Looking up books in the Buckinghamshire Library Catalogue

I've written a bookmarklet that enables you to see if the book on the page you're looking at (at Amazon for example) is in a library in Buckinghamshire. I've adapted the work done by Jon Udell on his LibraryLookup page. To install it, drag the text below to your links toolbar.

LibraryLookup

Then when you're on a page which has an ISBN in the URL click on it and it will create a popup window with a search for that book in the Bucks libraries. If you want more guidance look at the videos on Jon's LibraryLookup page.

Facebook Apps on Google's App Engine

Since I wrote my first Facebook app I've been wondering if you could host it on Google's App Engine. Hosting at a low price is a problem - the free sites seem to be driven by ads, which don't get served up when you just run scripts. There's a lot of low price hosting, but you're tied into a contract.

Amazon's EC2 is pay as you go, but not cheap if you're just wanting to try stuff out. I came across this blog entry this morning in which someone seems to have got the two working together - Facebook Apps and Google's App Engine. Now I just need to understand it...

Web 2.0 and linguistics

An old blog entry, but an interesting one: Towards a social linguistics from Peter Austin at SOAS.

It says

One of our MA students, Paul Butcher, is currently writing his dissertation on application of Web 2.0 concepts to language documentation and support and I look forward to reading what he has to say when it is finished in September. Perhaps he can be persuaded to contribute to this blog when he's done.

but unfortunately I couldn't find any such blog entry.

My facebook app

Here it is - Vision 2025 Countdown

First steps with a facebook app

I've been working on my first facebook app. Some things I've learnt:

1. A PHP script in cgi-bin behaves differently to one not there. I should have known that really, because I have a vague concept of the cgi stuff.

2. The documentation isn't that helpful when you're starting. The footprints tutorial app is pretty good as it goes, but seems to be using an older version of the api. The anatomy overview is quite good, but it doesn't tell you how to achieve what you want in each of those areas. One thing that's confusing is how the same code, called by Facebook under different circumstances, needs to do different things. There's some good information on the page Your callback page and you.

This helps to explain the uncommented code in the footprint application:

if (isset($_POST['to'])) {
$prints_id = (int)$_POST['to'];
$prints = do_step($user, $prints_id);
} else {
if (isset($_GET['to'])) {
$prints_id = (int)$_GET['to'];
} else {
$prints_id = $user;
}
$prints = get_prints($prints_id);
}

though I haven't quite worked out what it does, because I don't need to for my app.

3. Javascript behaves differently. I took some code involving the Date object and put it into facebook and it behaved differently. I had to fiddle around before I found out what would work and what didn't. For example.

new Date("December 31, 2025 00:00:00")

returned some other date.
I had to use

end_date = new Date(2025,11,31);
end_date.setHours(0,0,0);

The months start at 0. The hours, minutes, seconds are ignored on the constructor. All very strange.

4. It says this in the documentation, but its worth repeating - the stuff your app does in a profile is static and won't update when the profile page is loaded, so you have to find another way of doing it, e.g. on a click, or when the user interacts with the app.

5. If you're tweaking your app and you want to change the way it looks on everyone's profiles look at Fb:ref.
Good fun working on this though.

Aeroplane for Bible Translation with Artificial Intelligence

I've just come across an aeroplane which is going to be used for Bible Translation. It has built in artificial intelligence, so that it can even put tweets on twitter and sound like a human being.

Seriously though, this project is about building planes that use standard jet fuel, as opposed to the obsolete avgas that some of our current aircraft use.

Hindrances to viral

One of the nuggets at the Institute of Fundraising conference was "deal with the reasons people don't want to talk about you", or something like that. Then via @jonshuler I came across Why Word of Mouth Doesn't Happen from Seth Godin. Interesting (something I can't think of the word for that probably begins with "co" and isn't "synchronicity").