French Roast

Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty

The Lady and the Reaper

Mary & Max – Official Trailer

This is really the thing with software testing. Its not about stifling creativity. Its not saying that you are too dumb to understand the system. If you test you are simple admitting to yourself that you are fallible. Any software engineer who thinks they are not are just in denial. All part of growing up I guess.

PS: I would like to apologise to anybody who has had to deal with any of my shit code I have left behind in my formative years. Please forgive me, as I forgive others who left me in a similar mess. We all have to learn.

• British Sea Power – Open Season
• Eels – Blinking Lights and Other Revelations
• Strokes – Is This It
• Elliott Smith – From a Basement on the Hill
• Battles – Mirrored
• Green Day – American Idiot
• Hold Steady – Boys and Girls in America
• Eels – Souljacker
• Boards of Canada – The Campfire Headphase
• Modest Mouse – Good News for People Who Love Bad News

Now, I’m not good with unexpected time off work, especially when I can’t drive or really move about much.  In the upcoming week(s) though, between doctor visits and physio, I think I’ll avoid the internet and get back to some reading.

After far too long I’m starting to realise that the Web is detrimental to my learning.  It encourages reading of short and light articles.  My eyes seek hyperlinks and my mind is constantly getting distracted.  Time for a few cups of tea and a good book.

Sometimes I get involved in some internet japes that are only there to make me giggle. The latest is the twitter bot, @robot_santa. So on twitter he’s telling anybody that they are very naughty, to much amusement and bemusement. For those who don’t know, he stared in an awesome episode of Futurama and basically blew up everybody on XMAS eve.

God knows what I’ll do with him now…

# Rakefile

require 'rake'
require 'twitter'
require 'hpricot'
require 'open-uri'
namespace :b3ta do
  desc 'find a random quote from b3ta.com/talk and post it to twitter'
  task :random_quote do
    hdoc = Hpricot(open('http://www.b3ta.com/talk').read)
    subs = []
    hdoc.search(".post1, .post2") do |post|
      username, subject = '', ''
      post.search(".username") do |un|
        username = un.inner_html
      end
      post.search("b") do |b|
        subject = b.inner_html.to_s.gsub(/<\/?[^>]*>/, "")
      end
      subs << "\"#{subject}\" #{username}" if subject != ''
    end
    message = subs[rand(subs.size - 1)]
    twitter = Twitter::Base.new('twitter_username','twitter_password')
    twitter.post(message)
    puts message
  end
end

To set it up and running, just put in a real twitter account and use “rake b3ta:random_quote”. Simple. Ok it may lack any error checking what so ever, but its still amazing what you can do with Ruby with such little code. (check out the rather offensive twitter feed here)

I found this scanning around Vimeo HD.

1) Edit mephisto to give you all your post in one Atom document. Have a look in app/controller/feed/feed_controller.rb and change the limits of 15 to over the amount of posts you have.

2) Wordpress doesn’t like Atom, so convert your to RSS 2.0. I used a cool little webserice for this. With this service we can output something to our computer with curl
 

curl http://atom2rss.semiologic.com/?atom=http%3A%2F%2Fmibly.com%2Ffeed%2F > old_posts.xml

3) Upload old_posts.xml to you smashing new wordpress blog.

Now this doesn’t import any comments which is a shame.

So what you are looking at is all the programmes on iPlayer whose synopsis contains something that is of geographical importance. Now thanks to Opencalais’ new beta we get the longitutude and latitude of a given point (without it, you would have to use something like GeoNames) hence a point on the map. Simple really.

Whats in the mix?

• All the same old iPlayerlist stuff, DB, html scraping, and what have you.
• Httparty – makes dealing with restful APIs rather interesting.
• Google maps.
• Facebox – for the lightbox thing.

So its another dumb map mashup. Now the real question is does it add anything new for the user? Well I’m not sure. I’m going to add a few colours to the markers, and output the geolocations in KML if I get the time.