Geek Alert

Okay, last little tidbit about my “Now Playing” ticker. I’ve gotten two emails asking for details on how I did it, asking for the source code, and questioning my musical taste.

In short, I won’t be sharing the code anytime soon – I hobbled this together to work with my particular setup and it would be tough turn it into a generic solution.

Basically I went to SourceForge.net and downloaded the source code for NotifyCD and Booku. NotifyCD is a nice CD player app that sits in the Windows toolbar and it can be configured to call a program every time a CD is changed.

I then wrote a program for it to call. Initially it was written in C/C++ using a terrible GIF library that some crack head coded. I rewrote the program using VisualBasic and the Booku Flash library. I store the Flash file on a local web server, which is served up for your viewing “enjoyment”.

The code is more complicated than it needs to be. I’ll see about simplifying things – remove the database code or perhaps make everything run as a server-side app.