OAuth for PHP Twitter Apps, Part I

September 3rd, 2010

Twitter recently turned off basic HTTP authentication for its API. This means that Twitter app developers now need to use OAuth to access Twitter. In this first tutorial of a two-part series, Raj shows you how to authorize your PHP app to post automated tweets to a specified account.




&partnerID=167&key=segment"/> .1719,cat.TechBiz
.rss"/>

Upgrading of old website

September 2nd, 2010

Upgrading of old website.

Editting of website contents.

Enhancement of the website.

The Cash Machine that goes Ping!

September 2nd, 2010

Apple has released a new social network around music, called Ping! This post is not to bury it, nor even to praise it, but to understand why they have launched Yet Another Social Network, especially into the crowded space of Music and the resounding cries of “where is Last.fm now” et al….

Giga Om says that Ping! is The Future of Social Commerce:

My belief has only been affirmed by growth in the amount of data available. With 12 million songs and 250,000 apps, the best way for Apple to enhance the iTunes store – aka its shopping experience — is through the use of social. Back in 2007, I argued that social networking was merely a feature that had to be embedded into applications to enhance their value. Apple has done a great job of that, but it’s also gone one step further, not only by adding a social networking layer to iTunes, but by meshing it with its commerce engine, the iTunes Store. And it’s made this experience available on both the desktop and its devices.

Apple received much of this social capability with the acquisition of Lala, an online music service, which as a standalone company used sharing of social objects to drive folks towards paid music downloads. Now Apple is only closing the loop by further sharing what users bought. I wouldn’t be least bit surprised if sales of music on the iTunes store rocket upwards, thanks to social discovery.

Our review of Lala strategy is over here by the way

From MySpace onwards “Social” music has failed to deliver the goods, for a whole host of reasons but primarily its not a big enough “Social Object” to capture enough attention for a full grown sustainable Social Net. Music is a subset of why and how we interact with people, not a reason (in fact, based on some of my friends’ musical tastes its probably a reason to drop people….).

Now, GigaOm is sounding Ping’s praises from the rafters, but whether they were paid to do it or not, I ain’t buying it as the Future of Social Commerce. My hypothesis is that “Social” and “Commerce” are uneasy bedfellows at best.

But Apple are no fools, they will know all this. In fact, I would hypothesize that Apple does not need this to be a sustainable social network. All it needs is for a sufficiently large crew of volunteers to add sufficient folksonomic aggregation data around iTunes to ramp up its purchasing attractiveness some more.

No, the real play here is harnessing this to the iTunes store – this is all about selling more songs, not about being sociable. It’s about getting a Folksonomy going – Folks do the heavy lifting (recommendations etc), Apple gets the economic benefit (aka the loot in extre spending). I await with eager anticipation the use of kickbacks to “influential” super-users.

Think Social Recommendation Engine, not Social Network.

And of course, getting some more behavioural data about YOU never hurts in the Social Network game…

Protecting Your Hero

September 2nd, 2010

page hit counter

[info]d_fuses has been writing a great series of posts about expectations regarding the power relationship between GM and player, and how these shift depending on one’s prior gaming experiences and placement of personal boundaries. Steve remains wary of scene framing, for example, because he’s not personally looking for intense emotional conflict when he takes his seat at the gaming table:

I got into roleplaying because I don’t like competition or anything that smacks of confrontation. Hence I don’t like a GM that puts me in dramatic situations. It’s part of being depressive, every second of my life I have a knife to my throat, demanding answers, so when I play I basically like everything I do to be the right thing.

As you’ll see by looking at the above-linked posts, Steve sees this clash as flowing from a distinction between diagesis and exegesis.

I’d point out an additional versus, that of the dramatic and the iconic hero. Many roleplaying games seem to take place within the tradition of escapist genre fiction—that is, the territory of the iconic hero. Yet the iconic hero, though popular, is seen as unworthy of literary analysis. Because of this we lack the vocabulary to discuss, evaluate and improve stories created in this mode. Principles derived from the more respectable dramatic stories get pressed into service. They are applied to iconic hero stories, often with unfortunate results.

Iconic heroes, if you look at the source material, aren’t necessarily under constant emotional pressure or internal conflict. Something interesting is always happening to them, but typically it occurs in the procedural arena of external challenges and jeopardies. They are allowed to maintain their emotional dominance, and to change the world through that dominance. Dr. No, as analyzed in Hamlet’s Hit Points, reinforces that point monomaniacally. Bond is, in more contemporary screenwriter parlance “protected” as a hero, to preserve the escapist thrill of our identification with him. In their installment of the Creative Screenwriting Magazine podcast the writers of the recent Star Trek revival discuss their need to protect both Spock and Kirk, even though the plot of the reboot movie puts them at odds with one another.

Both dramatic and iconic stories can make for engaging roleplaying. Unexamined expectations about which set of rules is in play may however lead to a surprise triggering of the boundary issues Steve describes.

Apple TV and the fight for the Home Controller

September 1st, 2010

There has been quite a bitter fight going on for the last 8 years or so (ever since Broadband reared its head) for the ownership of the Device That Lets (Comms and) Entertainment Into Your Home. Various Set Top Boxes (cable, satellite) held sway but over the ‘noughties have had to duke it out with increasingly powerful multifunctional routers, IPTV boxes, ‘net connected games machines, New New STB’s like Boxee and of course MyPCTV (my PC controlling the TV set) which has held sway in Chez Broadstuff for some 4 years now, especially since BBC’s iPlayer came into use.

Next up is the new Apple TV – or more accurately, the Apple Set Top Box That Controls the TV. It is definitely smaller and more stylish the Old Set Top Boxes (no doubt there will now be a rush to be thin, small and black among other STB makers).

But, while the chatterati all ooooh their way to their Applegasms, it is time for us more sanguine types to look at the overall value chain and ask “what has changed”. The old Apple TV was a download and play (iTunes) model, the new one has streaming deals with TV stations and no memory at all. There is no new technology at play here, nothing in the value chain that doesn’t exist already, no new “gee whiz” device – what is interesting is that Apple has done a complete shift of value chain model, from download to stream (because that is what most people like).

The really fascinating bit of this picture however, is if you go up one step in the system diagram. Apple now has a plethora of screens and devices that all interact with each other and with an end to end delivery value chain, from content via aggregation to user device. They don’t own the distribution piece, but they have made deals with Moble Telcos that no one believed possible beforehand. I await similar with TV Co’s (they have already pushed streaming prices down from $2.99 to $0.99). Appls pricing is now coming in at $99, a lot cheaper than most other STB’s that don’t come attached to large bundles of bloatvid.

And that is where it gets interesting. The big prize has always been to control the Home Multi-media Controller, and this Apple TV device – plus the apparent ubiquitous rollout of a new IOS4 operating system across all their devices – is another move in the Apple play to surround and then own that piece of turf.

By the way, I am no Aple fanboi, but I have been using the Apple Value Chain diagram in consulting to clients since iTunes came out, and what amazes me is that no other big player has replicated it as they have stormed moble music, mobile telephony/smartphones, the mobile web, tablest and starting now, Quad Play in the home.

Incidentally, I believe this is a more robust strategy than Google TV, as SAI notes:

Specifically, Google wants to turn your TV into a computer. Apple says people specifically don’t want computers on their TV. Who will win?

Apple made it clear today that it’s trying to complement the gadgets that are already in your living room and hooked up to your TV. Apple TV is an add-on — it’s basically there to provide a few extra streaming features, in addition to your cable box and videogame console.

This is not even a question by 2010, so I think Google strikes out at first base – we set up usage experiments with the MyPCTV concept in 2006/7, its clear that the TV is not a computer, but is part of a complex “4 screen” (TV, PC, Tablet, Mobile) end user world.

But more than that, the real thing Apple has going for it is that end to end value delivery system which Google hasn’t replicated – not in Mobile (albeit they are putting a lot of effort in belatedly with Android), and not in Video.

Oh, and they own the end device – s. Never forget that……………

This does not of course mean they will win – but what they are positionng themselves to do is cream off a lot of early adopters, take massive market share early on with high margins products, make it expensive to roll them back.

Multi portal website

September 1st, 2010

i need to create a multi portal website , consists of :-

1-online shopping like (www.otlobmall.com)

2-auction (www.ebay.com)

3-freelancer (www.freelancer.com)

4-advertisement a-cars (www.carlog.com)

b- real estate (www.makanoo.com)

5-tourism (osc4.template-help.com/zencart_30484/index.php)

6-jops (www.bestfreetemplates.info/webtemplates/freewebtemplates-29.html)

7- send free sms & mms

Hamlet’s Hit Points Now In PDF

September 1st, 2010

page hit counter

Gameplaywright has prepared a PDF edition of Hamlet’s Hit Points, which you can now purchase from Drive Thru RPG or IPR, as your file purchasing predilections dictate. As is its wont, IPR also offers a print/PDF combo.

This e-version of the book comes as a bundle of files formatted for different reading experiences. One is the layout as it appears in print, with beat diagrams appearing as a ribbon across each two-page spread. Another is presented for the page at a time reading most PDF users will be doing on a tablet or laptop screen, with the diagram for each beat appearing alongside its explanatory paragraph. Also part of the bundle is an extended spread that shows you the whole diagram of each of the three analyzed narratives (Hamlet, the movie version of Dr. No, and Casablanca.) This map appears only in the electronic versions.

Gameplaywright hopes to produce e-versions for other popular formats, like the Kindle and EPUB, and is exploring options in that regard. I’ll keep you apprised on that front.

Styling HTML Lists with CSS: Manipulating Padding and Margins at the Same Time

September 1st, 2010

In this third part of a series I demonstrate how easy it is to manipulate simultaneously the padding and margins of an HTML list with CSS. In fact the process is so simple that you shouldn t have major trouble replicating it when designing your own web pages….

Recompile one file & boost performance Quickly find & fix hotspots with Intel® Parallel Studio. Get the eval guide.

Dragon King

August 31st, 2010

This site is for an online college. We have most of the database set up in MySQL. We need forms for user entry, and SQL queries written so we can retrieve information.

We need the following:

1. e-commerce: we must be able to accept fees online and sell products. a shopping cart would be ideal for this. use a free open-source one – we don’t need to calculate delivery charges. we want to use authorize.net.

2. secure login. password must be transmitted and stored in encrypted form.

3. automatic emails for user interactions – for instance, when they register for a course, email must be sent to them automatically.

4. content management system so we can post changes, news items etc easily

we already have a design, maybe needs some tweaking.

iPhone App

August 31st, 2010

Project will consist of a simple iphone app that does a simple date calculation. Further details can be explained after NDE is signed. The app will consist of 3 drop down menus and a results box. The graphic design layout has already been completed.

Developer must use iOS SDK 4.0.2. Apples mobile app development.


erf
ghd
lighting
hp toner cartridges