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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.
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.
One thing that consultants are good at is marketing. One thing that OSS developers are ridiculously bad at is marketing. (Witness OGG VORBIS) The presence of athe Ajax meme on Slashdot is the proof in the pudding, so to speak.
OSS developers could make a lossless 90% compression codec - and they'd probably call it OMGWTFBBQ!& (pronounced BANGAMP) Then they'd complain because nobody would adopt their brilliant product.
Geeks don't like to admit it, but marketing is important.
Yes, it's a blog. Sorry if that offends you.