Just as well, I thought it could make for some interesting blogging for me, and reading for you. Here's how I plan to begin:

I'm starting with a simple landing page that asks for your email address, telling potential customers we'll let them know when it's ready. Cost: $22.00 or so for the .net and .com domains. Email list is free to start out at MailChimp, and I'll only need to pay them if I generate more than 500 signups and want to email those folks (which of course, I will).

The reason behind the landing page and email list is to gauge interest before I start. Right now I've only tested the technological feasibility of my idea by trying out all the moving parts needed to make it work. It's not all in one code base (some of it isn't even code), and there's no UI to speak of.

If there's a decent amount of interest, then I'll put it all together with an easy to use interface, and I'll probably devote more time to it in the short run. If it looks like me and my tech savvy friends will be the only users, I'll probably still release it, but you might configure it with text files instead of WinForms until I get sick of doing that and build the UI for it later down the line. I'm pretty sure that would be a free version. =)

So by going the landing page + email list route, I only invest a little time and money up front, until I can see what the demand will be like. I seem to remember hearing that dropbox started similarly, and I'm sure I must have heard this tactic mentioned a hundred times on Mixergy, where Andrew Warner interviews entrepreneurs about how they've been successful (and sometimes not-so).

On to pricing: I'm thinking of initially starting it out at a one-time fee of $35 (US), but that may change. More than likely, I'll test different pricing schemes and see what works well. I've got $105 of credit in Google Adwords, and I thought I might use that to do some A/B testing on the signup page. Half of the users would see Test which A might mention the one-time $35 price point, while the other half see Test B, which may be $5 per month. Hopefully, this would inform us as to which one results in more signups to the email list.

However, I decided not to do that at this point. It's just more up front work that has to be put into the idea. Instead, I'll probably wait to see if anyone signs up for the list, then do something similar to test which pricing options are better than others (using the email list instead of the website).

As I mentioned above, the DVR is not ready for public consumption yet, but you can sign up for the email list on MediaServerX if you want to be notified when it's ready.

If this little business experiment generates any action on my part aside from "well that flopped, I give up," I'll keep you updated here on the blog.

Deciding on technology

At first I thought I might like to really dig deep and write something from scratch, so the world was open for me to be cross platform and there were flowers in the fields with unicorns and rainbows. However, after taking a look at the UPnP spec documents, I realized I didn't really care about that rainbow and what I really wanted was to just write some code.

So I moved on, thinking I'd use Developer Tools for UpNP Technologies to generate the beginnings of a control point. After messing around with it for a little while and reading that Casey Chesnut "would probably try to use the MS stack next time," I decided to go with the UPnP Control Point API that's been included on Windows since Millenium Edition was all the flop.

It seemed like the lowest barrier to entry, which is something I haven't heard in a while about programming and Microsoft.

Code

First I created a solution in Visual Studio and included a reference for the UPnP 1.0 Type Library (Control Point). It can be found by right-clicking on References, then clicking on Add Reference. It's under the COM tab.

To start out doing anything, you can find a UPnP device using the UPnPDeviceFinder class. The code below will find all devices listed as MediaServer:1 (there are also :2 and :3, but I have yet to look into the differences between them).


The basic object model consists of a Device Finder (seen above) which can get you a collection of individual devices. Individual devices have a collection of services. A service is what you need to communicate with to control and get information from the device. (Here is a diagram).

In our case, we want to get the MediaServer's ContentDirectory service to give us a list of ContentDirectories and their children.


Now that you have the content directrory service, you can invoke actions on it. For example, to see what it contains you can use the browse service:


This where it really starts to get wieldy. I find it a complete PITA to be sending and receiving basic objects and casting them back and forth to their desired types. The result string ensures more fun searching through XML to get what you want. It's nothing we want to be doing throughout our source code, because it's a ton of noise to sort through. Side note: Setting the objectID to 0 will get you the root element. After that, the results report back their IDs so you can use what it returns. That took me forever to find out, so hopefully it will save you some time.

Obviously, this sort of hassle calls for some abstraction, so I began writing a wrapper library. So far it works through everything I've shown above, and includes a sample project showing how to use it.

Source code: upnplib-mediaserver-wrapper

It's a Visual Studio 2008 solution with 2 projects: the upnplib-mediaserver-wrapper is the library, and example-upnp-mediaserver-browser is an example of how to use the library. You'll need to set that one up as your startup project for it to run. I'd have guessed it would be in the .sln file but it's not, and I don't want to include my user-specific settings in the source control.

Let me know if you're interested in seeing it become more complete.

If you're a fan of PlayOn or TVersity and want a DVR service, click the preceding link to sign up and be notified when it's ready.

As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts or questions on the subject.

A couple of my tweeps responded with what we we're used to using: loops.





Another two mentioned redo in Ruby.





redo is certainly a cool construct (and underused), but it doesn't do what I want it to:




Ruby responds, "tryredo.rb:35: unexpected redo." As you might know, you need to use a loop:


So I'll ask to this larger audience:

Suppose I have a zombie who only really likes eating braaaiiinzzz. Most of the time, he gets exactly what he wants. But every so often, we try to feed him some other body part. Now, if he's really hungry, he eats it. We might only have fingers available at the time, so I want to try to feed him fingers again until brains are available or until he's hungry enough to eat the fingers.

I know that conceptually this is just a loop even if we don't explicitly code it. But does your language have a try again? What do you think the merits or demerits of such an approach would be? Is it just a harmful goto?

My zombie is hungry and waiting. Rather impatiently I might add.

1. Initially, Microsoft envisioned the controls running in several places: perhaps the browser, a printer, or a zoo. But three and a half major versions in, we're still required to pass the same attribute with the same value for every control. Couldn't they drop the requirement and make it a default if they decided to add more valid values?
   
   
2. They wanted a constant reminder to novices that this code was running on the server. This way, people wouldn't ask why changes weren't occurring on the browser before posting forms to the server.
   
   
3. They wanted to remain consistent in having to tell the computer everything at least twice, à la Object obj = new Object();. However, in this case, it seems more like Object obj = new Object(type="Object");. I'm not sure why that is.

Can you think of any other possible reasons? Please enlighten me, so I can forgive and forget this minor annoyance.

Then ContentBoxVariation includes ContentBox like this:


You might think that the ContentBoxVariation would pass it's Title to the ContentBox, and that the result would be "Welcome to Sam's."

Unfortunately, it does pass it's title, but the title hasn't been changed from its default of "" at the time it happens. As far as I can tell, the instantiation happens in this order:

1. Instantiate ContentBoxVariation
2. Instantiate the composed ContentBox
3. Set ContentBox's Title to the variation's title, which is currently "". Even if setting it to a different variable, it seems to stay blank as if that variable doesn't exist, even though it does and no error occurs.
4. Set the variation's title.

The order makes sense if you are looking at it like that, but being in templates and looking at it from that point of view, it is surprising.

The solution is to explicitly set the title for ContentBox in code, like this:


Hopefully that saves someone some time.

1. JetBrains' IntelliJ IDEA: An awesome IDE for Java. So great, I don't mind spending the $249 (US) and using it over the free Eclipse. The Ruby plugin is not too shabby either, the license for your copy is good for your OSX and Windows installations, and you can try it free for 30 days. Martin Fowler thinks IntelliJ changed the IDE landscape. If you work in .NET, they also have ReSharper, which I plan to purchase very soon. Now if only we could get a ColdFusion plugin for IntelliJ, I'd love it even more.
   
   
2. Programming Ruby, Second Edition: What many in the Ruby community consider to be Ruby's Bible. You can lower the barrier of entry for your favorite programmer to using Ruby, certainly one of the funner languages a lot of people are loving to program in lately. Sometimes, I sit and think about things to program just so I can do it in Ruby.
   
   If they've already got that, I always like books as gifts. Some of my favorites from this year have been: Code Complete 2, Agile Software Development: Principles, Patterns, and Practices which has a great section on object oriented design principles, and of course, My Job Went to India. I have a slew of books I've yet to read this year that I got from last Christmas (and birthday), so I'll have to list those next year.
   
   
3. Xbox 360 and a subscription to XNA Creator's Club (through Xbox Live Marketplace - $99 anually) so they can deploy their games to their new Xbox. This is without a doubt the thing I'd want most, since I got into this whole programming thing because I was interested in making games. You can point them to the getting started page, and they could make games for the PC for free, using XNA (they'll need that page to get started anyway, even if you get them the 360 and Creator's Club membership to deploy to the Xbox).
   
   
4. MacBook Pro and pay for the extra pixels. I love mine - so much so, that I intend to marry it. (Ok, not that much, but I have been enjoying it.) The extra pixels make the screen almost as wide as two, and if you can get them an extra monitor I'd do that too. I've moved over to using this as my sole computer for development, and don't bother with the desktops at work or home anymore, except on rare occasions. You can run Windows on it, and the virtual machines are getting really good so that you ought not have to even reboot to use either operating system.
   
   Even if you don't want to get them the MacBook, a second or third monitor should be met with enthusiasm.
   
   
5. A Vacation: Programmers are notoriously working long hours and suffering burnout, so we often need to take a little break from the computer screen. I like SkyAuction because all the vacations are package deals, there's often a good variety to choose from (many different countries), most of the time you can find a very good price, and usually the dates are flexible within a certain time frame, so you don't have to commit right away to a certain date.

Happy Thanksgiving to those celebrating it, and thanks to all you who read and comment and set me straight when I'm wrong - not just here but in the community at large. I do appreciate it.

Do you have any ideas you'd like to share (or ones you'd like to strike from this list)?

What we really need here is a way to filter the collection while looping over it. Move that extra complexity and indentation out of our code, and have the collection handle it.

In Ruby we have each as a way to loop over collections. In C# we have foreach, Java's got for(ElemType elem : theCollection), and Coldfusion has <cfloop collection="#theCollection#"> and the equivalent over arrays. But wouldn't it be nice to have an each_where(condition) { block; } or foreach(ElemType elem in Collection.where(condition))?

I thought for sure someone would have implemented it in Ruby, so I was surprised at first to see this in my search results:


However, after a little thought, I realized it's not all that surprising: it is already incredibily easy to filter a collection in Ruby using the select method.

But what about the other languages? I must confess - I didn't think long and hard about it for Java or C#. We could implement our own collections such that they have a where method that returns the subset we are looking for, but to be truly useful we'd need the languages' collections to implement where as well.

Of these four languages, ColdFusion provides both the need and opportunity, so I gave it a shot. First, I set up a collection we can use to exercise the code:


Then, I exercised it:


Obviously, that breaks because don't have a cf_loop tag. So, let's create one:


It works fine for me, but you might want to implement it differently. The particular area of improvement I see right away would be to utilize the item name in the where attribute. That way, you can use this on simple arrays and not just assume arrays of structs.

Thoughts anybody?

It seems you need an army of programmers to make even a decent game now.

But then people started releasing game-development frameworks that could help you get past the technical hurdles. However, by the time I thought about something like that (or had the capacity to think it) I had almost long forgotten about my dream to make games.

And even if you're using a framework, what do you do about the monetary hurdles? A computer to program on is one thing, but where would you find the cash for a good 3D modeling studio? What if you wanted to deploy to a console? That license is in the tens of thousands of dollars (or so I've heard).

But as some of you have known for a while, and I only found out as recently as August, Microsoft is helping to solve those problems. They've released the XNA framework, which lets you deploy to XBOX 360 or PC (Developer Center, Creators Club, XNA Team Blog).

I'm only three weeks in and I've got quite a decent start for a game. It's cartoon-like, so it doesn't require the type of art you'd find in Gears of War (though I could still use the help of a 3d modeler if you're offering). It works mostly how I want it to, and I need only a few tweeks. Most importantly, I've got a nice framework written that allows me to add levels and new game objects with relative ease (not WYSIWYG just yet, but that might happen at some point in the distant future).

So that only leaves the soundtrack. Unless you don't plan to distribute your game, licensing songs may still be an prohibitive issue (barring that you're good at making your own on the computer, and have a good sound-editor to do it). For that, I'm trying to get the band back together over the winter to record an impromptu soundtrack. Getting back in the studio with those guys would be reward enough, but I'll have a game to go with it. Thanks XNA!

As always, thoughts are appreciated. I'd especially like to hear from you if you know or are a member of any community where free(ish) 3D models and textures are available.

Chad mentions a measure he used to assess a job candidate's depth of knowledge in Java: a question of how to make the JVM crash.

I'm definitely lacking in this regard. I've got a pretty good handle on Java, Ruby, and ColdFusion. I've done a small amount of work in .NET and have been adding to that recently. I can certainly write a program that will crash - but can I write one to crash the virtual machine (or CLR)?

I can relunctantly write small programs in C/C++, but I'm unlikely to have the patience to trace through a large program for fun. I might even still be able to figure out some assembly language if you gave me enough time. Certainly in these lower level items it's not hard to find a way to crash. It's probably harder to avoid it, in fact.

In ColdFusion, I've crashed the CF Server by simply writing recursive templates (those that cfinclude themselves). (However, I don't know if that still works.) In Java and .NET, I wouldn't know where to start. What about crashing a browser with JavaScript?

So Chad mentions that you should know the internals of JVM and CLR. I should know how JavaScript works in the browser and not just how to getElementById(). With that in mind, these things are going on the to-learn list - the goal being to find a way to crash each of them.

Ideas?

For web developers, InfoQ let us know aboutBrowser Shots, which is a service that will test your web sites in tons of different browsers and present screen shots to you. It lets you choose whether to enable Flash, Javascript, or certain media players, and allows you to set the color depth and screen resolution. It's quite slow at the moment (set it and come back in four hours or so), but it shows us what can be possible! (Screenshots of codeodor.com, as they are coming in more will pop up)

Also, InfoQ completed its first official year. It was "pre-released" (I forget the exact term they used) I think in May 2006, but it went officially live a year ago Friday. Congrats to Floyd Marinescu and the entire InfoQrue! (And they have a lot of relevant news (to me) I'll be posting links to today)

The first item where I see a distinction that needs to be made is on, "what do we mean when we are talking about XML?" I see two types - XML the paradigm where you use tags to describe data, and the XML you write - as in, the concrete tags you put into a file (like, "see that XML?"). We're talking about XML you've written, not the abstract notion of XML.

The second idea: what is code? What is data? Sean Corfield offers what I would consider to be a concice, and mostly correct definition: "Code executes, non-code (data) does not execute." To make it correct (rather than partially so), he adds that (especially in Lisp) code can be data, but data is not code. You see this code-as-data any time you are using closures or passing code around as data. But taking it a bit further - your source code is always just data to be passed to a compiler or interpreter, which figures out what the code means, and does what it has been told to do.

So is XML code? Certainly we see it can be: ColdFusion, MXML, and others are languages where your source code is written (largely) in XML. But what about the broader issue of having a programmatic configuration file versus a "data-only" config file?

Is the data in the config file executable? It depends on the purpose behind the data. In the case of data like


I think (assuming there is nothing strange going on) that it is clearly data. Without knowing anything about the back end, it seems like we're just creating a data structure. But In the case of DI (and many others uses for config files), I see it as giving a command to the DI framework to configure a new bean. In essence, as Peter notes, we've just substituted one concrete syntax for another.

In the case of XML, we're writing (or using) a parser to send data to an intepreter we've written that figures out what "real" commands to run based on what the programmer wrote in the configuration file. We've just created a higher level language than we had before - it is doing the same thing any other non-machine code language does (and you might even argue about the machine code comment). In the configuration case, often it is a DSL (in the DI case specifically, used to describe which objects depend on which other objects and load them for us).

While we don't often have control structures, there is nothing stopping us from implementing them, and as Peter also notes, just because a language is not Turing complete), doesn't mean it is not a programming language. In the end, I see it as code.

Both approaches are known to have their benefits and drawbacks, and choosing one over the other is largely a matter of personal taste, size and scope of problem, and problem/solution domain. For me, in the worlds of JIT compiling and interpreted langages, the programmatic way of doing things tends to win out - especially with large configurations because I prefer to have the power of control structures to help me do my job (without having to implement them myself). On the other hand, going the hard-coded XML route is especially popular in the compiled world, if not for any other reason than you can change configurations without recompiling your application.

I don't make a distinction between the two on terms of XML is data, while programming (or using an in-language DSL) in your general-purpose language is code. To me, they are both code, and if either is done incorrectly it will blow-up your program.

Finally, I'm not sure what value we gain from seeing that code is data (and in many cases config data is code), other than perhaps a new way of looking at problems which might lead us to find better solutions. But that isn't provided by the distinction itself, just the fact that we saw it.

Comments, thoughts, questions, and requests for clarifications are welcome and appreciated.