Sony Service Fail vs Apple Service Win!

I have two colleagues at work (Nick and Brad), both doing development pretty much all the time on their respective laptops and consequently, very dependant on them. Both work on the train for longish commutes and need their batteries to last the trip.

Sad Sony Story

So a few months ago the battery in Brad's Vaio started to die and he contacted Sony about a replacement. Since that time Sony has provided a customer service experience worthy of a paranoid conspiracy theorist's diary. They have been evasive, contradictory, but mostly just unresponsive. Three months later, and with his failing battery giving shorter and shorter operating times, Brad was told that his battery had arrived at head office. He just needed to provide his credit card number and they would send it out. Brad did so and two weeks later has heard nothing, that's right nothing from Sony. Despite multiple emails, Sony has simply ignored him.

Update : Brad did finally get his battery, several weeks after the assurance that it would arrive tomorrow.

Happy Apple Story

A couple of days ago the battery in Nick's laptop started dropping in power alarmingly and so Nick took it into the George St (Sydney) Apple Store. The guys at the Genius Bar plugged an iPhone into the USB port, ran a funky diagnostic app and declared the battery was fried. They promised a replacement within a couple of days. Two days later Nick gets a call and goes down to pick up his brand new battery.

I am usually not prone to writing cranky get off my lawn style letters, but the contrast between these two cases just cried out for some angry walking stick flailing. Not sure what Brad will do next in his quest to get a new laptop battery, but evidently it shouldn't be this hard.

Permalink - Comments - Tags: Development

Create Timeline Data Point

I have been making some good progress on my Timeline Project Community mode work. The thumbnailed image is a screenshot of the data point creation web form (click it for a detailed screenshot). I have tried to streamline the data creation process as much as possible. I see the data entry process as follows:

• Select the project. Currently this is just World War Two and the Napoleonic Wars.
• Enter a short title.
• Find an appropriate article on WikiPedia which describes the data point in question. Alternatively the user can just select default which will use an appropriate root page.
• Select a start date and, optionally, an end date for the event in question.
• Type a brief description of the event (more detail can be found in the WikiPedia link).
• Determine if the event can be described with a single location, a line (for fronts and borders etc) or a shaded region.
• Based on the previous type, either type in coordinates or draw on the Google Map.
• Select appropriate Tags for the data point. Tags are just identifiers to qualifier and sort data points. The primary tag decides what sort of icon to put on the map (land combat, naval combat etc). The other tags supply more information about the vent. One or more country tags describe which nations were involved in the event.

So that is basically it, hopefully pretty straightforward, with the real effort being the research to create a data point in the first place.

Permalink - Comments - Tags: World War Two,Development

Timeline Project Community

I haven't entered any new data points outside the original early war European data points. The time taken to enter the data and the wealth of historical knowledge on the Internet, has motivated me to implement a community mode for the site. When I have finished I hope there will be users willing to contribute accurate World War Two chronological and geographical data. I am in the process of adding the following features:

• User logins
• Ability to add and edit data points for the Timemap
• Ability to comment on data points
• Ability to flag data points as accurate/inaccurate.
• User badge system to acknowledge contributions

Once I have the core framework implemented I hope to extend the site to other periods of history.

If you are interested in being involved in the BETA for this project, please send me an email at .

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Python Soup is Tasty

This is why I love Python. I wanted to get a list of countries for my Timeline Project, so I went to WikiPedia and found a pretty decent list of countries. The combination of Python and Beautiful Soup made writing a tool to scrape the data faster than copy-pasting and text editing.

import urllib2 import httplib import codecs import sys from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup opener = urllib2.build_opener() try: url = "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries" req = urllib2.Request(url, "", { "User-Agent" : "Souper" } ()) response = opener.open(req) data = response.read() except urllib2.URLError, err: print "HTTP error:", err.reason sys.exit () except httplib.HTTPException, err: print "HTTP error:", err sys.exit () streamWriter = codecs.lookup('utf-8')[-1] sys.stdout = streamWriter(sys.stdout) soup = BeautifulSoup (data) print "$countries = array (" countries = [] image_spans = soup.findAll('span', {"class" : "flagicon"}) for span in image_spans: href = span.findNextSibling('a') if (href): countries.append (unicode(href.contents[0]).encode('ascii','ignore')) for i in range(0, len(countries)): print """ + countries[i] + (""," if (i < len(countries) - 1) else "");")

Permalink - Comments - Tags: Development

World War Two Timeline Project

I have got my new Google Timemap based mashup project to a version 0.9ish level of functionality:

World War Two Timeline Project

I still have a lot of data to enter, but the framework is there and is an adequate proof of concept.

Permalink - Comments - Tags: Development,World War Two

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