TinySong allows you to share music using a short URL using Grooveshark.

I have created a very simple script that connects to the TinySong API.

The TinySong TCL script for Eggdrop allows you to search for a track using tinysong.com and return the artist, title, album and url.

It works as follows:

> .song Midnight Juggernauts – Nine Lives
<Bot> HM2K, * TinySong: Midnight Juggernauts – Nine Lives [Dystopia] <http://tinysong.com/uAb8>

• Download tinysong.tcl

Enjoy!

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So, we’ve been running WhoisX since 2004, it was slightly updated in 2007, since then not a lot has happened…

Until now…
We’ve spent the past few weeks putting together some plans and developing them into a brand new site, which we hope you’ll like.

Now for the good stuff…

To get started, simply visit our website:

• http://whoisx.co.uk/

So, what are you waiting for? Let’s go!

We hope you like what we’ve done, but I’m sure you will have something to say, so we’ve made it really easy for you to give us feedback, just look for the link on the website.

Ps. You’ll also find us on twitter @whoisxuk.

Thanks!

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I’ve tried emailing them…

sales@upgrade.co.uk

No response.

I’ve tried using their “online quote request”

“please fill in the form below for a competitive quote”

http://www.upgrade.co.uk/quotes.asp

No response.

I’ve tried emailing a contact I already had:

Alex Holden <alexh@upgrade.co.uk>

It failed.

I’ve tried emailing another email address listed on their site:

busisales@upgrade.co.uk

No response.

Their website is difficult to reach:

http://upgrade.co.uk

Server not found

Even when you do reach their website, it looks pants and is difficult to navigate.

Pants

To further add insult to injury: All the phone numbers on their website are 0871 numbers charged at 10p per minute:

0871 231 1900

* Please note calls to this number will cost 10 pence per minute from BT landlines, calls from other networks and mobiles may vary. Calls may be recorded for training and quality purposes

Call Now For Dell Spares and Dell Upgrades – 0871 231 1924

I’m going to say no

They seem to leave me with only one option, which is to open a credit account with them:

Click here to open the credit application form, please then fill in all the details on the form, print it, sign it and fax it along with two trade references to 0871 231 1921. If you have any problems or queries, please call on 0871 231 1900.

No thanks

Will anyone ever get back to me?

Whatever your hardware needs we can help

Main Tel: +44 (0) 871 231 1900
Main Fax: +44 (0) 871 231 1921
Website: www.upgrade.co.uk

Customer services: customerservices@upgrade.co.uk
Account sales: busisales@upgrade.co.uk
Internet sales: isales@upgrade.co.uk
Accounts: accounts@upgrade.co.uk
Human resources: humanresources@upgrade.co.uk
Marketing: marketing@upgrade.co.uk

Upgrade Options Ltd
Clocktower, Greenhills Rural Enterprise Centre,
Greenhills Estate, Tilford, Surrey GU10 2DZ

I have hardware needs, but don’t appear to be getting any help…

I did however manage to find an alternative phone number…

Upgrade Options Ltd.
Greenhills Estate
Tilford Road
Tilford
Farnham
Surrey
GU10 2DZ

Telephone:    01252-797660

Companies House
Registration Number:    2873785

From http://www.do-business.net/Indexer/Company/Upgrade-Options-Ltd

Success, the number works. Press 1 for sales…

Just in case you missed it, that’s

01252 797660

Enjoy!

Update

It turns out that emailing isales@upgrade.co.uk gets a response within 24 hours. Jack Bodian <jackb@upgrade.co.uk> was kind enough to get back to me with a non-answer, but a response all the same.

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The guide came with a pre-made package to get you started.

However, Quercus has been updated since this was produced.

Unfortunately the official Quercus website has very little detail to help us get started…

Further research lead me to a blog post by the company that makes Quercus entitled: Quercus on the Google App Engine

It gives a general overview of what is required, but isn’t really very direct.

I did also find an entry on their wiki for Quercus on Google App Engine, which was more useful.

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Follow the Google App Engine: Creating a Project getting started guide to create your file structure and the xml files.
2. Download the latest version of Resin (ie: resin-4.0.6.zip)
3. From the zip, copy lib/resin.jar to your WEB-INF/lib
4. Add GoogleQuercusServlet as a standard servlet and any params to web.xml (example web.xml)
5. Put your PHP files in your “war” directory.
6. Use the AppEngine Java SDK appcfg to update.

If you get this error:

java.lang.IllegalStateException: Found a jar file too large to upload: “…\WEB-INF\lib\resin.jar”. Consider using –enable_jar_splitting.

Using the suggested option fixed this, which looks like this:

C:\appengine-java-sdk\bin\appcfg.cmd –enable_jar_splitting update war

That’s pretty much it to get you started, when you visit your app address, you should be able to call your PHP files.

If you are looking for something a bit more advanced, take a look at these articles that explain how to get WordPress working:

• Converting Wordpress for Quercus on Google App Engine
• Using Quercus® to Run the WordPress PHP blog on Google App Engine (pdf)

For additional help I recommend you visit Caucho’s Quercus Forums.

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I used to use the xeucc.tcl, but that script no longer works and hasn’t been updated since 2008.

> !ucc 9 usd gbp
<Bot> Could not obtain results from XE.com, sorry!

Further more xeucc.tcl uses the XE.com website to gather the information, however they don’t like us doing this, and have since added the following message:

WARNING: Automated extraction of rates is prohibited under the Terms of Use.

Other scripts such as Incith’s Exchange also use a website. This one uses Yahoo Finance. The problem is that this website is subject to change at any time without prior notice.

Parsing a website that is subject to change is not always a good idea. Instead what is needed is an API which is easy to parse and extract the data and also unlikely to change formatting.

Although XE.com does have an API, it is not free. This is no good.

I have decided instead to use the Yahoo Developer Network Currency Converter API, which is much easier to parse and permits this kind of usage.

There is a choice of two URLs which you can call to get the data:

http://finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?e=.csv&f=sl1d1t1&s=USDGBP=X

http://download.finance.yahoo.com/d/?f=sl1d1t1&s=USDGBP=X

Both examples should provide you with a csv file to download which will contain the currency information.

I have used the second URL in my script.

Usage

> .ucc
<Bot> Usage: .ucc <amount> <from> <to>
> .ucc 9 usd gbp
<Bot> HM2K, * UCC: 9 USD is 5.8905 GBP as of 2/25/2010 9:22am

Download

• Download ucc.tcl

If you like it, or even if you don’t, please leave a comment below. Thanks.

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I remembered reading about this very thing in .net magazine/august 2009 (i191,p100), which said:

“Sponsor and associate logos can be a challenge for a designer who is making a valiant attempt to create a cohesive website layout. Logos can be contrasting colour schemes and can be displayed at a wide range of different aspect ratios. When faced with this challenge, I recommend greying out the logos and having them appear in their respective colours upon mouse-over. When placing logos next to each other, I’d consider using visual weight versus actual size to determine spacing.”

- Samantha Warren @ badassideas.com

So, sure we’ve established that it’s a good idea, the question is how to achieve it…

It’s really quite simple, there’s two parts:

1. Convert the image to greyscale using PHP.
2. Write HTML and javascript that will change the image source on mouseover.

Before I get started, I need to point out that because I’m British, I use “Grey”, instead of the American “Gray”, apart from in the actual code.

I very quickly discovered a number of ways to convert an image from colour to greyscale, however the easiest way appeared to be using the imagefilter() function with the IMG_FILTER_GRAYSCALE greyscale filter which produced the results I was looking for. I found you can also very easily add all sorts of effects to images using PHP.

I kept it simple and wrote a function that would convert an image from jpeg, gif or png to a png greyscale image. I called it imagegray().

It’s very easy to use, you just pass the filename to the function and it will display the image in greyscale. For example:

<?php

$i=isset($_REQUEST['i'])?$_REQUEST['i']:”;
if ($i) { imagegrey($i); }

?>

Next, it’s onto the HTML, which although isn’t exactly difficult, you may stumble if you’re unsure…

<img onmouseover=”this.src=’image.jpg’” onmouseout=”this.src=’imagegrey.php?i=image.jpg’” src=”imagegrey.php?i=image.jpg” alt=”image” border=”0″>

That’s it, that’s all there is to it.

If you run a large site, for scalability reasons you may wish to involve caching, but for most small sites, this method is quick and effective.

Enjoy!

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OpenSRS-PHP is a PHP-based client class that communicates with the TuCows OpenSRS Domain Name Registry System via an API.

I have just released version 2.8.1 with many long awaited fixes.

• Website

Enjoy!

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> .tz london
<Bot> HM2K, The time for the london timezone is Fri Feb 13 23:31:30 2009

However, much like my old weather.tcl, I realised that my worldtime.tcl had passed it’s sell by date and had now expired.

My old worldtime.tcl which was based on a script by Murf which used worldtimeserver.com to gather it’s data had stopped working.

It would seem that worldtimeserver.com had changed their markup which meant that it was no longer possible to parse the correct data from the HTML.

Never mind, I thought, there must be a better way, that doesn’t need to use a third party website, that won’t stop working.

After all operating systems have worldtime build in without using a website, so how do they do it?

So, I did some investigation…

I discovered that on Linux based systems (including FreeBSD) the time zone information was stored locally.

/usr/share/zoneinfo/

Using a bit of Google magic, I managed to locate a few pre-made procedures to help me read the time zone information.

• load-timezones.tcl
  • get_tz_names
  • get_tz_rules

Using these functions I was able to find the right timezone and get the GMT offset which allowed me to work out the time in that timezone using the unix ticks.

At the moment, because it reads the time zone files that are only available on Linux based systems, it will not work on windrops.

However, what I may do next time is build a function that saves the timezone information into a database file which can be used on windows systems and will also give the Linux systems a cache file to make it respond quicker.

Update: I decided to stop using the tz database method and replace it with a Google lookup method, which is far more accurate and portable.

So now you’ll probably want to download it…

• Download worldtime.tcl

Hope it works for you.

Enjoy!

Note: If you find this useful, or have an issue with the script, please add a comment below. Thanks.

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If you think about it, Google has mostly only used other protocols for communication in the past, now it’s creating it’s own. They clearly want to create a completely new protocol that will effectively be the future of these old primitive protocols.

For this to catch on, it will either have to run directly along side smtp and xmmp or layer on top of them.

We’re going to need a way to pass requests over http to smtp or pop3/imap, and what better way to do it than with gmail?

Sure, but there’s no API…

It’s argued that all you need to do is roll your own “api” or library class to use smtp and imap server provided by Google Mail (gmail) to send and receive emails.

The problem with this is that you’re forced to hand the app your username and password. Naturally this raises security concerns.

Of course this isn’t a big problem if you only use your own username and password and manage to store it on your server security.

The problem comes when others want to use their gmail accounts with your web app. They have not choice but to hand over their username and password. What can possibly go wrong?

• Their username and password gives you FULL access to their account, including account actions such as changing passwords.

My proposal would be for an API that allowed you to interface with gmail, in particular to send emails (which has the biggest scope here).

To access the API you could generate an API Key from within gmail that would allow you to interface with gmail, but limited to mailing functions, rather than account settings.

An alternative to this is similar to the “GoogleCode.com Password”, used by project members when checking out or committing source code changes, or when using command-line tools to upload files to the project “Downloads” tab.

If you could set a “Google Mail SMTP Password” or similar, which would only permit you to access the gmail SMTP server, but not gmail itself, this would also allow you to overcome the security issues mentioned above.

However, this alternative wouldn’t help towards integration with Google Wave as much as an api would.

In summary, to resolve the security issue an API is an option, but for Google Wave integration too, it’s essentially a must.

I hope someone at Google reads this and agrees with me, for that matter, I hope you or anyone reading this agrees with me.

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Here’s my setup…

I have two machines in my office, one has a hifi system attached, the other does not.

I use the lightweight media player Foobar2000 (foobar2000.org), developed by Peter Pawlowski, a former freelance contractor for Nullsoft. So you know it’s a good alternative to Winamp.

In Foobar2000 I add the location for PlusFM’s stream:

http://91.121.48.90

I then use the last.fm plugin for audio scrobbling in Foobar2000 (foo_audioscrobbler.dll).

This allows me to feed the track I’m listening to the last.fm API.

I can then call their API and display the current track I’m playing on any device, anywhere in the world.

I currently use it in combination with my “last.fm” mIRC script, which calls the API, reads the currently playing track, then displays it on screen when you trigger it using the /amp command.

This mean that when I hear a song I like, I could display it to share it with others, or just display it for my own interest.

This was great, until recently, when plusFM changed, and decided to stop displaying the track names on their feed…

* +HM2K is listening to www.plusfm.net – current track available on www.plusfm.net <www.last.fm/user/hm2k>

I understand that you guys want more hits to your site, but you’re messing up my last.fm feed.

Perhaps PlusFM could sign up to last.fm and feed the audio scrobbler, then I can simply read it from there!

Or perhaps I could read it directly from your site…

So it turns out there’s a feed on the site I can read from instead…

http://www.plusfm.net/titre_plusfm.php

So I wrote a little script for it called plusfm.mrc…

• Download plusfm.mrc
• Usage: /plusfm

[12:16:48 pm] * HM2K now playing Justice – Genesis <www.plusfm.net>

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