Lance Wicks
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JudoGeek Blog

The Guild Series Three, W007! 

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-us&fg=Xbox_Channel_guild_player_final&vid=bdab0fe5-ecc7-4f5e-a946-feefa45d531b" target="_new" title="Season 3 - Episode 2: Anarchy!">Video: Season 3 - Episode 2: Anarchy!</a>

Woohoo!

The Guild series/season three is online!
I love this show, check it out asap fellow geeks.

http://www.watchtheguild.com/

Lance

p.s. Yes, I am WAY nehind the curve on this series.
p.p.s. Having MSN video on my site does make me feel dirty!
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Creating a new open source project, meet DojoList! 

HI All,
so you may have noticed that the blog has been quiet lately. There are several reasons for this, including lots of $client work at the moment. I am also in the midst of arranging a Judo training camp, starting a new business venture and (getting to the point) starting a new open source project.

DojoList
DojoList is my new project, which aims to provide an open source web application that allows someone to maintain a list of (Judo) dojo. The project started as aprt of my taking over maintenance of the Hampshire Judo Association website, and wanting to put a Google Map of where all the clubs are on there.

Then someone else wanted something similar and I had the experience of trying to use the British Judo Association's web based list of clubs. So I decided to polish up my little hack and try and make it worth sharing.

The project is being shared and hosted at http://github.com/lancew/DojoList where you can download the source code and use it. It is licensed under a AGPL license, which basically means it is free and open but you have to share any change you might make to the code that improve it.

I have a demo installation installed and working at http://www.lancewicks.com/dojolist/

The system as it stands needs no database (I wanted to host this on the lowest possible spec host server possible). It uses PHP and the Limonade PHP framework for it's core MVC structure. jQuery and Mapstraction javascript libraries are used too.

The system has an admin interface where you can add a dojo, including importantly, the longitude and latitude of the dojo. All the information you add gets stored in an XML file and a KML file is created as well as a plain text (well plain HTML) version also.

The KML is overlayed over a Map to provide the markers for the map. Click on a map and you get the details about the club.

All pretty simple really.

It is very much at the starting stages, it is only today that I added a simple (and rather by-passable) authemtication system. Today also with the help of Fabrice the developer of Limonade I was able to get it all to work on the target IIS server for the first time.

Microsoft's IIS server is, I might add, a pain in the butt to work with compared to my local LAMP stack and all the other Linux based servers I test on. Thanks Microsoft for being totally non standard, it really makes us need to learn how to cope with quirks that get in the way of getting the job done!

Anyway... please do take a look at the project over on GitHub and if you have any bright ideas, or want to contribute please do let me know!

Lance


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Judo-Notator 

Picture 7


In August I shall be attending the 6th annual International Science of Judo symposium, where I shall be presenting my research into Attack Rates in Judo as a predictor of victory. As part of the research I wrote a small hack to make the notation faster/easier/better.

It was quick and dirty, but it helped me get through the hours of video footage.

In preparation for the symposium I have been revising the code and making it a bit better, so that I can put a link to it on the poster I have to produce. I also intend on sharing the SPSS data file and possibly my actual assignment so that others can access the data and make their own study of it and compare it to mine. Maybe people can use the code I have written to replicate the research or do it elsewhere and push forward the field open source community stylee. ;-)

The original code, was just a console app, with little/no feedback to the user. Ick. So with this version I decided to created a user interface yet I wanted to stay console based; mainly to simplify making the code portable across operating systems. I am on a Mac, but the code "should" run on Windoze or Linux. It is in Perl as that is the language i wanted to use, no other reason.

...actually that is not entirely true. I am more experienced in Perl code than other languages. Also, the community and resources are amazing. CPAN is incredible and makes life so easy if you have code that is unpredictable. What I mean by that is that if like this code you are making decisions "on the fly" Perl and CPAN make it so easy to magically have the modules you need at hand.

For example, I decided to try using curses to do the user interface. So it's dead simple with Curses::UI I didn't have to learn/do too much to have a menu system, windows and dialog boxes etc.

Also, I love using Perl::Critic and Perl::Tidy to ensure that my code is of a definable quality level. At some stage I might try using Kwalitee as well. :-)

I am using Coda (which rocks) to develop the code and a mix of local SVN server and mainly Git to do the sources control. I am really hoping that Coda gets proper support for GIT soon. Maybe replace SVN with GIT, especially seeing as Git can (with limitations) work nice with SVN servers.

I have been using GitHub.com as a host for the code, so you can pop over and clone the code and take a look for yourself. In fact, I would really appreciate it if you did ( http://github.com/lancew/judo-notator ). Both branches are up there, I am working on the "GuiVer" branch at the moment.

It has been enjoyable and rewarding to be writing some code. I have been adding services and trying to contribute to NoseRub.com too, but this is a bit different as i am starting from scratch and the codebase is simpler.

After I have the code for the GUI aspect done, I have to give thought to output of each match, I am thinking if it is possible to write direct to SPSS format so it can be processed there right away... we shall see.

Anyway, I just wanted to get some of this out of my head and onto the blog to reassure the universe I am still there.

Lance
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A new project... MartialConversations.com 

This week has been rather busy and exciting for me.
Mike (from http://www.thejudopodcast.com ) and I have launched a new website http://martialconversations.com a social networking site for Martial Artists.

The catalyst for this was the launch of the European Judo Unions "community" social network. I had been aware the EJU site was coming since Bath when I had seen some info on it. I also know the British Judo is looking at social networking too, though via FaceBook.

We were really impressed with the vision of the EJU to create a social networking site, though the site itself annoyed me a bit. It was rather... well rough around the edges. And closed to people outside Europe (though I gather this has changed). It was also (obviously) Judo only and also limited to the EJU and it's member organisations, be that implicit or explicit.

So Mike and I said "well hell, lets create our own site and see what happens", so, here we are on Friday and the site has been live a couple of days and all is good. We have a few members on the site and the buzz is starting to grow.

For me personally it's the sort of project I love, working with someone else, working fast and hard. Making it work. It was enjoyable also as it forces me to learn something new. Prior to this week, I had never installed WordPressMU before or BuddyPress. We have pushed out our first Judo specific modification to the software, so I have had to learn how the BuddyPress code works and how to modify it. I love that!

Lance
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Developing for the iPhone. 

This week I am doing some interesting things for www.PlanetJudo.com starting with the server move and launching the Spanish language site to the public.

The second part has been making a iPhone friendly version of the site available. Which I have now done... at least a first stab at it.

I have basically done a very lazy hack to make it work, which is this. I created in Dashcode a Web Application that uses the RSS feed to create a iPhone web app. It is pretty easy, there are a few little gotchas, but overall it's nice and easy.

Then I created a little PHP redirect that detects the iPhone browser and when it does it redirects Safari on the iPhone to the iPhone specific site, it is a one liner so that was pretty cool.

Whilst I was getting used to Dashcode I realised I could create a Dashboard widget for PlanetJudo also... so I have done that too. I want to make it a bit shinier, but soon it will be put up on the site.

Overall, I have to say I really like the Apple developer tools, I have played in XCode in the past and liked it, this is the first time I have played with Dashcode and it was really nice to work in, so I shall be doing more with it in the future I am sure! :-)

It is nice to work with these development tools, it is only Wednesday and I get to say I have worked in Perl, PHP, Dashcode this week... what will that list look like by the end of the week, a bit of Scratch no doubt, what else, Ruby, Smalltalk? Who Knows! :-)

What I must do is look at NoseRub again this week and try and add some more services if nothing else.

I have also finally managed to get the TV next to my desk hooked up as a second display for the laptop, the resolution is rubbish, but fine for video, or the iTunes visualizer! ;-)

Productive week so far... nice!
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