Everyday software development is composed mostly of non scientific related problems, meaning less time working on complex new algorithms, and more doing simple, action-reaction development, like UI, database queries, reports and so on. Meaning that the bulk of our everyday tasks should involve more effort on how to organize and write the code than how to solve a particular problem, thinking more on abstractions and code interactions ratter than the algorithms themselves.

It is like that lazy developer that delivers a simple functionality, like an UI interaction, but through a highly coupled and dispersed solution, with code being written in places it shouldn’t be. Sure it could be said that the value was delivered, but a big amount of legacy code was created in the process, and that is because the developer is focusing on the easy part of the task, the algorithm, ratter than a proper abstraction to define it.

It is easy to make something work, but making it maintainable, that is another story. We should, as developers, excel at creating abstractions. This is our real job.

Recently I had to integrate video playback on my job’s Java OpenGL engine, which uses JOGL.

Java has a support to media playback through it’s Java Media Framework, which unfortunately, on it’s current version (2.1.1e) does not support many formats for video playback.

So I quickly looked for alternatives, including IBM Toolkit for mpeg4, that hadn’t a sufficient production performance I was looking for, and didn’t offer an easy option for frame grabbing or plugin extensions as JMF does.

Next was Fobs4JMF, which is JMF + ffmpeg. This solution was much more interesting, since it offers a wide variety of codecs (ogg, mp3, m4a, divx, xvid, h264, mov, etc) and is based on the solid ffmpeg solution to decode audio and video.

My implementation, uses the plug-in capabilities of JMF to extend a custom renderer that does a pixel type conversion and rendering to a texture:

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It’s been more than 6 months that my Wii was producing an awful lawn mower sound in the disk drive, and I finally decided to open it up and “try” to fix the problem.

Since I’ve seen other people with similar problems on YouTube, such as:

I decided to put my experience on how I fixed it.

You will need Nintendo screwdriver, which you can easily find on eBay.

I’ve used the following video as a guide during the disassembling of my console:

Now how I did it:

There is one screw above your Wii’s drive that is right above the power button, loose it a little and stick something to level the plate a little bit up. You can test this with your Wii still opened until you don’t hear that noise anymore.

Here is a front picture of my fixed Wii (follow the link to see the Flickr notes):

I should have taken a picture from above, but I was too happy that the problem was gone, that I just remember to register how I did it after most of my Wii had been put back together already.

Hope it helps someone!