Category Archives: My Programs

netDiscographer is largely finished. It’s speed is impressive – searching the database (of about 10,000 tracks) faster than winamp. netAudio has been largely complete for some time as well. There are no more features planned for either library and as of now I am not aware of any bugs. netAudio still needs to undergo a minor upgrade to have full support of libVLC 1.x.x but that’s taking a backseat (as it’s still working well).

A full feature list for both libraries will be released in the coming months.

Next comes a fully skinnable WPF GUI library. Although I have yet to really think about a name I have a feeling it will follow the previous libraries’ naming scheme with a “netGUI” or “netWPF” or “netSkin” or “netGooey” name.

Media Player

Posted by Mr. Pig on June 27, 2009 No comments

I’ve been working on a media player that I have high hopes for, but that’s not what this post is about.

I’m introducing two libraries I have developed for this media player and plan to release independently in the near future. The first is netAudio, a system of abstract classes (and the implementation of these classes) that allow you to play audio files in a .NET environment. Currently, it only has support for libvlc, but because of the library’s structure, adding new decoding and playback engines should be fairly simple. netAudio also has a shared meta data editor. The second library is netDiscographer – an audio library system. netDiscographer, like netAudio, is relying on abstract classes and inheritance to allow for support of many different types of database engines. Currently, netDiscographer only supports SQLite.

Whether these libraries will be released as open source under the GNU Lesser License or as closed source DLL’s has yet to be determined (I think it depends on how far I get into development of the media player itself).

Any inquiries are welcome.

Start Menu… Cleared?

Posted by Mr. Pig on March 8, 2009 1 comment

Recently, without a reason, my entire start menu got cleared. All shortcuts within C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu and the C:\Users\<user name>\…\Start Menu got deleted. Being the intelligent man I am I instantly thought “OH I BETTER START RECREATING THESE NOW!” So I did. Sadly, when I realized I should have downloaded an undelete program I had already overwritten those sectors on my hard drive.

In order to recover my deleted start menu icons I wrote an application in C# to help. It scans the various “Program Files” directories (or any others you specify) for .exe files and presents them in a list. You select the files you want and edit the default folder/name options and press “add selected” and the program automatically creates all the folders and short cuts in the start menu.

This application only works with Windows Vista.

In case anyone else runs into this problem, the app can be downloaded below.

Start Menu (Re)Builder Version: 1.0

Take your armor off, you’re not under attack.

Posted by Mr. Pig on February 2, 2009 No comments

Spam. It is no fun.

This blog of mine gets quite a lot of spam – and has been recently. In order to protect it from such senseless attacks I run Spam Karma 2 on top of WordPress’s own anti-spam tool. Currently – between both systems – I have a total 33,750 of spams logged (40 days later the total is 34,459). I recently upgraded wordpress to the latest version and I was having some problems configuring Spam Karma – which lead me to notice the spam count.

And now for something completely different…

Hopefully, within the next two weeks, I’ll have some interesting updates for the XNA engine I’m writing. Work has stopped as other things have taken priority – hopefully it will resume shortly. Maybe within a month I’ll have an interesting app for everyone to play with. Only time will tell.

Finally; last.fm!

Two Weeks of Work…

Posted by Mr. Pig on January 12, 2009 No comments

After two weeks of on and off work on the engine I’ve managed to speed up rendering drastically (although there are still some light optimizations I have planned). I also began adding support for textures to my primitive classes – as seen below.

Deferred Rendering

Posted by Mr. Pig on December 29, 2008 No comments

I recently got deferred rendering working after struggling with it for some time (my friend Tasky managed to find that I had a negative sign missing somewhere). Defuse lighting, ambient lighting, and specular lighting are now implemented and everything is progressing nicely.

Engine Progress

Posted by Mr. Pig on December 18, 2008 No comments

Well, I got a chance to work on the engine a bit more and I’ve got some basic shader effects done but the major additions are terrain and procedural primitives (boxes/spheres). You can see a screen below – I wrote my name on the heightmap image.