Author: Barry Carlyon

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

ooooh a JPG, #GSoC2010 for the Visually Oriented

oooh a JPG!

So there I was doing nothing constructive, watching some South Park. Then checking the new LSRfm.com Ustream feed, found the jukebox had failed over, bloody Flash leaking like a whore. So went to remote into my Laptop which is running everything whilst we are offline for Easter. It works thru a high numbered port for VNC access, the only problem is the port is open on my firewall, but not on the University Firewall, only taken me a day and a half to realise this.

So fixed that, and went to IRC to loiter for a bit, and some in the #GSoC channel, did a !timeline, which makes the bot output links to the timeline. Someone has made (in the last few days) a nice Graphical Timeline: I was ooooh a JPG!

Click for the Full version!

This should be how my summer goes, if I get accepted 🙂

#GSoC 2010 – My Applications

My GSoC 2010 Applications.

So for Google Summer of Code 2010 I’m applying for two Organizations, GeekLog and WordPress.
Both are PHP based, and are primarily MySQL.
Both meet my skill sets and use Object Orientated Programming, so hopefully anything I learn/develop I can fold back into CarlyonCMS. Win 🙂


GeekLog, I have applied to work on the Email Queue needs and Core Notifications, sending subscription emails and the like to end users. Email Queue I have knowledge of since LSRfm.com can only send 600 emails per hour… (Its a Spam Thing). So the LSRfm.com Megalist, sends upto 400 emails per hour. Subsequently this queue system is part of Carlyon CMS.


WordPress I am applying for two separate projects.

Taken from the ideas page, I’ve selected Trac Annihilation (still can’t spell Annihilation, thank God for spell checkers), and the Bugtracker.

Bugtracking I have experience on, having seen and worked on the Bugtracker for PHP for GSoC 2008, (woo go me I have bcarlyon [at] php.net as a email address (Update: Hmm it doesn’t appear to work anymore :sadface: (Update 2 I think they purged it when PHP moved to SVN over CVS))), which was good fun and a learning experience.

(As part of the WordPress application you need to document your application on a WordPress powered blog….)

WordPress, as a publishing platform, should lend itself easily to being adapted to become a BugTracker, since the main elements, like categories, posting and comments, already exist, simply moving a b(lo)ug post, from one category to another would make it open/closed/assigned etc.
The interesting part here would be the interaction with SVN, and the need to extra data from Commits or source files.

My other WordPress application for Trac Annihilation (got it right that time), involves working on and closing as many open tickets as possible, since with the advent of WordPress’es beta the number of tickets is gonna rocket.
Essentially this is just a matter of munching thru as many tickets as possible and closing them, after solving them.
Which would be good fun and a great learning experience.

I just hope one of the three accepts me, or I could end up with a Summer of nothing big to do…..

Motion Graphics Audio Sourcing

Some YouTube Audio Sourcing

Just been doing a quick hunt for audio, whilst I finish my story board for my motion graphics project, and I’m going with some audio from 2001 A Space Odyssey.

First YouTube result, was interesting, since apart from containing the audio I was after, its a Adobe After Effects CS3 remake of the opening.

Comparing that to the original, its quite a faithful reproduction…

Anyway back to finishing my storyboard, but given that both of these is a minute long, or so, still need a further 2 minutes of audio….

Then again I might change the order of elements, since I am making a advert for firefox or chrome (I can’t remember which one I put in my brief, so should probably dig that out…. and check).

Anywho in other news, my other project is coming along nicely, the new games module for 360gaming [dot] net, now gathers data from Xbox.com and Wikipedia. All thru async. jQuery.

WIll be posting about that another time.

Post #SRAcon

Post #SRAcon

So its post #SRAcon now, it was a good conference, nice to catch up with people, had some fun with the Flickr wall, but banned from the Twitter wall, no fun to be had their.

Learnt some things and came up with some ideas for the coming year.

In other news, didn’t get appointed as Web or Chart, so that sucks.

Anyway this week is GSoC application time, so getting on with that as well as general coursework. And loosely job hunting….

Should hear about Glastonbury Radio Station soon too…..