Today, I had a brief flash of concern when I left the book I was reading cracked open and went into the other room….

I was worried I would drain the battery…

Just a little pat-on-the-back post to myself.  I spent a grueling week in a Rapid Track class and finally today took a nightmarish test to earn the title “Certified Engineer” in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.  Yay me..

If you scroll down past the book section you will now see live TiVo lists for Sarah’s and my TiVo. These are updated every fifteen minutes and shows the status and if they are HD.

I’m proud to say I hacked this plugin together myself. There wasn’t a single TiVo plugin out there that will parse the standard, unhacked TiVoToGo xml and display it.

I’m considering releasing it as a plugin for WordPress, but the quality of the code is so poor, it would take a near re-write.

For coders: A cron job on the webserver pulls nowplaying.xml every 15 minutes and places it in the “tivolist” plugin directory. The tivolist plugin parses the xml, does some sorting and munging and displays the recording info. Actually, all the code at this time is in the widget file, with no proper plugin file, but it’s working pretty solidly. The difficult part was writing a xml parser that worked in both stock PHP 4 and 5. If I had done a PHP5 only plugin it would of been about 100 lines less.

Finally was able to hack the “Now Reading” code to work properly.

I’ll discuss it in case anybody googles this page. I’m not positive if it was a bug in the “have_books” not taking the $nr_id correctly, or the “the_book” not globalizing correctly, and frankly, I didn’t bother once I saw that the meat of the call was to “get_book” anyway. Even with that call, the “The_book()” call didn’t work, which is only three lines of code forcing the return into a global variable. I then simply globaled it myself locally, and the rest of the page worked perfectly.

I replaced this:

<?php if( have_books(intval($nr_id)) ) : ?>
<?php while ( have_books(intval(nr_id)) ) : the_book(); ?>

With this:

<?php
$book=get_book(”$nr_id”);
$GLOBALS[’book’] = $book;
?>

What this means for you non-coders is simply that we have a working library plugin again, and will be keeping our current reading materials up to date.

Remember that you can click the books on the right to see a larger size picture of the book, with a link to Amazon.com to read the reviews or buy it directly.  Another great feature is the tags area, that once our collection grows, will allow you to easily link to other related books.  Finally, if you click the recent books section, you’ll (shortly) start seeing a rating system for the books along with a short review.

Well, I at least got the “Now Reading” plugin to not destroy the site when you click a book.  I basically did that by making it just pop back to the front page.  Not pretty, but prettier than a trashed page.

I don’t count myself a programmer, but if I’m not mistaken, throwing every effing variable around globally in PHP is the single most asinine thing you can do.  And that’s exactly what “Now Reading” does.  ON top of that, the API docs suck, and a simple single book pull I do doesn’t work after 50 tries at it… Garbage… All garbage..

At the completely opposite side of the spectrum, I installed a Netflix plugin, that along with it’s widget, made it butter to install and a snap to config.  Both Sarah and I, (and you people), can now see Sarah’s Netflix Queue… Neato…

AAAAHHHHH…

Trying to put the “Now Reading” plugin back up. I’m ready to throw something. The damn “Library” page (when you click one of the books on the right) has NEVER worked through 6 upgrades of the plugin and three different themes…

Welcome to my new interest. RFID’s (pronounced arphids) are small electronic devices that when put near a specialized electrical field, generate a structured pulse of energy that contains a unique number.

You can use this number to validate an objects identity and perform many interesting functions. One supermegacool function that has been floating around the web in the past year has been using an embedded RFID ampoule to unlock a deadbolt on a door. As the air turns cold in my neck of the woods and thoughts turn to indoor projects, I have begun the process of building my own RFID deadbolt.

I have already collected many of the parts. This was the first test of combining the embedded controller, RFID reader, and reed relay. It worked perfectly and I was able to get a decent video of the action. What you are seeing is me waving a test RFID tag in front of the reader, then the controller (bottom right) reading the serial data from the reader, it comparing the input against approved ID’s, and then finally the controller triggering a small reed relay to turn on the led.

More detail, including the breakdown of the components and code, in the upcoming posts. Along with fun discussions about how you actually go about embedding the RFID tag and the type of people that think this is the mark of the beast.

The cab driver excitedly explained to me, on the way to the hotel from the airport, that it might actually rain today. It only rains about four times a year and it’s been over 100 degrees and sunny for weeks.

The picture above is my head. The result of walking about 20 feet across the street. I’ve been here two days. It’s rained two days. Perhaps it will just keep going, Texas will become a tropical paradise and they’ll name a city after me, like they did for Sam Housten. Or Yakko, Waco, and Dot.

And I thought I’d be sunning by the pool every day. Guess I’ll just have to take pleasure in the painfully exciting computer training I’m getting. The one with the huge test at the end of the week. The one that you need to study an extra 4 hours every night, after the 8 hour class every day.