Archive for June, 2008

Last.fm Loved Tracks RSS Feed

Update: October 2008
As of this month, last.fm have started providing an official RSS feed for loved tracks (Thanks Anil!). My homebrew feed, the original subject of this article, will be retired at some point in the near future in favour of the official feed.
The Official Feed
http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/user/jamiethompson/lovedtracks.rss

My Original Homebrew Approach
Ever wondered why last.fm don’t provide an [...]

Publish / Subscribe With jQuery

With a view to writing a jQuery UI integrated with the offline functionality of Google Gears i’ve been toying with some code to poll for network connection status using jQuery.
The Network Detection Object
The basic premise is very simple. We create an instance of a network detection object which will poll a URL at regular intervals. [...]

All Change at Citynoise.org

For those who are interested I’m going to start documenting the upgrades and improvements I’m making to citynoise.org over the coming months. The site has been struggling under some pretty heavy traffic and several internal optimisations including query caching for some of the more complex database operations has gone a long way towards making the [...]

BBC IPlayer XOR Decryption

As has been widely reported, it is still possible to successfully download the x264 MPEG streams of BBC programmes from the BBC IPlayer service but that they are now XOR “encrypted” in such a way that they will only play on Apple mobile devices.

It’s not really encryption, is it
Long story short, the streams are [...]

Tips for Using JQuery with ASP.NET Ajax

Dave Ward has put together an excellent and extensive post on his experiences integrating jQuery with ASP.NET
There are the usual number of pitfalls you’d expect when integrating [insert widely-used microsoft technology here] with [insert useful open source technology here]
Want to consume a JSON Web Service with jQuery? Sounds simple. That’s kinda the point of JSON [...]

Microsoft SQL Server Vs MySQL

A collegaue of mine – a VB developer – sent me a link to this page on the Microsoft website which attempts to comapre MySQL to their own SQL Server by drawing some.. shall we say creative comparisons.
By no means is the article completely factually inaccurately. There are many valid points which no one would [...]

imagettfbbox() Could not find/open font

This evening I noticed a problem with the script which generates the image headings for this site. It had stopped working. I hadn’t noticed until now because the process caches all previously generated images and as such it hadn’t actually run for a while.
The error
imagettfbbox() [function.imagettfbbox]: Could not find/open font
The specified font file existed and [...]