Months back the youtube widget player I created stopped working. It was quite obvious what happened but I still did some digging just to make sure. Sure enough, youtube implemented a crossdomain policy which basically shut all flash development of widgets and services that used their apis. It was depressing. I put a lot of time into the flv player that played solely youtube content. Sure sure, I was basically ripping their flv content without the “youtube” watermark but that’s another issue for another argument for another day.
But for basic api access I had to build a proxy service to get info from youtube then sends it to my youtube widget. What a pain in the ass, the latency I mean. What’s confusing is that youtube people aren’t stupid. They know about proxies so completely shutting off flash developers, especially when the platform they choose was flash, was IMO rather disturbing outright frustrating. Yeah yeah, I’m not talking about business or the loss of money or whatever. I’m talking just in the developer’s perspective. You want to have developers pushing youtube content and the youtube brand then open your apis like you had intended to everyone.
Yes Jess, the last post was almost two months ago. I posted seven days before Jess and me left for our first European vacation. I’ve been meaning to catch up but there was so much to talk about. Then time or the passing of it just became too much to manage. I’ll start again. Sometime.
I can officially say I worked for the NBA on my resume. I coded, and made minor design tweaks to the player “widget” below. You can find these at the NBA under any particular player. I’m so proud.
Looks like my YouTube widget (MyTube) isn’t working. When testing in Flash Pro it works however as soon as I upload it dies. Weird part, it’s using the same web service as my ripper and that is working just fine. I’m going to check that project into svn, clean up the code, and do some more testing to resolve this problem. Need to rewrite a good chunk of the code base anyway. My logic was all over the place.
Update 12/20/06:
Found out why. YouTube implemented a crossdomain.xml file on their root domain so only youtube can access youtube apis from other domains. Damn it. I guess I have to work on a proxy.
About a month or so ago Dreamhost, my hosting company, fell into a dark hole for more than a few days. It wrecked havoc! For me personally, this wasn’t so much of a problem albeit really annoying. However it was my playground for testing, and when you’re webcentric, well - your fucked. The worst part of the experience was recommending them for our company blog, widgify, for reasons which always rule the business world, money. It was dirt cheap.
However when the pressure was on, Dreamhost didn’t do so well. And I’m being nice here. When I knew the problem wasn’t going to get resolved (I had waited for a couple of days) plus pressure from work, I switched to MediaTemple’s new grid server. Now I wished I would have stuck it out personally with them as well. The service has just been phenomenal. Everytime I called they answered within minutes.
I had a problem with the MySQL connections to the blog and restore from a dump file. MediaTemple had been having problems with MySQL for a few days before I rejoined, however it was nice to physically talk to someone about those problems (No phone support from Dreamhost even though we paid for call back support). Still connections problems. Finally on a last ditch effort, I sent an sos email to the Director of Marketing, Alex. He personally saw to it that the problem was solved, and it was fixed. The problem was rather embarrasing, it was the wrong environmental call for php to mysql. Yet, still more problems with MySQL. Through ssh I found a pattern in the tables which were a little off. The dump from Dreamhost didn’t exactly sync up. When the tables where fixed the blog went up. It was a great feeling, but it felt even better than I can count on the people at MediaTemple for future support.
I joined Facebook. It looks like I’ll be joining MySpace as well. I’ve discussed my not so affinity for social networks before because of the waste of time however I’ve lost touch of some friends, and low and behold, their in one or both of the those social networks. Facebook has been decent so far, at least they worked on their usability and ui. Myspace is just useless, but *sigh* I’ll just deal with it.
In my previous post I created a widget called “MyTube” which uses the YouTube api to find my favorite videos. It’s actually quite simple - you just make a rest call to youtube’s api services which return an xml to whatever you called. I then just extract the specific child nodes from the xml that need. However, to create a fully customized player, I had to get to the YouTube flv source to stream instead of loading a pre-compiled swf player that YouTube already pushes out. That’s where the flv ripper service comes to use. I take the video id which then goes to the flv ripper service and returns to me a link to stream into the player.
I can’t take credit for the ripper code unfortunately, I don’t have time to write one - but KEJ did with his online ripper called GooTube FLV Ripper and made the php source code available. I took his code modified it to create a serviceable interface for flash so calls to the service returned to me a url bounded to object in flash then created the app below. Pretty sweet. I’m working on creating a flv widget for mac os x and yahoo. I’d like to thank KEJ!
yup. designed. coded. by moi. enjoy. more here and to get it for yourself. credit all goes to YouTube for opening up their APIs for easy access to their content.
then hit CTRL O to save then CTRL X to exit the editor
What does it mean? cron will run the mysqlbackup script on midnight every seven days of every month. If any error occurs then you’ll receive an email. If you want it to go to a log file just replace the above where appropriate with the code below:
0 0 1,7,14,28 * * ~/scripts/mysqlbackup > ~/logs/cron/cron.log
I’ve switch to a new hosting company Dreamhost. I highly recommend them and if you need tons of savings google “dreamhost promo code” to get up to $97.00 bucks off your first year or two year subscription fee. My top hosting company choices were my previous hosting company for ai MediaTemple and Dreamhost. I choose Dreamhost because of the kick ass promo codes available from them and just the vast amount of options they provide. Initially, I was worried about the downtime they were having in the past months, but I also learned that MediaTemple collocates to the same building as some other major hosting companies so it just wasn’t Dreamhost with downtime. But as I continued to read on their blog, they are proactive at maintenance, upgrading data centers, so on and so on. I was quite satistfied with the hosting options they provided with the continual addition of bandwidth and storage on a weekly basis like what gmail does to storage however the blog probably helped me make the final decision to go with them. Anyway, I’ll write a more indepth post about them later. One of the options they provide is shell access (greeaaaat!) and from the indepth documentation they have online, here is a simple mysql backup script based on their script.
Make sure to replace the bolded text with your info. Also that’s not a mistake at -ppassword. If there is a space the script with prompt you for a password it’s completely up to you.
