Whew, it's been a tough week and a half. Earlier in the month I began coding up the section of this website dedicated to music. The functionality itself is something similar to what I've tried to accomplish in the past, however, rather than manually entering music track information, this time it needed to be automatic. Like I mentioned in a previous post, thanks to Brandon Fuller's Now Playing plugin for iTunes on OS X, I can now use iTunes as the agent that makes the POST requests to this web site. The rest is handled by some Ruby on Rails magic.

Like many other fans of Dan Brown, I was extremely enthusiastic about Ron Howard taking the Da Vinci Code and porting it to the big-screen. Heck, Tom Hanks was the star, how could you go wrong? The impossible never ceases to amaze me. Not only was the Da Vinci Code movie one of the worst movies I've allowed my eyes and ears to entertain, but it wasn't even accurate according to the story-line in the book.

Let me back up for a moment and admit that I have not yet completed the book. I started it and got about 25% of the way through it and quit. The book was interesting, but I think at the time, Halo 2 attracted my attention a little more. However, my friend, Shawna, did read the book and gave me the scoop on just how poorly instrumented the movie was in comparison with the events that occurred in the book. Despite the lackluster quality of the movie itself, I'm sure all the hype, marketing, and other buzz about the movie will still draw quite a profit.

I'm done ranting, but let me offer you an alternative Friday night, one that doesn't involve puzzles, boring story-line, poor acting, and a movie that never seems to end. I would highly suggest that you and a few friends take the $8-10 you would each pay for tickets to Da Vinici Code at a theater like Loews at the Waterfront and alternatively spend that on 3-4 glass beer bottles. Take those bottles, smash them over your heads and then take a 9-volt battery and repeatedly place it on your tongue. The end result will be more entertaining and less painful than the 2 hours and 29 minutes I just endured stuck to my seat waiting for a ray of hope that never came.

I've been writing Rails test code for what feels like the last century. Unit tests, functional tests, integration tests...ick! I finally managed to get it up to about 1.3 lines of test code to every line of production code. Now that I've hit that point, I figured a change in coding behavior was necessary.

For quite some time, I've been using my own AppleScript code to do a HTTP POST to a certain web service on my site. Yeah, I guess this worked, but it wasn't quite as slick as I would have liked. There were a few plugins available, but nothing to useful. Now Playing is a useful iTunes plugin written by Brandon Fuller and was previously only available for the Windows platform. It provides a number of features, one of which was what I mentioned above, however, until now, it hasn't been available for OSX.