Noah Oliphant - Technology

Tivo vs. Windows Media Center

Mon, 15 May 2006 09:04:41 -0600

I’m a huge DVR fan.

DVR is an acronym for Digital Video Recorder. Most people have heard of Tivo, which is a DVR. The convenience of watching the shows and movies I want whenever I want is enormous. It is hard to imagine going back to regular TV now that I have that constant ability to pause live TV and fast forward through commercials.

My DVR of choice is Tivo. I’ve been using a directv flavored version of Tivo for over two years and have always been impressed with its interface and reliability.

This weekend I visited a friend in Seattle who works for Microsoft. Having drank the cool-aid, he had the Microsoft DVR called Windows Media Center set up in his apartment. For the most part the features were the same, but the biggest difference between the two systems is performance.

Maybe his setup wasn’t optimal. Maybe he should have been using wired Ethernet instead of a wireless network. Maybe he didn’t have enough RAM or processor power for the streaming and encoding tasks needed. In any case, the result was a poor experience.

For now, I’ll stick with Tivo.

Prototype

Tue, 02 May 2006 09:19:57 -0600

In a group meeting today, someone pointed me at Prototype.

I’ve been thinking about Web 2.0 functionality for a while now and most of the great features on advanced sites use AJAX. Basically this is the idea of calling back to the server from script within a web page. This allows more interactive and statefull websites.

Typical of many free libraries, there is very little documentation. Just wanted to post a few great places that I found rather quickly:

A Quick Guide to Prototype

Prototype Documentation

I plan on using this library shortly.

Pure joy of pure coding

Sun, 09 Apr 2006 00:29:35 -0600

I recently stumbled upon a very interesting article by Charles Petzold explaining how sophisticated tools can actually limit our creativity.

The text can be found here. I have had similar thoughts in the past, but his examples and argument are very well founded.

I have been programming for over 12 years, and have used all kinds of tools from simple text editors to full featured Integrated Development Environments (IDE) like Visual Studio .NET. While I find the sophisticated features of heavier tools to be time saving, sometimes I prefer to do my editing in notepad.

Now that I only program as a hobby, I am pulled toward open source languages and tools. Typically the tools used to develop in open source technologies lack many of the features found in complete IDEs. While I miss a few of the features in Visual Studio .NET, it has been refreshing and mind-sharpening to go back to the tools on which I learned to program in Pascal and ANSI C.

Most of my work these days is in PHP, and my development environment consists of a glorified text editor with syntax highlighting and FTP client.

It's a little slower but I know I have complete control over my projects.

Drupal Hack #1

Tue, 14 Mar 2006 07:38:27 -0700

A big part of using open source products like Drupal is sharing. Through use and customization, a great product can become incredible. Drupal is an example of an open source product with a great design, current functionality, and huge user/developer base.

I'd like to share my first Drupal hack and hope this makes it's way into the larger Drupal community.

I'm using the popular recipe module for sharing and collaborating on recipes. I'm also using the taxonomy module for categorizing content. I noticed that when I visit the pages created by the taxonomy_menu module, recipes would not display correctly. The reason was that the taxonomy module treats recipes like regular nodes without adding the additional information stored in the recipe table.

To fix this, I had to make a slight change to the taxonomy_render_nodes() function in taxonomy.module. I changed

while ($node = db_fetch_object($result)) {
  $output .= node_view(node_load(array('nid' => node->nid)), 1);
}

while ($node = db_fetch_object($result)) {
  if ($node->type == "recipe")
  {
    $n = node_load(array('nid' => $node->nid));
    $recipe = recipe_content(recipe_load($node));

    $n->body = $recipe->body;
    $output .= node_view($n);
  }
  else
  {
    $output .= node_view(node_load(array('nid' => node->nid)), 1);
  }
}

Now recipes show up correctly in the pages created by the taxonomy module.

Drupal

Sun, 12 Mar 2006 19:34:25 -0700

This site is powered by drupal. I've had a lot of fun playing with this free software package, and recommend it to anyone who has the need to create a full featured content management system quickly and cheaply.

I've also been incredibly impressed with the community of developers and users who share their problems and solutions. The documentation is excellent.

As a former software architect, I recognize well designed software. With some basic PHP and web design skills, drupal is very easy to extend and customize. I look forward to continuing my enhancements to this site.