Categories
Free Software Personal

Back from FOSDEM

Last friday I was very afraid that I was not going to be able to attend FOSDEM due to a large amount of snow in most of Denmark. Luckily our flight was not canceled so it was just a matter of getting to the airport. Easier said than done, the busses was not driving because of the weather and the taxi companies phone system was overloaded. But we managed to reach the airport in time and after several hours of delay in both Aalborg and Copenhagen, we landed in Brussels late friday night.
snow

It was my first time there. I’ve been to linuxtag and linuxforum before and I must say that this event beats both hands down. There was a lot of interesting talks, some of which can be found here, and in general everyone seemed to be in a very good mood – especially sunday. My favorite talks was Jim Gettys OLPC talk, Miguel de Icaza’s mono talk and Federico Mena Quintero’s extremely funny Profiling talk. Be sure to watch that one, it’s both entertaining and learningful.

Categories
Movies

Time for a free alternative to iMDB?

After writing my last blog post, I wrote to iMDB to hear what they thought about my first suggestion. They have a whole department for this kind of stuff 🙂 Sadly they weren’t that happy about it: “The minimum cost to license data from IMDb is US$15,000 per year. If that is within your budget […]”. So I guess I’m back to the second solution: create a library for passing iMDB html pages. While thinking about the whole thing yesterday, it hit me (hard), that it’s quite strange there is no wiki-like site available for this. The idea is to use a wiki-like site, with a little stricter syntax so that it’s easier to pass, colored with a voting system. The same concept could also be used for music. While wikipedia does have some classic movies, it does miss the voting feature. So why hasn’t this been created before?

Categories
Movies My Media System

imdb page layout restructuring

Seems imdb has changed their page layout again. This is bad news for all parsers, such as MMS, which relies on the format of the html structure for fetching information. Luckily MMS has already been updated and now works with the latest page layout. Expect a release soonish. There are two things I would like to do to better this current playing catch up situation:

  1. Find out if imdb is willing to give FOSS projects access to their xml data
  2. Create a library, like imdbpy but in c++, to encapsulate the imdb parsing if 1 fails
Categories
On the web

Cool T-shirts

I stumbled upon the threadless t-shirt site some days ago. Very interesting concept. Their business model seems to be letting the users do the design and filtering of suggestions while they just print the shirts and run the site. They pay back the designs gets picked in cash. The only problem with the shop seems to be that some (all?) of the really nice shirts are sold out 🙁