Was looking at the lazycoder blog and saw a post on Herding Code podcast, sounding cool, I saw he posted on a "Back to the Basics" episode.   I just want to be clear as I start this.  I am a beginnermediate (not quite a begginer, but defintely not an intermediate developer) developer.  I look and listen in my world at that level and base my conclusions on my skill level.  The purpose of this post is to show a bit of the discrepency between what an advanced developer would consider basics and what a beginner would consider basics. I do agree these are all basics, but I believe there are levels to them that should be clarified.  

Below, I have categorized things the podcast hit on as basics.  I tried my best to put it in a linear fashion as what you should learn first to last.  I have also included a short opinion on each of these.

Beginner

Memory Management

This is defintely something a beginner _needs_ to know.  Not necessarily every part, but have a good idea of what is going on.

References (pointers)

This I agree is another thing to learn so you get a better idea of what is going with Memory Management.

Requirements

Here is the gold of what a beginner needs to learn.  If you don't know the requirements or can't translate those requirements to code then you will most likely fail as a developer.

Beginnermediate

Floating Point Math

This is one thing that should be learned and is important, but not quite as important as not knowing the above.  This tends to be an extensive thing to figure out and to really grok so I put it in the beginnermediate area once you know the beginner level and the general basics of developing like: if, then, for, varaiables and the like.

OOP

This is one thing that is a basic to learn. However, it is HARD to learn for the real world.  I learned OOP in a college class in one semester no problem.  It has taken me well over a year to translate, effectivly, that knowledge into real world applications, that aren't games.  This is a big must, but can be put on hold to learn whats above first.

Source Control

To me this is kind of a debateable topic as when to learn.  I think before you move to intermediate level programming level you should learn the basics of source control because it is at this point that you are going to be writing more sophisticated programs that are going to need Source Control.

Intermediate

Data Structures

Data Structures being an intermediate skill to learn is kind of misnomer.  I think you should learn 2 to 3 basic data structures like an array or in .net generic List<>. Just something to get you by then later once you understand more and more go back and really learn other data structures.  I believe this really would work out well because then you have probably coded quite a bit and will learn the data structures quicker and really know when and where to use them.

Design Patterns

This is most definitely an intermediate skill to learn.  Design patterns are important to writing smooth pretty and effective software, but until you learn OOP really well or a few other things you are stuck in the land of "please just work".  Understanding and using design patterns from what I have seen just takes time and writing quite a bit of code before they make sense.  I saw this because I have yet to be able to use them effectively and really understand when and where.

Dependency Injection

I put this in intermediate because I still don't know what it is and everytime I ask I just get confused which means it is something beyond my skill level so I am defaulting it to the top of the list.  Because of the not understanding problem I personally don't think this is a basic, but I will listen to those more experienced than me and consider it a basic.

 

Concolusion

I guess I mostly wanted to do this post to kind of come up with a way to organize what and when to learn the basics.  From reading and research ALL of the above basics are things that are used daily and very important to know, but not all of it is easy and can be learned quickly so it is good to break it down. I really loved this podcast episode because it is honestly not often I get to hear pro's talk about the basics.  The basics are something I strive to help people understand because it isn't taught a lot online usually and _most_ of the time not well.

Most anime fans should get a kick out of this.  If you cross Lucky Star and Transformers this is what you get.

Hope you enjoyed that.

I have been wanting to watch my videos that I have on my hard drive on my TV for a looooong time, but never seemed to have the right equipment that actually worked.  Well yesterday a friend finally hooked me up with the right equipment and I have been playing with Vista Media Center since then.

First off, Vista Media Center rocks. I am loving it.  I used to have to get up every so often and switch videos on my computer to watch from my chair or bed, not to mention mess with rotating the flat panel monitor.  Well, now with media center and the IR Remote that is hooked up to the computer I basically have a TiVo like system going, minus recording tv.

Now along the way I ran into a problem, was user error.  If you hit the power button on the IR remote it would send the computer to sleep mode.  Not to big of a problem except the setting for windows was to prompt the user for a password upon resume.  Normally that wouldn't be a problem for I couldn't seem to login or even get anything to display on the TV or my computer once I hit the power button on the remote again.  So, I did the one last thing I could think of.  Hard turn off of the computer.

That is when the problems started.  Once I got it back up apprentely some db got corrupted that no longer let me view the videos.  So after reading for a few hours on the internets i came accross the solution, and with a bit of guessing, to just delete the db's.  Only probloem is I didn't know where they were located as no where explicitly said where.  After some searching I found out 2 things that are kind of important.

1. Media Center information and stuffs are stored in "Microsoft\ehome" folder
2. The media library database is stored in the "Microsoft\Media Player" folder

You can find the main stuff for Media Center at "C:\Windows\ehome". That is where the executables and other things are located.  Other stuffs are in "C:\Users\Buddy\AppData\Local\Microsoft\ehome" that will be important for other thigns besides this problem. Just letting you know file locations.

What is the most interesting though is that the media center library is stored at "C:\Users\Buddy\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Media Player".  I was amazed because I figured they would store that info in the ehome folder.

Anyway, the problem specifically that I had was when I would go to the videos  area of the menu in Media Center it would try to display all the folders, but wouldn't.  I could actually get it to do anything.  Once I decided to delete the database information it reset everything back and I could finally add files through the monitoring folders of settings.  Well once I did that it still didn't work properly as the videos would only display in the "Date Captured" view.

So what was my solution?

1. Delete the database files at "C:\Users\Buddy\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Media Player" 
2. Unmonitor all video locations
3. Install 3rd party MCE application called Video Browser

That is it.  Now I just use video browser app that I installed into Media Center as it works a lot better, but a bit different.

 

Install and Use Video Browser

Installing Video Browser is super simple.  Just visit the site "http://code.google.com/p/videobrowser/" download the installer and install it.  After that go to the Pictures+Video section of your Media Center menu and you should see a tab to the left called Video Browser.  

Now the most important part to not is. VB only monitors your "C:\Users\<user>\Videos" folder.  So to add vides from other locations just simply create a shortcut to that folder or file and it will work.  This works out great for me as I have a lot of things I need to watch so I only put shortcuts to my "To Watch" videos.

 

I suggest giving the Media Center stuff a try in vista it is a lot of fun.  So much fun infact if I am not careful I might make an app for it.

One thing that apache has is mod_rewrite, but IIS doesn't seem to have it nativly.  However, Ionics made an ISAPI filter and submitted it to CodePlex for people to use for free.  To get it to work in Code Igniter is pretty easy once you do it for the first time.  As a note it is best to do it per site.  Here are the steps and some images.

1) Download files from codeplex site (http://www.codeplex.com/IIRF)

2) Unzip IsapiRewrite4.dll

3) Put IsapiRewrite4.dll in folder of the top level of the website (wwwroot/default site)

4) create .ini file named IsapiRewrite4.ini (Must be named IsapiRewrite.ini)

5) Open IIS Manager

6) Right-click on site -> properties

7) Isapi Filters Tab

8) Add...

9) Name filter what ever you want. I named it IONICS Rewrite

10) Click browse and load the IsapiRewrite4.dll in the top level of the site

11) add the code below to the .ini file

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [L]

12) recycle the application pool and all should work.

 

I got the snippet for the ini file from the CodeIgniter forum, but can't seem to find exact post to link to.  There are a lot of things that you can do with this rewrite module much similar to mod_rewrite for apache.

Also as a side note this works awesom for wordpress blogs too to get good permalinks.

As many of you may know from my last post, yeah a long time ago, I like anime a lot.  One thing that was always interesting to me was how fansubbers did subtitles.  Well the other day I actually spent about 20 or 30 minutes and figured out how to do basic subtitles.

What I learned was softsubs. Basically an external file (*.srt) that you add your subtitles to and load them up when you play the raw video with no subtitles.  The site I learned off of was from a post on afterdawn website.  They are a great resource when it comes to audio video stuff. Anyway the directions are fairly simple.

1) Get video file.
2) Create a new textfile in that folder. I prefer to call it the video name with srt at the end. so (videoname.srt)
3) Add special codes and text
4) watch video and load the srt file.

Step 3 is what is the most difficult and it really isn't difficult at all. To do it all you need is the start frame and end frame of when you want the text to appear.  Followed by the text.

{1}{200}Hello World How are you Today

That would display "Hello World How are you Today" from frame 1 to 200 then stop displaying it.  You can also change colors and do bold, italic, and underline.

{201}{300}{y:i}I'm Italic
{301}{400}{y:b}I'm bold
{401}{500}{y:u}I'm underlined

You can also do colors too. So something like:

{501}{600}{c:$333333}I'm A different color.

Finally you can even do different fonts too.

{601}{700}{f:Arial}I'm A different font.

So if you wanted to copy paste into a text file all of the above to test it. It would look something like:

{1}{200}Hello World How are you Today
{201}{300}{y:i}I'm Italic
{301}{400}{y:b}I'm bold
{401}{500}{y:u}I'm underlined
{501}{600}{c:$333333}I'm A different color.
{601}{700}{f:Arial}I'm A different font.
{701}{800}{y:i}{c:$333333}I'm several combined into 1

After you have that done you are ready to view them. I personally use windows media player classic and the best way to use them, once the video is loaded, is:

File->load subtitles->(Browse to subtitles and open)

Here are some pictures

 

If you have wanted to do basic Subtitles this gives you a good start.  I am going to look up how to do embeded subtitles next and will post on that, hopefully soon.