ShrimpWorks

Soooo, almost another 2 years since last posting. Lol. That’s way worse than mithrandi used to be.

Anyway, I spend more time mucking around with my car these days and attending various events and track days than doing anything this blog has usually been about :). I thought I might as well start posting about how that stuff is going to fill some space and perhaps inspire me to write more stuff here, if only for myself.

To start with, here’s a gallery of images from a Honda Racing Club breakfast run, held in March. All manner of Honda vehicles were in attendance, our convoy from Northgate to Auto Cradle Estate was around 70 vehicles long, comprised of Civics, Accords, Ballades, S2000s, Type Rs, Jazzes, even the odd Integra. Fun was had by all :)

[View Gallery]({{ relref “2010-03-06-hrc-breakfast-run” }})

Hah. Only 3 months late.

Out of Eve has been fully updated to Quantum Rise spec, the promised journal feeds, API key security, and a number of other tweaks. OutofEve.com has been updated to the latest available version, and the source is available for download.

Please leave any feedback in the comments of this post. I’ll set up a proper OOE page on this site at some point, with download links and more detailed information.

Well, shit happens, and unfortunately OOE 1.1 hasn’t as I’d planned. I HOPE to be able to have this going by next week….

I’ve wanted something to make browsing through largish JSON objects a bit easier for work for a long while now, and suddenly got the idea that 01:00 on Saturday morning would be a good time to create such an application.

The result is the rather simple but effective JSON Explorer.

As mentioned previously, I just wanted to outline a few plans for a new Out Of Eve version, mostly for my own reference, as I’m finding it much easier to work toward goals which are actually written down/typed up (lol?).

Obviously first order of business is Empyrean Age compatibility. A number of table and field names have changed and require some code updates. Lots of icons have been added and updated, so I would also like to make use of those. Unfortunately a number of images are actually missing in the EA icon dump (drones, rookie ships), so a simple drop-in replacement doesn’t works so well.

Another essential requirement, which should probably have been included in the original release, is encrypted API keys. My plan is to simply encrypt and decrypt these with a simple key file stored elsewhere in the filesystem - away from the usual configuration file, database and published www documents, so if any of that is compromised, without the key file, the API keys are useless to anyone snooping them. This also requires a method to automatically update existing unencrypted API keys.

Another handy feature would be the introduction of Atom feeds for market and journal transactions. My initial idea was an entry for each new transaction, however anyone doing a lot of trading would find their feed reader overloaded quite quickly. The obviously better solution is to just generate entries with all transactions since the last feed poll (taking into account API caching delays as well). I know I’d find this one particularly useful.

Actually that’s all :-). If all goes well, it should be releasable by the end of the weekend.

Soo, a year since I last posted anything, so I guess it’s about time I did something a little more constructive with this space than leaving it sitting here gathering comment spam.

Everything’s happily upgraded to the latest Wordpress version, complete with reCAPTCHA spam protection.

I’ll begin updating things more frequently now, starting with some continuing development of my most recent project, Out of Eve.

Sup.

Since there are certain people about how hosting a website on unreliable home ADSL is a generally bad idea, I’ve decided to move it to a more stable, permanent home on my little Linode.

Also, since my last post, a number of things have happened in my life in general. Firstly, I bought a really leet car. A brand spanking new Honda Civic hatch. It’s probably the single most awesome thing I’ve ever owned, and I love it to death :D.

Shortly after that, mother and I decided to club in together and buy a town house. We’ve only ever rented places before, so the whole buying thing was a bit new, but it pretty much sorts itself out after 3459094 different companies and institutions shove 459345 different documents in front of you to sign.

The place is in a nice small complex in a quiet corner of Ruimsig, on the very western edges of Roodepoort. Very nice little house, nice big garden (sometimes it’s very relaxing to feel real grass under bare feet :)).

Anyway, work’s been keeping me pretty busy, so I haven’t had a lot of quality time with either of the above new things… Really need to take some leave I think…

Sooo, I received a query about whether it would be possible to have a DynaBar plugin show information from a ShoutCast server.

A bit of investigation on the issue revealed it is indeed quite easy to query a ShoutCast server. As a result, a new DynaBar popped into existence:

Image lost in time

Just dump it into the “plugins” directory, and you’re ready to go.

A long time ago, in a galaxy not far away, I created a very small application named SaveScreen. Today I’m rather pleased to release a much-improved SaveScreen 2.

A couple of anti-virus applications complained that the .dll file distributed with SaveScreen which enabled detecting when “Print Screen” was pressed, was a virus or malware of some sort, so even I was unable to use SaveScreen, which made my cry.

Finally fed up, I set out to resolve the situation by creating a brand new application which did not rely on random keyboard hooks and stuff. The result is SaveScreen 2.

In addition to no longer being flagged as a virus, SaveScreen 2 features direct ImageShack posting (complete with automatic forum code creation and thumbnail support), and FTP uploads of screenshots. Something which may be rather handy (just don’t take a screenshot of your bank statement then complain when the whole world is exposed to it - use with care). Also, it can save screenshots in per-application folders, making organisation somewhat neater.

Just for random phun, if you have an AniDB profile, you can now show your stats off in a DynaBar dynamic userbar.

Something like these (output is completely customisable):

Heh, I guess there are already plenty of tools out there which do this sort of thing already (never seen them personally, but then I’ve never looked either, heh), but this only took me half an evening to throw together anyway.

Basically, it’s a Python (uses youtube-dl) and PHP-powered web-based YouTube video downloader and converter, you just stick in the URL to a YouTube clip you want to save, and it will download it and offer it for download as an MPEG which you can save on your PC and play in all it’s low-quality glory whenever you want.

Basically it automates the following, which can be run on any Linux PC:

# youtube-dl.py -o myvid.flv http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=123abc # ffmpeg -i myvid.flv -ab 56 -ar 22050 -b 500 -s 320x240 myvid.mpeg

As an added benefit, it stores a complete history of downloaded clips, so you and others can re-download them at any time without having to do the whole fetch/convert process over again. Plus it uses a nifty fake AJAX waiting effect :P.

Requires Linux with ffmpeg, Python 2.4+, and PHP 4.3+.