Blogging with swype and android!

Posted by ekrunch in Technology on June 29, 2010

In follow up to my earlier post about Swype and how excited I was to see it, I’m writing this blog post using it on my new htc evo. :-)

Outstanding phone, outstanding input method. I can’t wait until they unleash this product on the world.

Oh and the wordpress app for android is also great! Another fine work from the gang at wordpress!

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Woo Hoo! WordPress 3.0 is here!

Posted by ekrunch in Technology, Useful Information, Videos on June 17, 2010

Check this thing out! Congrats to the WordPress team on making what i’m sure will be another amazing release. Seeing this video reminds me of why I’m using WordPress and why I’ve been using it since the 1.x days. It was great software then, it’s amazing software now, 3.0 looks to raise the bar yet again! (Just when you didn’t think they could get any more features into this thing… SURPRISE!) And now on to the video…

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It’s time to Swype!

Posted by ekrunch in Technology on June 7, 2010

Okay, for the first time in a while, i’m excited about a new technology. Swype looks absolutely amazing. I’m about to take the Android leap and go to a 100% touchscreen phone and i’ve been dreading the messaging part. Looks like my prayers have been answered and somebody has finally invented a better way. As a matter of fact, it was one of the guys who helped to invent T9 word mode, which is absolutely the best way to text on a regular number pad phone!

Check out these videos on the Swype site. Absolutely incredible. I can’t wait to get a copy for my Android phone.

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iTunes Cover Art extraction script for Windows

Posted by ekrunch in Technology on May 16, 2010

I’ve recently started using iTunes to organize my music library, but I use TVersity and WMP (via UPnP A/V) to play it back. I needed a way to export iTunes cover artwork to Folder.jpg so WMP & TVersity could pick it up. After digging around for a while, I couldn’t really find a solution so I broke open my text editor and put together a little something to do the job. It’s a JavaScript file that uses the iTunes COM object.

As far as I know, iTunes must be running for this to work and I think you need to have your entire music library open for it to see all files. I’m not 100% sure about that, but just do it anyway. :o

Note: Please consolidate and organize your music library first. This script puts the Folder.jpg in the same folder as the track itself, so if you’ve got tracks scattered everywhere, you’re going to have a lot of Folder.jpg files everywhere.

Download this script here

The following is the contents of the script for those who just want to see the code and derive their own works.

/*
    File: ExportItunesArtwork.js 
 
    Version: 1.0 
 
    Copyright © 2010 Edward Presutti (intellidick.com), All Rights Reserved
*/ 
 
/* iTunes delcarations */
var ITTrackKindFile		= 1;
 
var ITArtworkFormatUnknown	= 0;
var ITArtworkFormatJPEG		= 1;
var ITArtworkFormatPNG		= 2;
var ITArtworkFormatBMP		= 3;
 
var	iTunesApp = WScript.CreateObject("iTunes.Application");
var	mainLibrary = iTunesApp.LibraryPlaylist;
var	tracks = mainLibrary.Tracks;
var	numTracks = tracks.Count;
var	fso = WScript.CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject");
 
while (numTracks != 0)
{
	var	currTrack = tracks.Item(numTracks);	
 
	// is this a file track?
	if (currTrack.Kind == ITTrackKindFile)
	{
		// yes, does it have an empty location?
		if (currTrack.Location != "")
		{
			// no, let's get some artwork
			var artwork = currTrack.Artwork;
			var numArt = artwork.Count;
 
			while (numArt != 0)
			{
				var art = artwork.Item(numArt);
				// WScript.Echo("Album : " + currTrack.Album + ", Artwork Description : " + art.Description);
				var f = fso.GetFile(currTrack.Location);
				// WScript.Echo("Path : " + f.ParentFolder);
				var extension;
				switch (art.Format)
				{
					case ITArtworkFormatJPEG:
						extension = ".jpg";
						break;
					case ITArtworkFormatPNG:
						extension = ".png";
						break;
					case ITArtworkFormatBMP:
						extension = ".bmp";
						break;
				}
 
				if (art.Format != ITArtworkFormatUnknown)
				{
					var fname = f.ParentFolder + "\\" + "Folder" + extension;
					if (!(fso.FileExists(fname)))
					{
						WScript.Echo("Saving artwork : " + fname);
						art.SaveArtworkToFile(fname);
					}
				}
 
				numArt--;
			}
 
		}
	}
 
	numTracks--;
}

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Super Street Fighter 4, time to get funky!

Posted by ekrunch in Games on May 8, 2010

Here lately, i’ve been on a gaming kick. Mostly because work has been killing me and I have a large amount of stress I have to get rid of. A good game is decent for stress relief and i’ve definitely been enjoying it. I’ll never be as hardcore of a gamer as I once was, but it’s fun to play again. Xbox Live has really brought the fun back into it as well. I can play with my friends from around the country and not have to worry about setting up TeamSpeak, Ventrillo, etc and all of the drivers and patches you need to play PC games.

Thanks to Geoff over at 3rdmoon, i’m now playing Super Street Fighter 4. All I can say is “Good job Capcom!” What a fun game. I’ve really been enjoying it. It’s got that old school SF2 feeling but all of the new combos and such that make it so much fun. It’s comical and cartoony, but the style works. The challenges are solid and the gameplay is intense. Definitely a winner!

Seeing as the fighting genre is one of my favorites, I decided to go ahead and splurge on a nice arcade quality fighting stick. Conveniently enough, MadCatz makes one… check it out whenever you get a chance! I just snagged one and if you’re in the market, you might consider getting one. Footnote from Geoff though, there are two versions of this stick. The cheap one uses much lower quality buttons/joysticks and they’re breaking left and right. The more expensive “tournament” ones use high quality Sanwa arcade parts. Definitely the way to go!

Here are some pictures…

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Krunchy’s 4TW tips for email server management.

Posted by ekrunch in Rants, Technology on April 29, 2010

While conversing with my friend over at dopplercow.com, we got into a discussion about how companies allow their users to have HUGE email boxes and other stupid behavioral patterns that they allow. It’s amazing how out of hand email has become. What started as a joke has now become a blog post, here’s some quick tips on how to successfully manage your email servers.

  1. Stop using email for attachments. Collaborative Document Suites 4TW
  2. Stop CHATTING in email. Instant Messaging 4TW
  3. Stop being an idiot and delete your old mail. Cleanliness 4TW

With the addendum from Chris over at Dopplercow

Allow IT to implement mail quotas.

I’ll add my 0.02 to that and say

  1. Allow IT to implement mail quotas. Good IT Practices 4TW

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Pure Genius

Posted by ekrunch in Humor, Personal on March 18, 2010

I was up at 2 AM this morning (after being up all day of course) and was considering going into my office to write some code. I’m in the middle of a huge software development project and not sleeping much. Then I decided I should jot down any ideas I had and evaluate them in the morning? Why you ask?

Only 2 things come out of working that late after you’ve been up all day.
1) Pure Genius
2) Complete Stupidity disguised as Pure Genius that you spend the next 4 days removing and rebuilding anyway.

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The life and death of Skunkwerkz

Posted by ekrunch in Rants on February 22, 2010

Having recently formed up a new company, my business partner and I had an idea one day. We’d call our development group Skunkwerkz. It was an inside joke. Nothing ever came of it until one day I needed a domain name. I was building an email archive and needed a domain name to host my old corporate email on for searching purposes. What better place to do that than on our development machines, so I registered skunkwerkz.com and set it up. No web site, no publicly reachable email accounts, etc. Hidden away from the public eye, not visible except via WHOIS, etc. Just for me, just my little thing. All was clicking along fine until one day, I got a really ugly email from an attorney.

So apparently Lockheed-Martin FUCKING SUES PEOPLE for registering domain names that “infringe their trademark” and I made the hit list. My little joke that I never intended to be publicly available apparently got found and was misinterpreted. So apparently they’ve got attorneys that sit around and dig through WHOIS or something. WHISKEY-TANGO-FOXTROT?!?!? Maybe they have a bot or something that scans for it. Whatever the case, I got a nasty gram from them showing previously won cases and a list of domains that they’ve ceased… over 100 of them. Some not even really all that similar. But apparently, you can’t use the name Skunk and Works in the same sentence without lighting these guys up.

So with that, my email archive is now moved over to good ol’ Intellidick.com where it will live out the rest of its days. The skunkwerkz.com domain has been surrendered and I’m left without anything. They didn’t even offer to cough up the $12 bucks to cover the registration fees.

Long live Skunkwerkz.com, my pointless little joke that never was going to be anything more than a URL for me to use. Oh and to all of the attorneys that have nothing better to do than sit around and scan the WHOIS registry, congratulations on being great at your job. You got what you wanted. You took away my freedom to enjoy the internet. Thanks for that.

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Hey Nikon! Thanks for nothing!

Posted by ekrunch in Rants, Technology on November 30, 2009

Looks like Nikon put out that update for the NEF Codec that I was asking for.

It officially supports W7 now, even though the 1.8.0 release worked from what I read. Still no 64-bit support for Vista / W7. So hey, thanks for nothing!

Seriously though… what’s the hold up? Are you using some 3rd party library in your code that’s not available in 64-bit or are you just too cheap and/or lazy to upgrade your development tools? Come on now, 64-bit Windows is coming. Almost all new servers are 64-bit and a significant portion of Windows 7 installations will be 64-bit. Get with the program already! NEF Codec 2.0 needs to get here and it needs to be 64-bit.

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Network neutrality, are you ready for the internet without it?

Posted by ekrunch in Technology on November 21, 2009

A friend of mine over at The Systems Engineer sent me a disturbing image and I thought i’d pass it on. This is just a taste of what the internet might be like if certain people have their way. All I can say is that if you don’t know what this is about, you should pay more attention to what your government is doing …

The internet without net neutrality

The internet without net neutrality

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