Ionshard Development

Pyxis is operational

I have been informed that the old style of streaming is now operational again.

I do plan to continue working on migrating Pyxis to the new Adobe Flash based system to hopefully prevent further outages in the future. However now I will plan to keep the old provider supported.

Thank you for using Pyxis

Pyxis Notification

So I believe I should be able to get Pyxis up and running. However I don’t know when that may be. If you would like to be notified when Pyxis is operational again please fill out the form below.

UPDATE: This will be used to update people when the new flash based player is supported which should solve a lot of the bugs!

Pyxis has stopped working!

I have received multiple reports that Pyxis has stopped working, and it is as I feared. It appears SIRIUS has deprecated the old style player.

This means that 90% of Pyxis is now broken and to fix it I will have to reverse engineer the entire new player, which is now flash based. This will take time and a lot of effort, something I am curious if it may or may not be worth it. Originally Pyxis was so important because it was very difficult to listen to the online streams on Linux. However the new flash based player is compatible with Linux. This isn’t saying that I won’t do the work, but if I am going to put this much time into it, I need to know it’s worth it.

Here’s how we do it:

1. Tthe best way of all to get Pyxis working again, and this is the heart of Open Source and why Ionshard exists, is to help out! All the code is on github and I’m using the github wiki to document the new player. Any little bit helps, I’m not saying fix it yourself, just help me out since this is getting out of my area of expertise, I have never had to reverse engineer a web application, much less a flash based web application. Join github, fork the project, poke around, shoot me an email with questions, get some discussion on this going. Yay community!
2. If you aren’t a programmer or you think “I couldn’t possibly do anything” (which you’d be amazed if you tried) I am going to swallow my ideals and add a donate button to the bottom of this post, I have never tried to profit off of Pyxis before, and I am not trying to profit now. I am not looking for a “set” limit, I just need to know people want this done. The main reason I am putting a donate button up, isn’t for the money itself, but what the money will do, which is motivation. If I have received monetary gain for something, I must deliver. So that’s what I am looking for, ‘you’ to put pressure on ‘me’ to do this.
3. Now I am also a cheap student, and I don’t like having to give money if I don’t want to, so there is also the free method, just send me an email saying why you think it is worthwhile to update Pyxis, even when there is a compatible web player. I’m not looking for begging, I just want to know why people want Pyxis.

I am going to start looking into what it would it would take / is it even possible to get Pyxis working again. Hopefully this isn’t as complicated as I think it is going to be.

Corey a.k.a. Kasuko

Version 0.2.3 Released

So I received a lot of reports of bugs after Sirius/AM updated their new channel line up. This was all around one clump of code that involved taking the audio stream’s name and trying to find the “Now Playing Info” from that name. This isn’t a direct relationship, the stream’s name isn’t a perfect match to the channel name in the now playing info (an XML file that is grabbed from the website) when there was a problem retrieving the now playing information or the stream name didn’t match the channel name (such as “sirius xm chill” not matching “siriusxm chill”) then funky things would happen.

This has been fixed thanks to Don Klime who graciously set up a VM with his account information that allowed me to test and fix these issues (since I do not have an active internet account any longer).

The issue has been resolved and the changes have been pushed to the Ubuntu PPA and the Arch Linux User Repository (AUR), so just update via your standard update method.

This isn’t everything though and there are still some unresolved issues with Pyxis, such as the inability to play on Natty Narwhal. Which I should be getting around to eventually.

New SIRIUS/XM Player

So it appears that SIRIUS has upgraded their system a bit and if you use the “Listen Online” function you are greeted with a new fancy flash based player. While this is exciting in the fact you can now use the online player on Linux based systems (making Pyxis a little bit obsolete) it is upsetting because there is a new authentication system. When I last checked the old system was still working however I have received reports of a certain type of subscription not working. Which means it looks like I have to reverse engineer this new system. Which is a large task among it self. I am really glad I got around to separating the Canadian and US authentication because the Canada site hasn’t changed.

To add to the misery SIRIUS has canceled my Lifetime account which means I guess I’ll be joining the ranks of the $2.99/Month to continue development on Pyxis.
Here’s to hoping I get some time in the future!

Kasuko

New incredibly stable hosting

As more and more people begin to use the software associated with Ionshard Development, most notably Pyxis, I am finding the stable hosting of ionshard.com becoming more and more important. I need people to be able to see what Pyxis is and how they can get a hold of me in case something isn’t working.

I am a Computer Science student so that’s why thus far the hosting has been unstable. I’m always playing around with the technology behind the website, but all that has to stop.

This site is now hosted as a Tumblr blog. It is free so it requires no financial support. Tumblr is a great service so I shouldn’t be having large issues with uptime.

The email backend is now run by a free version of Google Apps for Business and the domain has always been a Go Daddy domain. Which I don’t find is a burden on my wallet at all.

So there you have it, no more changing, no more error pages. Just this site! I hope you like it.