Red Writes Here

Embedit.me

Tuesday, September 30th, 2008 | Projects | No Comments

Considering Embedit was initially created to make our lives easier I’ve had a great response back from people using the gem. This just goes to show that if you find something annoying or too complicated for it’s own good, then its extremely likely that others have the same problem.

However the gem, being a gem, provided one problem; it is quite isolated and only really useful to Ruby programmers. So I thought it was time to show the other communities a little love.

After receiving a great contribution from @Bumi I thought it was time to move Embedit over to a web service. The new Embedit provides an extremely easy to use API that spits out xml (JSON coming very soon). It also has a web interface so you can have a play around.

Find it @ http://embedit.me

I’m working (almost finished) on a wrapper in Ruby, which you’ll be able to find over at GitHub 

More services are in the TODO, along with json and calls to allow you to specify height and width of the html (this should be up tonight).

Enjoy!

Tags: Embedit, Embedit.me, Projects

Panda and Some Embedit

Sunday, September 7th, 2008 | Uncategorized | 3 Comments

As some of you may or may-not know, we are currently rebuilding The Green Thing. I’ve posted before about how much embed-able data the new site uses, and from this Embedit was born. However, we also allow users to do a straight upload of their videos, audio or pictures.

About a month ago I attended my first LRUG and met a couple of guys from New Bamboo. Not only do they have a cool name but they also introduced us to their newly released

open source solution for video uploading, encoding and streaming

called Panda. Here’s an extract from the site as I’m sure it does a better job at describing what it does than myself:

Unlike other video platforms, Panda is not just a service for encoding your videos for the web; Panda handles the whole process. From the upload form to streaming, Panda takes control.

Panda run’s completely in the cloud computing environment provided by Amazon’s array of web services. The application runs on a customised EC2 instance with everything pre-installed, including FFmpeg and an plethora of codecs. SimpleDB is used to store all of data for video, encoding, accounts and encoding profiles. Uploaded and encoded video files are then stored on S3.

So basically it’s a really cool thing that handles all our media upload needs, in the background, uses Amazons web services and all on a single Merb instance. ‘Perfect!’ I though, so I went to get us a SimpleDB account, unfortunately, SimpleDB is currently a closed beta! So I forked over Panda and have started making it usable with MySQL. It’s going quite well. It’s my first time using Merb, after having several hiccups due to versions and what-not all seems to be going smoothly now, thankfully.

As for news with Embedit, it is now on v0.0.5, newest release included Nokia’s OVI video/audio/picture service, Spec tests and the ability to validate an url. Please visit the repo for more info.

When Panda is working smoothly with MySQL expect to see Embedit work rather nicely with Panda.

Tags: Embedit, LRUG, Panda, Projects, The Green Thing

Is My Tube Late?

Friday, August 8th, 2008 | Projects, Uncategorized | 7 Comments

After much inspiration from:

• Delighting With Data
• Low Flying Rocks
• CO2 Updates
• One Hundred Months

I’m please to announce Is My Tube Late?

In short…There are 12 tube lines, each now has its own Twitter account. I have also created an ‘all tubes’ account that keeps up to date with all the 12 lines.

The status of each line is checked every 5 minutes and if there is a change in status a message is sent to the respective Twitter account and of course, the all tubes accounts.

If you wish you receive these updates on your phone, all you have to do is:

1.  Sign up to Twitter.
2. Go to the Twitter device setting and set-up your mobile to receive update.
3. Go to a lines Twitter page
4. Click follow and then select ’status updates’ to on

Due to furniture maneuver (the server will have to be shut down) the service won’t be up 100% until 9th August, but then should be pretty reliable.

Here is the list of all the lines and their Twitter accounts

All Lines

Bakerloo

Central

Circle

District

East London

Hammersmith & City

Jubilee

Metropolitan

Northern

Piccadily

Victoria

Waterloo & City

If there are any problems feel free to contact me @ reddavis [at] gmail [.] com.

The code will be released on GitHub as soon I tidy it up a bit.

Enjoy!

Tags: ismytubelate, Projects