Nicholas Pike

This afternoon UPS dropped off a present for me, with the following letter:

Dear Xbox Customer,

So that you can get back to playing and enjoying your Xbox quicker, we have replaced your Xbox console with a replacement unit.

Bla bla bla

…

Please accept our aplogies for the inconveience you have experienced by having to send your Xbox 360 in for repair.

It is our goal to provide you with the best gaming and entertainment experience possible, and hope to regain your trust, satisfaction and loyalty.

So the “new” Xbox seems to be working great – I spent that afternoon playing a new game (purchased this afternoon) – Mass Effect, and I definitely feel its a strong contender for the Game of the Year title.

Its good to have a working Xbox again…

I have been religiously  checking the Xbox Service website ever since I sent my Xbox to Microsoft for repairs (Nov 15th).  If you’ve been following my blog, you’d be well aware that my Xbox was struck down with the famous Red Ring of Death (Affectionately referred to as RROD by the Xbox community).

Xbox 360 console experiences a “general hardware failure”, on the front of the console three flashing red lights appear. This is reported to be caused by multiple systems failing simultaneously

(Xbox 360 Technical Problems)

This morning, to my ultimate surprise, the status on my xbox changed from “Device received” to “Device Shipped to Customer”.  Whoa, fast turn around time batman!

The UPS tracking number isn’t active yet – but maybe its time to go out and purchase Mass Effect and prepare for an early return to NY.

So it’s no secret that I have been slaving away on a few new projects for the last couple weeks – one of them is actually to a point where I have something to show!  First a little background information:

The MobileMail application on the iPhone is able to receive attachments via email, and if they are images then it will let you view them inline in the email message.  But thats it.

iExtractor is an application that will let you extract attachments from your iPhone and save them to any location of your desire.

A few interesting uses:

• Save emailed images to a Photo album (probably limited to the CameraRoll album)
• Save pdfs to local storage to view in a PDF Reader
• Save other binary files into the iphone file system (useful for modification of iPhone software)

Application Status

Currently all the application does is identify the encoded attachments stored by MobileMail.app and list them.  The next step will involve check the Mail database to retrieve their original file names, decoding them to their original form, and saving them to your desired location.

I’ve implemented most of the above separately, but need to integrate it into the UI now.

In a few days I should have an actual application for testing on other iphone/ipods.

My days as a Software Engineer COOP are over, I am almost graduated, and I am on vacation for the next two weeks.

I’ll be spending the Week of Turkey home in NH with my family, which likely includes fun activities such as splitting and hauling firewood!

I have a few programming projects in the oven, that I hope to start and finish in my free time during the next two weeks… mostly iPhone/iPod Touch applications, with a dash of Google’s Android.

December 4th I start my last Winter Quarter of classes here at RIT (my schedule)  – and I start working as a Part-Time employee for Thomson West, the company of choice for fledging Rochester Computer Scientists about to graduate from RIT.  It should be pretty cool, they have already replaced my horrible CRT with an LCD monitor – and while I am gone they will be giving me a brand new workstation.  Hoping for something with Dual Cores…

My XBox 360

My xbox has almost arrived at the Texas Microsoft Service Center, heres hoping for a fast turn around time on the repairs so that I can play all the sweet games I am missing out on.

For those of you looking to get me a sweet birthday and/or christmas present – xbox games are perfect!   ;-)

More info on the Google Reader Blog – but in short, its awesome!

Erica Sadun provides a slew of command line applications for the OS X mobile operating system – my favorite being her series of screenshot applications.

I just have one problem: Theres no easy way to take a screenshot of an arbitrary screen directly from the device. (Unless you install the “Dock” launcher, which does not work for me)

I wrote the following two scripts to accomplish my task. From the terminal application you execute s.sh with a name for the screenshot:

You then have 10 seconds to exit the terminal, and navigate to the screen you want to take a picture of. After the screenshot has been taken and saved, a dialog will popup to tell you.

screenshot.sh

s.sh

Both these scripts require EricasUtilities to be installed, and /var/root/bin to be on your path (otherwise the binaries in EricasUtilities wont work).

Save both scripts to /var/root/bin, chmod +x on both of them, and optionally rename s.sh to s for easier launching from the terminal.

All screenshots will be stored in ~/Media/screenshots (which will be created if it doesn’t already exist) – once you have the screenshot, you can use the fileToEmail utility included in EricasUtilities, or SendFile available via Installer.app

For awhile now, I have been using the VLC Remote HTTP interface to control the VLC instance running on my laptop hooked up to a TV through my iPod Touch.  Now this is really cool, BUT the default (and apparently ONLY) interface for this is absolutely ugly.

During lunch today I took some time to draw up a mock UI for the interface for the iPhone/iPod Touch:

This will only support a subset of the features that the current VLC interface allows (as these are all I really need):

• Play/Pause
• Skip forward
• Skip backward
• Volume
• Full screen toggle

Native or Web App?  At first I am just going to whip up some new HTML files that will override the ones that come with VLC – but once I get my iPhone toolchain up and running on my new Leopard install I will shoot for a completely native app.

Finally got a chance to beat Portal this weekend on Jenn’s roommate’s Xbox ( or I could just say Kevin’s Xbox, but thats not nearly as confusing.)

The following youtube video is for the credits at the end of portal, with an awesome song sung by the antagonist in the game (the computer).