Links for 2007-10-28
- Mr Emap wants another Smash Hit - Telegraph An interview with Sir David Arculus, who is bidding to become chairman of Emap
Rob's Blog - October 2007
Contents
Here are Rob's Blog entries for October 2007.
- Links for 2007-10-28
- Links for 2007-10-26
- Links for 2007-10-25
- Links for 2007-10-22
- Atom Posting To Movable Type
- Links for 2007-10-15
- Links for 2007-10-12
- Links for 2007-10-10
- Links for 2007-10-09
- Uploading Files To A LAMP Server Using .NET
- Q Awards 2007
- Links for 2007-10-03
- Links for 2007-10-02
- Sam And Amanda
- Links for 2007-10-01
Blog entries for other months can be found in the main blog index.
Links for 2007-10-26
- Global tipped to buy Kiss stations from Emap in youth push | Media | Guardian Unlimited Global Radio is likely to buy the Kiss radio stations from Emap and merge it with its own Galaxy brand to create a youth radio network with unparalleled reach
- BBC NEWS | England | Tees | Man who urinated on woman jailed A man who urinated on a woman as she lay dying and shouted "this is YouTube material" has been sentenced to three years in prison.
- Ex-boss wades into Emap row - Peterborough Today Sir David Arculus said he is confident that, if appointed chairman of Emap, he can grow the business and drive up its share price from the current £8 a share to £12.
Links for 2007-10-25
- Radio - News - Q&A: Emap programming chief Mark Story - Digital Spy Emap's programming chief talks about todays RAJAR figures
Links for 2007-10-22
- DBSlayer What a great idea, a MySQL / HTTP / JSON abstraction layer.
- Emap chairman faces open revolt - Times Online It looks like a bunch of shareholders want to ditch Alun Cathcart as Chairman of Emap and focus on building the business instead of breaking it up.
Atom Posting To Movable Type
For the Q Awards 2007, we wanted to have minute by minute blogging.
We used Movable Type for the website, but didn't want to have to rely on having a laptop available to blog from, so blogging from a mobile phone was the approach we took.
Originally we looked at Twitter for this, but we worried about connection speed. We also looked at Nokia Lifeblog, while good, it doesn't really allow for just headline posting. Finally, we took the custom code approach.
Movable Type has an Atom interface, it's what Nokia Lifeblog uses. This lets us post articles, so all we needed was a suitable client. Thankfully, using Perl, there is XML::Atom::Client.
Ben Hammersley provides an great tutorial on using the Atom API in Movable Type.
My code needed to take a line of text and post automatically to Movable Type in a certain category (called "livefeed"). I built a really simple HTML page that could be used by any internet enabled phone. It had one text box and one submit button. Copy entered here and submitted would appear in the Movable Type blog automatically.
I needed some glue Perl code behind this page to make this happen. It turned out to be really simple, and here's the core functionality. I won't bore you with CGI handling or display code, just the Atom meat.
my $api = XML::Atom::Client->new;
$api->username($username);
$api->password($password);
my $dc = XML::Atom::Namespace->new(dc => 'http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/');
my $entry = XML::Atom::Entry->new;
$entry->title($title);
$entry->content('');
$entry->set($dc, 'subject', 'livefeed');
my $edituri = $api->createEntry($posturl, $entry);
if ($edituri) {
## posted ok
} else {
## not posted, $api->errstr has the error message;
}
This code assumes you have a few variables in place, those are
- $username - the poster's username
- $password - the poster's web services password
- $posturl - the web service's post url
- $subject - the copy to post to the blog
Movable Type has two different passwords per user, it is important we use the webservices password and not the users normal Movable Type password.
Now we were posting and creating entries each post, we wanted to show them all on one page. my collegue Ross wrote this block of code to display the posts.
<MTEntries category="livefeed">
<li>
<MTIfNonEmpty tag="EntryTitle">
<p class="time"><$MTEntryDate format="%I:%M %p"$></p>
<p><$MTEntryTitle$></p>
</MTIfNonEmpty>
</li>
</MTEntries>
This turned out to be a nice, fast solution to getting content up quickly on the day.
PERMALINK - Atom Posting To Movable Type
Entered: 2007-10-19 17:02:40
Links for 2007-10-15
- Channel 4 asks Emap about taking full control of Box TV - Times Online Channel 4 has held talks with Emap about taking full control of Box Television, home to The Hits and Kerrang! TV, The Times has learnt
- Guardian joins Apax to bid for Emap titles - Telegraph Apax, the private equity firm, has teamed up with the publisher of The Guardian newspaper to mount a joint £1.2bn bid for Emap's business publishing division.
Links for 2007-10-12
- String of bidders through to next round of Emap sell-off - Times Online It looks like Hearst, Providence, Cinven, Quadrangle, Exponent are all through to the 2nd round of bidding for Emap's consumer magazines.
Links for 2007-10-10
- BBC NEWS | World | Asia-Pacific | Doctors save man with vodka drip Australian doctors have kept an Italian tourist alive by feeding him vodka through a drip for three days, medical staff in Queensland say.
- Tommi's S60 applications blog Nokia Mobile Codes beta adds support for creating QR codes, in addition to Data Matrix.
Links for 2007-10-09
- Netimperative - Mcdonalds serves up free Wi-Fi McDonalds is going to offer free Wi-Fi in all it's restaurants in the UK by the end of the year. Cool!
- SMS-enabled solar parking meters for Eastbourne | The Register The Sussex coastal town of Eastbourne is soon to receive a new hi-tech boon, in the form of solar-powered armoured parking meters which can send text messages.
Uploading Files To A LAMP Server Using .NET
We had to setup and run a webcam for the Q Awards red carpet earlier this week.
The original plan was to have an old Axis ethernet webcam, connected to a wifi network using a Dlink bridge. After a nightmare of not being able to get the Dlink to work, we gave up and went for a USB webcam connected to a laptop approach.
I had to write some software to handle the capture of the image and the upload to the webserver. Because we wanted to do a few custom things on the way we weren't able to use out of the box software.
I'll post on how to use a webcam with .NET another time. What I wanted to document was how to upload a file using .NET to a LAMP server.
It turns out to be easier than I thought for .NET, one line of code can achieve this using the My.Computer.Network.UploadFile Method.
For example, to upload test.txt to http://www.robertprice.co.uk/asp_upload.pl we can do the following (in Visual Basic)...
My.Computer.Network.UploadFile("C:\test.txt","http://www.robertprice.co.uk/asp_upload.pl")
Now we need some code at the other end to store this upload. As I was building a webcam application, the uploaded file, an image in this case, was always overwritten.
The uploaded .NET file uses an bog standard HTTP upload as described in RFC 1867.
If we use Perl to read this file, we can use the standard CGI.pm module to do most of the hard work for us.
The uploaded file is passed a parameter called file, so we can create a CGI object and get a reference to this using the param method. Once we have this, we can treat it as a filehandle and read the date off it. Then all we have to do is to write it out to a file.
The following code achieves this.
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use CGI.pm;
my $CGI = new CGI;
my $file = $CGI->param('file');
open(FILE, ">/path/to/my/file/test.txt") or die $!;
while(<$file>) {
print FILE $_;
}
close(FILE);
print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
print "OK\n";
PERMALINK - Uploading Files To A LAMP Server Using .NET
Entered: 2007-10-09 13:47:31
Q Awards 2007
I've been working at this years Q Awards.
Look out for content i'm posting via mobile and wireless on the official website, q4music.com.
PERMALINK - Q Awards 2007
Lifeblog Entry - Posted via Lifeblog from a Nokia smart phone
Entered: 2007-10-09 13:44:51
Links for 2007-10-03
- BBC NEWS | England | London | Burning chilli sparks terror fear A pot of burning chilli sparked fears of a biological terrorist attack in central London.
- Londonist: Thai Chilli Fry Terror Soho streets were brought to a terrifying standstill yesterday afternoon when "a very hot and sharp smell" and a cloud of acrid smoke provoked chemical attack panic.
- Former Chrysalis CEO, Cinven among Emap bidders Former Chrysalis Radio Chief Executive Phil Riley said he had put forward a bid for Emap's radio assets with backing from an unnamed private equity partner.
- Cinven eyes two Emap assets amid break-up Cinven has made indicative offers for both the company's business-to-business (B2B) and consumer magazines assets
Links for 2007-10-02
- BBC NEWS | UK | Phonecalls and texts to be logged Information about all landline and mobile phone calls made in the UK must be logged and stored for a year under new laws.
- BBC NEWS | Technology | Data row hits mobile mast website I wondered why it was impossible to get easy access to lat/long positions of the phone masts on this site, it turns out the operators and ofcom refuse to give them out.
- BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Broadcaster Sherrin dies aged 76 Broadcaster and writer Ned Sherrin has died from throat cancer, aged 76.
- BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Theme tune writer Hazlehurst dies Ronnie Hazlehurst, who wrote the theme tunes for television shows such as Blankety Blank and Last of the Summer Wine, has died aged 79.
- Cinven bids for Emap's business-to-business, consumer magazine units - report | Latest News | News | Hemscott Private equity group Cinven has made bids for Emap's business-to-business and consumer magazine business, the Times reported without citing sources.
Sam And Amanda
Here's a picture of me with my new favourite twins, Sam and Amanda of Big Brother fame.
As you may have read, i built the website for Heat Radio so was invited along for tonight's launch party.
I have to say, both Sam and Amanda are very friendly, beautiful and genuine people. After posing for a photo they even stopped for a dance with me.
Cheeky girls move over, Samanda are my new favourite twins.
PERMALINK - Sam And Amanda
Lifeblog Entry - Posted via Lifeblog from a Nokia smart phone
Entered: 2007-10-02 22:28:12
Modified: 2007-10-03 09:07:07
Links for 2007-10-01
- FT Alphaville ? Blog Archive ? UK’s Emap to assess bid interest Emap, the UK media group, will learn this week whether its auction has generated sufficient interest to proceed with the sale of its three divisions
- Emap considers pension sale to bring in bidders | News_ | Guardian Unlimited Money Now it seems Emap want to sell our pensions too
- Riley fronts offer for Emap's stations - Telegraph Phil Riley, the former chief executive of Chrysalis Radio, is fronting a private equity bid for Emap's £400m radio stations.