I really liked Youtube’s Gdata API, I had it all working nicely. As you can see from that post I had a nice popup overlay on Sharemovi.es with the movie trailer video embedded. Till it broke … Gdata is gone. So needed to fix it …

Alternative

Turns out that you can get the trailer via themoviedb API. See here: you need themoviedb’s movieID and call the /videos method. When testing it gave me 5 trailers. I will show you the PHP code I use to query the API and how to convert the youtube to HMTL you can embed into your page. I use the Jquery boxy plugin for the overlay (see printscreen at the bottom).

Code

 $ more trailer.php 
<?php
if (!isset($_GET["id"])){
  echo "Please call with movie ID";
  return;
}
include 'libs/functions.php';
$id = $_GET["id"];
if(!is_numeric($id)){
  echo "Need numeric ID";
  return;
}
// Gdata died, themoviedb is your friend though
// https://www.themoviedb.org/talk/5451ec02c3a3680245005e3c
$res = queryApi3("movie", $id, "videos");
//print_r($res); -- stdClass Object notation
$youtubeId = $res->results[0]->key; // monitor if first trailer is always OK enough
echo getTrailerSnippet($youtubeId, '640', '385', 1, 1);                                                                                                                  
?>

Below the functions I use. Essentially you need to curl this URL: http://api.themoviedb.org/3/movie/<movieID>/videos?api_key=<YOUR_API_KEY> and json_decode the results. The function args make it more generic so you can use it for other API calls too (as I do for my movie site).

$ more libs/functions
..
..
function queryApi3($category, $id, $method) {
  // query and lang optional, only needed for search
  $key = getKey();
  $query = "http://api.themoviedb.org/3"; 
  if($category != '') $query .= "/$category"; 
  if($id != '') $query .= "/$id";
  if($method != '') $query .= "/$method"; 
  $query .= "?api_key=$key";
  // use curl, not file_get_contents
  // http://stackoverflow.com/questions/555523/file-get-contents-vs-curl-what-has-better-performance
  $results = useCurl($query);
  return json_decode($results);
}
..
..
function useCurl($url) {  
  $ch = curl_init();
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR, 1);
  $results = curl_exec($ch);
  $headers = curl_getinfo($ch);
  $error_number = curl_errno($ch);
  $error_message = curl_error($ch);
  curl_close($ch);
  return $results;
}
..
..
function getTrailerSnippet($youtubeId, $width, $height) {
  if( $youtubeId ) {
    echo "<iframe class='youtube-player' type='text/html' width='$width' height='$height' src='http://www.youtube.com/embed/$youtubeId?autoplay=1' frameborder='0'>";               
  } else {
    echo "No Trailer found";
  }
}

On the main page I have a link to this script with a GET variable called “id” that receives the movieID. The class “boxy” is required to make the Jquery boxy overlay work.

echo "<a href='trailer.php?id=$movieId' class='boxy trailerOverlay' title='Trailer of ".str_replace("'","",$dataMovie['title'])."'><img src='i/youtube.png'></a>";

Result

And we’re good again:

http://sharemovi.es/movie/206647-spectre

I. see red trailer button

II. when clicked:

The problem with PHP sleep

This taught me a cool trick: you need to pause a bit so the user can read the message before being redirected. My first approach was PHP’s sleep function, but that would show the initial echo only after the sleep, rendering it useless.

Then I read about ob_start() and ob_flush(). This did not work either, reason: browsers also contain their own buffers. I realized that apart from sleeping I wanted to show some sort of progress bar.

Here we enter JavaScript which is great for this kind of asynchronous stuff. I used this solution. As explained at w3schools: “the setInterval() method calls a function or evaluates an expression at specified intervals (in milliseconds). The setInterval() method will continue calling the function until clearInterval() is called”.

Code:

    <script>
    var div = document.getElementById('wait');
    var counter = 0;
    var waitSecs = 8;
    var refreshId = setInterval(function () {
      ++counter;
      div.innerHTML = div.innerHTML + '&#x25cf;'
      if(counter == waitSecs){
        clearInterval(refreshId);
        top.location.href='http://sharemovi.es'
      }
    }, 1000);
    </script>

Notes:

• See a demo of this script here.
• I put an empty #wait div in the html and get it with document.getElementById, this element is used to append progress elements to.
• I choose dots for progress, but I probably redo it with a count down which is more cooler, I choose a bigger dot = html encoding: &#x25cf;
• setInterval does something for every interval (here 1 sec = 1000 ms), until waitSecs = 8 seconds, then it stops the loop by calling clearInterval and redirects to the sharemovi.es homepage (top.location.href).
• An enhancement could be to redirect to FB login page directly but it could surprise users, hence the feedback loop.

Two more comments:

1. to learn to code: practice, fail, get better by doing, it takes time and effort. This is a small feature, but it taught me a few valuable things about PHP and Javascript. Follow Alec Baldwin’s ABC: always be closing and replace closing by coding :)

2. the featured image for this and last 2 posts were made with a new webtool I built: CSS Featured Image Creator. I will write a blog post about it soon, it is still work in progress …

So I rewrote this script, improving it and adding some cool new features. Check out the code/readme on github.

Usage

main.py [options]
Options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -a ACTOR, --actor=ACTOR
                        filter on actor (not yet implemented)
  -c CATEGORY, --category=CATEGORY
                        category [now_playing, upcoming, top_rated, popular]
  -d DIRECTOR, --director=DIRECTOR
                        filter on director (not yet implemented)
  -g GENRES, --genres=GENRES
                        filter on genres (not yet implemented)
  -l LISTING, --listing=LISTING
                        create email from themoviedb list URL
  -m, --mailres         mail the html to recipients
  -n NUMRES, --numres=NUMRES
                        number of results
  -p, --printres        print the html

To use it yourself:

1. create a flat text file called ‘key’ with your themoviedb API key;
2. create a flat text file called ‘recipients’ with one or more emails (each one on a new line);
3. use a cron job to call the script to send one or more notification alerts, I use the weekly.py script for this (note I also added a customized banner, if you don’t want it modify generate_header in output.py).

Some things I picked up:

Apart from the end result – a rich html email with new movie details -it’s nice to see what you can learn from this kind of project:

• for any data mining, use the API if available, relying on HTML is trickier. Themoviedb has a great API I already used for my sharemovi.es site, for this exercise I used the friendly tmdbsimple Python wrapper.
• instead of a text file or DB, I use the Python shelve for caching. I store movie IDs and movie details (info and credits = cast) as a key,value pairs. So data for each movie ID is downloaded once, then re-used for priting, mailing, etc. Also, storing objects is a pretty flex solution, you can load them from the shelve and call methods on them).  See cache.py for its implementation. I used the shelve recently for the Safari new books project too (see here)
• use several classes (files) to decouple the design (cache, mail, output generation, movie objects, handle movie lists). The code was easy to extend, for example to work with customized (themoviedb) lists. I only had to write some code to crawl the list page (tmdbsimple does not support lists), the subsequent actions of shelving, printing and emailing worked out of the box, passing a list of movie IDs.
• optparse / OptionParser makes CLI switch handling very easy and compact, I use it all the time.
• I learned how to Python email using bcc and how to exclude mails and API key from the code putting them in files and ignore them from version control with .gitignore, pretty important.
• probably a couple of things more … comment if you like to know more …

Example mails

I. weekly

II. of a customized list (hacker movies)

Update 19.11.2015

You can now add movies from the newsletter to your sharemovi.es watchlist when FB logged in – see the small link at the “Released” line, alongside the IMDB link:

However going to this page every day is cumbersome and there don’t seem to be an RSS feed. Hence it was time to set up a notification mailer that grabs the page, parses its content, checks the timestamp (less than 24 hours) and sends a nice html email. You can grab your copy / checkout the code at github.

I use the great BeautifulSoup plugin as discussed previously), including the html5lib. It’s most convenient to run the script in a cron job. I use the -d (daily switch) to get all new titles in the last 24 hours, and use the -w (weekly) once a week to filter on topics that I am interested in. This last execution mode saves me time searching for these filters manually. You can also filter by publisher.

I never get to miss a book this way :)

==

Example of running it with the weekly flag and (-t) filters

# python safarinew.py -wt "Android,mobile,Java,python,hadoop,
big data,security,machine learning,data mining,data science,
mean stack,hacker,hacking,javascript,developer,code,coding" 
-e

==

CLI flags – usage:

# python safarinew.py -h
Usage: safarinew.py
-c : use cached html (for testing)
-d : see what was added in the last day
-e : send parsed HTML output to comma separated list of emails
-h : print this help
-p : filter on a comma separated list of publishers
-r : refresh the cached html file
-t : filter on a comma separated list of titles
-w : see what was added the last week
Note:
* -d and -w are mutually exclusive
* -t only works with -w (weekly report)
* -c refreshes the cache file if older than 24 hours, use -r to forcefully 
refresh it

==

Example email:

==

Enjoy and let me know if you have additional use cases …

==

Update 09/11/2015:

There is an RSS feed available. It seems richer in content, adding category and book cover and description, so I am definitely going to consume it and see if I can make the notification email information-richer …

==

Update 10/11/2015:

I made a new script to parse the mentioned RSS feed which stores each book entry in a Python shelve object, then prints (mails) an html output to a list of emails (in a text file). -d specifies how much time to look back, usage and run sample:

# python main.py -h
Usage: main.py [options]
Options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -d DAYS_BACK, --daysback=DAYS_BACK
                        number of days to look back
  -m, --mail            send html to recipients
  -t, --test            use local xml for testing
# python main.py -m -d 2
Downloading: https://www.safaribooksonline.com/feeds/recently-added.rss
book not in shelve, shelving info for book id 9780134278223
book not in shelve, shelving info for book id 9781466697096
..
..
book not in shelve, shelving info for book id 9781119059578
book not in shelve, shelving info for book id 9780134275796
100 books processed
..
html output
..
..
mailing the output 
..

Example output in mailbox:

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

Note taking

Reading tools (Kindle centered)

Batch read articles

Learn via Audio

Read in small chunks

Invest the time

We buy things we don’t need, to impress people we don’t like.
Tyler Durden (Fight Club)

I just finished Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. Here are some things to ponder over:

– A lot of essentialism is to become focussed on what matters most. This takes practice. One good advice I found in the book is to ask yourself the following question while doing any particular task: “Is this the very most important thing I should be doing with my time and resources right now?” or “Will this activity or effort make the highest possible contribution towards my goal?”

– Define what you want and prioritise your life. Not doing this has a double cost: not only will you not advance, you also are subjected to the whims of other people who will plan your life for you.

– The Essentialist thinks in: “I choose to,” “Only a few things really matter,” and “I can do anything but not everything.”

– Learn to say NO. There is always too much to do, read, learn. However only a few things matter. Watch out for the trap of “decision fatigue”: the more choices we are forced to make, the more the quality of our decisions deteriorates. As Derek Sivers says: No more yes. It’s either HELL YEAH! or no.

– The importance of sleep. Sleep is the driver of peak performance. Lack of sleep has a detrimental effect on your health and productivity: you cannot think clearly, you cannot prioritise (fundamental essentialist skill!). To learn more about the science of sleep, check out Night School (Richard Wiseman).

– Disconnect. The book states “We need space to escape in order to discern the essential few from the trivial many.” – too much routine and we get stuck. Sometimes we have to step outside. You remember how clear your mind was after that last trip abroad?

– Less is more. These days we have more information, but less knowledge. Quality lays in doing a few things very well, rather than a lot of things half-assed.

– Essentialism is not about how to get more things done; it’s about how to get the right things done. As Stephen R. Covey said: “If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster.”

– To advance in your career it usually boils down to: “What would happen if we could figure out the one thing you could do that would make the highest contribution?” – usually there is one or a few critical things, spot them. Use Pareto’s principle to guide you: what 20% of the effort is producing 80% of the results? Further reading: The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch.

– Eliminate. Essentialists invest the time they have saved into creating a system for removing obstacles and making execution as easy as possible. One trap the book describes is our sunk-cost bias: “studies have found that we tend to value things we already own more highly than they are worth and thus that we find them more difficult to get rid of”. Elimination is not only limited to material things. We should avoid time wasters, automate, and delegate where possible. Refer to the 4 hour work week for practical advice.

– Lack inspiration what to work on next? The books gives us 3 questions for determining where to put our time and effort towards: “What do I feel deeply inspired by?”, “What am I particularly talented at?” and “What meets a significant need in the world?”. For me similar questioning led to prefer a career in Software Development over Finance (my degree) = passion, talent and market demand combined.

– “Every day do something that will inch you closer to a better tomorrow.” said Doug Firebaugh. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Long term goals may seem overwhelming. Building an Android app with little experience surely was for me. Yet, when dividing it in subtasks (small wins), the app came to life and I was surprised how fast it was coming along. Moreover, small wins create momentum, you become unstoppable. Same with getting into physical shape: it does not happen overnight, but putting the disciplined work in every day you start to see significant results soon and you just keep going. Persistence and repetition are very powerful skills!

Essentialist quotes

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”
Mary Oliver

 “You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything.”
John Maxwell

A non-Essentialist thinks almost everything is essential. An Essentialist thinks almost everything is non-essential.
Greg Mckeown (link contains other quotes from the book)

“I do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day; how singular an affair he thinks he must omit. When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all incumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. Probe the earth to see where your main roots run.”
Henry David Thoreau

“People are effective because they say ‘no,’ because they say, ‘this isn’t for me’.”
Peter Drucker

“If one’s life is simple, contentment has to come. Simplicity is extremely important for happiness. Having few desires, feeling satisfied with what you have, is very vital: satisfaction with just enough food, clothing, and shelter to protect yourself from the elements. And finally, there is an intense delight in abandoning faulty states of mind and in cultivating helpful ones in meditation.”
Dalai Lama

Bodybuilding is much like any other sport. To be successful, you must dedicate yourself 100% to your training, diet and mental approach.

Almost 2 years ago I started working out and following a healty diet. I lost 10-15kg (depending volume vs. definition phase): more muscle, a lot less fat.

Although a proper diet is 70/80% of your success, focus on training and motivation are essential too. Arnold’s education of a bodybuilder addresses both.

Some interesting things I picked up from this book (there are many more gems as well as a contagious optimism and self-confidence):

– Focus on basic (compound) movements: bench press, chin/pull ups, squats (!), and dead lifts. They create the foundation, the most growth stimuli, you cannot go wrong with them (of course make sure you get the technique right before adding more weight). Arnold also explains that heavy groundwork on these exercises gives the bodybuilder a more powerful look.

– Do full movements for full muscle development. Better 5 complete dips or pull-ups if that’s your “fail” than 10 half-reps. Choose correct form over amount of weight to measure progress in weight lifting.

– Keys to success: self-confidence, a positive mental attitude, and honest hard work. One of the things I like from working out and dieting is the discipline and persistence they require. There is no short-cut, it takes continuous, discliplined, hard work. This influences very positively other areas of life.

– Admit your weaknesses and work hard to improve them. For me shoulders were underdeveloped, so I trained them in multiple workouts per week, especially focussing on the smaller rear delts. I soon started to note the difference.

– Change your routine. Doing the same workaround over and over again the body adapts and it’s growth rate slows down. Arnold gives an example of bulging his quads by varying his leg workout by performing a horrendous 55 set squat routine in the forest. Not for the faint of heart, but you have to surprise the muscles from time to time.

– Develop a mentality to do whatever it takes to achieve something.

– Connect your mind to your muscle. Focus, feel the muscle when working out. It takes a while to get there, but it is important to target different muscles. Muscle stiffness for the body part(s) you worked out is a good sign. But Arnold reached an even higher level as he states: “By just thinking about it, I could actually send blood into a muscle.”

– Thinking of loosing makes you loose, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, lack of faith in yourself sets you up for failure. On the other hand imagine you already have what you want before it will happen, if you set your mind to it you can achieve anything. Your mind is the most powerful tool you have, but you have to make it work for you, not against you.

– As important as long term big goals are short-term small goals, they are the building blocks of your long-term success.

– Some specifics: reps are more important than resistance in waist training (to burn off the fat), the calves are very stubborn muscles, you have to bomb them, down to half reps till failure. Chin-ups might be the king of back exercises, but don’t ignore the rows which guarantee a complete back development.

Of course there is much much more, bodybuilding is a never-ending life learning experience. As succinctly summarized in a bodybuilding documentary I saw recently:

bodybuilding is a sport, lifestyle and art …
(I think it was Joe Weider who said that)

Arnold quotes.

But I took it and I managed to do it, the result is Free Monkey, my implementation of Hangman. No casualties though, I changed the theme to be more gentle: you have to prevent an innocent monkey to get locked in. If you guess the right word he is set free and can eat his banana too:

This is much more fun than a hanging poor fellow, game development is a creative skill as well :)

The game is simple but has all the necessary features: multiple themes (cities, famous people, movies, music, books), 5 levels with increasing difficulty (last 2 levels have a timer), 1 hint per game and a point-gaining/bonus system.

The game is in English and Spanish (however the words are mostly in English). And unlike other Hangman games I played you don’t get interrupted by annoying ads and popups :)
You can read the details in the readme.

1 hint per game, Spanish / English interface, button pad to quickly enter letters

you win: monkey is set free and even gets food, more bonus the better/harder you play

you loose: monkey locked in, no worries: just click on New Game and keep trying

The game can be installed from Google Play. If you like word guessing games, give it a try and let me know what you think. Your feedback is invaluable to me as I am learning both Android and game development.

Have fun!

After getting the two with brew install mpc / mpd, you define where your music lives:

$ cat ~/.mpdconf
  bind_to_address  "127.0.0.1"
  music_directory  "/Users/bbelderb/Music/"
  db_file  "/Users/bbelderb/Music/mpd.db"
  audio_output {
    name  "audio"
    type  "osx"
}

And you create the DB file:

$ touch ~/Music/mpd.db

Then you can start playing music with:

$ mpc update
$ mpc ls | mpc add 
$ mpc play

(use “listall” instead of “ls” if you have subdirectories in your defined music_directory)

Now I wondered how to quickly search for songs and play the search result.

I ended up adding this to my .bashrc:

alias mp="mpc toggle" # handy to quickly stop / resume music
alias mn="mpc next"
function ms() { mpc search any $1; }
function mss() { mpc clear 2>&1 >/dev/null && mpc search any $1|mpc add && mpc play; }

Note the difference between ms and mss: former just lists search results, the latter plays them as a new playlist. Thanks to this StackExchange thread.

So now if I want to play something specific I can do so pretty quickly (of course my options are limited to the music in the defined music_directory):

$ mpc stats
Artists:     66
Albums:       6
Songs:      120
..

# list search results
$ ms tony
 timferriss/timferrissshow-tonyrobbins-pt1.mp3
 timferriss/timferrissshow-tonyrobbins-pt2.mp3

# same, but play them  as well
$ mss tony
Tim Ferriss: Bestselling Author, Human Guinea Pig - Tony Robbins on Morning Routines, Peak Performance & Mastering Money - Part 1 of 2
 [playing] #1/2   0:00/68:20 (0%)

# create new playlist on-the-fly, searching for "roni" (of Roni Size) 
# result: a new playlist of 6 hits plays:

$ mss roni
 Roni Size - It's Jazzy (Nu:Tone Remix)
 [playing] #1/6   0:00/6:06 (0%)

I enjoyed this entertaining page-tuner. There are many useful lessons in this book, just a couple:

– Have a system instead of goals. A goal is something specific you achieve or not, systems however refer to things you do on a regular basis that increase your odds of happiness. Systems for me are: diet + exercise, reading, writing, parenting, and coding.

– To find out where your talent lies, remember what you were doing obsessively by the age of ten. In my case it was painting and building stuff with Lego. This explains my interest in designing websites and building software.

– Don’t fear failure, embrace it. As you read through Scott’s many failures you discover how much he learned and how it all contributed to later successes.

– Try a lot of different things (sampling), bail out if you don’t see results. The more you try, the greater the odds you stumble upon a successful idea. Scott reveals his Success Formula: Every Skill You Acquire Doubles Your Odds of Success. The more concepts you understand, the easier you learn new stuff.

– Achievers see success as a skill that can be learned. That means they figure out what they need and they go and get it.

– Learn essential skills like writing, psychology (cognitive biases), conversation, persuasion and technology.

– Don’t assume you know how much potential you have. Sometimes the only way to know what you can do is to test yourself.

– The biggest component of luck is timing. Samuel Goldwyn said “The harder I work, the luckier I get.”

– Proper eating and exercise form the corner stone for further success.

– Books change us automatically, just as any experience does.