blog sport gruppe*

webhook2email: Read what gets POSTed

When you write (or consume) webservices that need some time to process your request, you may end up implementing (or using) a push notification service that gets triggered once the call got processed. In a RESTful world, it’s done by POSTing data to a given URL (call it HTTP callback, or “WebHook” if you like buzzwords). A neat technique to build workflows between distributed systems. But before machines interact with each other, some human being must understand and route their communication data.

The best way of understanding what gets POSTed is reading and studying the data. Unfortunately that’s not a trivial task if there is no proper documentation with samples available. Therefore I wrote a request handler on Google’s App Engine that you can POST data to and that emails you formatted headers, formatted data and plain data in return.

The URL of webhook2email is as follows:
http://webhook2email.appspot.com/?email=[youremailaddress]

If you want to test it right now, open a Terminal and execute the following snippet:

curl -d "hello=nihao&goodluck=haoyun" http://webhook2email.appspot.com/?email=[youremailaddress]

Have fun!

Prepaid mobile internet in Croatia

If you want to be online while travelling through Croatia, you should consider buying a “Vipme Broadband” SIM and plug it in your 3G stick (they sell simlocked sticks, probably lacking Mac support). To prevent paying per MB, you can buy data options for one month (50MB, 300MB, 1GB) online, on their free-to-use account page, that does not require a login once you are using their SIM card. Vouchers are available at many kiosks or at the Vip stores and Vip retailers.

Since the Vip store in Zadar really wanted me to buy their stick and refused to give me the proper credentials before my 10 minutes of complaints, here’s what you need:

• APN: data.vip.hr
• LOGIN: 38591
• PASS: 38591
• DNS1: 212.91.97.3
• DNS2: 212.91.97.4

Veranstaltungstipp: Taktwechsel im
Mediennutzungsverhalten

Am Donnerstag werde ich im Podium der Expertenrunde über die Auswirkungen der Digitalisierung auf die Film und Fernsehindustrie im Raum D des Wiener Museumsquartiers mitdiskutieren. Die Interdisziplinarität, der Altersunterschied und die vertretenen Firmen versprechen einen spannenden Diskurs und interessante Blickwinkel in die Zukunft.

Die Anmeldung zur Veranstaltung der FilmFonds Wien und FilmTiki ist bis morgen kostenlos per E-Mail möglich.

VideoCamp Wien am 30. Januar 2010

Am 30. Januar 2010 findet das erste Wiener VideoCamp statt, ein BarCamp zum Thema Onlinevideo. Ob Drehbuch, Dramaturgie, Produktion, Technik, Playout oder Marketing - Das Spektrum ist breit gefächert und wie bei einem BarCamp üblich entscheiden die TeilnehmerInnen über was sie sprechen, nachdenken und diskutieren.

Am besten gleich anmelden, und Sessionvorschläge machen.

Blogger im Garten

Im Informationsgarten dctp.tv sind sie nun eingepflanzt, die ersten von Philip Banse interviewten Blogger. Genauer Markus Beckedahl, Stefan Niggemeier, Johnny Haeusler und Sascha Lobo - letzterer blüht auch schon.

Digitalks Web 2.0 Handbuch

Das Digitalks Web 2.0 Handbuch, an dem ich mitgeschrieben habe, ist gerade fertig geworden und riecht noch nach Druckerschwärze und warmen Pixeln. Geruchserlebnisse teilen können wir auf dem Digiday im MQ Wien am 17. Oktober 2009.

Cloud Computing and WebTV

I was attending a barcamp in Vienna this weekend and held a session about cloud computing and WebTV. The slides are available in german and english:

Why we won’t enjoy HTML5’s video tag

The HTML5 standard introduces the video-tag, that finally allows adding videos in markup without the use of additional plugins. Pretty much like the img-tag embeds images. Google recently published a YouTube-demo using HTML5, which can be viewed in bleeding edge browsers that already understand HTML5, like Safari 4 Beta on a Mac. It pretty much looks like YouTube as we all know it, but with tiny fast motion preview videos instead of images and without Flash. Sounds like your browser is your TV now and everything works out of the box? Far from it!

The major part in compatibility and standards has not been solved yet: Audio and video codec support. Google’s demo medium uses H.264 for video and AAC for audio compression, which is the combination your new Adobe Flash Player plugin, your new mobile phone, your new gaming console, your new korean DVD player and probably your new freezer are able to play back. Your browser knows how to display PNG, JPEG and GIF images because it comes with their decoding algorithms. Mozilla’s and Opera’s proposal was to include the free open source OGG Theora (Video) and OGG Vorbis (Audio) decoders into any browser. A clean pragmatic approach that doesn’t cost a dime. But Apple and Nokia didn’t like the idea. So the w3c page now reads ‘user agents may support any video and audio codecs and container formats’ and a red disclaimer adds that going with OGG is still a good idea to not fail completely.

But it will fail completely. We will see more H.264 video and MPEG4 audio, because quality and size are great and we don’t have to encode and store a medium more than once to play it back in most browsers and Flash Player 9+. Mozilla, Opera, Safari and Chrome browsers will also support OGG. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer won’t. Microsoft has all those funny media formats and browsers, and they even have Silverlight. They will play WMV and WMA, and nothing else. And we developers will just continue to do what we like most: Building browser switches, adding capabilities by using browser plugins and testing all versions of IE that have ever been released since August 27, 2001, the birthday of IE6. Show me that I’m wrong Microsoft.

Including JavaScript into JavaScript (using Dojo)

Ever thought of including a JavaScript class into another one? Usually you place all required JavaScript modules in the right order within the head of the page where you want to use them. Sometimes I prefer loading the requirements within the script (with checking if it has already been loaded before) instead of writing a lot of documentation.

The following code snippet uses Dojo 1.3+ API to create a script tag and place it to the head as the first child:


var script_url = 'http://www.topfstedt.de/js/foo.js';
var script_obj = dojo.create('script', {
    'src': script_url, 'type':'text/javascript'
});
dojo.query("head").addContent(script_obj, "first");


dctp.tv has landed

Today we launched dctp.tv, a german WebTV site that offers Alexander Kluge’s awesome productions in the form of a livestream and on demand video, grouped by topics. The whole project from the idea, the encoding farm, the video management system and the streaming farm to the frontend took us about five months to realize. Finally we are proud to see that our ideas in using Amazon’s and Google’s cloud computing infrastructure turned out to be both cost-effective and scalable: Our systems took the spike of being featured on SPIEGEL ONLINE’s frontpage really well. Enjoy the informative web-television programme!