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Am I working or shopping at the supermarket… April 26, 2006

Posted by James Webster in : development , 1 comment so far

…because sometimes I wonder?

Professional Ajax Selenium

Australian EPG fun and games April 25, 2006

Posted by James Webster in : gadgets , 1 comment so far

Update: Via Om. Yahoo have rebranded Meedio (a PC media centre app they recently purchased) and made it available for free download. Given the relationship between Yahoo and Seven in Australia, perhaps an EPG for 7 might eventuate sometime soon.

I recently upgraded and reconfigured DVB Webscheduler in order to be able to schedule recording of Sydney’s DVB-T stations; mostly the same as the rest of Australia, with the notable exception of Macquarie Digital. For a while I have been using D1’s EPG web service, however it didn’t initially appear to have any data for ABC2*. So I thought I would give IceTV’s EPG service a go, especially since I have been happily using their OS X Dashboard widget. The widget’s hookup to their EPG only brings down one day’s data at a time, which was fine for my purposes. But it looks like IceTV prevent anything other than their widgets from accessing single day data… so no luck getting Webscheduler to access IceTV then.

These sorts of fun and games are well known to any Australian PVR afficionado. There are other solutions of course, such as running your own TV listings scraper to pull data into an XML format, then sit back and wait until the listings are reformatted and break the scraper’s parsing. I could just sign up to IceTV’s 7-day EPG service @ $13 per month. But why don’t the networks just get over their EPG fears and start providing this data for us? At least the ABC provides an RSS feed for their primary channel, although it does not include ABC2. Interestingly, IceTV are planning an IPO in the next few months…

* I’ve since figured it out, in case anyone else is having similar issues. The default value for the Channels lookup (found in Guide Data Source Settings/Web XML Service) needs to be changed to http://d1.com.au/D1xmltv.asmx/GetChannels?region=&provider=freesd, rather than http://www.d1.com.au/d1xmltv.asmx/GetFreeChannels, which only returns analogue broadcast channels.

Is using an IDE like playing a musical instrument? April 24, 2006

Posted by James Webster in : development , 5 comments

I recently caught up with a former colleague, Greg Davis, over a few drinks. We were discussing IntelliJ, our mutually preferred development tool for Java and how it can be hard to describe just what the keyboard shortcuts are. I’ve found that I frequently cannot verbally describe what the key combination is for a given refactoring; its easier to just do it and have my programming buddy observe which combination of modifier and alphabet keys were pressed to get the job done. It occurred to me that this is much the same as how some musicians informally communicate how to play a particular piece by demonstrating the correct finger placement to get from one chord to another.

As someone who played piano for quite a few years and still tinkers with a synth every now and then, I wonder if handiness with keyboard shortcuts is supported by musical abilities? If we want to get better at freeing ourselves from the mouse and keeping both hands on the keyboard, maybe we should pick up a guitar first?