BANJOOOOOOOO!

I love adult swim programming so much. Its shame its on Bravo in the UK. Anyhow, enjoy this episode of “Space Ghost: Coast to Coast” from around 1994.

Opencalais + iPlayerlist

Opencalais is one of those Web 3.0 (sorry) services which is really rather interesting. Basically if you throw plain text at it will return the concepts it finds. For example it would recognise the Royal Albert Hall as a place and London as a city. The output is in RDF, yay.

As you might have guessed I’m thwacking the data from iPlayerlist (which is essentially bbc.co.uk/programmes) through it and see what we get.

Well its made me giggle. You get some cool stuff like programmes relating to Cities, People and Nations, but also some rather random topics. Medical Conditions is my favorite, you would be surprised how many programmes pop up in that topic.

So keep you eye out, it won’t be long before you will be able to subscribe to iPlayer shows relating to “sore throats” :)

Branding

Hmm, if I go to watch an episode of the News at Ten on iPlayer I see.

• The BBC logo
• The iPlayer logo
• The BBC One logo
• The BBC News logo
• The News at Ten logo
• A 15 second video TV station identifier.

Not sure if thats right or wrong, just something to think about.

iPlayerlist is back, less sucky and smells of lemon

Ok, I was stunned by the new iPlayer site to such a degree that I let iPlayerlist die for a bit. However, after a few people got in touch asking me to carry on I thought I best had do. So its back!

There really isn’t too much different than the old one from the face of it, but underneath its brand spanking new and loads cleaner. This is mainly thanks to iplayer now outputting Atom feeds. Thanks for that :)

One of the coolest things I’m working on is the idea that a user can sign in and subscribe to a given series. It’s actually up and running now, but not really ready for the whole world yet. Here is a link to what I’m currently watching on iPlayer.

Now that sort of thing opens the door to a whole raft of cool code writing fun. Suggestions welcome btw.

Pop under hell

I wish people would stop doing this. Makes me mad.

iPlayer v2 is wonderful!

I have to hand it to the people at the beeb who work on iPlayer. The new site is loads better and putting radio and TV together is what I really wanted to see more of. So well done all around, it’s brilliant.

What does this mean for iPlayerlist? Well, I’m not sure, I still use my little site as I do like the lo-finess but to be honest, the new iPlayer site is much better for everybody else.

Perhaps I should change the tagline to “making the unmissable, slightly shitter”?

Should I bother continuing to maintain it?

The popularity of the features iPhone and iPod version of iplayerlist is making me think that I should. The fact that most users of the site are using these apple products is rather interesting. Getting linked from apple.com must have done something (grin), but the fact that they keep returning must mean its doing something right.

So I’m torn. Should I go on to try something else, or try and fix this for more devices and other such shenanigans?

Server changes

I’ve kinda changed the whole platform mibly.com is running on. I’ll outline here what’s changed and why.

Source control
iPlayerlist and some other projects I’m involved with now use Git, rather than Subversion for source management. The Rails core team have also moved over. So being the Technology magpie I sometimes am I jumped on to the latest shinny thing. Github. My code is now stored at Github, and I deploy from there too. It’s such a nice interface and nice not to have to worry about setting up repositories and deal with user management.

Application server
The old server used to run on Apache 2 front end with 3 mongrel instances in the background. 2 for iPlayerlist and one for this blog. It was a pain to set up and rather limited. Since then however, Phusion Passenger, a.k.a. mod_rails has come on leaps and bounds. Its fast, spawns new threads when needed and easier to use and to implement. I now Passenger along with apache2. yay.

Deployment
The old install used Capistrano. So does this one, as its lovely. However, I’m now up and running with the latest (version 2 strain) of Capistrano with support for Git. A little bit code is added to help Passenger to gracefully restart after all my code is checked out from github.

Host
I’ve moved from slicehost to get a larger 512mb slice at railsplayground. It was a bit of a bargain and to be honest, 256mb can be a bit limiting when it comes to RubyGems and passenger.

iPlayerlist gets a little love

Lots has happened since my last post. I’ve moved to a new server and suffered domain name issues. However on the positive side, I’ve had a little spring clean of iPlayerlist.

One of the big things I’ve added is the “featured episodes” on the front page. Now this is mostly powered by what appears on the front page of bbc.co.uk/iplayer. However, there is a little twist. The featured episodes are also powered by the reviews posted upon the rather ace Watchification blog. When an episode gets mentioned by that blog it will become featured, and a link to the review will appear on the episode page. Thanks to the people there for letting me do this :)

Thats about it for now. In the next week or so I’ll be putting up a re-factored version of the back end, which should get rid of those annoying bugs that keep cropping up. Or I might do a bit of it at the BBC Mashed event.

Radiofall

Following on from the XMPP stuff, I made a little site that just reads and output what’s playing on BBC radio. It is a toy app at the moment with no real point (and might well fall over), its worth putting on the DAB radio to see the sort of delay it might be experiencing.

mibly.com/radiofall

What is it using I hear you bellow?

• Ruby – well what else?
• xmpp4r gem – for connecting to the xmpp server and parsing the messages
• json gem – for outputting the messages in …. json
• jQuery – to make all those Ajax requests

The next steps are to add some intelligence into the script, interacting with some APIs or something. I have a few ideas, but it depends upon time and if I can get somebody to help with design.

BBC Radio Labs and XMPP

God bless BBC Radio Labs. They get to build some cool little things including a fun little XMPP server. Its pushing out messages that usually only get seen on the front of DAB radios. I whipped this ruby script together pretty quick (you can tell), but shows how easy you can connect to it.

require 'rubygems'
require 'ruby-growl'
require 'xmpp4r-simple'

username = 'myusername'
password = 'password'
domain = 'hug.hellomatty.com'
im = Jabber::Simple.new("#{username}@#{domain}", password)
im.status(:chat, 'Hello world')

#  This bit just adds a few radio stations.  Should only be run once for your user
#
#  %w(radio1 radio2 radio3 radio4 5live 6music radio7 1xtra).each do |r|
#    im.add("#{r}@#{domain}")
#  end

g = Growl.new "localhost", "ruby-growl", ["ruby-growl Notification"], nil, "growl"
i = 0
while true
  i+=1
  if im.connected? == true
    im.presence_updates.each do |friend, old_presence, new_presence|
      if new_presence != nil
        puts "#{friend.gsub("@#{domain}", '')} #{new_presence}"
        g.notify("ruby-growl Notification", friend.gsub("@#{domain}", ''), new_presence)
      end
    end
  else
    puts '**************************** disconnected *************************'
    im = Jabber::Simple.new("#{username}@#{domain}", password)
    im.status(:chat, 'Hello world')
  end
  sleep(2)
  if i == 10
    # reconnect every now and then as we seem to be having odd issues.  a bug really
    im.reconnect
    i = 0
  end
end

Here is some sample output.

radio3: Details from bbc.co.uk/radio3 or call 08700 100 300.
1xtra: 1Xtra Dancehall Show - Robbo Ranx. Txt 88111 [network rates apply].
radio4: The World Tonight. Web - bbc.co.uk/news
radio2: Mark Lamarr. Mark presents the Shake, Rattle and Roll Show.
5live: Richard Bacon: Lively and provocative discussion regarding the day's key stories

Now I have no idea what I can do with this (twitter posting is already done to death), so I might have a think about this sort of thing. Be fun if it makes it into production.