Hangover's suck

For what ever reason I decided I’m doing too much js to not being using the Excellent JSLint as such I’ve decided it’s time to use it in anger, no more bespoke copy and pasting, automated stylee, here how to do it

$bash – ./scripts/jslintchecker.sh iplayer/ report.txt scripts/jslint.js

Files here ->

JSLINT AUTOMATOR_SHELL_SCRIPT ZIP HERE

update 4th May – fix script for absolute paths agruments

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Here’s the stats from my supposed 8meg line from virgin

Throttling + iPlayer == Virgin Media are Scum

Can’t watch James May on the Moon, had to watch Top Gear on Redux

on a train back to london, from the ed film festival, and i feel rejuviated i’ve regained some of my mojo after the hard slog of vr, time to talk about testing (for the record probably my personal weakiest best practise).

part1 part2

Testing

I’ll be talking a bit about testing, i’ll go through what i think the purpose and spirit of testing is, what’s it’s advantages/disadvantages, and then finally give a general overview of it.

Through out the 3 part brain dump on best practises i’m intending to try and stay constructive and positive, this is the one i may drop some hints of the inner scars i have on this particular one, sorry guys here we go…

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part1 part2

Hi guys,

I’ve been thinking up some ideas of recent about how we (eg myself and the department) do code, it’s part of a planned initiative to do best practises and stuff, rarararra

In my opinion there’s simple stuff like use version control, don’t use eval and such, but there are sort of lower down, plain coding competency,

It’s not really best practise just really stupid not to do it, best practise to me is three tricky issues, documentation, code testing, and peer coding practises (by which i mean peer programming, peer code reviewing, peer branch/merge control techniques etc)

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ooops, content producers forgetting to double check their data entry

1. oops, bbc news team inserting placeholder text into cms

ps opera-mini is still great, just not a great as it used to be

2. Why is opera-mini inserting google adwords into the bbc news website!!! grrrr

update -> cool online opera-mini demo may setup a version of this software for the visualising radio mobile version

I love opera-mini but i wish they wouldnt do this shit (prosuming it isn’t O2), having said that the adverts look perfect and look almost designed to fit into the place they have inserted them into.

Sorry for the poor image quality since i use my phone for all my camera needs had to use the iMac Camera which is rubbish.

Simply the best, what a guy

3. Finally the lord of darkiness, lord mandelson, wow what a man, no one can deflect, lie, or weasle quite as good as mandelson,

points to watch out for are :-

the amazing deflection and complete non-answer of the first question of the interview (first 2 minutes),

the proceeding demonition of the poor bbc anchor who has the interview dicated to him by the frankly amazing misdirection, deflection, and various other straw man techinques from the master of the dark arts,

then my favourate highlight is in the point where the whole operation is undone by the slightiness freudian slip of the tongue where we hear something quite unbelievable, simply amazing at 17.55-18.25

sorry for going into politics, i don’t normally infect my blog with this stuff but this guy’s brillant, it’s the most interesting thing i feel watching politicians do what they do best: bending; maniupating; stretching the truth.

Like I said this a point and case study in the dark arts of the politician.

And now for something completely different

- my favourateiest bestist new song ever! since i first heard it yesterday

- the best source of all knowledge on this planet, no seriously i mean it

thanks all folks

Zap

I was doing a code review for my more recent project visualising radio, and saw what I thought was a bug,

dataLoader.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, onXMLComplete(rssTitle));

i was about to go into one of my trade mark, “now what you’ve done is great, but…. actually it doesn’t work” when to my surprise the code was working fine, i had a look further down and saw the following genius

private function onXMLComplete(t):Function {

return function( e:Event ) {parseXML(t, e);}

}

This was fantastic, this wee programming trick (while perhaps creating a possible memory leak around the function scope) is amazing!

All of a sudden using this trick all sorts of fun, customisable functions are possible (if not advisable)

eg

function event_callback(data_object_for_callback:Object):Function{

return function( e:Event ){

// some code involving “e” and “data_object_for_callback”

// doing cool stuff

}

}

anyway i thought the technique was cool enough to blog about, when i get a copy of flash installed i’ll post a flex/flash example

Zap

Ps sorry for the lack of a flash example, my work machine currently doesn’t even have it installed… though because of my current projects all being flex it doesn’t matter too much, and the designers are much happier without me optomising there graphics

The gorgious Tim-licious artwork of phase 2

after 7 extremely hard weeks, and one of the more stressful dress rehearsals of a my career with the 5live team , watching mark kermode, and the shorter bloke from the peep show appear on the radio vis client was amazing,

Visualising radio mark 2 has launched, it’s a bbc experiment to see what can be done to engage with audiences more, personally i like to think of it as web red button, it’s only a trial but the tech is there to do some really cool experiences,

wanta show the wikipedia entry of outcast as their playing, sure….
wanta show a rss feed of premier league goals, sure…
wanta build a module to dynamicly parse the football press acc ‘s feed and push it into the client, sure… will cost a bit though
wanta show the music video, sure… though the trust would probably never allow it

it’s a modular system easily expandable to test out how to do this thing, and it’s great, but only the start, only a fraction of the potiental has been reached, the ux ain’t perfect yet, and is even a little confused in places, are the audience passive or active, should we be pushing or should they be choosing, the important thing is the base tech is here now, with it’s extendable api mark 3 could really be something special, and i mean that, we just need the courage to build ontop of it,

today’s launch was no less amazing, alot of flash/ruby/monterosa tech went into this thing,

sage stats, rss feeds, webcams, sms messages, vcs feeds, drm(evil…. but necessary oh i feel so dirty), json, nuts, bolts, and even a few big name celebs

it’s going to be a fun few weeks

started today it, it’s to be repeated for the 5live simon mayo show 1pm to 4pm, monday to friday for the next few weeks, then expanding further into other networks

http://bbcami.s3.amazonaws.com/live_5live.html

for those of a geeky persuasion here’s the debug link (no secret easter eggs i’m afraid but it shows you a bit more about hows it’s been made)

http://bbcami.s3.amazonaws.com/live_debug_5live.html

ondemand links (of questionable if strongly debated quality) will be on the website soon

i can honestly say, with the restrictions, time-restraints, set-backs, this is one of the proudest products i’ve made, hope anyone watching it enjoys it, will probably do a bbc radio labs blog posting about the vis radio client/console at some point its a ugly disgusting, thing of beauty , most of the credit of which has to go to the the mark 1 team,

cheers

Zap

updated to include the<censored>radio blog post</censored>

Hi guys haven’t posted for a while, thought I’d post this wee little script I did yesterday afternoon for a site

It’s basically a proxy cache-ish system, using wget + ftp + a bat script to tie it all together

So basically tada – it’s a script which every X secs downloads a file, then uploads said file automatically, without user intervention

There’s two different version, one for those lucky enough to be on a raw internet connection, and one for those who your unluck enough to have to access the internet through a proxy server/and a ftp proxy server, which configures wget/ftp appriorately,

NonProxy & Proxy Server Version

Script BAT –

:: wget needs to be explicitly told where the bbc proxy is

set http_proxy=HTTP_PROXY_LOCATION

:: echo off

:: Repeat until end

::==============

:repeat_command

:: delete old file / download new file / upload new file

:: =============

echo “UPDATING FILE”

del rss.xml

wget.exe INSERT_URL_LOCATION_HERE –output-document=rss.xml

ftp -s:proxy_command_list.txt

:: wait 1 seconds then repeat

::==============

ping 1.1.1.1 -n 1 -w 100000 >NUL

GOTO repeat_command

Script Niggle details –

1. Requires wget.exe (included in zip above) in the same folder
2. FTP.exe on the commandline

Changes maybe needed in “XXX_command_list.txt”

• The proxy version may need to be changes to your proxies unique login settings
• The ftp server like wise may require the authorisation in a different order

I would recommend ftp-ing on the commandline once by hand, then coping these settings into the file

Saw this really interesting snippet from a old Victorian writer on words, i found it fascinating thought some one else may too

This was a wee talk i did on thursday for those who missed it

mashed presentation