Broken Picture Telephone

May 12, 2009, 8:30 am

and their respective games ...

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Timeline Project Community

May 11, 2009, 8:31 pm

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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Podcasts

May 8, 2009, 12:11 am

Part of my motivation for building this blog (apart from PHP being just so much fun), was the persistence of my 1993 style links page on each iteration of my website from that time onwards. So here goes my totally web two point zero links bonanza.

I like audiobooks, but thanks to my decrepit phone and Audible DRM, I found myself looking elsewhere for audio distractions. On the whole Podcasts fill this niche nicely:

Stack Overflow Podcast - Entertaining and often informative developer luminaries and creators of Stack Overflow.
The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe - Skeptical goodness with a K.
Quack Cast - Mark Crislip, an Infectious Disease specialist, talks about alternatives to Medicine (as opposed to Alternative Medicine).
Democracy Now - Quality independent news with a progressive slant.
This Week in Tech - Tech, Online Media, Social Networking. Sometimes a Meta-podcast.
HanselMinutes - An intelligent, informed speaker goes a long way to make the often Microsoft .NET centric content, interesting for me.
Stephen Fry's PODGRAMS - Rarely published bite sized goodness from my original Twitterlebrity.
The Ricky Gervais Podcast - Gervais/Merchant hilarity with inexplicable Karl Pilkington for good measure.
This Week in Startups - Jason Calacanis interviews successful Startup creators.
The Mobile Orchard Developer Podcast - iPhone developer interviews.
The Startup Success Podcast - Startups from a developer perspective.
Software Engineering Radio - Interviews and discussion on specific programming topics.

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Python Soup is Tasty

April 30, 2009, 5:50 pm

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 "");")

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World War Two Timeline Project

April 10, 2009, 1:31 am

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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