Slash Dot Dash

It’s been a year since I last mentioned trawlr on this blog at which point I promised no further status updates here. Well I’m going to just pretend I didn’t say that for now as I wanted to get some feedback (and usage) on the latest feature I’ve been working on.

Streaming your life away

It’s support for “lifestreaming” – combining your online identity from various different social sites into a single stream. Very much like a diary or timeline of events, grouped by date.

The inspiration for this feature came from a blog post by Jeremy Keith (hence the title) so props to him for the idea.

Lifestreaming is like Twitter, but covers everything you do online that is publicly available and has an RSS feed. Currently there’s support for Delicious, Flickr, Twitter, Upcoming, Last.fm, your own blog feed (RSS) and any other site that provides an RSS feed.

You can see an example of my lifestream in the screen shot. If you already have a trawlr.com account then why not give it a whirl and create your own lifestream. Don’t have an account yet? Registration is quick & simple (with no email activation required) and once you’ve tried out the lifestreaming, you might also be interested in the main RSS reader.

Once you’ve created your lifestream, it’ll be automatically updated throughout the day.

Let me know if you can think of any important sources I’ve missed, such as; YouTube, Picassa, SmugMug, FaceBook, MySpace, Google Reader shared items, Digg (dugg by) and Reddit (activity).

I’m planning to create a “widget” version of the lifestream so that it may be embedded within your own blog or website, allowing customisation of the display

Evan Weaver has just announced delta indexing support for his UltraSphinx Rails plugin.

Delta indexing speeds up your updates by not reindexing the entire dataset every time.

First, in your .base file, set the indexer option delta to your maximum interval between full reindexes. A day or a week is good, depending. Add a little bit to account for the time it takes the actual index to run:

delta = <%= 1.day + 30.minutes %>

Now, configure your models for delta indexing in the is_indexed call:

is_indexed :fields => ['created_at', 'title', 'body'], :delta => true

Now you can run rake ultrasphinx:index:delta frequently, and only records that were changed within 1 day will be reindexed. You will need to run rake ultrasphinx:index:main once a day to move the delta contents into the main index.

From the UltraSphinx documentation.

I’ve previously written about how fast Sphinx search is in Rails searching with Sphinx using the acts_as_sphinx plugin (and also contributed a chapter to the Advanced Rails Recipes book using the UltraSphinx plugin). I’d now recommend using the UltraSphinx plugin if you want to take advantage of Sphinx for your Rails application.

In my opinion, this completes the ‘missing’ piece of functionality and should make Sphinx your default full-text search engine (if you’re using MySQL).

Thanks to the increasing prevalence of Apple laptops – including the MacBook, MacBook Pro and new Air – having a Mac no longer makes you l33t! To combat this, a couple weeks ago I decided to pimp my MacBook Pro by changing the illuminated Apple logo on the case. A Canadian site sells a multitude of inserts that can be used to alter the logo.

Customize your laptop for only $4.99! These high-quality inserts will make your laptop one of a kind! Free Worldwide Shipping! Compatible with: iBooks, Powerbooks, MacBooks and MacBook Pros

The installation guide steps you through the process, the MacBook Pro is rated as “Medium” difficulty. Apart from the tight angle to unscrew the 2 retaining screws at the bottom of the screen, the tricky part to the process is removing the back of the screen using a credit card. You need a steady hand and a slightly cavalier attitude to prise the cover apart!

I went for the ‘Rainbow’ design – one of the original Apple logos – the end result is rather pleasant update to the plain white logo and it still glows in the dark.

Yesterday the BBC announced that their iPlayer video on demand service was available for the iPhone (and iPod Touch). There’s a more in depth post on the BBC Internet Blog where they give details on the technical implementation.

Back to BBC iPlayer on iPhone implementation: we’re not using the new Apple SDK, nor are we using the much-rumoured Flash for iPhone (no – we haven’t seen it, either). Instead, we’re creating 516Kbps streams (400Kbps H.264 video, 116Kbps AAC audio) that show off BBC programmes brilliantly on an iPhone.

It’s interesting to read about the raw processing power required to transcode their 24 simultaneous incoming programmes, for a peak data rate of over a gigabit per second of incoming video.

I tried out an episode of Top Gear and was impressed with both the streaming speed and the quality of the video (check out the images below). The only downside is that it only supports streaming and requires a WiFi connection; unsurprisingly, EDGE isn’t fast enough. Ideally it would be fantastic to be able to download a programme to watch ‘offline’, such as on a train (I’ll keep my finger’s crossed).

Update

I knocked up a quick Ruby script to download the mp4 files that the iPhone version uses (it uses wget).

ruby iplayer_download.rb http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/page/item/b0074fvk.shtml

Now enhanced with the help of Richard & Richard via the comments.