Dropkick Murphys in Stuttgart

Yesterday the Dropkick Murphys were in Stuttgart. A friend of mine asked me if I wanted to go to the concert and even though I didn't know the group at all I decided to reserve wednesday night for fun and irish punk. Except for the fact that we lost ourselves in the forrest for about half an hour trying to find the damn site, the night was great. I specially enjoyed the bagpipe! Here are some photos, they are not great... i know... but that´s what the cell phone camera could do with that much light.

Obvious

A veces uno se encuentra en plena faena con un humor negro, negro. Encontrado en los comentarios de un torrent de la banda sonora de Juno.

Children left unattended will be sold to the circus

En dos artículos -primera parte y segunda- he leído esta mañana unas pautas para no cometer errores a la hora de hacer una UI. Algunas fotografías para ilustrar lo que se quiere explicar son merecen un post aquí:

Lesson 4: Redundancy increases complexity


Lesson 8: Sentences with the right meaning


Lesson 12: UIs should never surprise the user


Lesson 13: UIs should never scare the user

The Italian man who went to Malta

Dedicado a Piero Favaretti

My first PHP/MySQL/AJAX application

This post is intended to serve as a start point to others who have interest in developing their first GoogleMaps application using PHP/MySQL, to those who enjoy reading about this stuff just for fun and to those who don't have a clue about what these acronyms mean but perhaps would like to get into it after you've seen the result. The idea is to follow the design proposed here by Pamela Fox.

Requirements:

• Apache, PHP5, MySQL
• Basic knowledge about Javascript and XML
• Google Maps API key (you can get one here with a Google Account)

How To:

• Step 1. Populate your database with data. There are several ways to do this. I chose to manually introduce 4 sample rows with phpmyadmin. You can populate the database with the data that you like but don't forget to reserve two fields (type float) for the latitude and longitude:

database sample entries

• Step 2. Output XML. In this part is where your PHP code has to query the database, extract the data and generate an XML output that the XMLHttpRequest can access later on from your main page. It's important that you keep your username, password and database name on a different file (dbinfo.php):

dbinfo.php

In order to query the database we just need to open a connection and run our query (xmlGenerator.php part 1):

xmlGenerator.php (I)

Yet, the xml output has to be generated and that is done by making use of the dom functions (xmlGenerator.php part 2):

xmlGenerator.php (2)

• Step 3. Now, all that's left is to load the markers in a Google map. If you are new to the Google Maps API, take a look at "The Hello World of Google Maps". Once we have our Google Maps API key for our URL, all we need to do is to load the map and the markers. This is done by the GDownloadUrl function, which is the wrapper of the XMLHttpRequest. The design of the main HTML page is left for the reader. The only two javascript functions used in the creation of the map are as follow:

load function

createMarker function

Finally, the part from which the load function is called:

Before the display of the markers, remember to store all marker information in the database, In this case, for the display of a picture, html code was stored previously in a VARCHAR field in the database. The result of all looks like this:

Precautions and Tips:

• Make sure you are using PHP5 and not PHP4 and that you don't have the domxml library activated on the php.ini file, since this could cause some incompatibility problems while trying to output data in XML. PHP5 has a dom library already built in and you shouldn't have to worry about anything if you intend to generate the XML data the way it was explained here.
• If you want to deploy your application in your machine, just type http://localhost/ in the signup page for a Google Maps API key (stupid but it works).

Sources for this post:

Google Code FAQ - Using PHP/MySQL with Google Maps
Using PHP 5's DOM functions to create XML files from SQL data
Google Maps API

Frozen Grand Central

There's a group called Improv Everywhere that has been taking great ideas to urban areas, by creating scenes that either cause some kind of impact or trick people or even just for fun. In January, they did something... just take a look at it, it's worth watching:



Great idea huh? It actually reminded me of a teaser-trailer from 'The happening' that I saw some time ago. It's the last movie from M. Night Shyamalan, the director of the Sixth Sense and The Village. Here it is:



By the way, you can find the original trailer of the movie here.

Google translation bot in Google Talk

Today, I discovered a nice way to have a text translated into other languages. Google translation are known not to be perfect as well as the rest, such as Babel Fish. However, if you could access it faster, would you use it more often? Regardless of the answer to this interesting question, Google decided to make their translation tool accessible from Gmail and Google Talk. The purpose is to make languages less of a barrier when it comes to chating with friends from around the world. The translation tool is integrated through a bot composed of two-letter language abbreviations as [fromLanguage]2[toLanguage]@bot.talk.google.com. So if you add a contact named de2en@bot.talk.google.com, you will be able to write a small text in english, and have it translated to german instantly as a chat response from your contact. Up to now, they have around 20 bots: ar2en, de2en, de2fr, el2en, en2ar, en2de, en2el, en2es, en2fr, en2it, en2ja, en2ko, en2nl, en2ru, en2zh, es2en, fr2de, fr2en, it2en, ja2en, ko2en, nl2en, ru2en, zh2en. Contacts don't have an image associated. They could have put them a flag or something... Just forget that, I find it pretty useful anyway.

The pervert's guide to cinema

There's a second part, but not as funny, except for the end, when he says that flowers should be forbidden to children.

Security vs. Accessibility

Today I read an interesting article from the W3C Accessibility Work group about the inaccessibility issues caused by CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart)
Websites that provide access to multiple resources have to take precautions and make sure that the services they offer are actually used by individual human users and assure that their content is not harvested by web robots. In order to have this security issue covered CAPTCHA was developed by the Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania). It usually consists of a set of distorted characters in a bitmapped image that the user has to recognize and type in order to avoid an inappropriate use of the web service resources. I always thought this idea was just great without thinking about further consequences. However, the WAI reminds us that things are not as resolutive as they appear. Obviously, these images don't have an alternative text value because this would give a way for robots to achieve their purpose. Therefore, this type of visual or textual verification means a great barrier for people that are blind, low vision or for those who have some kind of cognitive disability. In the article, somo alternative solutions are mentioned. Not all of them 100% valid, but it is definitely worth reading, if you hadn't done so before.

Finally, what they propose is the use of other methods for smaller websites that don't deny access to users with some kind of vision disability, such as heuristics checks or spam filtering depending on the purpose of the website. Furthermore they suggest to eliminate systems like the PINGUARD from ING Direct online financing, which may already be defeated by planned atacks and which means a short-term security benefit by sacrificing some people's autonomy to access their financial data.

I confess

I watched yesterday I Confess by Alfred Hitchcock, one of the best film directors ever. I wasn´t sure if I was going to like this movie. It received a lot of criticism and even cencorship in the time it was made. The story is adopted from a French theater play, Nos deux consciences (Our two consciences). Otto Keller is a german refugee in Quebec who kills a lawyer one night while trying to rob some money in his office. He confesses his crime to Father Logan. This priest is later accused of the murder by the police. The idea behind it all is just magnificent: A priest faces charges of murder and denies to reveal the truth because of the secret of confession. But this is not all. A woman appears in the crime scene mysteriously. She tries to help Father Logan with her statement to the police, but she gets it even worse... She was being blackmailed by the murdered and by revealing that she and Father Logan were in love before he became a priest, gives the police an argument against Father Logan, by making them think that he wanted to get rid of him because of the blackmail.

It may seem a little twisted now but in the movie, it is quite pleasant to follow the story. Hitchcock had a lot of problems to produce the film. He had to deal with the church because of the controversy and even the Warner Bros. producers who took over in the end. In the original French play, Father Logan has a 'hidden child' and in the end he is found guilty and hanged, but the Warner Bros. decided to change the end because of the strong censorship at that time (1953). I won't reveal how it ends... You'll have to watch it.


Finally, perhaps the performance of Montgomery Clift is not brilliant at some points. He seems too inexpressive for the dilemma that he has. The script on the other hand is as well fantastic. This has definitely become one of my favorite movies from Hitchcock. Magnificent!

Enjoy it!