Web Developer, Platform Coder, Coding Samurai, Person.

I’ll keep this post short and straight to the point, it just seems like this idea should have followed suit right after streaming media became a common feature in HTTP Servers (e.g. lighthttpd).

With the standard format for online music being MP3 files, and the versatile format of streaming MP3’s (can be played while downloading), I see no reason why we shouldn’t be able to add some minimal support for these files in the web server.

It seems like a good idea to me to build an apache module in for MP3 metadata. It could be configured / disabled & enabled via the apache.conf file, preferably something that works with ID3 and HTTP headers. Which is why I propose the x-id3 header standard.

It should be simple enough, basically parsed Mp3 metadata in the Id3 format, passed in the HTTP headers in the following format:

Just like every other HTTP header, I don’t know. Seems pretty basic and overlooked to me. I’d like to hear your thoughts though, so leave a comment with your opinion / ideas.

[Disclaimer: wrote this after pulling an all-nighter, so if it's written poorly, my bad]

Howdy,

So now that I’ve started blogging a bit more recently, I thought it was about time I come up with some weekly ritual-ish type of thing to do so that I get an incentive to post interesting content.

What I came up with, was ‘watch the week’. Basically I will post and embed what I’d say are pretty damn good shows/movies. You’ll see them all for the most part here, with no ads or popups.

For each one I post, I’ll do about a paragraph review to go with it. Just so you get a feel for what your about to watch. I’ll also give each a rating out of 5.

So then, I’ll get started with the first one ever:

I’ll open this one with a pilot episode I just finished watching:

Show: White Collar
Hulu’s Description: When the trail of elusive criminal “The Dutchman” deadends, FBI Agent Peter Burke teams up with a most unlikely partner to catch him; the imprisoned Neal Caffrey: master criminal, con man extraordinaire and Peter’s most accomplished collar.
Hulu Rating (At time of writing): 4 out of 5.
My Rating: 4 out of 5.

This episode is a very interesting pilot, for what looks like it will be a good season. Coming from USA network, which is starting to push some good ideas for new shows, this looks to be another good one.

For this one, I’ll go with a movie I just got around to watching based on reviews. It came out in 2000 but I hadn’t heard of it and don’t know how many people have seen it:

Movie: Boiler Room
IMDB Plot: A college dropout gets a job as a broker for a suburban investment firm, which puts him on the fast track to success, but the job might not be as legitimate as it sounds.
IMDB Rating: 6.9 out of 10
My Rating: 4 out of 5.

This is a very interesting movie to watch, the story moves quickly and is narrated in a style similar to ‘Fight Club’. As a forum member put it, ‘It’ll make you go out and want to make a million dollars.’ Well worth the watch.

Anyways that’ll wrap it up for this first post. Just keeps getting me thinking what I should do with this blog. If you got anything you think would be cool to watch / listen to, feel free to drop a comment!

Ciao,

- Gray

Alright, I’m fed up with this god damn service!

I have called ‘tech support’ many times and heard all kinds of crazy stories & ideas on how to fix my connection issues including but not limited to:

- Duct tape modem to window
- ‘Your modem is connecting to a tower across the lake when your surrounded by them’..
- ‘We know it’s slow’
- Youtube is not considered ‘normal internet use’

This bullshit is coming from a company that pitches ‘go beyond 3g’ on their billboards. If anyone wants proof t-mobile’s 3g on a wifi tether is faster then this feel free to drop a comment, but rest assured it kills it.

Clearwire reps/tech support also admit that it is slow and much slower then T-Mobile’s 3g. They make claims about Wi-Max but I doubt that service will be better. Not to mention it hasn’t rolled out yet.

Let’s just see the average day on clearwire’s speedtest:

Which is about 1/3 the speed of decent dial up. Ugh.

This is with 5 out of 5 bars on the modem by the way. And this is on a day when the internet service itself actually works, outages are regular occurrences. I’m also on my second modem, due to the other one completely failing to connect _at_all_ after several months of use.

I have NEVER received the ‘1.5′ mbps of speed my service plan dictates. Yesterday, a 10mb download ended up taking 2 hours.

This is, without a doubt, the worst internet service I’ve ever used.

Edit:

So I decided to speedtest T-Mobile’s 3g to compare. A couple things first:

- Contrary to the image, I am not in kansas.
- The ping time went down about 200ms on average after I did this test.
- This is the WORST it has ever been (Tethered 3g), although it still kills clearwire it’s not SUPER fast.

The proof is in the pudding here.

Edit Again:

So about a day after posting this (19 hours), my internet speed suddenly increased beyond anything it has before. Ever in 2 years of having it:

I also noticed the amount of bars went from 5 to 3, and the speed increased significantly. Meaning the tower I was connected to changed, although the positioning of the modem did not. I find it a bit odd that the time I get the fastest internet I have had comes a day after posting this, but that’s a bit I’m not going to touch on.

Ciao,
Gray

http://developer.yahoo.com/everything.html

It’s all there. Prettymuch everything that needs to be replaced. Collective effort anyone?

Wassup?

After having at _least_ THREE ‘g1 headphone adapters’ die on me within the space of 5 months, and having to spend more then $10 a piece to replace them, I got sick of paying for these rubbish wires. The phone is great but the headphone adapters are not, but I managed to pull my self a Hi-Fi one with just a bit of DIY and Tape.

What you need:
(Minimum)
- A lighter
- Electrical Tape
- Wire Strippers
- Something with a 3.5 audio jack on the end (In my case, half of a audio splitter)

Connecting the wires:

First at the tip of each wire you see after stripping the coat from the original EMU connector cord, run a flame from the lighter under the wire until it catches fire, then blow it out. This exposes the wire by removing the chemical coating.

The annoying part about these (And I didn’t care to do much trial and error as to what does what) is that with Android, if several wires are not connected it won’t detect it as headphones.

In order to wire this up, you should have left, right and ‘center’ (gnd) coming from your 3.5 jack. See picture (http://graysblog.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/IMAG0010.jpg). All bronze / semibronze wires should be tied together and used as the gnd/center (at the ends where they were opened by burn). The blue and the white wire are microphone / button wires. You can safely set them aside.

The red(Organish) and green wires are respectively, right and left channel. See picture.

Wires all done:

http://graysblog.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/IMAG0010.jpg

Taping it all up:

Alright this is pretty simple, the way I like to do it is a strip of tape on every separate connection you make, then tape everything up. I’d advise listening to the headphones while doing this, the risk of shortage is low and it ensures that it works. No solder or mess. And for lazy people like me little work

Finished Product

And.. It's done

Surprisingly this works well, and the audio quality is great.

I apologize for the crap quality of this ‘miniguide’, I was rushed and just wanted the info out there

References:
(Soldering the wires)

http://hackaday.com/2009/05/24/soldering-headphone-wire/

http://www.alexwhittemore.com/?p=205

(Pinout)

http://androidforums.com/t-mobile-g1/4480-how-create-emu-3-5mm-headphone-jack-adaptor.html