Well a friend and coworker recently got me for my birthday the Roku Soundbridge M500 Network Music Player. I still think he spent too much on me, but I really appreciate the gift. The thing is totally awesome. Before in my living room, I had a stereo and a 5 disc player. Plus about a 100 CDs. Just a pain in the butt to operate (mostly cause I am lazy). So this morning I decided to connect it up.
Out of the box, most of the work was disconnected my old disc player and running the cable from the stereo to the media tube. Otherwise, I plugged the wireless card into it, plugged in the other cables and turned it on. I walked through a simple wizard to setup the wireless network security. I went down to my WinXP and enabled Windows Media Connect (a UPnP Media server). I came up and tried to connect, no dice, but the error message said to activate my device in the WinXP machines device list. Two clicks later I was listening to MP3's off of my computer. Awesome. I added all my CDs to my PC months ago for this purpose and I finally get to try it. The controls are good. The remote has an awkward feel, but the functions are easy.
Thank you John.
On to Open Source. I have decided to add to the open source community. I first did something that it seems most people forget about. Search to see if someone is already working on my concept. And low and behold, nobody is. Darn. I really didn't want to write the code. I don't code for the joy of coding. I prefer to code with a purpose. So now I have one. At work, we use a project planning and tracking tool called XPlanner to handle that stuff, but I am horrible at updating it just because it is cumbersome ot go out to the planning site everytime I work on something new or change gears. Accuracy is key in this thing. For a while, I was writing down start time and end time on the work that I was doing. It worked, but I thought that I coudl automate this process. So this week I started work on Time Journal 1.0 written in Visual C#. Hopefully we will see version 1 completed fairly soon. Maybe this week sometime.
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