Something (somebody…?) has been keeping me busy. Sorry!

A couple of interesting developments, all of a techie nature.

One… is that I got hit by a drive-by virus infection at work the other day. Imagine that – me, getting a computer virus! I became aware of its presense almost immediately, as I tend to do a lot of work online and I was suddenly unable to do anything. Existing connections – like the VPN to my home network – continued to work fine, but I couldn’t visit new sites.

The culprit was some trojan or whatever that was opening untold numbers of TCP connections in an attempt to send email. And while I suppose that this is a good, self-serving way to propagate, it’s not terribly inconspicuous. However, it took an entire day to get the thing removed; the eventual victor was a tool named ComboFix.

But that’s neither here nor there.  The point of interest is that Firefox has been Behaving Badly(tm) since then, using copious amounts of CPU every time it changes pages.  I suspect it’s been damaged in some way – or maybe it’s trying to phone home somewhere – but suffice it to say that it’s now maddeningly frustrating to use.  I can’t see any phone-home connections, but that hasn’t stopped 2.x, 3.0 and 3.5 from all being naughty in this regard.

So I’ve been using Google Chrome for my browsing needs.  Again, that’s neither here nor there.  The real message… which is quite selfish really… is that I’ve been using Chrome with the Whole Home Audio web interface and it’s quite a slick experience.  Which is to say – in a very, very, very long-winded way – that I’ve come a long way from Firefox-dependence with respect to said interface.

I still don’t have workable drag-drop support, and its absence is notable during some playlist maintenance operations.  But with this one exception it’s all slick as snot.

And while I’m on the topic of the Whole Home Audio interface… I made a small discovery the other day with IIS’ setup that was potentially causing some consternation.  The interface will show you what’s playing on a particular zone, and the page which shows this information is very dynamic; a draggable, self-updating time bar; a self-updating, dynamic tracklist; a dynamic track position time counter, and some other goodies.

Anyhoo, this all is made possible with XHR objects, all of which make their requests back to IIS.  IIS normally logs every HTTP request, but when you’re making one call every second it gets a little silly.  (On a side note, I may look into using a keepalive connection to do these updates; I don’t know if anybody else does this, but it’s an idea that could reduce the overhead of handling all of these sequential async requests)  Sooooo… the XHR objects would make their requests to a virtual directory which was told to not log any requests.  Great.

Except that, for whatever reason, I had configured this virtual directory with its own “application”.  I have no idea why I would have done this if the only thing I was trying to accomplish was to keep logging in check.  So that config has been removed, and since then the XHR requests have worked as expected.

What else?  Oh yes.

The collection is constantly growing, especially since I made a ton of room on my disk by moving some movies to my netbook.  So as any music listener knows, it’s nice to discover new music.  Having a kick-@ss way of navigating my existing collection is great, but what about discovering similar music or artists?

Last.fm is great for this kind of thing.  And even greater is the API, which allows my music application to query their database.  Today I’ve got a button that can retrieve similar artists and even populate a playlist with their albums.  Using that I’ve added a considerable number of new artists to the stable.  The next step, I think, is to make use of their “scrobbling” feature – allowing my application to update a last.fm user profile with tracks played, so that last.fm can make better recommendations.

This comes dangerously close to the “user” feature that the wifey nixed, but I think I can work around it; I’ll make a playlist “property” which is associated with a last.fm profile, and if you play from a linked playlist then my app will scrobble to the associated last.fm user profile.

So I guess those are the biggies, for now.  Some other small stuff, nothing blogworthy though.  So that’s it fer now.