Posts

The Stanford engineering department, often regarded as the best in the world for computer science education, has made its core CS curriculum free for anyone with an internet connection. There are some catches, ie: you don’t get your assignments marked, you have no contact with the lecturer, but all the same, it is really a great resource. The material is very high-quality, professionally filmed lectures and a full compliment of handouts and course notes. It also does not even assume knowledge of programming - it teaches you right from the basics. ...

At work I’ve written a couple of scripts that send out emails to the appropriate project team when someone checks in a commit to the project subversion repository. Here are the details. Firstly, you will need a subversion hook setup on post-commit. The post-commit hook needs to be located in SVNROOT/YOURPROJECT/hooks where YOURPROJECT is your svn project name, and SVNROOT is the root directory where you are storing the data files for your subversion repository. ...

I’ve abandoned the previous Wikipedia scraping approach for Brightonsound.com, as it was unreliable and didn’t pinpoint the right Wikipedia entry - ie: a band called ‘Horses’ would pull up a Wikipedia bio on the animal - which doesn’t look very professional. So instead, I have used the Musicbrainz API to retrieve some information on the artist; the homepage URL, the correct Wikipedia entry, and any genres/terms the artist has been tagged with. ...

For some reason, under ubuntu-server, my default MySQL 5 character encoding was latin1. This caused no end of problems with grabbing data from the web, which was not necessarily in latin1 characterset. If you are ever in this situation, I suggest you handle everything as UTF-8. That means setting the following lines in my.cnf: [mysqld] .. default-character-set=utf8 skip-character-set-client-handshake If you already have tables in your database that you have created, and they have defaulted to the latin1 charset, you’ll be able to tell by looking at the mysqldump SQL: ...

I’ve been hacking away at BrightonSound.com and I’ve been looking for a way of automatically sourcing biographical information from artists, so that visitors are presented with more information on the event. The Songbird media player plugin ‘mashTape’ draws upon a number of web services to grab artist bio, event listings, youtube vidoes and flickr pictures of the currently playing artist. I was reading through the mashTape code, and then found this posting by its developer, which helpfully provided the exact method I needed. ...

I passed the adExcellence exam first time.. woo! It wasn’t that difficult really. “David Craddock of iCrossing is accredited as an official Microsoft adExcellence Member. A Microsoft adExcellence Member has completed comprehensive online training on managing Microsoft adCenter search engine marketing campaigns and has demonstrated expert knowledge by passing the Microsoft adExcellence accreditation exam.” As of 21/3/08, I’m somehow also now #1 on Google.co.uk for the keyword “adExcellence exam”.. if that’s what you googled for, you probably want the adExcellence main site instead. Or use Live Search.

I have just seen Yahoo! Pipes , and am convinced this is going to change the web. For real. Data source sites will become ‘content providers’, data will be aggregated and filtered from multiple content providers, either by the user or by ‘intermediary’ sites. The user will be able to choose his ‘data view’ of the content on the internet, just as Google is currently doing. This is fascinating stuff if you’re involved in the web industry.

We’ve been working on a Brighton music events Google maps mashup project: www.BrightonSound.com It’s still developing, but it looks quite good, and we’re ready to start showing it off to people. So check it out! UPDATE: This project is now defunct after running for several years, and is no longer hosted. But thanks for the interest! .

I finally setup my Dell Lattitude D630 laptop the way I wanted it last night, and thought I’d do a quick writeup about it. Here is the parttition table: A 40GB Windows XP partition, with VMWare Player installed, which I will be using for Windows applications that don’t play well in virtualised mode (eg media applications). I will also be using it as the main platform for running VMs. A basic 5GB root + 1.4GB swap 7.10 Ubuntu server partition, with VMWare Server installed (for creating, advanced editing and performing network testing on VMs). I used these VMWare server on Ubuntu 7.10 tutorials . A 36GB NTFS partition for storing VMs A 26GB NTFS media partition for media I want to share between VMs and the two operating systems on the disc. We use VMWare servers at work to host our infrastructure, so this setup will be very useful for me. I can now: ...

I will be attending Brighton Barcamp 2 on the weekend of the 14th March, and presenting on a new web project I’ve been working on. See: http://barcamp.pbwiki.com/BarCampBrighton2 and http://www.barcampbrighton.org/ for more info. Update: Brighton Barcamp 2 is now over. This was really interesting, and I learned a huge amount in a very short amount of time. Thanks to everyone who talked to me. I’ll definitely be attending future Barcamps.