December 5, 2011

Facebook apps ahoy

We recently finished up on a couple of facebook apps at Brando. The first, an app for Lifestyle Sports, gave me a chance to look further into the Wowza server and live streaming. The cam seems to be broadcasting though and I’ve learned a few things about setup for this. I’m quite happy with the results. The first was for BUPI. It allowed the user to upload an image of their child, and then put them in a Christmas card.

November 22, 2011

Bess has pups

Quick update on Bess, she has now entered the stage of life of motherhood. The pups are fine and healthy, 4 boys. There’s something really cute about being followed by the pitter patter of 16 little paws when you go out the door.

October 12, 2011

Strobe Media Player

I’ve done a lot of flash video players over the years. Too many. Some had custom interfaces, some used the default flash video component. Others were completely custom, managing the stream events and displaying the video in the vanilla video component. Then Dave came to me with the OSMF Strobe Media Playback component. We had tried the JW Player a couple of times before, but found the per domain price a little excessive outside of large clients.

September 9, 2011

Wordpress wp_nav_menu output class when menu item has children

I recently wanted to insert a class for the case where a menu item has children in Wordpress. There doesn’t appear to be any option to do this in wp_nav_menu function, so I started doing some research. I found out from this article how to add a ’last-menu-item’ css class. This doesn’t quite work for what I wanted though, because the returned data object from Wordpress doesn’t tell you if the current node has children.

September 2, 2011

Tour De Picnic

Ronan Murphy, Dave Clarke, David Byrne and I recently put a site live for Tour De Picnic. This is a charity cycle to the Electric Picnic festival in Stradbally in aid of Temple Street Hospital. Ronan was doing the cycle and we decided it would be nice to track him on his journey. Thus was born a website that used an iphone, a handy iPhone app called SendLocation, a little lamp coding, google maps api and some html/css/javascript to update Ronans location throughout the trip.

June 5, 2011

Baby steps with Python

Started out playing around with Python as a scripting tool. Have to say, it really is a neat mix of the kinda power and libraries I’m used to with Perl and the flexibility of a pure scripting language. Just for a giggle, I decided to re-write my C# backup script to backup some of my mac folders. Most of the language I’m still getting my head around. 4 times out of ten, each line gets a semi-colon.

May 29, 2011

Got a new bike

Picked up a 07 Honda Hornet 600F a week ago. Seem to be a really nice bike to ride with puck of power in just about any gear.

July 6, 2010

Be The Difference gets a Cannes Lion and a One Show merit

Be The Difference 2010 has picked up a one show merit and a cannes lion. Congrats to all the lads, well done.

June 30, 2010

Kentico Smart Search

Recently started work on a new website. We’re using the Kentico CMS, and came across the following while building some search based functionality: http://www.kentico.com/Docs/DevGuide/smart_search_overview.htm The lads have integrated their system with a C# port of the lucene search engine library. From what I’ve seen so far, this gives developers really powerful search and sorting options. A summary of some these options can be found here http://lucene.apache.org/java/2_1_0/queryparsersyntax.html. Like I say, I’ve only started on this, and will update this post when the project is finished.

April 22, 2010

Sweet sweet bronze

An MSN takeover Brando did for O2 last year picked up a bronze at the ICAD awards last week. Congrats to all at Brando