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Manipulate Your TV Listings with TiVo+Ajax
scrapeYurShoos writes "As posted on PVRBlog: another cool use for Ajax (or whatever you want to call it), this one culls the Now Playing xml file residing on your TiVo and transforms it using xsl into a pretty webpage or a Pie Chart."
No more dirty movies.
to a pie chart that has a key so we know what the colors mean.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
yawn, someone has some time on their hands. Seriously, maybe better scheduling, or better recomendations would be nice. I sometimes miss a show I really like b/c I'm watching something else. That ability to put a type of show on some priority listing that allows you to be notified if one of these types of shows is playing would be cool. But why would you want to see the schedule as a pie chart?
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
If nerds could really manipulate TV listings, we'd have new episodes of "Star Trek" every night (including those "T'Pol's Bath" shows aired only after midnight).
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
This is a really cool hack, it's nice that it doesn't require me to get telnet or anything running on my tivo. However, it's not very accurate. For instance, I have 121 episodes of Good Eat's Tivo'd, but it's only reporting 13.
Read this
On the other hand, Ajax does sound like an interesting meat byproduct.
AJAX
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Yes, I know that Tivo hacking is popular, but leaving behind a lemon scent after cleaning up the dirt and filth that is recorded on a Tivo hard drive is a little weird...even for Slashdot.
I heard that your library burnt down and destroyed your only two books - and one was not even coloured in yet.
Ajax means that your browser makes requests via javascript to send/receive new content, rather than loading completely new pages. Very handy, and it's nice that there's finally a name for it. (Pain in the ass to unit test though, since there aren't any good javascript libraries for Perl or Ruby [what I use for web testing]).
So what on earth does it have to do with this little XSL hack? You could do the same thing from your command line, no web at all!
Let's go easy on those buzzwords okay? They take otherwise good ideas and drive them into the ground.
I'm glad somebody pointed this out. "Ajax" is just one guy's acronym ("Asynchronous JavaScript + XML") for a technique he didn't invent that's been around for years, first as the xmlHttpRequest ActiveX control for IE and now supported natively by Mozilla. Basically, instead of switching from one web page to another, you have a single page that sits in the browser accepting user input, getting data from a server and repainting portions of itself, just like a standard application. No need to maintain session state because the user stays on that page for the whole session.
When I first found out about xmlHttpRequest back around 1998 I got all excited. It seemed like what the web had been waiting for. I was really surprised when Asp.Net returned to more of a refresh-refresh-refresh model with an elaborate state maintenance scheme.
I find designing pages with xmlHttpRequest intensely fun and more like good old fashioned application programming. Do yourself a favor and try it out.
We decided to call it 'Jasc' at work.
Javascript API for Server Communication. AJAX seemed to avoid most of the uses of the various technologies the are included in this umbrella.
For example, the communications do not have to be asynchronous and doesn't actually need to have anything to do with XML.
Actually the engine isn't even required to be JavaScript, IE uses ActiveX objects and I have seen an example of an implementation using Java in Opera. However for our API, we are wrapping the engine in a JS object and only implementing in IE and Gecko engined browsers.
Here's a good comment from the original slashdot "ajax" discussion that sums it up
There is no gravity...the earth just sucks.