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Blog Transferred to OSTalks.com

Hi guys and gals,

I’ll not be updating this blog anymore. I’ve moved all my content to http://ostalks.com.

Starting a Facebook Application

One of the most popular social networking sites today is facebook. As of this time, the social networking site boasts of over 300 million users, which is pretty hard to ignore, considering marketing value.

What makes facebook interesting are its applications; which are mostly user created, and add life to the social networking site.

Here’s how to submit a facebook application to the net:

1. Join as a facebook developer, and on the http://www.facebook.com/developers/ url, click on the Set up new application button

2. On the Create App page, type in the name of your application

3. Take note of the API Key and Secret; you’ll need these later. Fill up the necessary items in the Basic Page.

4. Enter the canvas url (where your application will reside in apps.facebook.com), and the content url where your application is hosted.

5. Press Save, and you’re off to start a brave new world of creating a Facebook Application!

The simplest start for a facebook application looks like this:

require_once 'php/facebook.php';
require_once 'config.php';

$facebook = new Facebook($api_key, $secret);
$user_id = $facebook->require_login();

echo "Hello, $user_id!";


facebook.php is the facebook php client which you can download in the developers site. You can learn more about the api in the http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/ site.

Have fun!

Mypodcast.com Feeds and Longtailvideo Media Player

The religious community that I’m in delves into media. In fact we have a website that showcases video and audio materials for free.

We use the ever popular video/media flash player made by Longtail Video to stream our mp3 and video files to be distributed and seen by people in the web.

As we host our mp3 files in mypodcast.com, the rss feed that is delivered my the site isn’t exactly compatible with the player – so I had to parse the rss feed and re encode it into an rss feed that the longtail player recognizes.

In order to not reinvent the wheel in reading rss feeds, I used the ever popular open source (BSD-licensed) php feed reader, simplepie.

Below this page is the quick and dirty code that I used. I hope this will help you get started in the world of podcasting!


<?
require_once('simplepie.inc');

$feed = new SimplePie('http://host/rss.xml');
set_cache_location($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . '/cache/');

$feed->handle_content_type();

?>

rss feed name
get_items() as $item)
{
$title = $item->get_title();
$date = $item->get_date();
if ($enclosure = $item->get_enclosure())
{
$media = $enclosure->get_link();
$length = $enclosure->get_duration(true);
}
$subtitle = $item->subtitle;
$description = $item->get_description();
//print_r($enclosure);
$desc = explode("","",$image);
echo "

$title
$author

";
}
?>

Standards… Dilbert style

I found this sooo strangely familiar to what happened on the ISO standards committee on the OOXML approval process.

Heywatch and php

Heywatch is a cool video encoding web service that is being used by different clients like Sony, Fotolia, Kickapps, MTv, among others for their video conversion needs.

One nice thing about this service is that it has a REST based API that is simple to implement in php. However, the documentation that comes with heywatch shows only how to access the API using PEAR – this becomes a disadvantage if your shared hosted webhost doesn’t have PEAR installed. I also personally think that using PEAR just to call this api is basically overkill.

Why not use curl instead? I basically changed the PEAR functions in the API documentation to that of php curl functions (which are basically native and available in practically all shared php webhosting)


<?
$video_url = "http://osaddict.com/files/elephantsdream-480-h264-st-aac.mov";
$format_id = "1086"; // 1086 for flash h264, 31 for flash flv
$ftp = "ftp://username:password@ftphost.com";
$ping_after_encode = "http://host/heywatch/success.php?myvideoid=5&myuserid=1";
$ping_if_error = "http://host/heywatch/error.php";
$ch = curl_init();
$your_username = "";
$your_password = "";
$video_url,"format_id"=>$format_id,"automatic_encode"=>"true","ftp_directive"=>$ftp,"title"=>"My Video Title","keep_video_size"=>"true");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERPWD, $your_username.':'.$your_password);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS,$arr);

$data = curl_exec($ch);

if (curl_errno($ch)) {
print curl_error($ch);
exit;
} else {
curl_close($ch);
}

header("Content-Type: text/xml;charset=UTF-8");
header("Pragma: no-cache");
echo $data;
?>


What this code does is to download a video, convert it to h264 flash format, then upload it to a select ftp host in just one step (success.php and error.php are ping functions where the developer is notified if conversion was successful or not).

One thing to take note is that heywatch doesn’t like special characters in the ftp url, if you place such characters in the $ftp variable, heywatch upload fails.

Have fun!

Where In the World… is Open Source Software?

Working for a company that allows you to experiment with different technologies can be a very satisfying (and sometimes stressful, considering the deadlines) experience. Working in such an environment also lets you encounter people that even in your wildest imaginations would never have thought of meeting in your lifetime.

A few years ago, while we were starting out (I was in the company even before it came to be one), my boss in our talks mentioned a familiar name, Jim Everson. For those who don’t know him, he’s the guy who led in the development of several educational games including the classic Broderbund game “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego”.

Where does this all lead to, you may ask? In a nutshell, last year, Jim was diagnosed with advanced melanoma. Which led to his ex-wife (my boss’ sister) helping him out in whatever way she can – well, she helped design a website for him.

My boss asked a favor from me, to help quickly get some open source auction software and customize it for the website’s use, which I gladly did (as I was acquainted with him, and talked with him through emails in the past).

If it was not for open source software, we would have started programming from scratch, and would have taken much longer to finish (and at that time, I was up to my neck with deadlines at work). And, since the source code was there to see and customize, it was quick enough to implement it to their needs.

To end, if you do see Jim on your travels (he’s now an independent mac consultant), ask him about his mouth watering lamb chops recipe – he makes one mean lamb chops!

Unreleased aLinux Screenshot

I happened to chat with Jay Klepacs, aLinux creator, a little over a month ago (we’ve been friends since 2000s, during the PeanutLinux days).

If you’re wondering what aLinux was, it was a linux distribution derived from looplinux and was basically a hybrid of sorts (in it’s early days, it was very slackware linux inspired, but sporting rpms as it’s package format) and was featured in distrowatch years ago.

http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20050829

I asked him how he was, and what’s up in aLinux land (which hasn’t seen a release for quite a while). In fact, I haven’t worked on pnutproject for quite a while either with Craig… real life since has taken over and I’ve been working quite busy for a start up company which I’ve been in for almost 3 years (never had so much fun programming and doing cool stuff with linux too!).

To make the long story short, aLinux lives, but not for distribution… yet. I don’t know if Jay would release it to the public either (it still uses KDE 3.5.x, btw which I still prefer over KDE 4.x).

Anyways, here’s the screenshot for you to enjoy. Have fun!

Lenovo 3000 G430 and Fedora 10

A friend of mine asked me to help him set up linux on his newly purchased Lenovo laptop (doesn’t have an OS preinstalled). Few observations:

Ubuntu Intrepid failed to install on this laptop (messed up X resolution when it goes to the ubiquity setup screen).
Fedora 10 does install successfully.

There are two hardware gotchas that do not work after install, namely, the touchpad and the wireless. The laptop’s webcam gets detected and runs out of the box.

For the touchpad problem, disabling then enabling the touchpad by pressing the Fn+F8 key combination on the login screen twice does the trick.

As the wifi card of this laptop uses the Broadcom chipset, we have to install the Broadcom driver from the non-free repository of the rpmfusion website:

su -c ‘rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm’

and then running

su -
yum update
yum install broadcom-wl

and then rebooting the laptop will enable the user to use his wifi with no problems at all.