onClick","play(this)");

Thanks to the byteclub crew I have my sanity back.