Earlier in the year, we found many of our clients were looking for a solution to allow users to easily upload their own videos. We had a good look into the numerous existing services already available, but ultimately found none quite fit the bill; either being too expensive, closed source or overly complex. Panda was conceived to be a simple open source solution for handling online video. Essentially, Panda allows you seamlessly integrate video uploading, encoding and streaming into your web application, while utilizing the power of the cloud.

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We don't normally use the blog to announce the launch of client websites, but it might interest some people to check out some of the work we actually do. With this in mind, I'd like to introduce you to Protect The Human, a recently launched project for Amnesty International UK that we have been working on for the past few months in collaboration with our design peeps up in London Made by Many. Though it has been publicly available for a couple of weeks now, I wanted to let the dust settle a bit before posting.

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APML is an XML file format used to store the attention profiles of users, and it's got the potential to become a revenue stream for web 2.0.

From my time at various web 2.0 start-ups, one of my gripes with the industry was that too many start-ups were focussing on advertising as their sole revenue stream, gunning to grow big and sell to GYM (Google Yahoo Microsoft), and hope that whoever bought them would figure out how to make them profitable. This strategy has worked for some, but I doubt that it will work for all. There are start-ups out there who may have to find other ways to make money, rather than just chase VCs and old media conglomerates, and shovel the cash on a bonfire.

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http://groups.google.com/group/pandastream

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A lot goes on here, believe me. Not everything is worthy of a full post though, so we've been running a tumblog internally for a little while. Bambinos is where all those useful code snippets and links go. If you enjoy the posts here I'd certainly recommend you subscribe.

Some recent picks from the archive:

• HangUp Meetings - An improvement on XP’s stand-up meeting...
• Picture Bong - Graphs for the Bong benchmarking tool...
• ManEC2 - Keep tracks of all those EC2 instances you have...

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I've written a little lib which piggy backs on the standard merb form helpers to give you nicer looking forms with help from Andy and Martyn.

We weren't happy with our forms and we were writing too much code. So we wrapped some goodies around the merb form helpers. We've got notes, inline errors, required / not required formatting, and cancel buttons. The API is so minimal you won't be able to resist.

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You want to use the Twitter API but you don't want to die? I have the solution to API caching:

1 APICache.get("http://twitter.com/statuses/public_timeline.rss")

You get the following functionality for free:

• New data every 10 minutes
• If the twitter API dies then keep using the last data received for a day. Then assume it's invalid and announce that Twitter has FAILED (optional).
• Don't hit the rate limit (70 requests per 60 minutes)

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RSpec stories are a way of doing integration and acceptance testing using plaintext executable tests. You can use them in Merb as well as Rails. Here's how.

Setting up

Install edge Merb; the latest gem (0.9.2) will not work. You need merb-core, merb-more, and merb-plugins.

Merb-plugins gives you the merb_stories gem, so you don't need to install that separately.

Add this line to your app's config/environments/test.rb:

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Here we are going cover the install instructions for Merb, RSpec, and DataMapper (0.9) and how to create a bare application. The next post will cover aspects of the framework and introduce the example application we will be building.

Getting Started

Before we get started I'm going to assume you have the following installed:

• Ruby
• A DBMS (we'll use MySQL)
• SVN and git (on OSX, port install git-core worked for me)

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Here is the next part of the Merb, DataMapper, RSpec book. I was planning on releasing more today but I am rewriting the examples for DataMapper 0.9. There is a example app for DataMapper 0.3 in the git repository of the book, if you can't wait to play with it.

Communities

i'm going to become rich and famous after i invent a device that allows you to stab people in the face over the internet - <[SA]HatfulOfHollow>

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