November 2004 - Posts
Yesterday as I was telling a co-worker about my RSS to Audio converter we came up with the idea of having RSS Radio. Simply taking RSS feeds and converting them over to a shoutcast feed or what have you. Would be interesting to see what sort of marketing could be done with it.
Maybe I will get a beta done later tomorrow or during the week.
Also...
I have version 0.1 done of a RssToAudio tool. All you need to have installed is the the Microsoft Speech SDK 5.1 installed (I wonder if it will work with JUST the redist? Anyone care to test it, let me know). I only tested it on a limited set of feeds. If your feed breaks try another.
Download the rar here (this is a temp location. contact me if it is no longer active I will send it to you directly).
Right now I'm downloading all of the items from the Main Feed (RSS) off of http://weblogs.asp.net and automatically converting them to WAV using the MS Text to Speech (SpeechLib stuff), once that is done I'm using BladeEnc to convert the files over to MP3 and finally copy it all over to my MP3 player which I received during the last MVP award.
Now I have something -somewhat- useful for my drive home and weekend. Of course I'm thinking about how to organize more than just the single feed into folders so that I can browse RSS feeds by folder on the player.
This interesting little project took me all of 45 minute to throw together. Maybe I will publish the source if anyone is interested...
An old project of mine was to fully port over ProgramD from AliceBot.org to .NET. Java is nice but .NET is better. Right? Anways I never had the time, nor do I now. If you have completed this, please let me know.
I was browsing around yesterday and found a COM based implementation. I figured that was good enough so I threw a .NET Remoting wrapper around that, and installed it as a service on my machine.
Next I wandered over to the DotMSN project page grabbed their library, wired up the Conversation.MessageReceived to the .NET Remoting endpoint and installed that as a service on my machine.
Now I have the AI sitting on my MSN buddy list. If your looking for a quick time waster try adding her to your MSN list. Her email is anika@mscorlib.com and she should automatically approve you once you add her.
Say hello.
I like the direction they are taking with the UI and the feature set clean and useful, but hate the fact that it was consuming close to 70MB of VM on this machine. There is no way I'm willing to give up that much just for a few IM connections.
I noticed it migrated most of my settings over. ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo all brought over nicely, but IRC was not. I hope that is fix before their next release or at least before a production release anyways.
I did notice that all the existing plugins still work in this new version. The plugin architecture needs to be .NET friendly before I subscribe for another year of service. No .NET, no money!
Back on Tuesday, October 26, 2004 we (a bunch of friends and the Fiancé), all hit the Commodore Ballroom for another metal concert. This was my roommates younger brother's first time at a metal concert and first time in a mosh pit (Go Dev!), he of course was grinning ear to ear as we departed the event in the limo.
Fear Factory (not Fear Factor, the lame TV show) put on an exceptional show. I've said it before and I will say it again, they have to be the best bad I have ever seen live, and would see them live anytime that I get the chance to.
Lamb of God, which is supposedly the next big thing for the Metal scene, put on a great show but I thought could have did a better job. I've listened to a few of their tracks over the last few months and have always enjoyed it but I think they are plagued with the same curse that Hatebreed has; they suck live.
I didn't spend much time in front of the speakers this time or in the mosh pit so my ears were not plagued with the 2 day ringing after the event. I remember after Korn one year I heard the ringing something like 4 days later.
Excellent show, for only $35.
Next concert coming in early December is Cradle of Filth.
More Posts