I just made a little Yahoo Pipe that extracts all the info from the IMDB Top 250 list. There were already a few of thee out there but none of them just took all, and just all, the info and outputted it as a pipe.
So here it is, but keep in mind that it’s mostly useful as RSS, JSON, or PHP object.
It’s time for a roundup of week 3 of my photo challenges.
This week the theme was “The Rule of Thirds” and I again decided to pick one of my 7 daily submissions as the entry for the theme. Here they are in order.
I had some spare time during Christmas and new Year, reason for me to use my spare time to learn something new. In this case it involves making my first Firefox Extension and using Git.
The project I decided to work in is something very simple. As a Facebook Application Developer I often run into the problem of needing to be able to view part of the source of the HTML response of Facebook. Reason for this is that Facebook embeds server errors on our servers as hidden comments in the HTML. This is handy for developers as they can then see what error their server generated.
The only problem though is that this response is hidden in the source. I therefore decided to make a small bookmarklet that extracts this data, and opens it in a new window. The bookmarklet can be found below:
I also always wanted to make a Firefox extension, so I decided to make my bookmarklet into a Firefox Extension that detects the hidden Facebook HTML Comments and shows the user a small icon that they can they click to view the full server response. It was a bit hard, especially as Firefox extensions have their own flavor of Javascript, but it turned out to be fairly easy (less than a days work).
The result can be found here on the Firefox Add-Ons page but it’s currently still listed as experimental, so leave a comment or feedback to help me make this a public Add-On. For a tutorial on how to use the Add-On or the Bookmarket, see the video below:
Finally. I decided to add this entire project as Open Source on GitHub. I already had a GitHub account but no projects. I will probably be moving more projects over soon though, so be sure to follow the project for updates or follow me to see more of my projects show up in time.
It’s time for a roundup of week 2 of my photo challenges.
This week the theme was ”Creative Colors” and I again decided to pick one of my 7 daily submissions as the entry for the theme. Here they are in order.
The Internet Movie Database (IMDB) is the world’s most popular source for everything involving movies and TV shows. For years they have gathered movie ratings by their users and build a ever changing list of their Top 250 movies based on this.
Melinda and I are both fans of the big screen and we regularly write movie reviews of new movies that we’ve seen. Imagine our surprise when we had a quick look at the Top 250 and realized we had only seen a measly 25%-32% of the list! The Top 250 is filled with rather old, slow, and long movies, and somehow we had never watched any of them because one really needs to set some time apart for them.
So here is our home-made-challenge for 2009: watch 52 of the IMDB Top 250 Movies. That is one movie a week, and as this year started on a Thursday our weeks last from Thursday to Wednesday. This gives us the weekend to watch the movies, and a few days extra might we not be able to watch it in the weekend. We invite everyone to come and join us every week. We’ll be listing the next movie as we review the previous one.
Week 1
Last week’s movie was La Vitta è Bella (aka Life is Beautiful, 1997) which is currently #87 on the IMDB top 250. It is directed by and starring Roberto Benigni who is an Italian comedian and director. The movie won 3 Oscars, including that of Best Actor and Best Foreign Language Film. I had already seen the movie but Melinda hadn’t yet and she had gotten the movie on DVD for Christmas. We both loved the movie and even had to wipe a tear in the end. Here is the trailer:
Week 2
This week we’re going to watch the long-time #1 in the Top 250: The Shawshank Redemption (1994). As I said earlier, we’re inviting anyone to come and join us in watching this 142 minute long classic.
So it’s time for a roundup of week 1 of my photo challenges. I decided to participate in two challanges this year, one being the Project365 where I will take and upload one photo a day for 365 days, the other the 52 Themes challenge where I will be taking a photo in a different theme every week.
This week the theme was “New Beginnings” and I decided to pick one of my 7 daily submissions as the entry for the theme. Here they are in order.
I know I could write down some traditional new year’s resolutions like last year, but everyone knows (and nobody cares) that I need to eat more healthy, sport more, etc, etc.
So here are some of my more geeky new years resolutions for this year.
Project365: Take a photo a day, for a year. Sounds easy, but obviously ego gets in the way and I want to produce nice photos every day. I’m now on day 5 (1 to 4 are here) and still haven’t produced a nice photo yet today so I better hurry up. My photos will all show up on my Flickr stream and in a weekly brief here on my blog. Have a look at the Flickr group for more people’s submissions.
52 Themes: Quite similar to Project365, this project has set the target to motivate photographers to submit one photo in a certain theme every week, for 52 weeks in a row. I willprobably be picking one of my 7 daily photos as my weekly pick every time but I might have an eight photo instead. I will probably post this photo to my blog too but also have a look at the group for other people’s submissions. This week’s topic is “new beginnings”.
52 Movies from the IMDB Top 250: We noticed we had seen very little of the IMDB Top 250 movies (both around 30%). As movie lovers we couldn’t have this obviously so we have now handpicked 52 from the Top 250 movies and we will watch these in the next 52 weeks. More about this (including a list) in a future blog post.
Try Linux: I have never really gotten into Linux. The main reason for this is probably the fact that I’ve always ran Linux in a dual boot installation next to the OS that I was really using. This year I promise to somehow get a machine that I can run Linux on and use it as my workstation. I might get a netbook or some other small laptop, or maybe I will install Linux on my MacBook and just wipe OS X. Whatever I will do, I pledge I will give Linux a fair change.
Cristiano on Tech/Life 
