Programming

Since there is no managed or open source way to get a PUID for MusicBrainz (Thank you, thank you MusicIP…), you have to call it as an external process. However, since Windows makes all the console-based executables have a character set of SBCSCodePageEncoding, accents get messed up.

After several hours of smashing my head against the wall and venting on GTalk w/ scottp, I finally got it to work:

Encoding.UTF8.GetString(ProcessObj.StandardOutput.CurrentEncoding.GetBytes(“yadda yadda”));

And now it all works. Yay! iBrainz is almost finished…

Being sick of all the commercial GPS solutions out there, I’ve decided to start coding my own GPS solution – with autorouting and all! Let’s see how this goes…

So far I’ve already coded the NMEA/GPS integration. Took me about 30m to write it up; should be fun. IMO the hardest part will be getting the maps to work. Any takers on reverse engineering Destinator/TomTom/etc formats?

Once it’s finished, it should work on all .NET enabled platforms – standard and/or Mono-based. I’ll be supporting Windows Mobile as the standard mobile platform for development.

Drop me a line.