Songbird and multi-media keys under Linux

I’ve decided that under Linux I want to use Songbird as my music player. Unfortunately at the moment the latest developer release doesn’t support the multi-media keys on my keyboard 🙁 Not to be beaten I decided to do something about it and I’ve built my first XPCOM component along with some javascript glue to …

before_create considered harmful

I had a fsck of a time today working with rails. Normally I love Ruby on Rails, but today it gave me the screaming shifts! I had a model class to which I wanted to add some sensible default values to satisfy some constraints in the database. The logical place for that was before_create, so …

flvThing is released

I’ve released flvThing on the www.automagic-software.com web site. It seems to play every flv file I’ve thrown at it quite nicely 🙂 The flv files are played using the installed flash player which is hosted inside a WebView control. The application creates a tiny very stupid web server that serves up the flash files as well …

OmniGraffle is SO cool!

I’ve been building a simple little app to play FLV files on the Mac and I should be releasing it some time over this weekend. I needed to make some icons and I threw them together in OmniGraffle Pro. Go check out www.omnigroup.com for more details.  I’ve used it a few times for this sort of …

Blog spam and other stuff

I finally got around to cleaning up the spam on this blog. Unfortunately it looks like I zapped a couple of legitimate comments in the process however 😉  I’ve been really busy of late working and looking after the monster baby (who just recently turned 1 year old). On the train to and from work I’ve been building …