I checked in some bug fixes to FlexWiki at lunch today with regards to URL parsing.  Some of the special characters used in many URLs were not rendering.  I noticed this in my Intranet installation of FlexWiki at work.  I probably could have used an external link to solve my problems but I don't like the way the external links look. 

I have been using FlexWiki at work every day now.  Several other people have started to catch on in it's usage. We are starting the design phase of our next version and using FlexWiki has worked great as a way to consolodate a set of questions in a central place for review in design meetings.

It came to me today that my ideas on a Multimedia PC really falls under Home Automation.  I think a lot of things I want to do with this PC are directly related to Home Automation and the media player portion of the tasks are a subset of the Home Automation device.  So I am going to change the Namespace on my Wiki from Multimedia to HomeAutomation once I get a chance.  This will make the wiki a little broader in it's content.  I Think I will also change the Multimedia Blog category to Home Automation.

I have an old PC that isn't really doing anything so I decided to make it into a multimedia PC for my home entertainment center.  I looked around a little bit to see if there are any freeware applications that will handle this application.  I found Freevo and MythTV.  Both of these applications are Linux based which is ok for some people but I am a .Net developer so I wanted a Windows .Net solution.  I haven't found anything that is written in C# so I decided to start my own for now to see how far I could take it.

Here are some things I want to do

• Play MP3
• Play My Home Videos
• Slideshow pictures
• X10 Home control
• Speech and Voice recognition
• Record TV Shows
• Monitor Home Security
• Get News feed with speech
• Weather reports
• RSS Aggregator
• Internet Radio
• Home Wiki
• Audio/Text Message center
• Allarm clock
• Play Games

I started a Home Automation Wiki Wiki to keep notes on my progress.

I just finished a bug in the FlexWiki project that had to do with the System.Web.Caching.CacheDependency object.  What a cool object!  You can tie a cached item to a collection of files.  When one of the files is changed the cached item is cleared.  I did not relize the System.Web.Caching namespace had such an object. 

I finished an Xml Transform enhancement for the FlexWiki open source project late last night.  I plan on using this feature to extract XML configuration information from the integration and test servers that run multiple instances of a web application.  It is always painful to keep the documents up to date on what versions of the software are installed on the machines.  Now I will be able to navigate to a wiki page and display the information.

This is the second enhancement I coded for the FlexWiki project.  The first enhancement allowed a user to restore a previos versioned page as the current one.

I plan on contributing more to this project as time allows.

My commute to work has extended to almost 60 minutes at times here in Phoenix Arizona.  Nothing good seems to be on the radio anymore either.  So today I grabbed one of the .Net Rocks internet audio talk shows and burned it to CD.  The ride into work was a lot more informative:)  You can also get the shows from MSDN Hosted .Net Rocks.  I think I will be doing this more often.