I am a big believer in open source, open standards, open everything. I noticed this from Digital Standards Organization:
What is an open standard? The Wikipedia page shows many definitions, which specify characteristics of a specification, or of the processes that produce it and make it available.
To understand why there is no single agreed definition, and to let us build a canonical definition, we can start with two observations:
1. The standardization process is driven by two conflicting economic motives. Established vendors see standards as a route to direct profits, while the market at large sees standards as a route to lower costs.
2. As the economic has become digital, governments – both as users and regulators – have become engaged in the conflict between these two interest groups.
The joy of coding kicked in again the other night after a colleague mentioned Pivot, a tool made by MS. Part of my organisations work involves ingesting and understanding massive datasets. My colleague was interested in using Pivot to help display information to the business users. What is Pivot? Watch this TED Talk for a quick run-down:
After hearing my colleague talk about it and seeing the aforementioned TED Talk my coding juices started flowing. It was as if Pivot was my hammer. So many things at work could be displayed so efficiently via Pivot. Not having coded in a while I had to reinstall Visual Studio. (I downloaded the Express version as I suspect my MSDN licence will soon be given away to another employee…)
After playing with PhotoPivot and grabbing the source I thought I’d have a go at creating some pivot data files that let me browser my music collection in Pivot. I figured that as I’ve got the album art for most of the albums it would look pretty good. Plus I can pull out metadata like Artist, Release Year, Album Name, Genre, File Type, Bit Rate, Beats Per Minute, Track Count, Album Size, Album Duration straight from either the audio files or from their directories.
I bashed out some code late at night the last two evenings after the family had gone to bed. Very happy with the outcome so far, but the size of the collection smashed Pivot. I have not optimised the images at all – not using DeepZoom yet. Trying to view the entire collection caused Pivot to hang 4 out of 5 times.
Progress so far is good. I’ve whipped up a shoddy Visual Studio (Express) solution that creates the cxml file, based only on facets like Artist, Release Year and Album Name. So far so good. Tonight I’ll be working on implementing DeepZoom. That should free up a lot of RAM on my poor box – it only has 4GB RAM and Pivot seems to use every bit of it. That being said the memory requirements of my collection should drop by a large degree when I properly implement DeepZoom. I found a little discussion regarding how to implement DeepZoom using the pAuthor libraries so I will probably implement the same thing in my code.
I have found a few implementations of Pivot libraries online. I am using them as a reference of things I can do…
Uses a Teensy chip + accelerometer. I don’t think I’ll need the accelerometer, but I wonder if one can hook up the N64 hat-stick outputs to the teensy…
I think would be great for the SNES and N64 controllers.
Neo Geo, Neo Geo. Four bright buttons and two joysticks.
Neo Geo, Neo Geo. Cool red cab and a name that sticks.
No one quite did 2D fighters like you did.
No one quite did runnin’ and gunnin’ like you did
No one quite did Puzzle Bobble like you did
I’ll always love my four slot model cause I, I…
I played that cab for hours on end to the point where that thing was my only friend.
With a heavy machine gun in my hand I beat Metal Slug over and over again.
Youre 32 bits of endless fun. Youre a 1990 revolution.
Youre ahead of the game. You are the best. Youre the SNK king of MVS.
Youre an attractive machine in a pretty red dress.
When Im playing as Mai I wanna give you a kiss.
Forget Chun Li when theres Shiranui.
She’ll knock you out with those big ninja bees
I have used Drupal previously for a friends site so they would be able to manage the content themselves. (As I don’t want to be their bottleneck). But it seems that CMS’s require a fair bit of maintenance – mainly security upgrades. The latest version of WordPress makes it really easy. Click a link and the upgrade occurs automagically – too easy.
For the next community site I wanted to take the ease of WordPress. The site I am thinking of doing will require a bulletin board. Something like PHPBB would be great But I don’t think it integrates with WordPress that well. A few minutes ago I found http://bbpress.org/. It could be a winner…
Lambda Expressions (C# Programming Guide) [MSDN]: Discussion of what a lambda expression is and some examples of how it is used. Bingo! Explains that the lambda operator => is read as “goes to”.
Extension delegates [csharpindepth]: Demonstration of how to specify an extension method as a method group using extension syntax.
Intro to LINQ: Examples and discussion of LINQ in terms of Type Inference, Lamda Expressions, Extension Methods and Anonymous Types
C# Delegates, Anonymous Methods, and Lambda Expressions – O My!
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