Category: Geekery

Summer

So that middle part of Summer has been a bit sucky. So we shall skip all that, don’t really want to go into it….

Now things are better!

I lost my mac for a week and a half, hard drive failed, followed by back for two hours, followed by hard drive fail.
In the end Clockwork (Leeds Apple Care), replaced the drive and the drive’s cable, and shes all good now!

I’m off to Moor Fest next week, I’m doing the lighting for the Green Room, with Chamsys and whatever fixtures I get given, learnt some useful things from their Chamsys Guide for that matter, (and I fixed up the tab box on the home page for them!) Nice bit of jQuery!

Made a shoutbox for Halo3Wheelmen its hosted on 360gaming.net so had to do a lot of fudging and built a mini phpBB api to get user/ban data out of the forum, its all built in jQuery and PHP, jQuery makes ajax stuff, and append/prepend so much easier than pure javascript.

Job wise I am still waiting to hear back from Firebox.com, but it looks like I shall be staying in Leeds for another year at least, being a Venue Tech, which should, with the new boss, hopefully lead to more external work, but I shall still be working as a freelance web developer. Tho there have been some interesting local jobs come up on the GeekUp jobs Board. (I need to start going to GeekUp again….)

In that vein I currently have a bit of work on building a Asset/Event Manager for LUU Events, details on that to follow, but as a project it keeps me out of trouble, since Google fell thru.

Hopefully I should be getting back into modding phpBB which is even easier now since they now use GitHub to host their repository, so I’m gonna have to get to grips with forks, and loading parent data into the child repo…. (If that makes sense).

So essentially things are busy, not perfect but good. Could be better could be worse…

Hopefully at some point I will get around to doing a Carlyon CMS release candidate, tho I am thinking I need to rip out my CSS boilerplate and thus the relevant core html template files, we shall see.

In other news, I now have completely new graphics for 360gaming [dot] net, I was approached and offered the services of O Sheep Dip, and now I have graphics! Woot!
360gaming.net now has a HogBall league tracker on top of the 1v1 challenger system, tho no one has tested it yet, and I only have the one team, people don’t seem interested…

Tho there is a BTBhub on the way, it was suggested to me that building a BTB league is the way to go, and now I have the core Bungie Code checker, and with the advent of Reach, its data API (POTATO!) and of course, its massive ForgeWorld, the future is bright for Halo and 360gaming.net, now all I need is to find more games with similar developer offerings, and getting myself access to the true Xbox API……

So that summarizes the later part of summer… O and Katie is now home.

Also checkout my tumbleblog

Catch you after Moor Fest, (which will be my first ever festival, I’ve never been to one, and now the first one I am going to is also going to be my first external lighting job….)

Off to watch Sherlock on BBC1

And Happy Birthday to Kayleigh (The GirlFriend) 🙂

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

#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.

jQuery Coverflow, my First Plugin

My first jQuery Plugin: Coverflow

So I’ve been working on this for a while, based on a few googles searches (see this post for details.

Thru other posts on this subject I’ve chronicled my work, and youtubed a few videos, I’ve now deployed it and re factored it to a jQuery plugin. And fixed a bug so it works in IE as well as other browsers, was throwing a odd childelement error in IE8 of all things.

So, my jQuery Coverflow is live at the LSRfm.com Podcasts Page, I’ll probably be fiddling with the code locally to tidy it and make it better, but it works quite happily as a jQuery plugin now.

Heres how to use it on your site, if you are so inclined, stay tuned for updates :-).

The Plugin requires jQuery UI for the Slider, and jCarousel for the Flowy-ness, it relies on the jQuery stock animation suite as well.

In the head

<script src="/path_to_js/jquery.coverflow.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

In the Body

<ul id="coverflow">
        <li><a href="/some_link/"><img src="/someimage.png" alt="A Title" /></a></li>
</ul>

<script type="text/javascript">
        jQuery.coverflow();
</script>

Like with any jQuery Plugin you can pass it some options/settings.

  • total_items – total items in the carousel/flow, if 0 auto determines
  • sider_start – the start point, leave null for middle, or number for that number or rnd for random
  • targetflow – id of the ul with the items in
  • sliderflow – id of the div to hold the slider
  • titleflow – id to hold the title elements
  • largesize – size as a int, so 200 for 200px, of the image currently in the middle of the flow
  • smallsize – smaller size
  • speed – speed in microseconds so 3s is 3000
  • scroll – leave this as one
  • visible – how many items to be in the viewing pane at once default 3
  • animation – animation speed, if 0 takes it from speed

Essentially all the needs to be set is the names for targetflow, sliderflow, and titleflow, tho if you use the default names (coverflow, slider, coverflow_title) you don’t even need that.

Things I need to add to the plugin.

Auto generate the slider div if not present and add the relevant css to it.
Do a check to see if the item about to be highlight contains an image or not, and animate accordingly.

In theory this can support any type of content but an item of:

<li><a><img /></a></li>

works best.

You can grab a tar of the file at Coverflow_001 (9023 downloads )

Questsions? Feedback? Suggestions?

Comments below 🙂

Update:

Currently there is a small bug where in some browsers (so far Chrome and Safari), post load and setup, its not sliding to the desired element, the slider is moved, but the carousel does not.