HackNY 2011

Posted on 5th October 2011 in Something Daily

Hackathon this weekend. It was of course amazing!

I met a bunch of people from a lot of different NYC tech startups, many of whom were from Boxee and Tumblr, as those are the APIs we hacked on. We made a hack that we’re calling TumblrTV, which grabs the videos from your tumblr dashboard and creates a Boxee Box channel out of them. Check it out, if you’re so inclined. Myself, Eric Sluyter, Adam Krebs, and Yuriy Skobov stayed up all night (well most of us did) and ate and drank a lot of unhealthy things attempting to get it finished. But we did, and it’s awesome! Try it, seriously!

As you can see, Adam sat his netbook on a fan for the duration of the hackathon, as it’s prone to overheating. We thought it was pretty funny.

We got pretty loopy at around 4 AM, which I think makes sense. Surprisingly, though, it wasn’t very hard to concentrate (for me at least). I only got exhausted after the whole thing was over. We spent a lot of time on trying to get the Boxee Box’s remote buttons to correctly interact with our app, which ended up being hugely annoying – so much so, in fact, that we ended up scrapping our original button-interaction idea and hacking (what else?) a solution via remapping the keyboard.

By the way, all the work here is done client-side, with the exception of the questionably-named “get-bullshit.php” which calls the tumblr API. It was a great way for me to finally get around to learning jQuery.

This guy was great; he’s from tumblr and he was a huge help with some of the trickier aspects of making TumblrTV, especially OAuth (which we again ended up not using due to time constraints – don’t worry, we’re not logging your tumblr creds).

Also, the guys from Boxee gave us a free box for making such a rad hack! Awesome. Check out the TumblrTV code on Github if you’re into that kind of thing.

I <3 HackNY

comments: 0 » tags: , , , , , ,

Blip Festival 2011

Posted on 21st May 2011 in Something Daily

Continuing with the collection of surreal experiences that I’ve been experiencing lately, I decided at the last minute earlier this week to stay in the city a few days longer than planned and attend Blip Festival number five at Eyebeam. First of all, that was the best decision I’ve made all week, if not all semester. For those who don’t know, Blipfest is a three-day music festival/social hub for the New York City chiptune scene (chiptunes, of course, being musics created using hacked video game hardware from the 80s and 90s). There are a ton of bands who play, some of which are relatively popular for this niche genre, and some of whom are just getting their start. Regardless, there’s lots of awesome chip music to be heard.

So I got there on Thursday evening knowing one person there, and feeling a little awkward. I knew that a lot of the designers, gif-makers, developers, and musicians who I follow on Twitter and Tumblr were going to be in attendance, and I planned on introducing myself to as many as possible and making some contacts. That didn’t really happen on Thursday nights, because I really didn’t know a single person there after my friend left.

I did say hi to the guys from Anamanaguchi though. They played an incredible set, providing what was without a doubt one of the most fun performances I’ve seen in my short life. The crowd was crazy, to say the least (a guy was crowd surfing during Anamana’s soundcheck) and no one was dancing so much as pushing people around and attempting to support the hailstorm of stagedivers.

Anamanaguchi really owned the night on Thursday, as they were effectively the headliner and also awesome, but there were a few lesser-known acts that I’m very happy to have caught. Specifically, minusbaby came out with a many-piece acoustic ensemble including a baritone brass of some type that actually proceeded to rock really hard. Talk to Animals, as well, was the first act of the show to really get the crowd going; she walked down into the audience and jumped around with them while singing, her Gameboy pulsing out beats from the stage.

Night one was awesome, I got a lot of free stickers and saw a rad Anamanaguchi set. I didn’t really meet anyone, though, and last night I was determined to change that. I talked with Diego “Radstronomical” Garcia on Twitter and we arranged a meeting, which was thankfully a huge amount less awkward than I feared it might be. He turned out to be awesome and to know or know of a lot of the same people I’d wanted to meet, so it worked out nicely. Included among those people were (by Twitter handle) DeMarko, who was sporting the “I’m Fat, Let’s Party” Seibei shirt; JimmyRepeat, one third of MisterGif who bought me most of my beer and insisted on calling me a nickname that I don’t want to mention for fear it might catch on (you can find it on Twitter if you really want to know); DoodlesAndGifs, another one third of MisterGif, who was an incredibly friendly dude, and, lulinternet, who I met briefly with Diego and stared at dumbly for a few moments, apparently in awe of her internet fame or something. Also Liz (as in My Life as Liz) was there, as well as Pete from Anamanaguchi. So I’d say mission accomplished as far as meeting people goes.

As for the night two music, I didn’t know any of the acts before the show, but I now have a lot to check out. Pretty much every act last night was worth checking out again, in my opinion. The opener was NNNNNNNNNN, this young dude from Japan who made surprisingly rocking dance music. Tristan Perich, the creator of the One-Bit Symphony, also performed a piece for harpsichord and one-bit electronics, which was likely the most conceptually-driven piece that that festival will see this year (nonetheless incredibly rad). Ten Thousand Free Men and Their Families was also an interesting shift of genre for the festival; he’s a one-man 8-bit punk/hardcore band. His set was very raw.

I spent a lot of the other sets talking and meeting people, but I didn’t miss the opportunity to dance around like a fool during the BitShifter set. The guy absolutely killed it. He made some absolutely incredible 8-bit dance music that I feel like I’d actually be able to listen to outside of a live setting, which is rare for dance music. It was forty minutes of sweaty nerd in the front of the stage, with people constantly crowdsurfing up onto the stage to dance around for a few moments. Total mindless insanity in the first few rows. But so much fun. Also, I stayed for most of the cTrix set, which was also unbelievably cool. He debuted a new instrument that looked like a guitar body with a video game console and a bunch of stompboxes glued on, which worked after a few minutes of tinkering and actually sounded awesome.

I’m a bit (hah) disappointed that I won’t be able to make it to night three, but I don’t see it as a missed opportunity. This was an incredible experience. I’m totally going back next year.

comments: 1 » tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

Mr. Emmett

Posted on 2nd May 2011 in Something Daily

I just put my first game up on my website – you can play it with Web Start and download the source. Here’s the link. I just presented this game, which was my Java 101 project, to a current Java 101 class. It was a very good experience having to go over old code of my own and reacquaint myself with it enough to explain it in a manner that made at least a little sense. People in the class didn’t have that many questions, which was not entirely surprising to me. I remember when I was in that class, despite being mostly clueless as to how something like that would be implemented, being unsure of what question to ask due to lack of knowledge, and because of how confident and knowledgeable the presenter seemed. Now I get to be on the other side of it, where I’m the confident and knowledgeable one simply out of experience, and people are asking me questions. It was very nice, and I got to plug my website. All around a great experience, and I hope I get to do more of that.

Having a website that I update regularly is changing the way I use this blog. I used to post everything I did right here, but now I have a series of specialized outlets for all of my work, that have developed as a result of me trying to come up with a good website design. Basically,

  • stuff I draw goes on tumblr
  • music goes on Soundcloud and then embedded here
  • i write here most days
  • websites and everything else that’s worth it get posted to the gallery

That’s the basic breakdown of how I’m handling my online portfolio at this point. It’s changing like crazy, but that’s how it exists right now.

As for how am I doing today, it’s been very hectic and will continue to be hectic. I don’t think I’ve been less motivated to do a Music History paper than I am right now, and it’s due tomorrow. Also I’m recording a concert tonight, and I still have to finish my roommate’s website before I leave for the summer. And of course, all I really want to do is go through this hacking tutorial. But it’s a pretty good day.

comments: 0 » tags: , , , ,

Stick to WordPress

Posted on 12th April 2011 in Something Daily

In the wake of this weekend’s amazingly fun and educational hackathon, I find myself with a renewed drive to start learning and building cool stuff. You might have noticed that this drive, which is something that I usually have no problem cultivating, has recently been scarce for one reason or another – probably related to the rush of apartment-shopping as well as the letdown after finishing a major project such as Spaceratops. I was feeling pretty unmotivated, and when that happens, you start to get posts about Emma Watson and panda bears…which are actually great. I’m going to do more of that. But also, what in the world is going on in my tech life?

Like I said, my drive to learn stuff is firmly reinstated following the realisation that I actually do have some degree of sweet skills, as evidenced by the fact that I held my own on a group project and didn’t let everybody down by failing as I worried I might. Included in the new list of stuff that I want to accomplish: make a Twitter mashup – I don’t know what right now, but I want to play with Twitter and Hunch’s APIs (also Trendrr). Also, get deeper into web design/development. My Twitter profile says that I’m a “freelance web developer”, so maybe I should start living up to that. Yeah, sounds like a good plan. My roommate asked me to build his website for him, saying that his basic concept was a Tumblr blog with subpages (something that Tumblr doesn’t allow for).

Of course, I started off quite optimistic, only to realize fairly quickly that what I was setting myself up for was the singlehanded construction of my own content management system for this one website. He wanted his site to function as a blog, which would require all the functionality that we expect from WordPress of Tumblr (comments, administration, tags, all the rest). I realize that while, in truth, all of these things are completely within my current skill set, it would take me, one person, far more time that it’s worth to create something as full-featured and smooth as WordPress. This in combination with the fact that WordPress is free to download and supports custom styles has steered me off the path of committing myself to the creation of a decent CMS. (I still want to try my hand at this, and I will – just not for someone else.) So now, instead of writing the whole thing myself, the project has changed to the implementation of a custom WordPress theme for my roommate. Still a great thing to put in my portfolio, if perhaps not as gratifying as the singlehanded creation of the next big blogging platform.

And the funny thing, as my other roommate pointed out, is that knowing how to build a WordPress site may actually be more valuable to many employers than knowing how to do a CMS from scratch. There’s something sad about that to me – the fact that the one that requires less work and knowledge is more highly rewarded. But both are great learning experiences, so I’m not complaining.

comments: 1 » tags: , , , , , , , , ,

PHP Howto: scrape an RSS feed

Posted on 29th March 2011 in Tutorials

Since I’m building my own homepage, I recently learned how to scrape an RSS feed in order to dynamically create content for a website. The idea is that I would have separate feeds from my twitter, tumblr, and this blog all in one place. The tumblr and twitter feeds are offered by those companies in the form of API calls, so using those two is very straightforward in both cases. When self-hosting a wordpress blog, though, as I do, there is no readymade option for a feed that one can just call and have ready to go. So I had to make my own.

An RSS feed is essentially just an XML markup document that browsers interpret and show you in some type of feed form. What I wanted to do with this document (which wordpress produces for me) is essentially the same as what the browser does with it when you click an RSS link – it parses the tags in the XML document and applies predefined visual styles to make the information accessible to humans.

PHP can perform this process quite simply, via the simplexml_load_file function, which provides a simple framework for parsing XML documents.


$feedUrl = 'http://emmettbutler.com/threestegosaurusmoon/?feed=rss2';
$ret = array();

// retrieve search results
if($xml = simplexml_load_file($feedUrl)) { //load xml file using simplexml
$result["item"] = $xml->xpath("/rss/channel/item"); //divide feed into array elements

foreach($result as $key => $attribute) {
$i=0;
foreach($attribute as $element) {
if($i < 3){
$ret[$i]['title'] = (string)$element->title; //assign the desired elements to array entries
$ret[$i]['timestamp'] = (string)$element->pubDate;
$ret[$i]['summary'] = (string)$element->description;
$ret[$i]['link'] = (string)$element->guid;
$i++;
}
}
}
}

After the initial call, this code examines each unit of the divided document and assigns the contents of certain tags to elements of the $ret array. For example, there is a line in each item of the feed that is denoted by the pubDate tag, which contains the date that a certain post was published. The line $ret[$i]['timestamp'] = (string)$element->pubDate; finds those tags and assigns their contents to the $ret array. Once this loop is complete, you’ll have an array full of all the pertinent data for your feed. You can loop through the array and print each element between the appropriate tags, style with a bit of CSS, and you have yourself a homemade and very professional-looking RSS feed widget on your website.

comments: 0 » tags: , , , , , , , ,

My Online Life Expands

Posted on 25th March 2011 in Something Daily

Today involved my first use of an API in any real capacity, as I used some websites I visit as examples of how to add Twitter and Tumblr feeds to a page. (By the way, I started a Tumblr.) It occurred to me today what I really want emmettbutler.com to be: ideally, it will be the hub of all aspects of my internet life. It’ll have this blog, my twitter, and my tumblr all represented in the form of feeds, as well as my resume, bio, and a gallery of stuff that I’ve made. In terms of these feeds I’m talking about, they’re surprisingly easy to implement – a lot more so than I expected. In the case of the tumblr feed, it’s actually just one javascript call that returns your ten most recent posts, and the twitter one is just two calls. Very nice. This is quite helpful in getting ready for the HackNY hackathon on April 9th, as I was looking for an excuse to learn practical applications of APIs like these (who am I kidding…I really don’t need an excuse). But to make a long story short here, as of today I’m starting to pick up steam on this personal website project. Also everything that I previously had on my roommate’s web host is now here on my own, so it’s certainly a good thing that I don’t have to keep directing people to emmett.ericsluyter.com. That was a little embarrassing. Not really though.

I once again haven’t really had a time since Tuesday in which I wasn’t doing anything productive, and that is continuing, as I’ve been either web designing, writing html, drawing a triceratops with aviators, or doing studio maintenance all day today, and I plan to continue this at work until I go to bed tonight. I will eventually burn myself out and be forced to take a break, probably. I’ll just watch a few more episodes of Dragon Ball Z. I’m going to see Eric’s show tomorrow at Gallatin, which should be super rad (and also something that’s not ‘work’).

comments: 0 » tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

One does not simply walk into the internet

Posted on 23rd March 2011 in Something Daily

It may be a little bit easier than getting into Mordor, but it’s still a bit of a process to build up an internet presence. I’m starting the process of writing a personal website for myself, which should be a great experience. I just bought the web host, which means that in a few hours I won’t have to use my roommate’s hosting anymore – it’s already been a bit weird telling people the URL for Spaceratops and having it include “.ericsluyter.com/”. Something’s wrong with that, I feel like. Still, awesome of him to lend me the space while I was learning.

So as a result of me now having web hosting, this blog may start to behave strangely in the near future. I’m going to move it to my own host, which means I’ll then be able to edit CSS myself and use custom plugins (like a random button – I’ve really been wanting that). I’ll do my best to never let threestegosaurusmoon.com actually go down at any point, but it may still happen. If so, rest assured that very soon it will be back and probably better.

As for the personal website, you may be thinking “but Danger, you already have a personal website – it’s called Three Stegosaurus Moon, which I know because I visit every day and have read everything you’ve ever posted.” To that, I would say thank you, first of all, and secondly that this website on which you read presently only represents a part of what I’d like my web presence to be. Here, I can talk about whatever’s on my mind, update daily, do sloppily-written video game reviews and shameless plugs of my own work, whatever I want, basically. It’s kind of fun. The idea I have for this new one is that it will be slightly more serious/professional and less dynamic than this blog. This isn’t to say that I won’t give it a crazy 8-bit rainbow theme, which I will, don’t worry…it’s just that the content there will be probably more interesting to someone looking at it from a professional standpoint. Like I can put up my resume (which is extremely impressive (<sarcasm)), a little bio (not a sci-fi story that I wrote in 45 minutes), a big compendium of things I've created, and a list of links to everywhere that I am on the internet. You know, like my home base. I'm just beginning to consider the design, but I'd like to have something going on there by the end of the term. I think it'll end up being awesome.

If I start doing more visual art, I may also start a tumblr, because I like their default layout for showing gifs and images.

Get excited. Stuff is about to start going down. And play Spaceratops.

comments: 1 » tags: , , , , , ,