Monthly Archive for March, 2009

Dr. Sketchy Wellington (Mighty Mighty)

Published
by
James Little
on March 15, 2009
in events
. 2 Comments

Yesterday I attended the first ever Dr. Sketchy in Wellington at Mighty Mighty! It was great fun with Rachel Rouge hosting the afternoon/evening event in an amazingly saucey outfit. Performances by the beautiful Eva Strangelove and stylish Rhubarb Rouge (no relation to Rachel Rouge).

I attended with all most everybody that I had managed to convince it was a good idea; My girlfriend Tracey and Paolo, who I had been drinking with the night before until Mighty Might door staff told us that Head like a hole was sold out and there was nothing we could do to get in. Rob was up for it, but had furniture malfunctions. Part of my interest was how many people would come to an event that was publicised to me using Facebook groups and Wellington events email. I was really surprised by the turnout and by the artistic ability of the other attendees!

My friends and I are not particularly artistic and I was impressed by how well Tracey could draw! We didn’t realise we were supposed to bring art supplies until the last minute and appeared with pens and a drawing pad. But some people had just come to enjoy the show and others were taking photos, which the performers were more than happy to accommodate.

Dr. Sketchy is a pretty easy sell; burlesque dancing is provocative enough to be interesting, but the performers are not (necessarily) so revealed that the show is offensive. The other essential ingredients: cool music to encourage the burlesque environment and friendly bar service compliments of Mighty Mighty. We had a great time and I left with an enthusiasm to draw again and try more interesting events! I was also quite rehydrated and in a very good mood.

James Little on the Web

Published
by
James Little
on March 14, 2009
in web
. 1 Comment

You can find me involved with lots of stuff online, here are some of my favourites:

James Little, Linkedin

Flickr is my favourite photo sharing service. I’m also quite a fan of their photo map that allows you to position photos of your travels anywhere in the world.

YouTube is on of the video content services that don’t pay for your content – that isn’t google way. But they still dominate online video and you can find most music videos and funny snippets here.

Facebook is the “now” social network, I’m also on Orkut, Bebo, Hi5, MySpace, ShareMyNZ, OldFriends and several others; but most people I know are on Facebook. If you would like to connect please include a message explaining why, it’s usually advisable to only conenct with people you know.

Linkedin is a more professional social network, if you would like to be connected please offer me a job.

Last.fm is a really cool music library that you can use to find hot new stuff or cool old stuff – and to see what your friends, colleagues and random people are listening to; and what you listened to yesterday, this can be used to focus you to new music that fits your tastes, like google search tailors searching to match your clicks.

Twitter was one of the first micro-blogging applications. It doesn’t allow you to use more than 140 characters and it does allow you to SMS updates. Handy for people covering events and has been used in conjuction with Google maps to provide live updates on natural disasters.

Stumbleupon is my favoured bookmarking application, I’ve used others like Digg, Delicious, Yahoo MyWeb 2.0; but Stumbleupon has the quickest tagging mechanism – someone else has already done it. And Stumbleupon has the stumble feature. Unfortunately stumbleupon is unaware that some content isn’t english (though you can select other languages) and everything gets garbled as Latin1.

Building a weather service

Published
by
James Little
on March 12, 2009
in code and web
. 1 Comment

Create web service to return personal weather station or airport weather station data from wunderground.com.

The web service will return JSON or XML data. wunderground.com API returns XML data.

When a user request weather information for a location, the web service will return the closest weather information for that location that is available. If nothing is available, or the closest is deemed to be too far away, the user will be asked if this is good enuogh and a message will be added to our logs informing the application administrator that closer weather data is required.

If the user, or an administrator adds a new weather station, the longitude and latitude will be added to the database, as with the name of the station, a link, and an ID that will map to a file system location, when it was added and if the last update was successful. Weather stations once added will be updated every 3 hours, 8 times in a 24 hour period. These will be translated into JSON files when requested.

The directory system will be based on weather station ID and the date in the form YYYYMMDD. Each directory will only contain up to 8 XML files, relating to a single weather station and day. Each directory may also contain JSON files. Perhaps a PHP XSLT engine, or C XSLT engine could be used to generate the desired JSON and JSONP files. We may utilise a library such as Xalan-C to generate JSON files. I’ve investigated XSLT solutions and it appears that PHP has suitable XSLT functions. I will modify this procedure, but it shows that the functionality is suitable.

$proc = new XSLTProcessor();

if (!$proc->hasExsltSupport())
{
   die('EXSLT support not available');
}
// Load the XML source
$xml = new DOMDocument;
$xml->load('test.xml');

$xsl = new DOMDocument;
$xsl->load('test.xsl');

// Configure the transformer
$proc->importStyleSheet($xsl); // attach the xsl rules

if(isset($_GET["callback"])) echo $_GET["callback"]."(";
echo $proc->transformToDoc($xml)->firstChild->wholeText;
if(isset($_GET["callback"])) echo ")";

We will be able to resolve the closest weather station or stations to a particular point and (in our user interface) allow a user to select the favoured weather station.