A Tale of Sucky WordPress Plugins

I was looking for a plugin to grab Flickr photos by a specified tag, so that we can use it in the foss.my gallery. Though there are many Flickr plugins for WordPress, there was none catered to my requirements. Unable to find a solution, I thought it was quicker to hack one myself.

So this script just expanded from there, and I quickly had a Flickr batch downloader.

[block:important]There are several requirements:

• Download phpFlickr, and unzip it to the same directory as the script.
• You need to obtain a Flickr API key.

[/block]

Use the source

<?
/*
* phpFlickr
* http://phpflickr.com/
*
* Flickr API
* http://www.flickr.com/services/api/
*
* Flickr API call flickr.photos.search
* http://www.flickr.com/services/api/flickr.photos.search.html
*
* Photos are available via the following format:
* http://farm{farm-id}.static.flickr.com/{server-id}/{id}_{secret}_[mstb].jpg
*
* For more information visit http://www.flickr.com/services/api/misc.urls.html
*
* Applying for a Flickr API Key
* http://www.flickr.com/services/api/keys/apply/
*/

require_once("phpFlickr.php");

define('VERBOSE', array_search('-v', $argv));

// Download a batch of photos from the given page
function download($photos) {
$download = 0;
foreach ($photos['photo'] as $photo) {
$filename = sprintf("pics/%s-%s.jpg", $photo['owner'], $photo['id']);
$url = sprintf("http://farm%d.static.flickr.com/%s/%s_%s_o.jpg", $photo['farm'], $photo['server'], $photo['id'], $photo['secret']);
if (file_exists($filename)) {
if (VERBOSE)
print sprintf("33[33m %-10s %s33[0m \n", "Skip", $url);
else
print sprintf("33[33m.33[0m");
continue;
}
if (VERBOSE)
print sprintf("33[32;1m %-10s %s33[0m \n", "Download", $url);
else
print sprintf("33[32m.33[0m");

file_put_contents($filename, file_get_contents($url));
$download += 1;
}
return $download;
}

$flickr = new phpFlickr("YOUR_API_KEY");
$options = array('tags' => 'fossmy, "fossmy 2008", foss.my, "foss.my 2008"');

$photos = $flickr->photos_search($options);
print sprintf("Available 33[32;1m %d 33[0m \n", $photos['total']);

// Download the first batch of photos
$downloaded = download($photos);

$page = $photos['page'];
$pages = $photos['pages'];
// Download the following batch of photos
for ($i = 2; $i < $pages; $i++) {
$options['page'] = $i;
$photos = $flickr->photos_search($options);
$downloaded += download($photos);
}
if (! VERBOSE)
echo "\n";
print sprintf("Downloaded 33[32;1m %d 33[0m/ %d \n", $downloaded, $photos['total']);

Running it

It's just as a simple as:
[block:terminal]php download.php[/block]

Sample Results:

[block:terminal]
Available 492
..................[trim]............
Downloaded 0 / 492
[/block]

It even comes with a -v flag, so you can view what files are being downloaded.

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This competition conflicted with the eGenting Programming Competition, so I had to make a decision. Have a chance at possibly winning first prize again at eGenting, or risk the safety net and go into uncharted territories (at least for me) that is Singapore, and push myself to the max.

Even though it's so very near this was my first time I visited Singapore, and I am quite impressed with it. They say the grass is always greener on the other side of the field, hell I think it actually does, at least the trees. But once again, this is just from a tourist perspective.

My team members for the competition were once again Kamal, and Kegan from the previous Rails Rumble competition. Together we formed Team RSB, the Ruby Super Brothers (*cough cough*)

Arriving in Singapore, Kamal and myself checked into Carlton Hotel, and lured by the prospects of free Internet, I plugged my beloved IBM laptop into the wall socket, powered it on, and left it alone, while I got comfortable in the hotel room. A few moments later, I returned to my laptop to find the screen completely blanked out. After several minutes of restarting, trying to resuscitate it, I came to the conclusion that it was dead.

My laptop died on arrival to Singapore. How great.

In fact when Kamal put his MacBook charger into the wall socket, it started omitting strange noises, and we deduced that the wall socket must have been faulty.

Later we went to Sim Lim, the Lowyat of Singapore (or so I've been told) looking on trying to isolate the problem, and have it fixed within the day. But that didn't go so well. The repair shop said the mobo was fried and there was not much else I can do about it.

After arriving back from Sim Lim, we talked to the hotel trying to get them to claim responsibility over a faulty wall socket, but that didn't work at all.

Luckily by the end of the day, I was able to borrow a laptop from Kamal's relative and setup a development environment on top of Windows Vista. That was also a first experience for me, using Windows Vista. I didn't have the liberty to install Ubuntu, as I didn't want to mess with the partitions, so I ran the server version in VMware Player. It was more trouble than it looks, perhaps when I release a verbose version of this trip, then you'll see.

Now I had to win first place. To repair my current laptop, and or buy a new one.

The code::XtremeApps:: competition lasted for 24 hour, and was held by the renowned (at least the University, don't know about the school) Singapore Management University School of Information Systems. The campus is really nice, with a very modern architecture.

There was a large number of participants, with over 80 participating teams consisting of 1-3 people each. Surprisingly there were quite a number of girls, and some nice/cute ones to boot. I also noticed that at least half of the participants were carrying MacBooks around, and some were wearing either WWDC shirts or Digg.

The theme for the competition was:

Hospitality and/or tourism services in a participative society.

"Participative society", well that must have flagged something! Social Networking!

Our Team came up with EventPedia.sg, an event aggregation with all the social networking features (save for folksonomy) site for Singapore. During the first round of judging I was quite thrilled that we were able to build a complete site in 24 hours. Minus the tests for it!

Bummed out after staying up for more than 32 hours, we decided to call it quits, and returned to our hotel room for some nice shut eye. But before we could even rest, or at least I couldn't (Kamal and Kegan were already in dreamland), we received a call saying we've made it to the second round of judging the next day. Now I could sleep easily.

I was told that the second round of judging consisted of only 5 teams, so we only had to beat 2 other teams to get third, and another 2 to get first. Victory was so near.

But shortly after arriving, we found out it was 11 teams. Damn. After the judging was completed, we had some time to kill before leaving Singapore, and went to Vivocity.

After arriving home at 11pm, I checked my email. An email from the organizers. We had won co-third place. That is there were 2 teams who had won third place. I quickly went to sleep after that, from a completely exhausting trip.

I am completely disappointed in myself.

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Kamal, Kegan, and Sean and myself were camping out in RSB in Cyberjaya for most of the time. Found lunch and dinner there, though there really wasn't much to eat over there.

Our application idea was to build a contacts aggregator from the various services out there. Be it Twitter, Digg, Delicious, Flickr, or your very own blog feed. We dubbed it Reduxbook.

At the start, Kamal handled the server and setting up the continuous deployment via Capistrano. Sean covered the HTML markup and design. Kegan looked at integrating the services. As for myself I hacked away at application's source code.

The first few hours went okay, but as the 24 hour mark came by, we knew we were in a pinch. The last 24 hours was a real adrenaline rush, and it went by really really fast. But we were able to pull it through with an all nighter.

Don't forget to vote for Reduxbook !

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A team consisted of two members, and the competition consisted of two rounds. All universities, with the exception of MMU, could send only 2 teams. MMU had the priviledge to send as many as they want, which I would say is a bit unfair. You are limited to only use C/C++ and the DevC++ IDE. I find it a very crappy IDE. I bet I could have saved so much time using VIM.

I saw a lot of familiar face in the competition, some from the eGenting competition, and some friends of mine.

We went to Melaka on Friday evening, and spent the night at Kings Hotel. During the night we went out to the city to eat, and walked along Jonkers Street.

The first round eliminated the number of teams down to ten, and consisted of six questions to be answered in two hours. Simple logic problems. Insertion sort, a variation of the Tower of Hanoi, and creating a timer, etc.

Both Monash teams got into the 2nd round. Izhar (KageSenshi) also made it to the second round.

The second round consisted of two questions and was two hours long. The first problem was very simple, roll a pair of dice, and find out how many times it comes up to a certain number, and display in table format the expected and actual result. Didn't take much time. The second problem was to write an algorithm to match a text to a key. Our algorithm wasn't that difficult, and when we coded it out, it looked good. But we experienced problems due to our unfamiliarity with C, and me having done it a year ago.

Luckily one of the Monash teams made it into third place.

The Monash Team came in Uniform.

Now if only I could have done it in Ruby, I bet I could have won.

Looking forward to more competitions in the future. Know of any?

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Seven people attended this meeting. The original three and four others.

One of these are the original three.

Similarly it was a very varied discussion covering about all sorts of things:

• Personal Background
• Haml
• Mash Ups
• Capacity
• State of education in Malaysia
• Venture Capitalists
• Startups
• Lower barriers of entry
• Web 2.0
• The Semantic Web
• The future of Malaysia Ruby Brigade

The last listed topic was what the reason for the meetup. But before we continued Kean asked a very important question. Why do we want to do this? (Or somewhere along those lines)

Once again, each of us have different opinions on why we should push forward for Ruby in Malaysia. Each one, influenced by their personal backgrounds.

• Another avenue for the advancement of Free Culture (I wonder which crazy lunatic proposed this, and what juice was he drinking?)
• Belief that Ruby is a truly great language that everyone can benefit from
• Building local capacity for Ruby
• Monetization

Or somewhere along those lines I forgots, do correct me if I'm wrong.

To me, all of these are valid points. Even the last one. But what's more important to acknowledge is that we all benefit from each others contributions. We are all a catalyst for one another. I've discussed this in another post about FOSS Capacity in Malaysia. Even though our intentions may be different, our passion is still the same. Ruby.

So what were some of the ideas we came up with?

• General presentations ala MyOSS
• Hold Lightning Rounds: Maximum 20 slides in 5 minutes. Resulting in at least 10 presentations within an hour
• Hackathon. Get together a group of people to spend one weekend coding a Rails application
• Ruby/Rails Love (similar to Gnome Love) handholding in helping people contribute to Ruby/Rails)

Discussions will continue through the Malaysia Ruby Brigade mailing list. So if you are interested, but haven't signed up, do join!

Note: Malaysia Ruby Brigade Trivia: In Bahasa Malaysia (the official language of Malaysia), "Ruby on Rails" translates to "Landasan Delima"

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