Bluetooth Remote Control for Windows Media Center

After years of using my Bluetooth mouse to control Windows Media Center (WMC) from my couch - I figured out that I needed a proper remote control (actually I visited a friend who used the IR remote of WMC). After endless time of searching I found the PS3 remote (Sony employs Bluetooth *yeah*) and it works with WMC using a small program that translates the game controller HID events to actual keystrokes.

It is called PS3BluMote (SRC via github) and written by Ben Barron.
As Ben's website was not reachable, I compiled from using VS2012 - took me about 2min.

And it works perfectly - I only need to figure out good keymapping (WMC key shortcuts are available here). In fact, I recommend to use for play/pause, skip and volume control the windows events (in PS3BlueMote: Media_) and not the WMC shortcuts - in this way also VLC and other players can be controlled.

Here are some additional startup options for WMC: I created a shortcut to go to the music section directly.

PS: I use it on Windows 8 Pro with WMC

(Rails3) ActiveRecords: how to implement a constructor and init own attributes

Today I encountered two nasty things during Rails development. My idea was to create a model class (< ActiveRecord:Base) that on creation create the current timestamp.
It is not possible to override initialize (at least it is doing nothing) as it is an ActiveRecord:Base.

I found the callback after_initialize defined by ActiveRecord, which is however not the correct way anymore. You should use it in macro style (source).

The next problem is that ActiveRecord overwrites the accessors and because ruby is not using the accessors by default if you are in the object, it must be called explicitely.

This works for me:

class A < ActiveRecord::Base
  attr_accessible :a
  after_initialize :init
  def init
    @a = "a"
    self[:a] = "b"
  end
end