coding excursions – Page 7

Roadmap / planned features

I wrote a few points down as a way to structure my thoughts. It was never really intended to publish as a road map, but publishing gives everyone an idea where this project is heading. 🙂

This is a list of things I see being implemented by version 1.0. The order in the list also approximately reflects the order of implementation as basic features seem to correspond to easy implementation. 🙂 (aside from the fact that almost everything in this app is quite trivial ;))

channel setup

import from xawtv
start from europe-west defaults
reordering

simple tuning

sequential tuning with mouse wheel
direct select with keypad, visually and physically
direct select with list; this is channel editor without editing func 🙂

configurable commands

for viewing, recording, playing..

recording

configurable rec path
scheduled recording with at
on the fly recording by streaming the video to file and starting a player on the output file
time shifting: same as above, but start paused player 🙂
somehow use vlc’s save stream option somewhere..?

playback of recorded movies

show list using the configurable rec path

transcoding

show list of all recordings using the the configurable rec path
save long lasting recordings as mpeg4 to conserve space
use transcode 😉

tuning trouble

I used to borrow a friend’s Hauppauge WinTV card (bt878 chipset) for tv viewing until I finally bought my own Hauppauge WinTV PVR 150 . I went for the PVR series as I figured recording would be much more convient (pvr series comes with a hardware MPEG2 encoder).

In the past I had used the brooktree wintv card under linux which was really a joy since it worked out of the box along with all available soft (after trying xawtv, motv, (whatever-)tv, tvtime, etc.. I settled with KdeTV (formerly kwintv)). It even seemed the card was better supported under linux than under windows. I figured the pvr series would be supported as well as it seemed to be a fairly popular card for HTPCs. Which turned out to be slightly nuanced. 🙂
Continue reading tuning trouble

Netbean probs

Some while ago, I start coding a feed reader in J2ME to run on mobile phones. After some searching, it seemed like Netbeans would be the way to go.. They provide a nice UI builder including modeling of the flow between the different screens, tailored towards cell phones. Also, it seems the Sony Ericsson SDK provides nice integration with Netbeans.

My favorite java IDE IntelliJ doesn’t seem to support mobile development at all. (for the record, I wouldn’t use IntelliJ if I had to pay for it myself ;)) The next best thing, Eclipse, seems to be less mature in this area, although they are progressing fast. So Netbeans it became.

To my surprise, I even found a tutorial on the netbeans site which already gave me a bootstrap to my task! 🙂

So, where’s the problem?

Well, I set up netbeans and created a project and all, so I could get to serious work on my 2h train trip. Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to write a single line of code! 🙂 As soon as I opened my laptop, the Netbeans IDE seemed to have become very unresponsive! Opening a menu could take 10 seconds, scrolling through the code is impossible. I couldn’t believe my eyes at first, so I rebooted because I thought my laptop was having trouble waking up after having the short nap. However, not improved. I had to give up.
At home, I searched the internet, and indeed, netbeans has problems with my ATI X600 ‘s PowerPlay function! Who would have imagined that. 😉 Especially since this is the only Java app I have trouble with… Anyhow, just disabling the PowerPlay function solves the problem! It’s probably related to my ATI drivers, but since I have a fricking Dell laptop, I’m not allowed to install drivers other than from Dell, so, as you can imagine, Dell never supplies updates to the driver! If anyone knows how to circumvent the checks going on in the driver installer from ATI, please let me know…

ShowROTGui

So, while I’m at it, why not add a first one. 😉 This is actually most recent. It is a very simple tool to inspect the ROT. The ROT (Running Object Table) is a system wide table in Windows, into which objects can register themselves, making them visible to and accessible by other applications. Inspect could be the wrong term: the tool just lists all objects in the ROT by their display name. There is a refresh button so that you don’t have to restart it all the time. 😉

Coding category added

Coding excrjmblk.. what the? 🙂
yes, there went some thought in the correct naming of this category. 😉 It’s been already some time now that I was looking for a place to put my small tools I’ve been programming in the past year. Since they are so small, it’s overkill to dedicate a whole new blog to each of them. So I decided to group them in some subcategories on this general blog. I used to think of a “projects” category. But that sounds so mature. 🙂 My projects are only little beta thingies. 😉 Almost not worth to talk about, so “projects” would be overrated. So utils or tools would be okay? Mmmm… I don’t think so. Then I thought about “excursions”, sounds nice. =) To quote wikipedia:

An Excursion is a trip, usually made for leisure or educational purposes. It is often an adjunct to a longer journey or visit to a place, sometimes for other (typically work-related) purposes.

I think no other term would manage to define my tools any more accurate or subtle as this one. 🙂 So “coding excursions” it became! Now let’s find some time to add some subcategories. 😉