When there’s a will, there’s a way

A proof that Apple products are intuitive…she’s 2 years old

Platinum 0.4.7

Here’s a new
update of Platinum with some major bugs/crashes fixed.

Thank you XBMC and Mr Spoon from dbPowerAmp for the QA.

Adobe MAX

At Adobe MAX, General Session Keynote about to start…

XBMC and XBox360 support

Over the last few months, I have found a bit of time to work back on Platinum. One of the things I have always wanted to add was XBox360 support. The XBox is somewhat UPnP aware but does things not according to the standard so it needed a bit of hacking. One of the thing I have been missing recently is working on XBMC so I have decided to make time and jump back into the project. The result is that XBMC is now seen by the XBox 360 and can be used as a Video & Music server. (Photos are not supported yet)

Check out the release that supports it if you’re interested.

OpenID

As I have been spending all day investigating all the different ways of securing a Web API (oAuth mainly) and all kind of user authentications (WSSE, AuthSub, OpenID), I decided to try out OpenID (especially since Yahoo announced their support and that Google will soon join the party although if Yahoo get bought by MS, that might change things a bit, but I regress).

So I went to myopenid.com and signed up for one. I am now officially known as https://soothe.openid.com.

But then I realized I could actually use my own blog and delegate to myopenid.com. Following the instructions here, I could now use https://plutinosoft.com/blog/ as my OpenID !

Yeah cool but I still depend on http://www.myopenid.com and what if they go under. So instead I want to be my own OpenID provider! So I followed the instructions using Sam Ruby’s phpMyId and voila, my blog url can be used as an OpenID identifier for all websites supporting OpenID (including plaxo).

Here’s my setup:
1. Created a openid folder on my site (https://plutinosoft.com/openid/).
2. Downloaded phpMyID files into it
3. Renamed MyID.config.php to index.php
4. Renamed htaccess to .htaccess and commented out option 1 (since I am running my blog on dreamhost and php as cgi)
5. Followed the instructions in README to create password digest and edited index.php by modifying auth_username and auth_password
6. Edited the idp_url in index.php to be “https://plutinosoft.com/openid/”
7. Edited the header.php of my WordPress theme and added the following link tags under the html head:
<link rel="openid.server" href="https://plutinosoft.com/openid/" />
<link rel="openid.delegate" href="https://plutinosoft.com/openid/" />

8. Went to plaxo and logged in using my OpenID “https://plutinosoft.com/blog/”

I love it when technology works (although it took me a few hours longer than I expected) ;-)

Update:
Instead of editing the wordpress header.php file, I went ahead and modified the index.html at the root of my site with
<link rel="openid.server" href="https://plutinosoft.com/openid/" />
<link rel="openid.delegate" href="https://plutinosoft.com/openid/" />
and now I can use https://plutinosoft.com to sign in as an OpenID. Yep!

Divx Connected

So last week, I was at CES and I met with Jerome “Gej” Rota, the DivX founder, at their booth. We had a nice chat about their new product DivX Connected. It is very exciting because it’s what I wanted to do a year ago with a couple of friends:
Build a software platform for set-top boxes to access services/internet but make it opened (and not closed like AppleTV is) for people to build their own plugin and for companies to easily integrate their services.

Well DivX did it and quite nicely. So I spent my last week-end playing with their SDK and voila, a nice little plugin to browse the UPnP servers on your network (using Platinum of course). The idea is that maybe you have your files on your NAS running TwonkyVision or maybe you have Videos on your XBox and have the XBMC with UPnP server running. Check the screenshot out:

Ok, i just finished coding. There’s still no playback, just discovery and there’s no installer yet for the plugin.

Update:
There’s an installer now. It’s here. Video playback is not working great yet because of Divx Connected requiring HTTP 1.1 and some weird trick mode…