I was one of the “lucky ones” that had Monday off this week, so I was able to enjoy a long weekend.  I didn’t do too much gaming, although I did peek in on both AO and EVE.  In AO, I’m still coming up to speed on creating implants that I can actually use – it’s a fine balance between the quality of materials you use to make the implant and whether you have the stats to actually use/implant the item after it’s built.

I also spent a lot of time messing around with my jukebox application and trying various streaming technologies – of which none really did what I wanted, so I think I’ll have to figure that one out myself (i.e. code my own). I tried Shoutcast and Vibe, but neither do what I want.  I’ve also looked at Icecast and SAM, but I haven’t actually tried them out yet.

I actually think I may be able to hack Yahoo’s Media Player API in order to do what I want.  I did play around with it for awhile, but the documentation – what little there is – is woefully inadequate.  Basically a list of classes, functions, and modules without any clues as to how to get them to work together… And they appear to be written in JavaScript, which kind of makes sense, since the client needs to be somewhat in control of the situation and not the server-side.

The basic issue is appending to the “play list.”  I’ve tried various play list formats (RSS, M3U, XSPF, etc), and I’m able to append to the various play lists without any issue there.  The issue is getting the player to recognize that the play list has changed – normally it doesn’t, since it reads the list when it first starts playing and does NOT “poll” the list for changes. 

If you “refresh” the playlist on the player (using various methods), it will see the new additions, but it will also stat playing the whole list over again.  Basically, I want the “active” playlist to be dynamically controlled by the web client, without having to “re-start” the player every time the list changes.  Sounds like streaming, right? 

However most of the streaming suites I’ve looked at either have their own (bloated) clients without any other API’s (that I can find) in order to make a simple, custom web front-end to interface with the streaming server. Oh well, I’m pretty confident I’ll be able to find some kind of solution eventually… YMP is so far looking like the best shot, but we’ll see.

I also tried making my jukebox site “prettier.”  The way it is now it looks like a giant Excel spreadsheet, with some navigation at the top to jump to artists alphabetically.  But I wanted to make something that more resembles an actual jukebox, so I’ve got the CSS done to make a tri-column, two-row presentation of the information, each “cell” containing the cover art and song list.

Anyways, it still needs A LOT of work, but I do like where it’s heading now.  Basically the functionality is 90% there, and the aesthetics are about 20% done.  So hopefully I’ll have both completed sometime this year – It’s just a “spare-time” kind of fun project, so no rush on it, and I only work on it occasionally, so that’s that.

On top of all that, I also had a router failure in my LAN, so that was fun.  I’m currently using a really old DLink that I had laying around as a replacement, but it’s definitely been sluggish compared to my other one – and of course I forgot to configure it properly for my web server, so I can’t get to it from outside the LAN for now.  I’ll probably be picking up one of these today (or something similar). I’d prefer to find one that includes an addressable USB port – we’ll see. [NOTE:  I ended up splurging and getting the next model up.]

I hope y’all had a great weekend, and that this week develops into something great! Enjoy!