Barry Carlyon I ramble

21Aug/100

Some Random Useful Things

Some random useful things:

Twitter, is scrapping Basic Auth! Which means no more simple curl calls, its on to OAuth.

Check out http://dev.twitter.com/pages/basic_to_oauth for how to update your Apps/Usage, and http://countdowntooauth.com/ for a handy countdown.

In other twitter news, I use Notifo to forward my twitter replies to my iPhone, which uses Push.ly to grab the stream. Twitter has currently borked @Replies both in apps and on the website, however Notifo announced they have updated their website with a new design, (hurrah), and a desktop client (further hurrah).
So with my mac and growl I now get Growl @ Responses..... SUCCESS!

Thats enough twitter! I was linked in a random IRC channel to http://jsfiddle.net/, which is a sort of real time code and run/test interface for several different javascript libs, including MooTools, and jQuery. Its currently in Alpha and under "heavy development", so far I have found it quite useful, since it saves a lot of time in prototyping something. Looking forward to when they add user accounts, will be easier to track my own fiddles, heres the 5th version of me fiddling with jQuery UI tabs yes it has basic version control!

Facebook next, came across this today: http://developers.facebook.com/roadmap pretty much nails the coffin shut on FBML and suggests that we will all be using iFrames instead....

Not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing, since iFrames are not always the most secure of things, but will make sending more upto date stuff to a Facebook page easier. And no longer stuck with Facebook caching, which in itself is a useful thing....

Also they are moving to a larger oauth setting with the use of oauth version 2! And scrapping their Rest API.

So there is a lot of change going on within two of the larger things I have been involved with (in terms of building things for clients), so in this vein when is the Last.FM api moving to oAuth too, tho it does use a token based Auth now?!

I'm gonna need to do a lot of recoding/refactoring for things that use FBML and basic Auth....

Is oAuth the future for all API's? What do you think?

Edit:

O and I am going to invest in one of these!

15Apr/100

Twitter @Anywhere, and the End of Halo 2

So there I was last night, watching Justin.tv. a couple of streams, a Live Halo 2 stream and live coverage of Chirp, the Twitter Developers Conference.

My net was actually behaving for once, watching two Justin.TV streams, sending and receiving a Skype video chat, as well as uploading tracks to the LSRfm.com Jukebox.


Today is the final day of Xbox Live existing for Original Xbox and Original Xbox Games, most predominately Halo 2, what this means is that you can still play the game locally, but you can't go online via Xbox Live and play match making/custom games. They are going to turn those servers over to the Xbox 360 Network. Bungie News article about the end of Halo 2

So, no more Halo2, unless you're a Xbox KAI user for example or LAN PARTY!!!!

I have been up all night and as of 9am BST (+1) this morning, the servers are still on, so get you're Halo 2 on!

Back to Twitter/Chirp, Twitter has launched their new Developers website, which essentially brings together the API documentation, the Oauth application registration, and API status pages to a single location.

Twitter also spoke about @Anywhere which essentially allows you to integrate some aspects of Twitter into your website, thru the use of a single javascript call.


You can allow users to tweet from your website, automatically convert any @username to the new hovercards. See the example from @abraham on (His Site).

And then allow users to follow you, without bouncing to twitter, other than a popup to authenticate you to twitter and allow the Anywhere App access.

Check Anywhere out at http://dev.twitter.com/anywhere/ and checkout what The Guardian are doing with it.

On a unrelated point, when you login to Justin.TV via twitter, it is automatically posts anything you put in the video chat box, to your twitter account, along with links to what you are watching, bit of a spam fest, if you a) don't know about it and b) forget to turn it off. But it led to this: Read and LOL

25Mar/100

Halo Reach is coming

So Halo Reach the Beta multi-player is just over a month away.

And this caught my eye on the twitter feed as retweeted by @Bungietweets from @TheFeed

http://bit.ly/ciThuW

Halo Reach and its "All-Encompassing Player Investment System" looks quite good, but will be interested to see it in use when the times comes

28May/090

Summer of Code is on, Horace Andy is off and You Do Talk About Barcamp

So I have finally recovered from the epic weekend that was Fruity, Tidy, and Slamdunk as well as Slam Dunk prep. when not working.

In the end Arrived at work at 11am Saturday (Tidy day) and left 3am Monday (after Slamdunk after Party), an epic Weekend.

Throughly enjoyed some of the music as well, I was running lights using Chamsys (MagicQ) on the Vans Stage, aka The Riley Smith Hall, no drinks of any kind thank you!

Best thing about my MagicQ was the remote desktop into the PC, running lights off my phone and netbook was good fun.

So The Slackers and King Blues were enjoyed, but AntiFlag were far too policitical (I now know what a Circle Pit is too).

 

So Today is day 4 of Google Summer of Code, so far done nothing for it. I lost Monday to sleeping (eventually out of bed by 5pm) Tuesday was clear the theatre day, Wednesday was getting office back in order, and today is Thursday, supposed to be doing the Horace Andy gig, lighting wise, however its been Cancelled.

 

So that takes us to, what am I going to do today, and Friday. Lets plan Summer of Code work, I'm working for GeekLog on a Syndication API, details to follow.

 

That then takes us to the Weekend, which is BarCamp Leeds 2009, part of Leeds Web Festival 2009. Should be good fun, at least is was last time, last years BarCamp let me discover geekery in Leeds, which has led to loads of new friends. And lots of werewolf playing.

 

So look out for lots and lots of Twittering this weekend on that.

 

Also I jsut remembered its my Boss'es leaving do on Friday so off to Grease Fruity, its  going to be EPIC!

And the Fruity dancers are coming as Pink Ladies too.

 

Right to GSoC Planning

1Apr/091

GSoC WordPress Application!

MEDIA!


 

These days media has become an important part of the web, mainly in terms of cross media and platform.

 

From twitter to facebook, and images to film, wordpress needs to support everything and anything in a simple to use and understand way.

 

This needs to include Video, RSS+XML, Images and the related effective ways to show them to a visiting user.

 

 

 

 

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Personal Details

 

Name: Barry Carlyon


Project Elements

 

 

Out of the box support for,

Image Upload,

Image Thumbnail Generation, possibly using phpThumb, caching of thumbnail,

 

 

Lightbox Gallery,

CopperMine Gallery,

Facebook Style Gallery,

I see the creation of a page, and you pick what style of gallery you want, image selection by tag, category, month it appeared in a post.

 

 

Post to twitter,

Post to Facebook (news feed),

Easy method to display Blog on Myspace, or MyspaceBlog Integration

Including http://wordpress.org/extend/ideas/topic.php?id=74

 

Some of this may involve combining several plugins into core.

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Schedule of Deliverables

 

 

GSoC is roughly a 13 week period

Week 1

Week 2

Week 3

Week 4

Week 5

Week 6

Week 7

Week 8

 

Twitter/Facebook integration

 

Week 9

 

Myspace Blog Integration/Feeding

This will require some research, I'm not sure what MySpace offers to developers off the top of my head.

There are some shortcuts such as using a piece of flash to read the blogs XML/RSS feed and generate from that.

 

Week 10

Week 11

Week 12

Week 13

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Open Source Development Experience

 

 

I contribute (ir)regularly to phpBB, forum software, both as a “modder”, creating and supporting modifications/extra features and assisting users on the forum with posted problems about there own forum, been very busy at Uni this year, hence irregularly.

 

Last year for GSoC I was working with PHP, on the now aborted one bug tracker to rule them all.

 

I have/am in the process of building my own Open Source Content Management System written in PHP, CarlyonCMS.

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Work/Internship Experience

 

 

Only freelance web development work, on stand alone sites and the Facebook Platform, for Applications.

 

And of course GSoC last year.

 

I also volunteer at LSRfm.com Leeds Student Radio, I am currently Head of Web Development

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Academic Experience

 

 

I am currently in my Second Year, studying New Media at the University of Leeds, UK.

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Why WordPress?

 

 

Basically its difficult to find projects to match my skills set since GSoC tends to have projects that require code to run continuously not single run code like a website.

 

I nearly applied for WordPress last year, however I came in a little late and applied during the extended application period.

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Myself

 

GSoC is an interesting platform, however it can be difficult to find a project, that fits my skill set, I'm not a programming in the sense that one builds a programme to run continuously, but more of a coder who builds websites.

 

I was the recent winner of the Gary Frisch Bursary for Software in radio, for my Open Source Content Management System, which currently runs the LSRfm.com (Leeds Student Radio) website, (http://LSRfm.com/). This CMS (Carlyon CMS) I will use to form the basis of the web based Client.

 

I used to be able to program perl, but of late have not had the chance to practice it so my perl is rusty, I am currently learning Ruby on Rails and Coldfusion as well.

 

My aim in life is to continue working in the Multi Platform Radio Environment in the UK, which is pretty much what I do at the moment as a Volunteer at LSRfm.com where I am Head of Web Development.

 

Last year I was involved with the Now Aborted, One Bug Tracker to Rule them all Project over at PHP.