When I started this site, all I wanted was a place to pin down my thoughts. Back in 2007, I chose WordPress to be the backend of Code-muse.com. It’s been almost 6 years, my requirements for this site have changed and there’s been some interesting changes in the technology landscape with respect to web development and blogging in these years.

Besides writing down an occasional blog post, Code-muse.com has become the home of Remote Control for XBMC as well. I was getting tired of having to use WPs web backend to edit the posts and pages, and most of the time was copy/pasting text to/from Vim. So I was actually wondering why I didn’t choose to use a static website generator in the first place. Maybe they weren’t as popular in 2006 as they are now.

I’ve took some time to check out several popular static blog/site generators and finally settled with Pelican, a Python based static site generator. I’m not really into Ruby, which is why I didn’t go for Jeckyll or Octopress. I checked Hyde, which looks promising, but there’s almost no documentation for Hyde, whereas Pelican’s documentation is excellent. As far as I can tell at this moment, I quite content with Pelican.

So here it is; a statically served all new Code-muse.com.

XBMC Remote Control for iPad has a new name, it will now live on as Remote Control for XBMC. The latest release (1.8.0) has many internal improvements using new iOS 5.x features, preparing for iPhone/iPod touch support. Yep, you read that correctly: support for iPhone and iPod touch devices is coming! But before that’s finished, this release pushes some improvements made in the process so far and fixes compatibility with the upcoming XBMC Frodo (12.0) release.

For the full list of changes and to get the latest version, visit the App Store.

A new update to XBMC Remote Control for iPad, which adds additional eye-candy when you browse your music and TV show library and brings some minor bug fixes including updates to support the latest Frodo builds, is now is now available as version 1.7.0 on the App Store.

A few weeks ago I released a minor update bringing button tap-and-hold repeat functionality for navigation controls as well as the volume decrease and increase buttons. With that I was also preparing new seek functionality which is available in the latest update.

You can now tap-and-hold the next and previous buttons to rewind and fast-forward. Also the progress bar is now a slider, that can be dragged to seek as well. Furthermore, some minor improvements: I improved the volume slider graphic design; added suspend and reboot options to the power button; added early Frodo nightly build support ((Tested with 7/27 build, but no guarantees it’ll keep working with newer builds)); internal network robustness improvements and some minor bugfixes.

XBMC Remote Control for iPad 1.6.0 is now available on the App Store.

I’m very excited to announce that finally XBMC Remote Control for iPad now supports movie library browsing too! Version 1.5.0 is now available for download on the App Store.

I’ve spent a lot of time optimizing the new movie thumbnail view for all iPad models, including the original iPad 1, to work smoothly even with large libraries. The browser works in both portrait as well as landscape mode, just like the music and TV shows browsers. For large enough libraries a section index is included automatically for jumping quickly through different sections of your library. I’ve also updated the dedicated page here on my blog too with fresh screenshots. Enjoy!

Unfortunately I haven’t (yet) laid my hands on a new iPad, but I hope to do so soon. I’m really interested to see Apple’s Retina display on a 9.7” device, and of course I’d love to see my own XBMC Remote Control for iPad on it! I immediately updated it with Retina display support after Apple’s latest update of Xcode with a Retina iPad simulator and I’m happy to announce that this update has landed on the App Store. For everyone that can already try it on a new iPad: enjoy!

A few days ago the XBMC team released XBMC Eden release candidate 1. In there, the JSON-RPC protocol version has been updated to version 4, which causes problems with XBMC Remote Control for iPad. That’s my bad; I thought the version number would only be increased at the official release, but it seems that I should have accounted for the new version number in the RC cycles already. For everyone that updated to RC1 and having problems connecting, this morning I submitted XBMC Remote Control for iPad 1.4.3 for review by Apple, which fixes the problem. I hope it will be available in the App Store in a few days.

By the way, movie support is going forward, my goal is to release it around the time that XBMC Eden is officially released as well.

Update: 1.4.3 which fixes this problem has been approved by Apple and is available as of March 2.

A minor update of XBMC Remote Control for iPad is now available on the App Store, which adds support for the upcoming XBMC 11.0 (Eden). If you are still using nightly builds, please make sure it is from October 19 or later. Upcoming Eden beta’s and RC builds should be fully supported, because the XBMC development team has frozen the JSON-RPC interface, that XBMC Remote Control for iPad uses to communicate with XBMC.

In the meantime I’m continuing my work on movie library browsing support.

The past two months I have gone back to being a student again. Well, at least in the evening hours. Following ai-class.com took a significant part of the time I would have otherwise spent on other personal endeavors such as reading, blogging or writing XBMC remotes, but it was worth every minute. Although the future might prove me wrong, I have the feeling that the internet — after affecting or re-inventing many other fields — is now starting to redefine education as well. Not that the internet itself reinvents something; its of course humans themselves that redefine things using the internet as a new medium. That’s what Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun did with their “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” class.

Salman Kahn’s Kahn Academy was the first pioneer that I heard of that was trying to combine education and the internet in a very useful way, and he’s ever-expanding the number of online lessons you can watch. With 2,700 videos you can learn something new everyday for the next 7 years. Amazing.

Back in August I read on Hacker News the announcement that Stanford is opening up an AI class via the web. For free. I was really excited about this idea and I enrolled that same day. During my CS program at the Eindhoven University of Technology I didn’t really took any of the AI or machine learning tracks, so it would also be a very interesting topic for me to learn more about. How would that be, to enroll and follow a full class through the internet? Would I be able to do a Stanford-level class in my spare time, next to my day-time job? Is this the future of education?

After going through the full class I can only say I liked it very much. The material was interesting, the format was very well thought out, and both professor Norvig and professor Thrun are apt and enthusiastic teachers. To get a feeling of the format, just follow one or two units, do some quizzes or take a look at the homework or exam questions. There were teething problems of course, and obviously an actual live lecture with a teacher and peers is in many ways incomparable to following an online class by yourself. However I believe this is a really good start and gets very close; after finishing the final exam and receiving my final rating, the accomplishment feels the same as it felt when I was attending university.

Summarized, I’ve learned a lot about a field that I had left unexplored up to now, and while doing that I might have also seen a glimpse of the future.