Part 1: Microsoft and Stuff

My start date for Microsoft is coming up, and not a moment too soon either. I've been working a temporary job as the "Head of IT" at a company that really isn't interested in investing in IT. They still run SBS 2003 on all of their servers, XP on the majority of their desktops and aren't really interested in permanent solutions to problems (especially when those solutions cost money), they just prefer cheap, stop-gap measures. Whatever, I've only got one week to go.

I've been in touch with multiple people as part of the Microsoft relocation process, and am working with a realtor in the DC area now to try and settle on some lodgings. I'm not supposed to give any details publicly about my benefits package and salary, including relocation efforts, so suffice to say that Microsoft is taking care of moving me down to the DC metro area.

Emily and I have settled on Arlington, VA as a good place to settle down. It's about halfway between downtown DC (where she'll be working) and Reston, VA where the Microsoft office is. It's still within the tentacle-like reaches of the DC Metro (read: subway) system, so she'll be able to get in to work. Verizon also offers it's FIOS services there, which I can't wait for. I don't intend to pay for cable or home phone, but I do intend to pay up to $100/mo on a sweet internet package.

With faster internet comes more interesting streaming projects, and I intend to make my collection available via Plex Media Server to my devices over the internet, allowing Emily and I to watch/listen on the go. I also can't wait to play graphically intensive FPS online, something that my current bandwidth-capped existence has taken from me. Fortunately Guild Wars 2 still runs ok.

I'll hopefully have more to talk about here soon. I think I'm going to figure out exactly what I can/cannot talk about when dealing with the Microsoft onboarding/training process for associate consultants. I've found that there is very little detail about it on the internet and I would love to share my experiences to help anyone who just got hired there or is looking to get hired. Most articles online tend to deal with getting hired as a developer and working at the Redmond campus. Since I am doing neither of those things, my experiences may be more useful to someone interested about Microsoft.

Hopefully this is merely part 1 in the series of "Microsoft and Stuff".

Android Development + A Game of Thrones LCG

I've gotten pretty heavily into the Game of Thrones card game, and everything that goes with it. I've never played any other real collectible card game, unless you can count Pokemon cards back in 3rd grade. Honestly, I've never been able to afford it. That's one of the things I like about the GoT CCG: it's not a true collectible card game. You buy "chapter packs", or packs of sixty cards that come out monthly, but you always know exactly what's going to be in them. If the new cards don't suit your play style, you don't buy the chapter pack. Very simple. It does away with the whole luck and rarity mechanism of traditional CCG and introduces the Living Card Game model, where new cards are added and players can evolve their decks, but older decks can be just as potent. You don't get to buy your way to the top.

What does this have to with Android Development? Well, the deck creation process for GoT is fun and I find myself endlessly re-creating my Baratheon deck just to see what interesting combos I can put together. I often post my decks to agotcards.org, a site dedicated to the game where people can receive feedback on their decks and discuss the merits (or demerits) of their cards. agotcards.org also has an excellent search function, where you can put in variables like Type, House, Icon and Crest and it'll return cards that fit your criteria. This is invaluable for deck building, when you're trying to find the perfect card to fit a deck. I want to make an Android app that incorporates all these things, ideally incorporating existing comments/feedback from agotcards.org. I've emailed the owners of the site to see how they feel about it.

Will update when I have something to show, or when I hit a wall with Java. I've already noticed that finding a good WYSIWYG layout editor/mockup-maker for Android seems to be a rough spot in the development process, but I'm dealing with it.

An Update

I have not been good about posting my projects to this blog. I intended for this to be something of a compendium of anything I was working on; a diary of progress, failures and general cool details. However, my time has been almost totally consumed lately by school. I have one week of college left, and I have a ridiculous amount of work to get done. After that I start planning for the rest of my career.

I've been hired by Microsoft as an Associate Consultant. I'm very excited about that, it's a dream job and I can't wait to get started. It unfortunately doens't start until next February so I have 8-9 months of just hanging out. While I hang out, I hope to generate enough disposable income to start tinkering again. Once I start working at M$, I hope to be able to share some of my work here. Not sure what any potential NDAs will look like, but since I'm not going to be working on upcoming software releases, etc. They'll probably be pretty light.

There will be some desktop/server based projects this summer. There will be some HTPC projects this summer. There will be a lot of Active Directory and general Microsoft services experiments this summer as I prepare myself for the work I'll be doing in February. There will absolutely be some Windows 8 experiments, and a work log of that should start up soon.

I haven't touched the mobile stuff much, whether it be Android or WebOS. I hope to start playing more with Android, and we'll see if anything I do is worth publishing here.

tl;dr - Been busy, schedule freeing up soon. Summer projects incoming. Working at Microsoft starting in February. Interesting work-projects will find some space here.

Getting (Re)Acquainted with XBMC

I finished a longer piece for totalHTPC.com yesterday that went over some of the basics for XBMC usage. The post covered:

• Installation
• Library setup for music/TV/movies
• Add-on installation/removal
• skin installation/removal
• Some other assorted tips and tricks

Big Link to The Article on totalHTPC.com

XBMC Movie/TV Scraping

So I've been using an external scraper to collect media info for all my video titles in XBMC for a while now. People tend to tell me, "XBMC will do that for you, you don't need another program" but there's something that soothes me about having all my media managed outside of XBMC, since from within XBMC it can be difficult to override scraping mistakes, download extra fanart, etc. I just like the full-featuredness that an external scraper offers me.

I started with Ember Media Manager. But then the official version stopped working, due to the authors website going down. Since the program needed to call the website, I was out of luck. But then someone forked it, and it's living on in a few different places, the most popular of which seems to be here: http://ember.purplepig.net/

After trying some of the revival versions of EMM, I just wasn't satisfied anymore so I went to what I thought the majority of people were using: Media Companion. I've been using that and it's command line counterpart mc_com.exe for a while now, and included it in my guide to automating an XBMC/torrent-based HTPC. It was good, but the interface was absolutely horrible and the command line tool (the part I really needed to work well for my scripting stuff) would break every now and then without giving me much of a reason. I was also having problems with new episodes showing up in XBMC after they were supposedly scraped with MC. Turns out some episodes weren't being scraped properly, because of some improper <episodeguide> tag usage in the tvshow.nfo files. So I gave up entirely and decided to give XBMC native scraping another shot since I hadn't tried it since early Dharma (10.0), and now XBMC Eden (11.0) was out.

So far, the scraping seems to be going quite well. I still use EventGhost to shuffle around my media files after they download, so that they get renamed and moved into the proper place. Once they make it to my server, they get placed in the standard layout:

<TV Directory>
   ->Show
      ->Season #
         ->episode.avi

XBMC has my TV Directory set up as a source of TV shows, so it knows to use thetvdb.com scraper on all episodes/shows in that directory. You can use other scrapers if you wish, I'm just a fan of thetvdb. XBMC hasn't messed up yet, and it's been through a week of scraping or so. It's still hands off, since I just have EventGhost call the XBMC: Update Video Library action as part of the new episode script and then XBMC will scan for new media files and scrape them.

You can see where I've diabled the "mc_com.exe" part of this macro. The rest is still relevant, since I use scru.exe to unpack the downloaded files, and theRenamer.exe to rename/move them to my library. There are two python scripts in there that handle the original incoming sorting process, and then the cleanup afterwards.

I haven't tested movie scraping yet, but after I get through this massive pile of homework this weekend maybe I'll give it a shot. I see no reason why it shouldn't work, they key is to blow away all your .nfo files, and then remove/re-add the source to XBMC. It'll take longer to re-add the more media files you have in that source directory but it's worth it.

theRenamer Review

Aaaaand since I was feeling productive this morning, I banged out a quick review and guide for theRenamer. All this little program does is rename files and then move them to your media library. It has the capability to sort the episode files into their corresponding show/season folders if you wish. It also handles movies with aplomb. I wasn't honestly sure how much more to write, and I found myself wavering as I approached the guide section since there really isn't much needed to set up theRenamer.

I use theRenamer extensively in scripting and in my EventGhost stuff and only occasionally as a standalone program.

Big Link to the Article on TotalHTPC.com

XBMC UPnP Streaming

I wrote a quick guide for setting up UPnP streaming on Win7 and Android clients using XBMC as the library(server) and posted it to totalhtpc.com. It was supposed to highlight exactly how easy it is to stream the content you already have in XBMC to other devices on your local network. Yes, you can't stream it over the internet. Yes, I understand that's important these days. As a huge fan of XBMC I though I would highlight a feature that many people aren't aware of, or think they need to use other tools to achieve.

Some of the other writers on totalhtpc.com are going to get an iOS/Mac OSX XBMC UPnP (alphabet soup!) streaming guide up soon. Here's the direct link to the guide:

Big Link to the Article on totalHTPC.com