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.)
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/
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);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
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.
Continue reading “Job Hunting: A practical use for aggregated RSS feeds”
Sorry for the lack of updates, I’ve been working on a pretty large project that has eaten much of my time. Posting should be a little more regular in a couple of weeks, and I should plop in some new stuff soon.
You can use Yahoo Pipes to create an aggregated RSS feed from a CSV file you maintain. It’s fairly easy too, which is awesome. For those who are not familiar with Yahoo Pipes, it’s a beta product by Yahoo that makes it easy to create simple mashups of content available on the Internet, read more about it on the Yahoo Pipes homepage if you so please.
Answering a question that was posed at work regarding RSS feeds and Yahoo Pipes.
Q: How can I make an aggregated RSS feed in Pipes?
A: If you have a set of RSS feeds you’d like to include in an aggregated feed, simply drag the fetch feed module into the workspace and click the addition (plus) button to add more source URLs for the module. Then send the output to the pipe output. When you name and save the pipe, you’ll be able to get it as an RSS feed, or in a multitude of other formats.
Occasionally, you’ll have a project where one of the last minute ideas is to add a manageable list of links to a webpage or series of webpages. Nothing fancy, just a list of links that can be plopped into a layout.
Well, this little project allows you to quickly set up a web-based administration for simple link lists. This isn’t a full blown manager, but simply a piece of a larger project. Should readily integrate into existing solutions if you’re willing to do some code. At any rate, you provide the links in an easy to use back-end and then can pull that list in a variety of formats by hitting index.php (or whatever you choose to actually pull the list, it’s fairly easy to change.) Currently by default it can give you a raw html list, an rss feed, or the list in javascript form. Simply unpack it, make sure the data folder is writeable, set the password in config.php and then hit admin.php and off you go. A demo is available. It’s reset every half hour, and the password is ‘demo’.
I plan to release a version with some link generators for this in the coming weeks, until then you’ll need to hand-write the actual URLs to pull the lists.