Overview
I made a web tool that draws a heatmap to show where you’ve been if you upload your history file from Google Latitude.
What I made
See a heatmap of where I’ve spent the most time at heatmapforlatitude.appspot.com.
If you like it, you can upload a Latitude history file and make a heatmap of your own.
I posted yesterday about my quick play with the BBC Web API for programme schedules. I wanted to be able to programmatically find out what programme was on a particular channel at a given time.
The problem with the quick code I came up with was that it only gets me BBC channels. What if I want to know what was on a non-BBC channel?
Andrew pointed me at the Radio Times website, which makes programme schedule data available in XMLTV format.
And Dom pointed me at a neat Python library for parsing XMLTV data.
This one has been bugging me for a few days, and with help from a very helpful Google engineer I’ve finally got this working, so I thought I’d share my code where the next poor soul to try and do it might find it!
The problem:
I’ve written a small web service which I am hosting on Google App Engine.
By adding “login: required” to specific services in the app’s app.yaml file, I can make sure that you need to login to access a service.
If you’re accessing the service from a web browser, this is fine – you get redirected to a Google login page, and after entering your username and password and hitting ‘submit’, you get sent on to the web service you wanted.
But how do you do that programmatically? I wanted to do it from a Python application on my desktop, without being able to navigate the HTML login form.
Yesterday was the end of Mashed 08 – the annual London hackday from BBC Backstage.
I saw last week that there was going to be a “social responsibility” category in the hack challenge, and decided that a CurrentCost hack was in order!
Together with Rich, we spent a day trying to hack together a competitive challenge based around CurrentCost, encouraging people to reduce their home electricity usage by making it into a game they can play with their friends.
Here are a few notes based on the presentation I gave at the end.