Its Crunch Time

So this week is going to be one of the busiest weeks, I will have had in a long time.

Finishing touches to my Project 2 Project: http://360gaming.net/, deployed that last Monday, just need to finish testing the game tracker/ranking system and thats all done.
Thats due on Wednesday! Crikey.

It’s also Leeds University Unions@LeedsUniUnion, Celebrate Week, where LUU celebrates its member led Societies, culminating in The Riley’s, an awards ceremony!

LSRfm.com (@LSRfm_com) is up for 3 awards:

  • Best Publicity
  • Best Event, for Big Tidy Up, (live coverage from Rich Legates House)
  • Best Society

So, its always good to be nominated, since the nominations are Crowd Sourced from LUU Members.

I’m also a second time nominee for LUU Lifetime Achievement award, (nominated three years ago when they thought I was leaving).

I’m also working a hell of a lot this week.

  • Metropolis on Thursday
  • Fruity (Hollywood) on Friday
  • Live at Leeds on Saturday all day!
  • Damnation on Sunday all day!

Which then takes us to Monday 3rd of May, which is May Day Bank Holiday. Which means the union is closed, so LSRfm.com is broadcasting from my House for the day.
It’s the day of Halo Reach’s Beta toooooo! Hurrah!

Should be good fun, hopefully it will be Sunny too!

That then takes us to next week, with a double deadline for motion graphics and New Media Strategies and Futures on the 6th of May.

Then thats it the end of my degree…. Shit….

Oh and today I find out if I am doing GSoC 2010 (Google Summer of Code)

And tomorrow is The LSRfm.com Station Manager Job Presentations and Interviews, which I have applied for.

And tomorrow and Wednesday is PLASA Leeds, an Events Trade Show and mini conference, which should be good to make some industry contacts and see whats going on, in the World of Live events….

Its gonna be messy!

#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…..

Coverflow with jQuery V1.5 (an Update)

A jQuery Coverflow Update

So been working on my coverflow from: This post.

Been trying to make it a better replication, tho have some problems with reflections, so decided to skip that for a bit and work on scrolling, with steps greater than one.
I’ve had some hiccups with the animation again, so will have to consider ripping that out and redoing it.

The animation being the size alterations to the podcast cover images.

So heres the YouTube Demo of the Coverflow with the Slider working, and the traditional links updating the slider value.

Also when I get this to a working level, gonna need to redo the Version Numbers 😛

When I get this working nicely, it will be rather useful, both for LSRfm.com and personal use, since it will rotate any content inside a li, tho if theres an img it will do the resizing.

Perhaps drawing inspiration from the game covers rotator on Game.co.uk as well, we shall see….

jQuery Coverflow

My jQuery Coverflow….

So I’ve been hunting round for a coverflow plugin for jQuery.

Google search turned up both Blarnee Demo (or Blarnee Blog Post) and Paul Bakaus, both of which are quite good but don’t advise much on the use or implementation of.

Both of which are demos, using parts of jQuery and the jQuery UI, or elements of Canvas (which has been throwing odd errors in my firebug)

The second still being sat in the labs part of the UI svn, and not been touched for 6 months.

So further hunting found me, content flow, which looks quite good, but I couldn’t get it to implement properly or do quite what I wanted too, without throwing lots of errors and not working.

So, I thought about it for a while and heres the first result.

Video done on Mac Quicktime Player, (screen recording), web deploying soon…

I’ve used the jCarousel Plugin, which I already use on LSRfm.com for the LSRfm.com Twitter Rotator.

And using its callback functions and elements of jQuery’s animate library. I’ve created this iTunes/Apple Coverflow effect, still some work to do, and make it nice and configurable, so others can easily implement it, perhaps even make it and extension to jCarousel…

So a future blog post will describe the Javascript I used, and how to implement it.

Long Time Since I blogged

A General Update….

Again, its been a while. Things have been pretty busy.

Currently I just fixed the LSRfm.com Podcasts, they were downloading a minute or two of audio the PHP was dying, FAST CGI php5 was being ghey.

So after a quick chat with Dreamhost over live chat, my script now rather than munch the file, just passes it off to a http location, less of a memory muncher too.

SRAchart is its usual self, tho we did get a full house of Charts last week, (well near enough), Ellie Goulding and Owl City are dominating, and Glee Started Charting too.

(Yes I am a Glee Fan)

Handed in the Motion Graphics Brief.

So Uni Wise I just need to sit down and code code code, both for Project 2 (ala 360gaming.net enhancements), and start planning and researching what I need for project 2.

And start writing an essay for Futures and Strategies, fun times.

I’ve not had any spare time to play Halo, tho the Reach Beta has been announced! Hurrah!

Now I must get back to coding stuff for LSRfm.com fixed the Jukebox, now to do the music db, tho I do have a nice IRC bot sat in the new LSRfm.com Chatbox

Also <3 jQuery....