Amazon Associates WordPress Wishlist Plugin is No More

I think my post title says it all really. I’ve just discovered that amazon has deprecated use of its ListLookup method since October 15th. I had used this in order to retrieve details of my amazon wishlist and display neatly on my blog using my wishlist plugin. Now it seems I’m forced to generate one with their own widget builder. This in turn means my wordpress plugin will no longer work. Sorry for those who were making use of it, or would like to use it. It’s also apparent that this is a kick in the teeth for developers building sites entirely dependant on this method. This chap estimates he made $11k in the last year using this function. This is the trouble with building stuff that relies on third party services. I wonder how much more of their api they will gradually remove?

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Installing gPhoto on Snow Leopard

I always seem to choose the difficult route to do things. Having become equipped with a new canon camera, I’m instantly wanting to capture stop motion shorts with it. Unfortunately canons proprietry capture software isn’t really up to the job and FrameByFrame doesn’t work with such high-end cameras.

So, I got to thinking wether there was any other route? I was aware of the gPhoto commandline interface and libgphoto pointed out by a colleague some time ago, so I thought I’d see what I might be able to do with it.

It is possible to install gPhoto using macports, but I chose to compile from source. Here’s how to do it if anyone else is interested.

Install libusb

./configure
make
sudo make install

Install libusb compat

./configure LIBUSB_1_0_CFLAGS=-I/usr/local/include/libusb-1.0 LIBUSB_1_0_LIBS="-L/usr/local/lib -lusb-1.0"
make
sudo make install

Install libexif

./configure
make
sudo make install

Install libopt

./configure
make
sudo make install

Install libgphoto2 (it may not be neccessary to restrict to a subset of drivers as I have done here, but on my macbook it wouldn’t compile unless I did so.)

./configure --with-drivers=canon
make
sudo make install

Install readline

./configure
make
sudo make install

Install gphoto

./configure
make
sudo make install

You now should be able to capture, download, setup timelapses all from your terminal. See the full list of examples on the gphoto homepage.

In my own experiments, I’ve found I’ve mad to kill the PTP software that is initially fired up by the mac in order for gphoto to be able to communicate over usb. It also seems that any files I capture are not written to the memory card (or listed using the –list-files argument), meaning I need to use the –capture-image-and-download argument to capture direct to my machine. I’ve not had much time to experiment yet, so there may be another workaround.

Anyway, its not a stop motion app yet, but it’s a start!

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How not to: Do A Hack Day

It’s been well over a month since I attended science hack day and I’d thought I’d put out some notes on my time there. Rather than do a run down of the event, for which I’m sure there’s far more comprehensive blog posts available already, I thought I’d share my experiences based on attendance of a number of different hack events I’ve been to over the years. I went with the full intention of doing some hardcore hacking, but didn’t entirely meet my own expectations. Here’s my top tips, for now not to do a hack day:

  • 1: Don’t bother coming prepared – You’ve got 24 hours, and you’re bound to be the best coder at the event. You’ll have a unique idea and get that app finished in no time! No, far better to kick back and relax before setting on your way and conduct your research on what’s possible when you arrive.
  • 2: Arrive fashionably late – 24 hours is ages, and you know all the apis that presentations are going to cover. Nothing says “I’m superior” more than waltzing in a couple of hours late to the event whilst everyone else has been busy sweating it out already.
  • 3: Keep your distance from other attendees – Your idea is your own and you’ll want to claim all the glory for it after the event. Where’s the glory in letting people know you’re one of 10 people involved? Keep your app under wraps before that all important presentation at the end, the audience will be in total awe of you and flock to your side afterwards.
  • 4: Be sure to leave the event – You enjoy your sleep right? Why lose it by camping out on some office floor space, when you can head home to your comfy bed or to a hotel and return in the morning? This way, you also get to avoid all that small talk with big name, high profile coders who will belittle you with their outstanding knowledge of their own companies apis.
  • 5: Have your fill of the free refreshments – Free beer and pizza? Wow, these are a must for any late night software development project. There’s nothing better than feeling stuffed full of dominos and slightly rosy whilst trying to get your brain working at full throttle.
  • 6: Don’t prepare for your presentation – You’ll need every last second for building your app and the presentation is only a minute long. You might as well just attempt something of the cuff. Don’t worry about connections to your laptop, because those things always work and organisers like adactio are most amicable about trying to organise it for you along with 30 others at the same time.

I attended Science Hack Day and collaborated with a Mia, Prem, Tom Morris, Inayaili de León, Andy McMillan and Richard Boulton in order to build an app titled “The Revolutionaries”. Both Inayaili and Andy I never even spoke to and it was only through Prem’s organisation that the app came through in the end. I spent 2 hours of the event commuting to and from the guardian’s offices and 1 more stuck in a stationary tunnel in the dark. I’m glad that a made an effort though as the net result was a great app, which even won a little prize. I probably won’t be heeding much of the above advice at future events.

Posted in Code, Events, General, Web, Web Apps | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Installing MPlayer on Snow Leopard

Here’s a heads up for anyone installing MPlayer on Snow Leopard. I’ve been playing a fair amount with tools recently and inevitably ending up running round in circles in installing, compiling, setting flags etc. Here’s a quick one liner param for anyone compiling mplayer (and freetype as its dependency) which people on Snow Leopard may find useful.

You’ll first need to download latest versions of freetype and mplayer. Uncompress both.

cd freetype
./configure
sudo make CXXFLAGS="-m64"
sudo make install

(Check here that the command “file /usr/local/lib/libfreetype.dylib” returns “Mach-O 64-bit dynamically linked shared library x86_64″)

cd mplayer-checkout-2010-06-14/
tar -xjvf mplayer-checkout-snapshot.tar.bz2
./configure
make
sudo make install

The killer here for me was sudo make CXXFLAGS=”-m64″. Without it, mplayer’s make command failed with “ld: warning: in /usr/local/lib/libfreetype.dylib, file is not of required architecture”. I’ve encountered problems like this before, where the file is compiled for 32 Bit leopard rather than 64, but they’re usually solved with setting a CFLAGS variable.

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Lovefilm Filmstream Plugin for WordPress

Something I’ve thought I’d like to have on my site for a while is a list of movies that I’ve recently seen and some brief opinions on them. I’m not entirely sure how I would go about this for films I see at the cinema, or whether I could muster the stamina to review every single film I’ve watched, but a recent television upgrade has now meant I’ve got the opportunity to do this.

Our television came with a years subscription to lovefilm, which means I can now track our past film watching history. At four blu rays a month, that’s quite a lot of films over the course of the year.

Love Film have recently opened up their doors with an api and developer area (which unfortunately is not particularly active at the moment). Anyway – their documentation is pretty thorough and has made the process of creating a wordpress plugin to display my past rentals really simple. You can see some example output of it on my site over here.

You can grab the plugin over here. It’s authenticated by oauth (for which you’ll require php on your blog host to be compiled with oauth enabled) and so will bounce you over to lovefilm to ask for access to your account, but after that will update on a daily basis. Just click “Fetch Items” on the filmstream admin page and stick <!--filmstream_content--> in any page to display a table containing all your past rentals. There’s no options to speak of right now, but I’m sure I’ll be extending it in the future.

Posted in Code, Computers and Internet, PHP | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Mixbooth

Mixbooth is a dj mix hosting service I created several years ago. At the time there wasn’t a lot around in terms of options for allowing anyone to share them. You either had to exchange it upon a site filled with advertisements, or host it on your own space which might mean you’d breach your server bandwidth for any given month. I decided to use some space I had available at next to nothing to build something that might be of use to myself and any other dj whom saw fit to use it. It was good at the time and I got quite a buzz out of seeing new uploads appearing and hearing what others had created. I took the decision to end use of mixbooth after about a year of having a couple of mixes a week uploaded. This was mainly due to academic commitments at the time.

Anyway, I’ve been working on a rebuild of it for some time now. So I’m letting it loose on those who might be interested. I’m no longer hosting mixes, but hopefully exchanging useful info on them and those artists who feature within and allowing people to chat about them. It’s not everything I want it to be right now, but hopefully will serve to a use to djs other than myself. If you want to have a play, head to www.mixbooth.com/signup and I’ll get an invite out. I’ll also be tweeting updates via @mixbooth.

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Fair & Bare – January £10 Sale!

£10 January Sale


My Own Personal Robot

The Red Sparrows

Fair & Bare – The little shop I run (with a little help from my wife) is having a January Sale right now in celebration of entering the year 2010. Every shirt we’ve made to date is just 10 squid! Hurry up people, it only runs until Sunday.

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Amazon Associates WordPress Plugin v0.2

I’ve just updated my amazon associates plugin to take into account the recent signiture changes which amazon have introduced for their webservices api.

This now also means you’ll have to enter your amazon secret access key in the plugin configuration page.

You can download the updated version over here.

It also means my wishlist has finally been brought back to life. Just in time for Christmas…

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Discovering Google

I’ve recently read a post over on the guardians technology site which gave a whistle-stop history of the internet as it turns 40. I thought I’d share here my own experiences of growing up alongside the web, more for my own record than anything.

I remember at school a time at which there was no external connection, nor internal network (which we the pupils used) so the Acorn machines used at our school at the time could communicate with one another. Computers, for me at that point were standalone. I had as much of an interest in computing then as I do now and I can remember early on, staying around after school to use one of the only PC’s in the school (which was bought to run a piece of career piece software called Kudos), in order to attempt to run the demo games from cds found on pc mags at the time (the only one I can remember was a lawnmower man demo). I did this until ofter one time a friend and I accidentally removing the autoexec.bat file which I hadn’t backed up…..oopsy

RiscOS. Old School. Literally. Taken from toastytech.com

I of course had to stick around at school because we didn’t have our own pc at home, because they were very, very expensive (When we did finally get one, it was a Crappard Bell 486 DX2 66, 4 MB of RAM, 400MB HD and was over £1000). I felt a little jealous of my friends who both had PC’s and were able to use Microsoft’s Encarta to help them out with their homework at that time. (Interestingly Encarta later also became a website and is to be discontinued later this week).

Bizarrely, I’d opted for A-Levels at 6th Form which didn’t allow me to experiment with pc’s much, not that it would have mattered as although the rest of the world was transitioning toward them, the Gryphon school I attended had a whole computing lab full of RiscPC‘s. I think I went there once in the two years of A-Levels I did and kept my nose upturned whilst I was there.

Some point over this time, I’d also got hooked on a magazine called PC Format since the latter years of school, which allowed me to get all the games demos I wanted without spending however many years (and £’s) it would have taken to download them all. (I kept all 4 years worth of magazines I’d bought and cds/dvds right up unto moving in with my wife). At home, even though we were now in the year 1999, my parents hadn’t yet opted to purchase a dial-up modem and make that leap online. I was of course, still jealous of those mates – who now were connected. I got myself a hotmail account, where I eagerly awaited emails from no-one.

I can remember going to college and being scared about the prospect of doing a computing course but never having had any prior experience of using the web. My parents finally got a modem that year, but I still used to use the computing labs after teaching. I could download 1MB samples of music from Juno records much more quickly over the leased line than I ever could waiting on the 56Kbps dialup at home. I also began working at Dixons (for my sins), getting paid a pittance to talk to many clueless customers about “stereos”, “cd players” and “N64′s”. Working at Dixons did at least afford me the opportunity to experience playing Quake in Yeovils one and only internet cafe on a LAN against my friends and the staff that worked there.

My LAN parties moved to the computing labs at the university, outside of working hours (because as their 10 year old posters claim, you’re not allowed to use games on them during working hours…). Over several years of using the web, I’d never once heard of Google until it was mentioned by one of the research students taking our internet computing lectures. “You’ve probably heard of this” he said. “Er, no”, I thought – why did no-one tell me? I’d used a number of search engines such as lycos and later webcrawler, but all were pretty awful in terms of giving me what I wanted – results. Instead they seemed content with a ridiculous number of adverts and making me hunt through a huge number of pages. Their pages now seem to indicate a new direction.

A bit of a trip down memory lane, but that’s how I ended up being introduced to Google. How about you?

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Aardman

In order for me to generate this post I’ve created something quite novel on my blog – a new category which I’ve not had a great deal of experience in previously, “work”. For the last couple of months I’ve been working for Aardman features in Bristol on their forthcoming feature film, “Pirates” – building software, which I’ll be doing at least for the next couple of months too.

I’ve been having an amazing experience over this time. Being landed in a fantastic position of working with extremely talented, creative individuals – whom have worked on tons of entertainment that I’ve chuckled away too throughout my life. I’ve been fortunate enough to have been sent to LA in order to read up and fully understand the software I’m working on too and also get to see many exciting elements of the production process. The nature of the work I’m doing has meant I’ve had to talk to everyone from the floor crew, model making, camera assistants and animators to visual effects and editorial. It has been a massive task to take in the huge amount of new information, but I am loving learning about every step in the process. It’s great to see all these steps under one roof working as a massive family unit.

The whole experience is to say the least exciting and quite honestly I am honoured to be involved with it! Here’s to the next couple of months….

PS: Check out some of aardmans wonderful characters on this page.

Posted in Computers and Internet, Work | Tagged , , | 2 Comments