Basically, you can take something like the Hey Jude flow chart, marked up in ASCII and convert it into a proper version. If your face is doing this: O_o, seriously stop reading now.

I marked that last one up in JavE, which is fine for ASCII art but a bit laborious if you want to build a diagram. On the ditaa home page there’s a link to a screencast of the perl app, Asciio (App::Asciio on CPAN) which is almost perfect. With a couple of tweaks to the /setup/stencils/asciio file, changing all the corners to the ‘+’ character and then another tweak to setup/actions/file.pl to automatically create flat txt and native asciio versions of the diagram, then calling ditaa in the background on the txt file to build a neat PNG version.

I now have a Visio-lite system that can create data flow diagrams suitable for both source code headers and also pasting into more formal documents. So… yeah. How was your week.

If anyone else is this nuts, let me know in the comments.

So what are our other options? We’ve got a Wii and two XBox 360s. If someone ends up releasing a game on the PS3 we might even get one of those as well.

Wii

This is doable but completely pointless compared to the original xbox. I’d need to transcode everything in to the lower-quality sorenson flash video codec (whatever format it was in, this will be lower quality) and it won’t output at an HD resolution.

PS3

I’m told this works very well as a media playing client and gets along much better than the MS products with other machines on the network (as you’d expect). I don’t have one though.

XBox 360

There are basically two options for streaming to an XBox 360: Setting up Windows Media Center on your Windows-based machine or creating a UPnP (Universal Plug ‘n’ Play) based media server on the network. This is Linux (Ubuntu 8.10) we’re talking about so option one is right out. There are a few UPnP servers for Linux around though. Here’s a breakdown:

• MediaTomb (package name, mediatomb)

  This is a very slick service which is easy to set up, automatically scans your media and presents it in an organised manner. It supports video, pictures and audio with a variety of formats and has the ability to transcode between formats on the fly using VLC. Very cool. Works with everything except a 360.
  Next!

• uShare (package name ushare)

  This is pretty cut-down. The video playback works fine but there is no rescan option at the time of writing meaning you have to restart the service for new videos to appear. Not good if you want to watch something the minute it arrives on the server. This can be partly alleviated by creating a cron job to restart the server daily, but it’s not ideal. The audio library on uShare is also completely useless. It seems to attempt to organise everything, completely fails and only lets you see a handful of tracks in amongst folders which don’t even contain audio. It would have been better if it had just let you walk through the folders like in video mode.

• X360MediaServe (no deb package)

  This requires an old-fashioned manual setup as it’s not in any Ubuntu repository but works well. However it ONLY supports audio so is not suitable for my needs.

• FUPPES (no deb package)

  Steer clear of this if you don’t like the idea of not only an old fashioned manual configure, make, make install style setup but having to google error messages in order to even get it visible from an XBox. It’s almost even worth just using uShare and x360MediaServe both at the same time so that at least you have reasonably hassle-free video and audio.

  If you do happen to have enough patience and you’ve managed to craft the config files into something workable it turns out that this is actually one of the better least rubbish solutions for streaming to 360. The video works and although you have to hammer on the vfolder.cfg file (which doesn’t get built for you) in order to get something workable going it does kind of do the job in a very basic and raw way. Given a bit more time and a decent setup script this might turn out to be quite decent server, but then given a rescan option and proper music support in uShare I wouldn’t even be trying this out.

• TwonkyMedia Server

  Twonky sticks out in this list because although there is a native linux server available it’s locked to free trial only before you have to part with your readies. This proprietary nature of software releases is so foreign to Linux it left me reeling in confusion and I gave up on it before even getting it working. If none of that bothers you then it’s probably the best out of the entire list. I’m a man of principles though. Or a tight-arse.

• Samba

  Inexplicably notable by its absence is Samba, SMB, straight-forward common Windows file sharing. Every OS on earth understands it and I’d been sharing media using it for years already so why doesn’t the 360 support it? No DRM control? Is it because the protocol has been tainted by FOSS under the evil hand of the EU courts? Whatever the reason, it’s pretty typical Microsoft.

At the time of writing I have FUPPES serving both video and music although I can’t map the 360 media player’s “Artist” and “Album” drill down options to it. After a lot of fiddling I got most video working with a drill-down directory list. I haven’t given up on FUPPES yet but the truth is that despite the lack of rescan and decent music support, uShare is still the better option for video streaming at the moment. Install via apt, edit a couple of lines in the config file and then that’s the whole thing set up. Sure you have to restart it to recache the media list but it’s still less effort than FUPPES is.

Conclusion

If you want to stream music, use x360MediaServe. If you want to stream video, use uShare. If you have a ton of patience or you’re a masochist, use FUPPES. If you want to stream both video and music and you have better things to do, use MediaTomb and get a PS3, or you could try both x360MediaServe and uShare at the same time. Bit messy though, right?

Oh hey – could this be the PS3’s first worthwhile exclusive?

Update: Experiment1106 on Twitter pointed out PS3MediaServer which is apparently the best solution for streaming to PS3s (and claims basic 360 support).

It’s not totally finished yet – I’ve got a warning about not releasing connections there that I need to clear up (answers in the comments please!). You can take a look at the code on my SVN repo: http://svn.strawp.net/java/BeebhackDownloader/

Once this is all stable I’ll be having a go at making a GUI and getting it onto my phone.

Update: All working error-free now! GUI next…

v1.0.0 is largely untested and in “works for me” stage so try it out and give feedback!

Note that you may need to refresh the event page in order for the script to kick in because of how Facebook now loads pages in using AJAX.

1. To do a little bit of geographical and statistical analysis on some odd data
2. To laugh at a bunch of hate-filled racists

There were quite a few nuggets of statistical analysis in the first couple of days: A proximity checker to see which of your neighbours members, the obligatory google maps mashups (since, sensibly taken down), a sort of heat map and the Grauniad did an excellent map broken into electoral wards. They were all pretty good, but they still rather suffered from the problem that you see “hot spots” in areas which are naturally population nodes. There was no accounting for population density.

Anyway, in a spare moment I took a copy of the database, cleaned up the postcode information a bit, ran it through a geocoder to get lat and long data and then ran that through a lookup for population density and then grouped the data by postcode area. What I now have is a count of each person in a postcode area, divided by the population density – this should then give a population normalised rank of how hate-filled post code areas are. Anyway, here’s the Top 40, Top Of The Pops style:

Creating pipes is a bit of a mental leap from traditional programming.

I noticed Yahoo Pipes pretty soon after it launched nearly two years ago but other than aggregating RSS feeds I couldn’t really get into it. The visual psuedo-flow-diagram programming didn’t gel with me at all and I just found myself thinking I could have more easily achieved the same results in less time in PHP.

Well, after chatting with the Yahoo Developers booth at FOWA the other week and this week failing to find a decent UK Xbox 360 release calendar in iCal format I decided to have another crack using the messy data on Gamestation’s website as a source. The result: Gamestation XBox 360 releases. I’ve also created a conversion script in PHP to make that data iCal compatible and therefore importable into pretty much any calendaring system you’d care to mention.

If you’re used to writing screen scraping software in a real programming language there are a few mental barriers you have to clear in order to get anywhere:

1. There is no regexp “match” function. You have to use substitute if you want to extract a term and make sure you “.*” at either end of it to remove unwanted text.
2. You have to program loops one after the other instead of nesting logic all inside one big loop. Makes it a very odd thing to read.
3. Multiline regexps are a headache to write because you have a single-line regexp input. I got around this by making a multi-line string single line with “s/[\r\n]/” before doing proper regexp operations
4. It’s really quite buggy. Under Firefox in windows drag and drop operations would stop working after a while and under Firefox in Ubuntu after a while the whole edit area would turn into a bit of a mess. Save frequently.

Anyway, it’s pretty good once you get your head around it and it outsources some of the heavy lifting involved in screen-scraping to Yahoo instead of your own site. I’d like to see the ability to export in iCal format as standard in future updates.

People

Everyone I met was very cool and friendly, from small startups just trying to get noticed to relative tech celebraties and the larger stands like the Microsoft one – everyone came across as genuinely interested in the kind of conversations that make most of my friends eyes glaze over. I was even happily talking about XBox Media Center versus Windows Media Center and why the Silverlight IDE sucks (but the runtime is very good) with the MS guys.

My God do we all look the same though – white middle class guys with short gelled hair wearing jeans and ironic T-shirts. I was finding at times I honestly couldn’t remember whether I’d spoken to someone or not.

Out of the list of speakers, I only really spoke to Blaine Cook (ex lead architect for Twitter, current architect for Fire Eagle) who I found myself sat next to for Diggnation Live. He was a really interesting and friendly guy.

Rumours/Tech

• Reading between the lines, the reason twitter IM isn’t coming back is because it’s Blaine’s area (he did a talk on Jabber) and not really a priority for the other members of the Twitter team. In terms of bandwidth and resource use Jabber should actually provide a lower overhead than traditional polling over HTTP of the Twitter service and could even allow much of the twitter service to be decentralised to other companies – e.g. to provide SMS gateway functionality again.
• In about 3 years Facebook should be very open. APIs for accessing/exporting your own friends to other services are on the horizon but not currently a priority.
• Mark Zuckerberg still delves into the Facebook source code to do bug fixes, despite being head of a staff of 700 employees.
• Despite being $1.5bn, Mark Zuckerberg still wears North Face fleeces. Who knows why.

Sites of note and people I met

• Josh from iPlatform – a technology for embedding existing apps and communities inside Facebook as native apps (pitched his business to Jason Calacanis and about 1500 people during the Dragon’s Den section – clearly has sizeable gonads)
• Zuz from Huddle – an online collaboration tool for businesses
• The guys from Soocial (pronounced “Social” – they’re Dutch). Soocial is a cloud computing app for your contacts. It takes your contacts from your phone, Gmail, Outlook or your Mac address book and sticks them all in one syncable and backed up place. I’ve signed up to this and it needs work but it has a lot of promise.
• The guys from Everycity (managed hosting) who I drunkenly found the last tube back with on Thursday.
• Some guy from GUIMagnets (whose business card doesn’t have a name on it) which is a selection of magnets that look like GUI elements for prototyping apps.
• Snaffleup, which is like Freecycle but more organised
• Mapstraction – an abstraction layer for creating embedded map applications with any of the popular mapping services
• GeoCommons – a resource and tool for finding location specific data and creating interactive maps with it
• Rummble – a mobile discovery service. If this takes off over the next few years with the uptake of phones like the iPhone and Android based handsets it will be very cool.
• Last but not least, TactileCRM which is an excellent, uncomplicated CRM system for businesses

There were countless other people I talked to as well who I didn’t get a business card or promotional item off, so I can’t remember their vowel-free unpronouncable domain names, sadly. It was really interesting just seeing what people are building.

The talks are being uploaded to the Carsonified events site and the hilarious episode of Diggnation Live will be up this Friday (17th).

I don’t need to be paid off to thoroughly recommend Berocca – I’ve been addicted to the stuff for years and it’s saved my life countless times, however the odd cheap bribe never hurt anyone.

If that still doesn’t convince you, the prospect of luminescent orange pee after a glass always brightens up a dull day (and freaks out anyone else in the public toilet).

• Firefly Media Server – a class for direct access to the songs database
• Roku Client – a client for Roku music players like the Soundbridge. Allows remote scripting etc
• twitter – a bunch of functions for posting to, or getting info from a twitter account
• Delicious – a class for (currently only) getting delicious bookmarks. Will add other methods if/when they’re needed for other scripts.

And there’s a ping.fm class in there that I might work on if I can be bothered to get an App key for it.

Head to svn.strawp.net/lib to browse them, svn co http://svn.strawp.net/lib to check the lot out.

Update: Just added svn.strawp.net/scripts/ which currently just has my twitter command line client in it.

More details are on our lovely Beebhack wiki