Reading Radar

Sick again. I really, really couldn’t afford to stay home a second day but I woke up with chills and a clogged throat. I should have gone in to work and made everyone ill. Bastards.

I think today I’ll sleep, script, and be sick. I found the correct rss url to use for blip.tv feeds that gives the mp4 conversions on all files so even if the originals were in wmv or some other format, the itunes feed will let you play all of them in mp4 so they’ll play for anyone in-world. That solves my problem for getting a reliable in-world SLPN Video player set up. Thanks to Dedric and some of my own LSL and a little php modding, we can host the rss -> sss conversion on my server and not rely on third party players that have gone belly up in the past. I know I’ve said it before, but Dedric’s the guy you want for solutions to programming problems.

I just need to finish up the menu code and a couple minor things and I’ll be done. Yay. I got sidetracked with another project this week, but it’s going to be a fun one. It’s something Itazura and I will get going at some point.

The php script Dedric Mauriac gave me relies on the xml DOM’s open method, which under php apparently must use fopen under the hood. At any rate, the fact that my host has allow_url_fopen false in the php.ini means it won’t work.

What I did instead was rewrite it to use curl to grab the rss feed for parsing, and it seems to be working. Once I get the bugs ironed out, I’ll pass it on to Dedric in case he wants to make use of that method as well.

The fun part is that, although I’ve never programmed with php, my asp and asp.net and now LSL background has made it pretty trivial to pick up on what’s going on and modify things as needed. Very fun, since I always wanted to add php to the list of things I’ve at least used, and this project forced me to dive in and do just that.

At any rate, it won’t be long before I’ll be done with both the php and the LSL and have nice rss players for audio or video podcasts that we can copy (and therefore rez on demand) and let the podcasting community make use of. All credit will go to Dedric and if you have any scripting or gadget needs, please check out his stuff or IM him about your project. He does do custom work projects and he’s very good at what he does.

Dedric Mauriac, the original guy with blue hair, took time out of his busy schedule tonight to come help me get set up with what I need for running a php script on my server for converting rss feeds to SSS. I was looking for a way to get rss parsing onto my own server and have flexibility on how to implement the LSL scripts in-world to call that, so that we could create video players for the SLPN headquarters and the Destination Station on PI for video podcast viewing which are fully copiable so that they can be rezzed from a variant of Itazura’s RezzHud.

This kind of help goes above and beyond the call of duty and it shows the really giving side of community in SL. Huge thanks to Dedric for setting me up.

You can find his store on his Woodbridge sim next to Edloe, or check out his products on SLExchange. And finally, here’s a video from an SLCN tv interview with Yxes Delacroix.

One thing I almost forgot to mention, there is another scripter in SL with a free podcast player who states on his slexchange page that he’ll help people get set up if they want to run the php scripts on their own servers. I contacted him via IM and notecard (which he accepted) but never got a response. Even a simple “I don’t have time for this nonsense” would have been fine, because that’s an answer I can completely understand. The moral of the story is to support people who have a history of collaboration with others. Dedric’s always been really involved in helping others find answers to their problems.