Awesome, Totally Awesome: Jack Conley

The Awesome, Totally Awesome series will highlight actors, episodes and other entertainment industry stuff I want to provide a shout out to. This first entry popped in my head as I was polishing off season one of The Closer today. Jack Conley plays a dickish FBI agent who fucks over one of Brenda's cases late in the season and returns to get a verbal tongue lashing in the final. Conley's smug assholery will serve him well in many other parts. (more...)

Building ecdb: Step 2

Keeping it really, really, realllllly simple, step two features a switch to the modern ribbon style form, with a status bar and two dockable areas. Some of the procedures are identical to Step 1 so if anything isn't obvious when I write "like in Step 1" just go check that post out, huh? Yes, I love repeating myself, but I'm too tired to type said repetition so there you have it. (more...)

Building ecdb: Step 1

Okay, time's-a-wastin', let's get this party started. Uh, sure... It's time to start building the ecdb app. I'm going to take this slow because one of the biggest differences between the glory days of VB6 and the convoluted world of VB.net is instructions. Today help files seem to be auto-generated from property lists with no real descriptions, and rarely any examples. So this first one is going to be excruciatingly detailed in a way that will have you wanting to beat me with a shovel. But no matter, this is my exercise after all, so lump it. (more...)
  • Pause Screen 1
  • Pause Screen 2
  • Pause Screen 3
  • Pause Screen 4

Anantomy of a Pause Screen

A screen you'll often see a lot with bathroom breaks, texting flurries and of course, uh, you know... So you tap spacebar or hit pause on the remote or however else you interact with XBMC and your active theme throws up some extra information while you, uh, wait... yeah, that's what you're doing. Personally I haven't found a pause screen that does everything I want (look for that as an early feature when ecdb adds media playback), but that's a discussion for another time. Today let's take a look at the XBMC Aeon MQ3 skin's pause screen in various scenarios and see what works and what could use some fixin'. (more...)

OpenWebKitSharp for VB.net

One of the features I want in ecdb is a web view, both as a navigation option and as a way to share your entertainment center with others. While VB.net has an integrated WebBrowser control that is very advanced thanks to being around since the good old days (VB6, yes, I will continue to harp), it is based on the Trident engine used in Internet Explorer and thus significantly behind Chrome and Safari, two WebKit-based browsers, particularly in terms of features commonly used for more mobile devices. I also like the fancy transitions. So where does that leave us, "us" being people who loathe punctuation in our code? Thankfully some bracket-loving developers out there developed a wrapper for WebKit in C# allowing it to be embedded in any .net language. Unfortunately while its use is fairly straightforward, it's always nice to have an example to work from so I thought I'd build one as an exercise as part of my DANDY goal. So here it is, a simple multi-tabbed WebKit browser in VB.net. (more...)

DANDY!

I thought I had a job for life. Having created an online education system targeted at at-risk kids in high school, and owning my own code, I figured I could just work on features and research and wait for sweet death. But it was not to be. Losing your job because a company gets sold I can understand, that the sale happened because of a lie, that deals were made with no plan to honor them is a fucking disgrace. So here I am, 46 years old, having worked with computers since 1976, but a skill set that really only lends itself to temp jobs converting legacy apps to new technologies. I did that in my mid-20s, would rather skip it. So I looked at my list of owned domain names and wondered what I could do now that my meager savings was gone. I decided I needed a theme, and that's where Dandy comes in: Develop A New Day (more...)