a simple project i started back when i was bored and coding on linux. the code uses /dev/urand and a dictionary of words built up from an input file, in this case, a work of shakespeare. the ongoing joke being that given enough monkeys and enough time the monkeys could write a work of shakespeare. this of course is worthless process time better used to cure cancer or something (folding@home) however it's still fun.

the overall idea was to make a team system via distributed computing and have the teams race to complete a work. the process would be typing all the words in the work and then go into editing mode, the modes would be configurable to make the goal of completing the work quicker.

example being, editing mode would be progressive and not complete. such that as words are edited to be in the correct order they would be a building block to be used again. this would, much like the typing mode of just words, make an end to the sequence much closer.

an open ended programming experiment taking the idea of programmatic discovery of services into web service design. the approach consists of starting with a simple baseline of the service and providing content of which other participants will need to parse manually to understand and code against.

it's my version of programming like conversations, built around how a constant group of friends meet weekly for brunch and how the conversations (parallel applications) evolve.

the open ended webservice design was sparked by a lecture by tim ewald at my recent wcf + wf training in waltham, ma. the design proposed by tim is instrumental in making a social project like this possible. i welcome anyone who happens to stumble on this project to participate.

if you have any idea who remorse is you've most likely been somehow preached to about textella, perhaps even a minor lecture in streamtella! at any rate, textella is a gnutella inspired protocol for IRC like functionality. remorse has been working on this stuff for the majority of this decade, we'll eternally make fun of him eternally getting nowhere on the project for eternity. however, i have encouraged him to continue working on it and so it's only right that i actually code a client to utilize textella.

so here lies the humble beginnings of such a daunting task..

short for playlist extender, plext aims to be a plugin architecture to allow additional "playlist" like formats into currently inaccessible players.

winamp was the first (and currently only) supported media player. future targets include wmp, real, and quicktime.

playlist implementations currently include (current drive) xspf

one of the more powerful features of the xspf format is that of content resolution, which allows the content to be described inside the xspf but without a location of the resource. the resource can then be derived through services, allowing an xspf to have several mutations depending on the resolvers used. the resolved xspf is in itself an entirely new xspf which has no concrete binding to the originator xspf.

this xspf resolver is entirely customizable and priority level driven via configuration to allow preferences of which resolution targets (plugins) are preferred. it's entirely possible a resolver doesn't resolve directly to a resource but rather to more resolvable parts (metadata).

two resolver implementations are planned, one written in c# (.net 2.0) and one written in c++ (unmanaged win32/linux)