hola! Barcelona

I'm on my way to barcelona at the moment. Its perfect timing really as the weather this week has been crap. So 3 days in relative sunshine should be nice.

Jonathan and the social internet revolution

It's 2009. I forget this a lot of the time and find myself doing things circa '00.

Well as of today, no longer. Twittering, flickr posting, facebook ... Stuff (surprisingly doesn't have a verb yet), i should be doing it all.

I won't go as far as to say that the days of isolation are over, however when i find myself giving away my location (using googles new latitude service), you can see why i think this way.

i really want a new phone

Sadly in the mean time, i'll have to deal with just having this (e61) thing. I had planned to get the nokia e71 again however, the palm pre happened. At which point all my funds went right back into my pocket. This isn't a blog post of sorts, just an opportunity to test out blogging from a phone, via email. I was working on a blogger client using python for s60 however, i've just remembered how much fun mobile development is without a decent emulator.

Wow, thats old

Considering that this is the internet and all, i thought i should post this. below was the old text from the about me section of this very blog.

Russian Space Station, named in partial memory of the Fallen "Mir" and that outpost from the movie "Armageddon". I talk about technology, my new life at Southampton Solent University and living on my own @ 18. Subscribe on the RSS or just visit, thanks for popping by.

Tad out of date don't you think.

Are men really that useless: Anglerfish reproduction...

I've always been told that men are useless, however this takes the biscuit. This is how anglerfish reproduce

When he finds a female, he bites into her skin, and releases an enzyme that digests the skin of his mouth and her body, fusing the pair down to the blood-vessel level. The male then atrophies into nothing more than a pair of gonads, which releases sperm in response to hormones in the female's bloodstream indicating egg release.

Sadly i know men who are about as useful as this...

Source

Anyways I'm gonna try and liven up the blog, one post a month/2 months is crazy, this is web 2.0 right. Daily journal returns ...

Quote of the Day

Josh "After i'm done swiping my visa, I'm gonna ask them what their flavour is?"

Me "What do you take this thing for, Baskin Robins!"

Grown women taking their clothes off, seems to have a strange impact on people.

2008: The Year in Review

In keeping with RSS tradition, i felt that it was only right to look back at the year. Review my highs and lows, my victories and failures, and highlight anything else that took my fancy during 2008.

My highs of 2008

FOWA London 08

My first tech conference. It was a great experience. I met a lot of people that i would never have met otherwise. It also gave my twitter account a reason to exist. However, the best part of it was being surrounded by other people that knew what i meant when i said something, and more to the point, said things that went completely over my head. Part of me would like to go to the miami event, however not sure if i can slip it in given my workload.

Netro 42

Having been locked up as ASP programmer, i have to thank the folks at Netro42 for letting me break my professional PHP duck. However thats not the only reason that i enjoy it, it also gave me a chance to work with a smaller (not quite startup) company, and see what that is like. Best of all i got the job via facebook!

The return of a friend

One of my best friends had changed over the summer of 2007. Don't quite know how to describe it, but they were different. Anyway, when they returned to uni in 08 they had returned to their old self. It was like getting a whole new friend.

A New friend

Sure i met loads of people during the course of 2008. However some stick out more than most. This year that person was Yasmin. Don't know why, but we just get along really well. Like my other friends i'm blessed to be able to meet nice people.

Fulham/ Jimmy Bullard and Roy Hodgson

Amazing, simply amazing.

Working with Non-Brits

Thanks to FOWA, i got to work some nice guys from holland. Unfortunately our project, an iPhone application hit a snag, and won't be rolling out anytime soon. But it was one of my long term aims. I'm now really considering moving abroad to work.

Chinese Speaking

Ni Hao, wo shou zhongwen! Never thought that would happen, but it did in 08.

My Lows of 2008

Amit going home

This was a sad moment, just because he had been a constant character while i've been at Uni. Part of me felt responsible for not trying to help him more. But hopefully his absence won't be the end of our association.

Looking for work

This sucked. Full stop it sucks, ultimately it had a positive outcome. But during the search it sucked.

Wanting to leave uni

After returning from the summer break, i felt that uni had run it's course. Having tasted the big bad world, i wanted more. Maybe it was the paycheques going to my head, or maybe it was something else. But after moping around, and being told i'm a fool by most people i decided to stay, and look i'm writing this post now ^_^.

Some of my standout moments of 2008

• Tunde smashing a window when manchester united won the champions league.
• Quickly followed by a random guy dancing and screaming in our house.
• Being mistaken for a homeless person
• Helping Joel home after a messy evening envolving a bottle of rum
• Meeting Lorenzo Barbosa
• Working on the Kings Road, Ahem, Chelsea Ahem, West London Ahem.
• Spending £80 on a coat, never thought i would see the day
• Not buying a single piece of tech this year, although not without trying (thanks expansys).

Overall 2008 has been good to me, the lord has been good to me. Despite my attempts to mess things up via over thinking, and who knows what else, i'm still alive and well.

Targets for 2009

• Travel
• Go to China/Hong Kong
• Start making some damn software already
• Be slightly less boring (seriously)
• Get closer to God
• Learn another language
• Read more
• Speak my mind more

How many legs does a dog have if you call his tail a leg?' The answer: `Four, because calling a tail a leg does not make it a leg'

One of Abraham Lincoln's favorite riddles

I love high brow quotes as much as the next guy, but it wouldn't be the same without some of my favourites from the year...

"Chamonsters" - Yasmin

"All Right, Dear Diary, Jackpot" - Family Guy, Tunde, Josh, Jai

"Wee Ooh Wee Ooh Wee" - Lil Wayne, Ms. Officer

"Manage Expectations" - Any office anywhere

""

Objective-j is amazing

I got bored in the library today, so I decided to check out objective-j. In a word Amazing. It's objective C in the browser, not like it, it is actually it, down to the @at the declaration of a string.

Unfortunately I've got nothing to take advantage of it at the moment, maybe in the summer/ rest of my life

Javascript client storage library

So thats my dissertation topic. It's out there for the world to see. Up until very recently it was GIT GUI client, however after checking out GIT GUI my ideas seemed redundant, and wasteful.

So the plan is to develop a client side storage wrapper/ abstraction independent of any of the major is frameworks. Light weight wrappers can then be built modeled on the singleton pattern, for the various libraries. The library would have a "storage provider" interface , therefore as technologies are introduced new providers can be created. Initially I plan to create 3. Cookies, flash, & HTML 5 session storage.

As I'm typing this on a iPhone, I'll stop now. But rest assured I hate this thing.

IPhone livin

My brother was kind enough to lend me an iPhone.

At the moment it's just to test out my new iphone app. But I really don't think that apple will be seeing my cash on this front. As I learnt with my palm, touch screen keyboards dont compare to regular qwerty ones. Sure you narrow skus, but the difference in typing speed is to much for me.

I will say that the interface is just as amazing as it looks. But this thing still needs some work

Jonathan, The stock broker

First of this crap is gambling, don't let anyone tell you any better. With all the flashy screens and graphs you may think it's not, but when you really think about it, thats what it is.

My inspiration was Warren Buffett, he said

Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful

Greed is what ruins anyone, control the greed and the success will come (in theory). So first your wondering where did i get the cash from, well i had planned on buying a new laptop, but it didn't really make sense. So instead of just handing over the cash to apple, why not try to do some proper investing.

I'm a firm believer in not trying to be too clever, there is only one sector i really know anything about, Technology. I planned to do a mixture of short term buys combined with some long term investments.

Sensible Investments

Apple or AAPL was one of my long term buys. Currently trading at sub $100 only a few months ago this stock was floating around $200. The company has low debt, and good sales, so it sells itself.

Sun or JAVA is a little more of a risk, the stock is trading low at the minute, mainly because of the credit crunch (read: can't borrow cash to buy servers), so there is a fair chance we might see an upturn in the next few months.

Crazy Ones

Lehman Brothers LEHMQ, first your thinking, but they went belly up. Yeah, they did, and there stock is trading at $0.067. Tempting ....

AIG, This is a stock that at one point as $70 it's now $2. What's the worst that could happen? But seriously, they have over a Trillion dollars in assets, and their stock is in the tank thanks to losing $8 billion in the last quarter.

RBS, This is an example of the fact that i actually know nothing. I picked RBS in my google finance portfolio about two weeks ago. at the time it was £0.90. At the moment it's £0.64, i lost 28%! Theoretically! Dangerous game this

One Day

Berkshire Hathaway BRK.A. The company of the great Warren Buffett, it's 1.55 million shares trade at $113,000 each!!! Just a tad out of my league.

Basically this stock thing is crazy, extremely risky and a money pit, but i can't wait to get my hands dirty (not in an Enron way!).

Good luck to any fellow investors.

When did it get this bad?

When did it get this bad? Just as well i'm Jamaican

Quote of the Day

Simon: What you getting?

Me: An iPhone, worst thing is i don't even want it

Damn Apple and closed market tactics

FOWA: My thoughts

FOWA was actually amazing. I highly recommend it to anyone who, like myself doesn't have a hardcore programming team to socialize with. One of the key benefits for me was meeting other people, the talks were good, but the networking was better.

Francisco Tolmasky
My highlight was getting to talk to Francisco Tolmasky. He is part of the team behind 280 north, popularized for its 280 slides app, and for bring Cocoa to the web. It was fantastic to talk to someone, who is trying to take the future of the web in a particular direction, and having the opportunity to understand that vision first hand, and be able to interact with them.
Plus it was a chance to talk to a not only a (former) member of Apple's development team, but also to man who's work can be found in many pockets, far and wide, as he was part of the mobile Safari development team.

Perhaps the most interesting thing for me was discovering that he was actually head hunted by apple. He had submitted patches to Webkit, and seems that the overlord was watching and gave him a call.

Jason Calacanis
I also got say hello to Jason Calacanis. He gave an insightful talk into his hiring philosophy. Essentially he advocated dumping average performers, and employing only good and excellent staff, arguing that there work output is significantly better than that of a mixture of average and below par employees.

I partly agree, however from a emotional stand point i think i would have a issue with sacking folks just because they're not amazing, however it could be argued that i wouldn't have employed them in the first place. My theory is that unless your smarter than me, it's not gonna work out.

Live Diggnation

Alex Albrecht is actually really funny in person. I never realized just how funny he is until the diggnation taping. His timing is fantastic.

Personally i'm not the biggest fan of Diggnation, however it was fun, i certainly wasn't screaming and diving around for prizes, but it was good fun.

Adobe Air

When i had first heard about this i thought it was gonna be amazing. However the need to install the framework put me off. However adobe has discovered that no one wants yet another shockwave/flash/sliverlight situation, and you can now bundle the framework with your app. I spoke to nice guy at the conf who explained to me all the cool stuff i could do, and answered all my questions. Air looks like a serious competitor to traditional (does a traditional web app exist?) web apps. The ability to run offline, and completely independent of the browser is temping, a great use is for forms in corporate setups, (read oracle forms and it's siblings are dead). Look out for some air apps in the future, however first i gotta work out how to get the application.xml file to work correctly!

New Project(s)

One of the main reasons i wanted to go to FOWA, was to borden my horizons, and thanks to my new dutch friends i did just that. I've been commissioned to make a small iphone app. This is ideal as i wanted to do some work with the iphone, but i had no iphone, and no ideas.

Since i get to do some iphone work, and i'm not really scared nor care for apples legal team, i'll try to publish some samples as i explore the SDK.

Macs and more Macs

I knew that macs where popular among my kind, but damn! There were too many, i almost felt sick. I would have loved to see a photo of what the audience looked like from the stage, it would have just been a sea of apple logos. On the note of Mac laptops, the new ones come out tomorrow, i think i might have to drop a G ...

All in all FOWA was great, I'm tempted to go to the one in miami in Feb 09, however the whole idea of a conference in miami doesn't really seem like work. Plus i'm a third year now, i can't be flying around the world 'networking' ... can i???

Ignacio: To follow a testing methodology?

Me: Nah, not really.

This is why it is important to go to conferences!

Getting the file size before upload with Ajax

One of my new projects requires users to upload pictures to our service. The problem is that everybody and their mother has a 7.2 Mpx camera. After some wikipedia research i discovered that jpeg photos are encoded at maximum of about 8.25 bits/pixel. (don't write me about decimal point bit values please :) ).

So out came the pad of paper (and calculator)...

(7.2 * 10^6) * 8.25 = 594 * 10^5 [bits]

(594 * 10^5)/8 = 7425000 bytes or 7.1 Mb per picture

Now i wanted to limit the users to 1 Mb per picture, and wanted them to upload numerous ones at that. Now from a usability point of view it would be a "epic fail" if uncle Roy waited for 5 minutes while his picture uploaded, just to discover that we won't accept it because it's too big.

Now, I imagine your saying that this problem has been solved, it's called a flash uploader (or sliverlight depending on who you get your checks from). However there is a new solution, doing file size checking without flash, using only ajax.

Thats right ma, no flash. Firefox 3 has introduced something new to our world. It's called the filelist Object. Lying deep within in it is a property called (drum roll please) fileSize, and you can use it like so...

Javascript

//Only works in firefox 3

//i Used jquery to do a dom lookup

//However you could do the ol' fashioned window.document.getElementById()
fileSize = $('#fileInput')[0].files[0].fileSize;


It returns the size of file in bytes as an integer! 

Hopefully you've learnt something new, i certainly did. I have a plan to get a similar technique to work on all browsers, however at the moment i'm being thwarted by browser security issues :(.

You can get all the files over at the lab

Andrew Carnegie

A man who dies rich, is a man who dies shamed

OSS: Python webpage link checker

Another piece of python to go. Nothing special, but something fairly useful that i've thrown together. 

The following code samples are released under the terms of the GPL 2.0

It's URL link checker, it's not fully recursive (working on it, they don't teach recursive algorithms on my course). But checks all the anchor tags on the given page, returning warnings and the like depending on what it finds.

Usage: To use this just run it like so "python [scriptname]"
It will then ask for the url of the page you wish to check, and then it will print a report, like so.

Python

#Link Checker
#Brazen attempt to write one in 15 minutes
# Jonathan Dalrymple
# July 15,2008
# Start 11:52
# End 12:35

import httplib
import sgmllib
import re

#HTML Parser
class LinkChecker( sgmllib.SGMLParser ):
def __init__(self, verbose = 0):
sgmllib.SGMLParser.__init__( self, verbose )

self.linkList = []
self.inLink = False
self.lastHref = None
self.hostName = None

print 'Parsing file...'

def parse( self, fileStr ):
self.feed( fileStr )
self.close()

def start_a( self, attr ):

#Show user that the parser is working
#print '*'

self.inLink = True

for name, val in attr:
if name == 'href':
self.lastHref = val

def end_a( self):
self.inLink = False

def handle_data(self, str):

if self.inLink:

tmp = self.__parseUrl( self.lastHref )
self.linkList.append( (str,tmp['host'],tmp['path']) )

def __parseUrl( self, str ):
ret = {}

#slice of preceeding http
#if str[0:7] == 'http://':
# str = str[7:len(str)]

# Extract path regex "\w+\.(\w*)\.(\w{2}\.)?(\w{2,3})"
m = re.compile("\w+\.(\w*)\.(\w{2}\.)?(\w{2,3})").match( str )

if m == None:
#print 'Error in handle url, regex failed'

ret['host'] = None
ret['path'] = str
else:
ret['host'] = m.string[0:m.end()]



if m.end() <>

ret['path'] = str[ m.end(): len(str) ]

else:

ret['path'] = None

return ret

#Check link

def __checkLink( self, displayName, host = None, path = '/' ):

if host == None:

host = self.hostName

#slice path and determine if it is a full url

reqObj = httplib.HTTPConnection( host, 80 )

#print '---Requesting %s' % url+path

reqObj.request('get', path )

response = reqObj.getresponse()

if response.status == 200:

retVal = "SUCCESS |%s returned %d" % (displayName, response.status )

elif response.status == 404:

retVal = "FAILURE |%s returned %d, (%s)" % (displayName, response.status, path )

else:

retVal = "WARNING |%s returned %d, (%s)" % (displayName, response.status, path )

return retVal

def testUrlParser( self, list ):

for u in list:

print '--' + str(self.__parseUrl( u ))

def runReport( self, urlStr ):

urlDict = self.__parseUrl( urlStr )

if urlDict != None:

self.hostName = urlDict['host']

req = httplib.HTTPConnection(urlDict['host'], 80)

req.request('get',urlDict['path'])

response = req.getresponse()

if response.status == 200:

htmlStr = response.read()

self.parse( htmlStr )

print "%d links found" % len( self.linkList )

for v in self.linkList:

#print v

print self.__checkLink( v[0], v[1], v[2] )

else:

print "Download Request for %s failed: %d" % ( response.reason, response.status)

def main():

#urlStr = "http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=bar&btnG=Google+Search&meta="

urlStr = raw_input('Url you wish to check:')

if urlStr != None:

bar = LinkChecker()

#foo = ('www.google.com','http://www.google.com','http://docs.python.org/lib/lib.html','docs.python.org/test')

#bar.testUrlParser( foo )

bar.runReport( urlStr )

if __name__ == '__main__':

main()

Quote of the Day

I now finally understand why those guys buy £100,000  cars, only to sit in traffic. It's because they remember the days of running for the train, only to find that it's standing room only and their new best friend is a significantly taller gentleman's (or lady!!) armpit and or sweaty back.

Realizations, Andorra here i come

20 hours, count it if you haven't got anything better do.

In a few months i'll be going to china. I'm led to believe the fight is like 20 hours, making it the longest of my life. I honestly have no clue what to do in that time. A second battery for the macbook is essential, however beyond that what do i do! Count clouds, see if i can work out where i am, sleep...

On another front, i got a job or contract i should say. Working for netro42 in london. I must say i love it there for a number of reasons.
A. I have a 4 core mac pro and 23" cinema display
B. I get to use osx to work
C. They have flexible working times ie 10am is just fine with them.
D. The office design is ultra modern and open plan.
E. Management are the development team!!!!
F. The people aren't too bad either.

There are a lot of lessons which i plan to take out of this and apply to my own company once i'm free of uni. But its been a good experience thus far.
Quote of the Day

Caption

Facebook Chat

This started as a long post, but as i am learning actions speak louder than words

Death by Tray

Backrow, Thats a big ass framework

Some months a ago i spoke about front row. First, the plan was to reverse engineering it, then it was building a plugin for it. Well, it hasn't exactly had my complete attention, however it did drift back into my mind today.

The main sticking point for me has been the lack of documenation, however this should be expected considering that we're talking about a unsupported framework, from one of the most secretive corporate entities in existance.

So in my quest to write for leopard front row, i decided that a nice class diagram would come in handy, easy right...

Well this is what it looks like, after exploring appoximately 30-40% of the 500+ classes!

However i've learnt alot about naming conventions and framework layout. The most striking thing is the level of depth. For example there are classes for everything under the sun, like the Entry of IPv6 addresses. Stuff i personally would have overlooked. I guess thats why i get the semi-big bucks.

Needless to say the folks at apple know how to design a framework, and have done a great job in the absence of namespaces, to provide rigid catagorization of classes.

Class names are nice and logical, for example any class ending with 'layer', is most likely a subclass of BRRenderLayer, eg. BRListLayer or BRTextMenuLayer.

The experience has also made me feel like i've been using the framework, rather than an outsider, looking in. So hopefully in the coming days i can actually leverage this thing to do something other than allow me navigate tv series from the comfort of my bed.

Quote of the Day

"It's a pitty they made so much fuss about gay cowboys, it's actually a decent film"

I happen to think brokeback mountain is a half decent flick

Snake in the torrents ...

I decided to branch out last week and use python seriously for the first time.

Turns out it is as good as all the praise it gets. This conversion was round about the same time i switched to Transmission for my torrenting needs as the jre + azuerus don't do my memory usage any real favours. The main thing that i love about azuerus was the fact that i could have it subscribe to a rss feed and download "linux iso's" automatically. Coupled with the fact that everyones favourite release group, EZTV provides there releases in the RSS form, it was perfect. However the plugin stopped working correctly about a month ago and i've been forced to actually operate my torrent client, gasp!

Anyways, while having a shower (Yes, i come up with concepts in the shower), i thought maybe i can replicate that functionality using python! Transmission has a feature that makes it scan a folder for torrents, so in theory i would simply need to do the following ...

• Read a list of files/shows
• extract the respective links from a rss/xml feed
  
• calculate which ones are the most recent
  
• download the torrent files
  

Below is the entire script. It stores all torrent information in sqlite database, meaning that you can extend anyway you want. The script is released under GPL 2.0. I haven't done any real testing, but it works fine with the following conditions

• Python 2.5.1
• OS X 10.5
• Atom RSS source feed (Mininova)

My plan to schedule it as a cron job and sit back and watch.

Python


#Channel 0.1
# Jonathan Dalrymple
# May 17th, 2008

from xml.etree import ElementTree as ET
import os
import shutil
import sqlite3
import urllib

currentDirectory = os.path.dirname( os.path.abspath( __file__ ))

#Create SQL
dbConn = sqlite3.connect( os.path.join( currentDirectory,"torrentsDB") )

#Create the new table
sql = "DROP TABLE IF EXISTS torrents"

dbConn.execute( sql )

sql = """
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS torrents (
id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY AUTOINCREMENT,
title TEXT,
date TEXT,
url TEXT
)
"""

dbConn.execute( sql )
dbConn.commit()

#Get XML file
response = urllib.urlretrieve( "http://www.mininova.org/rss.xml?user=eztv" )

shutil.copyfile(response[0], os.path.join( currentDirectory,"rssSource.xml") )

xmlFile = os.path.join( currentDirectory, "rssSource.xml" )

try:

tree = ET.parse( xmlFile )

selection = tree.getiterator('item')

i = 0
#For each item tag
for element in selection:
#Get the request elements from the selection

title = element.findtext('title')
date = element.findtext('pubDate')
enclosure = element.find('enclosure').attrib['url']

sql = "INSERT INTO torrents (title, date, url ) VALUES ( '%s','%s','%s')" % (title, date, enclosure)

dbConn.execute( sql )

i += 1

#Commit records
dbConn.commit()

print '%d Torrents have been processed and added to the database' % (i)

except Exception, inst:
print 'Parse Error: %s' % (inst)

#Read the config file for the shows
configFile = file("shows.txt")
shows = configFile.readlines()

#Get the url for the show
print "The following torrents where found ..."

for show in shows:

dataSet = dbConn.cursor()

dataSet.execute( "SELECT title, url FROM torrents WHERE title LIKE '%" + show.rstrip() +"%' ORDER BY id DESC LIMIT 1" )

row = dataSet.fetchone()

#Test to ensure that a record exists
if type(row) == type(tuple()):
try:
print row[0]

#download the torrent file
response = urllib.urlretrieve( row[1] )

newFilename = os.path.join (currentDirectory, show + ".torrent")
#Move from the temp folder
shutil.copyfile( response[0], newFilename )

except Exception, inst:
print 'Download Error: %s' % (inst)

print 'Complete'


Lastly to create the config file, just open your favourite text editor and list your tv shows, delimited using return, mine looks like this

Lost
Battlestar Galactica
House
Cops
American Dad

It's not case sensitive, so don't panic.

touch base

I've been reading Microsoft's Code Complete in recent weeks. I highly recommend it for those of you, who like myself are mostly self taught. Yes we may be trying to b rockstar programmers but, we can't plan or organize a project to save our lives.

With that being said i've got a couple of old projects and a few new ones in the pipeline. As usual most are open source. As the term winds down and the amount of time i have to spend grows larger i hope to release a few.

Also as usual for the summer, i'm looking for work for the summer so if you run a start up and your looking for a half decent programmer in and around greater london and the south west, drop me a line.