Yearly Archives: 2009

Freaking Bioshock!

Gah!  I finaly got my Steam-purchased copy of BioShock to work.  If you’re using Windows Vista or Windows 7 and use a Realtek High-Definition Audio device and Bioshock crashes at startup: update your driver to the latest version from Realtek’s site.  Additionally, you may or may not need to enable the ‘stereo mix’ recording device in the ‘manage recording devices’ control panel applet.  (Right click in empty space and check show disabled devices for them to show up.)

Coming update to the Touhou Music Database

Alrighty, I finally tracked down a link to v.06 of the Touhou lossless music collection so there should be an update once I get off my lazy hind-quarters and load all the cuesheets from it into the database.  (Probably the end of the month)

Update: A link to the DB can be found here: http://touhoumusic.rrbits.com/

PHP: Random Password Oneliner

I am exceedingly lazy, so I made a one-liner random password generator.

How it works: Creates an md5 from a random string, packs this into binary representation, base64 encodes that, strips some of the characters used by base64 (most importantly the = that are typically at the end), and then limits it to 8 characters. It’s been broken out here on several lines to make modifying it a bit easier.

(Could make longer passwords by changing what’s allowed and providing more text to base64_encode or hexadecimal to pack.)

$randpw = substr(
   preg_replace('/[^a-zA-Z0-9\.\-!\$]/', '',
      base64_encode(
         pack('H*', md5(time().rand()))
      )
   ), 0, 8);

Touhou Music Database

I’ve created a new project, which I’ve dubbed the touhou music database.  Well, it doesn’t actually contain the raw MP3 files or anything, however.  I collected the track listings of over 1200 touhou music/remix albums and entered them into a database.  Given the name of a song, you can find what albums it can be found on.

Also, when you view a track’s page, I attempt a search of Youtube to see if the track can be found on Youtube, so you can immediately find music videos for most of the more popular songs!  Additionally, I have a page that shows the some of the most recent Touhou music videos from Youtube.  I love the Youtube data API.

Links: Main site Most recent videos

Job Hunting: A practical use for aggregated RSS feeds

A friend of mine was semi-recently laid off from his retail sales job, and I was wondering if I could use any of my knowledgeto help him in his search for jobs.  Then it hit me: RSS feeds!   I could create an RSS feed of the latest job postings in our area from the sites he checks for jobs.  This way he would save time in his search.  Since he mainly used craigslist and Washington WorkSource, I only needed to pull feeds from two sites.  To keep the RSS feeds relevant, I limited categories pulled.  Now there was one minor hitch with this idea.

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