MattKendrick.com

Universal Subtitles

A group of developers on a Mozilla Drumbeat project is working to provide a way add subtitles to online videos. I am extremely excited that this will open new doors for the deaf and hard of hearing. Being a hard of hearing person myself, I find it hard to understand what is being said on some online videos. This will also make it easy for those who don’t understand the language spoken on the video to enjoy translated subtitles as well. Granted it doesn’t mean subtitles will automatically work on any video. There will still need to be someone writing/translating subtitles. But I think it would be an awesome and noble service for someone to take the time to write subtitles for popular online videos. I know that any content that I would submit, given the right tools and knowledge would also have subtitles avaliable as well.

How does it work?

How does it work? It’s not completely clear. They’re still in the gathering stages of the project. But from what I’ve read, they’re working on a widget. The widget could make it easy for someone to add subtitles to video without needing to re-encoding. Basically the subtitles would over-lay the video. Through the use of browser plugins, subtitles could be fetched from centralized servers through a common protocol. The crew working on this project have their work cut out for them.

Great Tools + Community Mix

That’s what makes site’s like Drumbeat so great. They have a uniform place to work and share information. It’s like creating something while being miles or even worlds apart. Developers can jump right in any project they feel they can contribute to. I hope to be able to contribute to something like this at some point. I may not have time now. But someday I will have a chance to give back. Thanks to the guys at Drumbeat: Universal Subtitles team for working on something that I’ve wanted for a lifetime!

Mozilla Drumbeat: Universal Subtitles

About: This plugin watches your Twitter RSS Feed for user-defined “launch codes” to trigger user-defined script URLs.

Have you ever needed a script or task run on your blog and you were not near a computer with internet access? Well look no further than “Tweet My Script.” This plugin allows you to simply use your cell-phone to text a short tweet to Twitter with a “launch code.” When someone accesses your Word Press blog, Tweet My Script will check to see if you’ve left any new launch codes to activate. After each successful launch, the plugin records the previous tweet. This insures that the script being launched will only be launched once, unless the launch code is used again in a new tweet. This plugin can be used to launch any public accessible script.

Updates

Version 0.75 – March 7th 2010: Offset feature added. Allows for bloggers to set an offset on the number of times your blog checks Twitter to keep from exceeding API limits. This is ideal for blogs with high traffic or blogs hosted on high traffic shared hosting. Default offset is set to 0.

Installation

1. Upload `tweet_my_script.php` and `tweet_my_script_options.php` to the `/wp-content/plugins/` directory

2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress

3. Configure plugin settings from the dashboard settings option `Tweet My Script`

Download

Tweet My Script WordPress Plugin (663)

This is my first official plugin for WordPress! If you find it helpful or would like to help further push development, please donate!

Flash is not one of my strongest suites in web development. At this time, I would say my skills are very limited. You could say I’m more of a backend kind of coder. But from time to time I dabble in front-end affairs. I thought I would start learning more about Flash. So I read through some tutorials. Got a little confused. Became little frustrated, because there isn’t a ‘Hello World’ type tutorial for Flash. But now I think I understand things a little bit more. For my first project I wanted to try building a whiteboard.

www.webwasp.co.uk has some nice click by click tutorials for learning flash. I found one aimed at building a whiteboard. After a few minutes, I had a working product. I expanded a little bit more on the tutorial. I added a control bar at the bottom and restricted the drawing function from being able to draw in that area. Then I added a link to my website from control bar. You can see how this all turned out below.

http://www.webwasp.co.uk/tutorials/018/F8-click-by-click/index.php

A few weeks ago, our friends Catie and David gave us an electronic lab kit (about to get rid of it in a yard sale). The kit came with instructions and parts to build over 300 different electronics projects. We were ecstatic. Heather and I have been looking for something like this for some time. As a kid I had basic kits like the one we received. However they were much simpler. We ripped through the packaging and started playing around with some of the projects.

It took us a little while to put something together. One of the problems we kept running into was decoding the resistor values. Granted the theory is very simple. But it takes some time to get use to. We found some resistor calculators online. Most of them got the job done. The calculators we found, you submit the resistor codes and it returns the value of the resistor.

Since the instructions tell you the resistor value, it would be much easier to enter the value and get the resistor color codes. Then a light went off. Being a web application coding geek, I deiced to build my own calculator. That night I finished the basic functionality of the calculator. At that point the application allowed you to submit what the color bands are on the resistor. Then the script would reload the page with the resistance value.

This morning I finished the project by building the reverse method of calculating resistor color codes. Now you can enter the resistor value, and it returns the color bands in the order they appear on the resistor. Pretty easy huh? I used a pure PHP script (no java script, no ajax) on this project. I wanted a server side only approach. It wasn’t the easiest thing I’ve ever written. But I had fun doing it. You can check it out using the link below.

http://mattkendrick.com/projects/resistor.php

Here’s a quick script I wrote to display random quotes.


<?php

//Random Quotes Script
//Matt Kendrick – Aug. 2009
//mattkendrick.com

//Displays random quotes from a MySQL Table

//database server
$db_server = “localhost”;

//database user
$db_user = “user”;

//database password
$db_pass = “password”;

//database name
$database = “quote_db”;

//connect to database
mysql_connect($db_server,$db_user,$db_pass);

//select database
mysql_select_db($database);

//query database for random quote
$sql = “SELECT quote_text,author FROM quotes ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 1″;
$result = mysql_query($sql);

while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result,MYSQL_NUM))
{

//display result – format however you like
echo “<i>’$row[0]‘</i> – <b>$row[1]</b>”;

}

//close database connection
mysql_close();

?>

Below is the table structure needed.

–
– Table structure for table `quotes`
–

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `quotes` (
`quote_id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
`quote_text` text NOT NULL,
`author` varchar(50) NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`quote_id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=5 ;

–
– Dumping data for table `quotes`
–

INSERT INTO `quotes` (`quote_id`, `quote_text`, `author`) VALUES
(1, ‘I think it’’s fair to say that personal computers have become the most empowering tool we”ve ever created. They”re tools of communication, they”re tools of creativity, and they can be shaped by their user.’, ‘Bill Gates’),
(2, ‘Never trust a computer you can”t throw out a window.’, ‘Steve Wozniak’),
(3, ‘The Internet is not just one thing, it’’s a collection of things – of numerous communications networks that all speak the same digital language. ‘, ‘Jim Clark’),
(4, ‘What do we want our kids to do? Sweep up around Japanese computers?’, ‘Walter F. Mondale’);

You can download the complete script and database table here: Random Quote Generator (175)