Archive for the 'BBC' Category
March 12th, 2008 @ 22:38 comments(10)
After what has been the most strange of days, I thought I’d write a little bit more on the QR Code work I have been doing for /programmes. This is a bit of a sneak preview, as the work will not be pushed out live for a little while as we try and fix a potential bit of memory corruption found in one of the binaries we were using.
So, I mentioned in a post not long ago that I had been working with QR Codes, and that I wanted to extend the current offering we have, which is just basically a simple implementation of a clever Japanese guys JavaScript library. I was also interested in the embedding of images in QR Codes, as displayed on the wikipedia page. This is possible due to the Reed-Solomon error correction code written into the QR Code encoder. This allows up to 30% deterioration of a QR Code possible with it still being readable.
So armed with that knowledge, and a bit of tinkering in Photoshop, we came managed to come up with a solution that was still readable by a QR Code reader and also incorporated the BBC logo in a clearly readable form. I think you’ll agree, it came out quite nice? We were quite lucky as the simple geometry of the BBC logo was ideal. 
The next thing was to coderize (patent pending) our Photoshop mock up. I had a few choices, I could use Image software to merge the logo and the QR Code, I could write the logo first and the write out the QR Code data around it (this would be the ideal solution to be honest), but I adopted for, reduce the Image to be 1:1 pixel:data ratio, adjust the logo so it fitted, then create a matrix of the logo data. This way I had a kind of BBC logo blueprint I could scale up to whatever size the QR Code image needed to rendered at. Below is the matrix based on a min image size in pixels of 39×39.
It was then just a matter of drawing this information over the top of the QR Code image information and writing out the file, which as it turns out, does not appear very CPU intensive, as it’s a simple image construct, that along with the Squid caching we have in place means the server load is minimal.
So what we’ve ended up with is below. I’m really pleased with the results and look forward to the code going live.
Oh and for the benefit of people who don’t have access to one of the many free QR Code readers for mobile phones, the logo above decodes to bbc.co.uk/programmes
[Update] Just got a nice mention on the 2-d code magazine site. Also, good to see other people are liking the work.
Filed Under: BBC, Experiments, qrcodes
February 24th, 2008 @ 15:37 comments(8)
[Update]
I have also posted a bit more about the upcoming QR Code work for BBC /programmes.
We implemented QR Codes on /programmes (A project I’m one of the Software Engineer’s on, at the BBC) a few weeks back. They’ve been talked about since so I won’t repeat things, only to say it was a simple implementation using a JavaScript library by Kazuhiko Arase and took all of 5 minutes of my lunch hour to add. It started as an email by colleague Michael Smethhurst asking if we could/should implement them, and was also the first I had really heard of them.
Since then, I have done lots more research and think there is great mileage there for promotional material and advertising. At the moment the codes are built on the client side, but this will be moved to the server soon so we can start caching the pages, and also so we can provide the code in a more useful format (maybe images instead of the current HTML table).
So to the point of this post. During my research to understand QR Codes more and because of the lack of readable spec (Anyone know if there is one?) I decided to reverse engineer the JavaScript library into a Ruby Gem as there didn’t seem to be one out there. This helped me understand the how QR Codes are encoded, while at the same time giving something back for other people to use.
Anyway, it’s now done and there is a rQRCode Rubyforge project setup. You can also view the rRQRCode documentation (still to be improved) or just jump straight into installing the gem.
A quick simple example in the console:
Also, here is a quick example of using it in a Ruby on Rails project:
So that should get you going. I’m have some interesting features I working on adding so expect lots of updates over the next few weeks. Enjoy!
Filed Under: BBC, Ruby, gems, qrcodes
June 24th, 2007 @ 13:34 comments(2)
Update It’s now running on it’s own EC2 instance using Apache and Mongrel. So far so good.
I’ve been playing with facebook recently and have built my first app. It simply lets you display your favorite BBC Radio channels in your profile with a link to play and information about who’s currently on. Go install it and let me know what you think.
It’s a rails app that uses the BBC Web API (beta) to find all the schedule information. In order to push all the updated show info to facebook there is a cronjob running that in-turn runs a rake task in my rails app to look for new data. If it finds any it pushes that data to handles within my facebook app’s namespace and each users profiles fetch data from these handles.
It has been a bit of trial and error along the way due to facebooks API being very new; Their documentation being lacking and incorrect at times, and Oh, their crazy session handling. I’m sure these things will be addressed in the future. They use a push system when it comes to showing stuff in people’s profiles. So in order for me to stop making more and more requested to facebook’s server every time a new user, and networks chosen, I’m using the handler approach of sending data about each network to facebook. The users profile then just collects the network info from facebook when it needs them. This means that hopefully the app won’t die the more people use it (saying that it dies already once, but that was out of my control). It’s actually running on one mongrel instance at the moment until I sort out mongrel clusters and apache proxy forwarding. Not ideal but we’ll see what happens.
I can see why the likes of flickr and lastfm have not created crazy apps yet. In fact I don’t see how they can currently. Without posting info about every user up to facebook every few minutes their apps are gonna struggle to be useful.
Filed Under: BBC, Radio, facebook
June 14th, 2007 @ 12:44 comments(0)
This weekend is hackday in London. I’m looking forward to it as it will be my first. It’ll be nice to catch up with people I haven’t seen in a while as well as building some fun stuff. We have a whole load of extra music related feeds available on the day which are normally internal, so we’re hoping people are going to build some fun stuff with them.
Filed Under: BBC, Yahoo, geek, hacking
May 19th, 2006 @ 10:54 comments(0)
This is probably old news to some but I really like the idea of this. Radio 1 have rented an island in the virtual world of Second Life and plans to use the island to debut new bands over the next year. They have started by hosting a virtual party that mirrored BBC Radio 1’s real-world, One Big Weekend event, held in Dundee. At the virtual festival, festival goers got a virtual radio to take home to their virtual homes so they can tune into Radio 1 anytime.
Could this be the future though? big companies releasing new consumer products virtually to test the water. I heard that Adidas has realeased a pair of virtual trainers in this way ( not sure if that’s true though ). As computers get more powerful there is no reason why not. I can imagine checking out a new telly, radio, mp3 player, or even car virtually. The pictures you see in magazines of such products are after all, ofter CGI versions of the real thing.
Filed Under: BBC, Music
December 6th, 2005 @ 09:40 comments(0)
BBC news has started blogging. Nick Robinson is the first with I’m sure many more to come. Interestingly it is being hosted by Six Apart, and I would guess is a custom version of Movable Type running it. Hurrah for not completely re-inventing the wheel.
Filed Under: BBC, News, Blogs
October 4th, 2005 @ 13:50 comments(0)
So sad to hear of his passing away. We were fed on a diet of Ronnie Barker and his ilk when I was growing up and it brought me much happiness. I’ve tried to use his jokes on many occasions, not quite to the reception I’m sure he got when he told them. He will be sorely missed.
Filed Under: BBC, Fun, Television, RIP, Comedy
July 4th, 2005 @ 13:04 comments(0)
UPDATE: Hurrah, just got back from stage one of my holidays and I’ve just found out that we’re on the Apple site now.
After what seems like an age, we have managed to get the BBC Listen Live Widget live. This is a Dashboard Widget requiring MAC OSX Tiger and the Real Player Plugin.
I finished it around 2 months ago and had been close to bursting as I saw the stream of other radio player type widgets appearing every week. With a big help from Tom who provided the graphics and decided the feel of the player, we have a great little utility thats sits in the background and allows you to listen to BBC national radio stations on your desktop computer as if it had a built-in radio.
You can download it here: BBC Listen Live Widget and I guess via Apple’s site if they decide to stick it up there. We would also appreciate any feedback, as this will allow us to go forward and improve it in the future.
Filed Under: BBC, Music, Javascript, Radio, Widgets
June 4th, 2005 @ 13:32 comments(0)
So many people are missing out on this hilarious show. Arrested Development is the story of a wealthy family, who lost everything, and the one son who had no choice but to keep them all together. It really is a work of genius. I saw the show first on BBC FOUR, and then on BBC 2. I highly advise anyone who hasn’t seen it to buy it now and your life will be better for it.
Filed Under: BBC, Television, Comedy
May 25th, 2005 @ 19:58 comments(0)
Today I put the Glastonbury 2005 site live. There will be more to come from the site approaching and also during the event. The are also portals from 6 Music and Radio 1. The site is 98% (some things are out of our control) CSS which has been a challenge because of the all the browsers we have to support here at the BBC.
You can also subscribe to a Glastonbury RSS feed so you can keep up with all the latest goings on.
Filed Under: Web development, BBC, Glastonbury, Portfolio
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