"MyLibrary" in C#

Last semester I sat working at my desk and I looked at my bookshelf and realized that I had no idea which books I owned and which ones I didn't. I also had been wanting to learn a new programming language, and decided to write a program to keep track of my books (and later, DVD's). Since I get Visual Studio 2008 for free from school, I picked C# as the language, and MyLibrary was born.

This semester I was able to completely overhaul the broken, not well written program for a new class at BYU, the "unclass", where the topic is picked by the student. Mine is C#, obviously.

MyLibrary is completely light-weight, and at this point fully-functional. It stores the entire library in an XML file anywhere on the users machine. Many other implementations store these types of libraries in SQL, but I wanted it to be a standalone executable that the user doesn't have to install.

It also allows the user the option to automatically search the Amazon website using the UPC/ISBN (through the Amazon Web-services API) based on one row or the entire database.

In addition, the user can scan the barcodes in from a barcode scanner or a Cuecat scanner (we had to use one for my VBA class, and I thought it'd be fun to implement it here) and have the software find the information for them, limiting user-input.

There are still bugs of course, and I don't claim it to be the best written software, but it's been fun to write. I'll post the executable when it's more complete then it is now.

It also has a really basic stats page:

*sidenote - the stats page has a pie chart that the screen print doesn't pick up for some reason. Odd.

Media Center Update

A lot has changed since my last post on my media center. At that time, I had the media center up and running, and then it unexpectedly crashed on me. After much troubleshooting (the worst part about DIY projects) I realized it was most likely (note I never officially figured it out) that the video card I was using was PCI Express 2.0, and my mobo was an older one, that likely didn't support 2.0 on the Express slot.

Although that sucked, I was okay, because I wasn't quite ready to make the transition to HDMI in my living room. So, I yanked the vid card, put the media center in my office, and used my XBox 360 as a media extender to play my recorded shows from the office.

Did it work? Yeah. Was it the best solution? No way. I found the XBox to be somewhat slow and at times unresponsive. In addition, it required another remote (because I didn't want to take the time to program my Remote Commander for a temporary solution).

Anyway, I soon found a great deal at Buy.com for a 3-to-1 HDMI switch (only $12 with free shipping), and then picked up some HDMI cables, and I realized it was time to move the HTPC into the living room. But it was an unsightly thing in its' mid-tower case. Until my brother offered his "old" media case because he'd purchased a bigger and better one. The downside to this was it only accepts half-height cards, meaning my TV tuner wouldn't fit.

After thinking about this, I ended up being okay with getting rid of the card. I'm quickly becoming an HD snob anyway, and unless I wanted to upgrade my HTPC to Vista and run the TV Pack hack to get QAM on my tuner, I wasn't going to get OTA HD on my tuner anyway, and the new case looked great compared to the old one.

So I made the switch - and still couldn't use my HDMI card. Thankfully, I got an older Radeon X300 low-profile card with DVI out, which will work until I either upgrade my mobo or my video card.

Add to that using Handbrake to rip my DVD's, coupled with AnyDvd to strip the encoding, I've now got all my DVD's stored on my HTPC.

I also was looking for a good, easy to use visual piece to navigate the media when my brother recommended XBMC which is pretty, easy to use and develop on, and best of all, is free.

The last thing that I haven't done yet is to install VNC or Synergy to allow me to control the media center from my laptop. Once that's done, it will be fully functional. I'll post a pic of what the computer looks like sometime here soon.

Today's Quote

"I'm petrified of nipple chafing. Once it starts, it is a vicious cycle. You have sensitive nipples...they chafe, so they become more sensitive, so they chafe more. So, I take precautions."

-Andy