Month: October 2022

Old Media

I went down a rabbit hole over the weekend, and I thought it might be fun to write up some notes on it. I had decided that I wanted to watch Magnificent Butcher, a Sammo Hung movie from 1979. I have it on DVD, so I pulled it out of my random DVD pile and stuck it in my Xbox.

The Xbox appeared to boot up, but I couldn’t get anything to show on the screen, and I couldn’t eject the DVD. Long story short, I eventually got the DVD out and the XBox working, but it was stuck in 640×480 resolution. I eventually got it back to normal 4K resolution, but that’s another long story.

So back to the Sammo Hung DVD: I decided that this might be a good excuse to experiment once again with DVD ripping, and watching ripped DVDs on my Apple TV. I have HandBrake installed on my PC, with libdvdcss, but I haven’t used it in a long time. Well, it still works, and I ripped the DVD with no problems.

Next issue: how to watch it on the Apple TV. First, I decided to hook up an external USB drive to my new router. My old router supported an external USB drive too, but I tried it once and found it to be slow and unreliable. So I thought I’d give the new one a try and see if it was better. Well, it was. I hooked up an old 500 GB SSD, formatted as NTFS. The router recognized it, no problem. It automatically exposed it via Samba. I had no trouble accesssing it from my Mac or PC. And it’s pretty fast! So I copied the .mp4 file for the movie up to it, along with a few other random .mp4 files I had on my PC.

Next, I had to decide how to access that shared drive from the Apple TV. I already had VLC installed on the device, so I tried that. It connected to the Samba share, no problem, and let me watch the movie. So I guess I have a pretty good way of watching random .mp4 files on my Apple TV now.

So maybe I should go buy Ladyhawke from Rifftrax and watch that! I’ve been tempted to buy videos from Rifftrax before, but I’ve always held off, since I didn’t have a simple way to watch them on my TV.

I also remembered that I’d copied a few Akira Kurosawa movies from my TiVo to my MacBook several years ago (2016, apparently), via cTiVo. I gave one of those a try, and it works with VLC on the Apple TV too, so now I can copy those files over to the drive and watch them from Apple TV.

And that got me curious about whether or not cTiVo would work on my current MacBook. Well, it does. It was updated earlier this year, and should keep working for a while longer, though I guess it’s on its last legs.

So now I’m copying a few more Kurosawa movies up to my Mac, and I’ll copy those over to the drive tomorrow, so I can have a little Kurasawa marathon at some point in the future. (Of course, there’s no reason I can’t watch the ones that are still on the TiVo, on the TiVo, but…)

I also took an old scratched DVD that wouldn’t play on my Xbox and ripped it on my PC. It didn’t give me any errors, though that doesn’t guarantee that the .mp4 is perfect. I’ll try watching that soon, I think. (The movie is Syriana, and I’ve had the DVD for years, and just never got around to replacing it. So now I can finally watch it! Probably!)

As an alternative to VLC, I’ve considered Infuse, which is probably better, or at least prettier. And of course there’s Plex, which I’ve tried before, and was just too much of a hassle.

Looking at the Plex web site right now, they seem to be de-emphasizing their original purpose as a way to stream your own media, and are now touting the ability to watch free live TV via their app. Most of what they have seems like the same kind of stuff you can get via Pluto, so I’m not sure why anyone would be too excited about it. But OK.

So, anyway, I now seem to have a relatively hassle-free way to watch .mp4 files on my Apple TV. I don’t think I’m going to go on a bender, ripping a bunch of my old DVDs, but I may take some of the more questionable ones and rip those. (Maybe some more old Kung Fu movies that might be a little scratched up.)

Programming Potpurri

I’ve been meaning to write a blog post or three about some of the programming-related stuff that I’ve been doing at work recently. But I keep putting it off. I’ve got some energy today, and a little spare time, so I’m going to try to write up some random notes.

Razor Pages

A while back, we had an old SharePoint 2013 page stop working. The page uses a control that I wrote in C#. The control really has nothing to do with SharePoint; it’s basically an old-fashioned ASP.NET web form that makes some web service calls, populates some controls, gathers user input, then makes another web service call, then redirects the user to another page. The only reason it’s in SharePoint is… well, that’s complicated. Let’s not get into that!

Anyway, fixing the page would take about five minutes. I’m pretty sure all I needed to do was increase a timeout, and increase the max receive size on a certain web service call. But… my SharePoint development VM got nuked in our security incident back in July. So the actual time to fix the error would be more like several days, since, at this point, I have no clue how to build a SharePoint 2013 development machine from scratch. I’m pretty sure I could do it, but it would take a lot of time and effort.

So I decided to just rebuild the page as a single-page ASP.NET Razor Page project, which seemed like it would be a fun thing to do, and might be a good model for moving some other stuff out of SharePoint. At the time, I wasn’t too busy. Of course, that changed, and now I kind of regret diving into this. But I did, and managed to learn enough about Razor to get the page done and into production.

I’d known a bit about Razor already, and had messed around with it on and off over the last few years. But most of my recent ASP.NET work has been web services, so there’s no need for Razor there. First, I was surprised to realize that Razor has been around since 2010. Scott Guthrie’s blog post announcing it is from July 3, 2010. I’ve still been thinking about it as “new,” but I guess it’s not. Heck, I guess it could even be considered “legacy” by some folks. (I guess maybe Blazor is what the cool kids are using now?)

Since it’s been around awhile, there are some reasonably good resources out there for learning it. But, also since it’s been around awhile, a lot of it is scattershot, or out of date, or not really relevant to what I was doing. The best resource I found is the Learn Razor Pages site. I almost bought the related book, ASP.NET Core Razor Pages in Action, but before I got around to it, I was pretty much done with the project, and had to move on to other stuff.

Dynamics 365

So, with the changes that are going on at work, it looks like I’ll have to be doing a lot more work with Dynamics 365. D365 is a pretty big topic. It looks like I’ll probably be mostly concerned with Dynamics 365 Sales (formerly known as CRM). I took a three-day class on Power Platform back in 2020, which is kind of the underlying technology for D365. Power Apps and Dataverse in particular are important. (The terminology on this stuff is really annoying. When I took that class two years ago, Dataverse was called “Common Data Service” and some of the other related terminology was different. It’s hard to keep up…)

I now have Pluralsight and LinkedIn Learning access via work, so I watched some videos on those sites, and on Microsoft’s Learn site, to refresh my memory from previous efforts to learn this stuff, and pick up on the new stuff. I guess I’m now almost at the point where I could be useful…

VSTO and EWS

Related to all that, I’ve been assigned to work on an Outlook plugin that ties into D365, and a console app that does some back-end processing related to the plug-in. So now I also need to learn VSTO, which is how the add-in was built, and EWS, which is used in the console app.

VSTO is a bit out of date, but not yet deprecated. If I was going to do a major rewrite on the plug-in, I’d probably switch to Office Add-Ins, which is a bit more modern, I guess.

And EWS is also out of date but not yet deprecated. If I wanted, I could probably move from that to the Graph API.

The main thing I need to do with these projects is to get them to work with Exchange Online. (We’re in the middle of migrating from on-prem right now.) I think I won’t actually have to change the plug-in at all, since it’s working with the Outlook object model, and I don’t think that cares if the email came from Exchange Online or on-prem. There might be a “gotcha” or two in there, though, so I need to at least test it.

For the console app, EWS still works with Exchange Online, but I know I’ll have to change a few things there, including switching over to OAuth for authentication.

And both apps seem to need some cleanup in terms of logging and error-checking. I know that if I make changes to these apps, then people are going to start coming to me with support questions, so I’ll need to make sure I have enough logging to provide support.

There’s actually been a lot of overhead involved in getting up and running on this project. These programs were originally under a different dev group, part of which has gotten moved into my group, so they’re using some conventions and utilities and stuff that I don’t know, and need to learn (and in some cases, gain access to). And I don’t have Outlook on my dev VM, since that’s not normally allowed (for security reasons). And I can’t get to the Exchange Online version of EWS, since that’s blocked (for security reasons). And I need to set up a new app registration, so I can access EWS with OAuth, and that needs to be approved by a global admin. And so on.

Was there a point to this?

If there’s a point to all this, I guess it’s just that I need to keep learning new things and being flexible. I saw a funny comic strip recently about an old man whose doctor tells him that he can help keep his memory sharp by learning new skills. And the old man says that his memory isn’t good enough for him to learn new skills. And of course I can’t remember where I saw that strip now, so I can’t link to it here. It was probably on GoComics, which I recently re-subscribed to, after canceling my subscription almost a decade ago. I’ve decided that reading the comic strips every morning is healthier than browsing Facebook and Twitter, so that’s why I re-subscribed. (I may also sign up for Comics Kingdom too, but that’s a subject for a different blog post.) Anyway, since I can’t find the strip I was looking for, here’s a different one, along similar lines.

Not at NYCC

Well, it’s Saturday, and I’m keeping an eye on NYCC, but I’m not feeling like it was a mistake to skip out on it. I’m feeling a bit better today, after just staying home and resting on Thursday and Friday. I’d probably be in pretty bad shape if I’d tried going to NYCC this week.

It sounds like mask compliance and enforcement at NYCC hasn’t been great. I’m not really surprised at that. But it’s another little indicator helping to convince me that staying home was the right decision.

There’s plenty of news coming out of NYCC. Popverse has a lot. (They’re owned by Reedpop, so they’re kind of the “official” place for NYCC news, I guess.) The Beat has a lot too. I’m so far behind on my reading and watching that there’s just not much point in me watching any of these panels. The Star Trek panels might be fun, but I still haven’t watched the second season of Picard or the fourth season of Discovery yet. The LoTR: The Rings of Power panel might be fun, but I still haven’t started watching season one yet. (If I were going, by the way, this article from space.com has a good list of interesting panels.)

Back on the subject of COVID, Dr Fauci seems to be doing a little interview tour through New York and New Jersey. He was on Colbert’s show on Thursday, and he actually went and got his bivalent booster shot as part of his appearance there. The segment was kind of corny, but if it convinces anyone to go and get boosted, then it was worth it, I guess.

Fauci also appeared on NJ PBS’ Chat Box with David Cruz this week. I was kind of surprised to see someone at his level show up there. I don’t know how many viewers Chat Box has, but I can’t imagine that it’s a lot. Anyway, it was a pretty good interview, though of course most of Fauci’s answers are fairly predictable at this point. Cruz, at one point asks him “Are you optimistic that we can avoid, just, destroying ourselves?” which is a pretty depressing question, but one I keep asking myself too. (Spoiler: Fauci’s answer isn’t that reassuring…)

Vacation

As per my last post, I am starting a mini-vacation today, but not going to NYCC. I’ve been thinking a bit about what I might do to have fun for the next few days, and I guess I’m mostly going to just hang around the apartment, reading comics and watching movies. I put a hold on a couple of Studio Ghibli DVDs at the library, so I’ll go pick those up today and watch them.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been gradually watching or rewatching all of the Ghibli films over the last couple of years, following along with the Ghibliotheque podcast. I’m not really following their order, exactly. I recently re-watched Castle in the Sky and Howl’s Moving Castle, just because I was in the mood to rewatch those. I’m planning on watching Pom Poko today, which I’ve never seen before, and maybe Porco Rosso, which I’ve only seen once.

I could simplify this project by subscribing to HBO Max, which now has all the Ghibli films, but I still like buying Blu-rays and borrowing DVDs from the library. It makes the project more interesting, I think. I have about ten of the fancy Ghibli SteelBook Blu-rays now. I really don’t need to be accumulating more discs, but they’re not terribly expensive and there aren’t enough of them to become a storage problem.

Well, I was going to blog about a bunch of stuff that I might do on my vacation, but I wound up mostly just blogging about Ghibli. And now I feel like I should get up and go for a walk, since it is (finally) not raining, and I need some exercise.

giving up on NYCC

I’ve been going back and forth about whether or not I really wanted to go to NYCC this year. The show is next weekend, so I really needed to make a decision now. I’m sick this weekend, and I was sick last weekend, so I decided this morning that assuming I’ll be well enough to go into NYC next weekend was maybe not a good bet. And, if I am well enough to go in, assuming that I’ll get through the con without getting sick again was probably also a bad bet.

So I went ahead and returned my ticket. NYCC uses a service called Lyte to handle ticket returns and resales. The process was pretty simple. Four-day badges are sold out and there’s clearly still demand for them, so my “refund” was for basically the full value of the ticket. So I’m only out the $20 delivery fee. (And I still get to keep the $30 shirt I bought.) Lyte seems to be reselling the four-day badges at about a $50 markup.

I guess Lyte is tied into ShowClix, which handles tickets for NYCC, and automatically invalidates the badge. Still, they required me to fill out a separate Google Form and upload an image of my badge, cut in two. I’m assuming an actual human being will need to review that and click an “OK” button somewhere to validate the return, so it’s not a completely automated process.

The refund should be issued through PayPal on October 10, right after the con. PayPal wouldn’t be my preferred way to get that money back, but it’s good enough, I guess.

In addition to worrying about COVID, and my “general health” thing, I’ve also found that I’m just not that enthusiastic about anything going on at the con this year. I haven’t really fully read through the panel schedule or scheduled guest list, but from what I’ve seen, nothing is really a must-see for me. I’d probably find more than enough fun stuff to do, if I went, but there’s nothing that’s really calling out to me.

So now I also have three scheduled PTO days that I need to decide if I still want to take or if I want to cancel those too. I actually feel like I could use the time off, so I guess I’ll keep those, and just spend some time puttering around the apartment, catching up on some reading, and watching some TV.