The Phrase of the Day

A Bonus Wookie Adventure

Martha's Site Links to Stupid People

http://www.43places.com/person/marthasoft

My Motto

Come get some.

Google Just Told Me

"Tip: Try removing quotes from your search to get more results."

Seattle CBS Affiliate

Can somene explain how the Seattle CBS affiliate decided that the San Diego v. Indianapolis game was not something they wanted to broadcast? Instead we get the exciting Cleveland v. Oakland game. Let's see. A game between playoff contenders or a game between useless, waste-of-time teams: which should we broadcast? This is a ridiculous decision. Don't worry about having to deal with any totally useless morons in the streets in Seattle. They are all safely locked away in the CBS building.

ComCast is Useless Crap

It has taken me 10 minutes to try to make this post. This is due to ComCast's broadband connection to my house having only intermittent connectivity. I encourage anyone with options to pursue them instead of ComCast.

Cabela's Power Blaster

"Tired of squeezing your conventional jerky gun? Prepare mounds of jerky with the battery-operated jerky blaster."

Oddly, 'jerky' is used literally.

Other Fro-Guy Blogs

They are imposters!

http://froguy.iciblog.com/

http://g-blog.net/user/froguy

WTF?

Best Misheard Song Lyrics

Kurtis Blow - "Basketball"

Actual:
"We're playing basketball, we love that basketball."

As heard:
"We're playing basketball, without a basketball."

USB is Weird

http://gadgets.fosfor.se/the-top-10-weirdest-usb-drives-ever/

CDDB/GraceNote Lookup in C#

This weekend I spent some time trying to find a web service that would lookup album information. To my frustration I was unable to find anything useful. Yahoo has a web service, but the information it provides is limited. The Musicbrainz code is a bunch of crazy C that I just don't want to deal with. Therefore I whipped together some code to query CDDB and parse the results. It doesn't support the full range of options that I can imagine so I might add those in the future. If you grab this code and make additions, send it back to me and I'll post the updated code. Here's the source:


using System;
using System.IO;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using System.Net;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;
namespace CDLookup
{
public class AlbumReference
{
private String m_strName;
private String m_strUrl;
internal AlbumReference(String name, String url)
{
this.m_strName = name;
this.m_strUrl = url;
}
public String Name
{
get
{
return this.m_strName;
}
}
public AlbumInfo GetInfo()
{
return CDDBLookup.GetAlbumInfo(this.m_strUrl);
}
}
public class AlbumInfo
{
private String m_strArtist;
private String m_strAlbum;
private String m_strLabel;
private String m_strYear;
private List m_strTracks;
internal AlbumInfo(String artist, String album, String label, String year, List tracks)
{
this.m_strArtist = artist;
this.m_strAlbum = album;
this.m_strLabel = label;
this.m_strYear = year;
this.m_strTracks = tracks;
}
public String Artist
{
get
{
return this.m_strArtist;
}
}
public String Album
{
get
{
return this.m_strAlbum;
}
}
public String Label
{
get
{
return this.m_strLabel;
}
}
public String Year
{
get
{
return this.m_strYear;
}
}
public List Tracks
{
get
{
return this.m_strTracks;
}
}
}
public static class CDDBLookup
{
private static String s_baseInfoUrl =
"http://www.gracenote.com/music/album.html/";
private static String s_baseQueryUrl =
"http://www.gracenote.com/music/search-adv.html?q=&qartist={ARTIST}&qdisc={ALBUM}&qtrack=&n=10&x=39&y=6";
private static String s_queryRegex =
".*)\".*>(?.*)";
private static String s_infoRegex =
"(?.*)
Label:(?.*)
Year:(?.*)
";
private static String s_altInfoRegex =
"(?.*)
";
private static String s_trackRegex =
".*(?.*)";
private static String s_notFoundRegex =
"Your search could not be completed";
public static List Lookup(String artist, String album)
{
String strUrl = s_baseQueryUrl.Replace("{ARTIST}", artist).Replace("{ALBUM}", album);
WebRequest request = WebRequest.Create(strUrl);
WebResponse response = request.GetResponse();
String strResponse = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream()).ReadToEnd();
List references = new List();
Regex regexNotFound = new Regex(s_notFoundRegex);
if (regexNotFound.Match(strResponse).Success)
return references;
Regex regexBase = new Regex(s_queryRegex);
MatchCollection matches = regexBase.Matches(strResponse);
if (matches.Count != 0)
{
foreach (Match match in matches)
{
String url = match.Groups["Url"].Value;
String name = match.Groups["Name"].Value;
references.Add(new AlbumReference(name, url));
}
}
else
{
Regex regexInfo = new Regex(s_infoRegex);
Match match = regexInfo.Match(strResponse);
if (!match.Success)
{
Regex regexAltInfo = new Regex(s_altInfoRegex, RegexOptions.Multiline);
match = regexAltInfo.Match(strResponse);
if (!match.Success)
throw new ArgumentException("Unable to parse response.");
}
references.Add(new AlbumReference(
match.Groups["Name"].Value,
response.ResponseUri.AbsoluteUri.Substring(s_baseInfoUrl.Length)));
}
return references;
}
internal static AlbumInfo GetAlbumInfo(String subUrl)
{
String strUrl = s_baseInfoUrl + subUrl;
WebRequest request = WebRequest.Create(strUrl);
WebResponse response = request.GetResponse();
String strResponse = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream()).ReadToEnd();
Regex regexInfo = new Regex(s_infoRegex);
Match match = regexInfo.Match(strResponse);
if (!match.Success)
{
Regex regexAltInfo = new Regex(s_altInfoRegex, RegexOptions.Multiline);
match = regexAltInfo.Match(strResponse);
if (!match.Success)
throw new ArgumentException("Unable to parse response.");
}
Regex regexTracks = new Regex(s_trackRegex);
List tracks = new List();
foreach (Match matchTrack in regexTracks.Matches(strResponse))
{
tracks.Add(matchTrack.Groups["Track"].Value);
}
int iSlash = match.Groups["Name"].Value.IndexOf('/');
return new AlbumInfo(
match.Groups["Name"].Value.Substring(0, iSlash).Trim(),
match.Groups["Name"].Value.Substring(iSlash+1).Trim(),
GetGroupValue(match, "Label"),
GetGroupValue(match, "Year"),
tracks);
}
private static String GetGroupValue(Match match, String groupName)
{
Group group = match.Groups[groupName];
if (group == null)
return "";
return group.Value;
}
}
}

I'm from the Old West

And I've got a new blog. Yey!