Eshop pro Nakladatelství Toužimský a Moravec

April 2, 2008 – 5:35 pm

Udělal jsem nový eshop pro strejdu Michala Moravce. V nakladatelství Toužimský & Moravec vydává knížky o Bigglesovi, dobrodružné knížky z divokého západu včetně těch od Karla Maye a sem tam něco od Wericha nebo dokumentárního mimo normální edice, takže pokud toto čtete, tak jinde těžko najdete nižší ceny (omlouvám se za malou reklamu, ale je to pravda).

Technicky jde o upravený Wordpress. Žádný kouzla, žádný nákupní košík ani placení kreditkou. Prostě místo příspěvků do blogu, krátké anotace knih a navíc jednoduchý formulář pro objednání. Easy, easy, teď mě jen zajímá, za jak dlouho si to na sebe vydělá.

By Vaclav Synacek | Posted in Česky | Comments (0)

GeoURL Mapplet for Google Maps

February 22, 2008 – 10:27 pm

GeoURL is a service that maintains list of web sites and their geographical coordinations. It is possible to search a site and get it’s location as well as search a location and get all nearby sites. However the results are not shown on map. There have been attempts to map results (see comments under GeoURL meets Google Maps post at GeoURL offical blog). Some of these attempts don’t work any more or require server instalation.

Now that Google Mapplets have been released for quite some time I decided to write one for GeoURL:


var map = new GMap2();
var overlay = null;
GEvent.addListener(map, "moveend", function() {
map.getCenterAsync(function(center) {
var overlayTmp=overlay;
overlay = new GGeoXml('http://geourl.org/near/?lat=' + center.lat() + '&long=' + center.lng() + ';format=rss10');
if (overlayTmp!=null) {
map.removeOverlay( overlayTmp );
}
map.addOverlay( overlay );
});
});

This was not super hard and solves the visualization problem nicely. Once installed to Google MyMaps it displays the nearest sites to map center wherever you go on Google Maps. It can be used together with other Mapplets so one can see GeoURL sites next to flickr images or any other geocoded information provided by mapplets.

To instal this GeoURL Mapplet use this link or search for GeoURL on Mapplets gallery.

This is how Prague center looks like after instalation:

GeoUrl Mapplet Screenshot

By Vaclav Synacek | Posted in English, geo, web2.0 | Comments (0)

Google Earth or Google Maps overlay for Czech golf courses

January 27, 2008 – 11:14 pm

I wanted to do this myself, but first I searched, if somebody wasn’t faster. And there I found it. Complete kmz file for all Czech golf courses with some basic info like address, email and www of each course. It includes a bit of advertising for the map creators but I think this is much deserved credit where its due.

Personally I like this map much more than the one provided by Czech Golf Federation. It does not filter by course size or region, but viewed in Google Earth or Maps it can be used to find directions and zoom in to see actual course if Google has bought satellite map good enough for the location. As an example, this is a GE screen shot of Golf Hostivař (including the new clubhouse under construction).

Golf Hostivař in Google Earth

View the original map in Google Earth, Google Maps or embedded underneath.


View Larger Map

By Vaclav Synacek | Posted in English, geo, golf | Comments (1)

Facebook OpenID App

June 18, 2007 – 8:56 pm

Update: This has been implemented at identitu.de. I’m not sure if the implementation details are exactly as described in this post, but they seem so. See (de)railed blog for details.

Facebook does not officially support OpenID. But would the Facebook Platform make it possible for 3rd party developers to implement OpenID App on top of it? I’ve been thinking about this lately while reading the API documentation. I think it is not possible to implement OpenID consumer, so those of you who wanted a way how to log in to Facebook with their existing OpenID might now stop reading.
OpenID provider on the other hand should be possible. According to Authentification description in the documentation:

In order for a Facebook API client to use the API, the user of the client application must be logged in to Facebook. To accomplish this, direct your users to: http://www.facebook.com/login.php?api_key=YOUR_API_KEY&v=1.0, which will prompt the user to log in if necessary.

After successfull login it is possible to retrieve all user date with facebook.users.getInfo method and thus verify the user’s identity.

So the complete workflow looks like this:

  1. User enters OpenID enabled site (OpenID consumer) such as this blog, Zooomr, Jyte or whatever.
  2. He enters his OpenID URL such as http://www.f8ID.org/700107342. The number is his facebook profile number and the domain is a domain of the hypothetical OpenID App service provider (the domain is free as of writing this).
  3. The consumer site redirects him to f8ID according to OpenID protocol.
  4. f8ID redirects him to Facebook login page.
  5. User logs in with his Facebook password.
  6. Facebook redirects him back to f8ID.
  7. f8ID calls the Facebook getInfo method and verifies that this session has the the same profile number as is in the OpenID URL. If they are equal f8ID redirects back to original OpenID consumer site according to OpenID protocol.

This might seem complicated and unintuitive. But as with OpenID in general, the theoretical description puts off average internet user, but practical use is much easier to understand and use. I practice the user is involved only in step 2 and the first time of the day also in step 5. The rest is transparent to him.

So technically implementing this is possible, but would anybody actually use it? I’m not sure. There are many OpenID providers to chose from. This app would have just one advantage - one can use just one password for OpenID, one password that you need to have anyway. In principle it is very similar to idproxy.net, which turns Yahoo ID into OpenID. I can’t find the numbers, but I guess that only a very small fraction of Yahoo users use idproxy.

Please share your opinion. Would you consider using Facebook as OpenId server?

By Vaclav Synacek | Posted in English, OpenID, web2.0 | Comments (11)

Google Maps Street View and my memories of NY

June 3, 2007 – 7:01 pm

Google has done another big thing. They released the Street View feature for their maps. As with every google announcement the blogosphere is exited with a post about it every few minutes. And as with almost every google product people are asking if it compromises our privacy. Maybe, may be not. I don’t have a strong opinion yet.

Pizza place from hostel room

All I have is one positive experience: I have been to the states only once for a few months. I stayed in New York only about a 4 days of the time. I have walked down the Central Park, across the Brooklyn Bridge and I have seen the Flat Iron Building. I also remember eating several meals at one pizza place across the street from the hostel. It is probably a place like hundreds others, but I liked it a lot. Especially the fact, that the waitress spoke worse English than me.

I took a photo of the place from the hostel room. Now, 5 years later, while trying out the new google feature I became curious if I still can find the place and if so, if google took a photo too. And guess what! I can and they did!

Pizza place from google maps

There is only one thing missing in the puzzle - a photo of the waitress. I can’t google it, it’s neither on flickr nor on Zooomr. Anybody going there for pizza, who would send me the photo?

By Vaclav Synacek | Posted in English, geo, useless, web2.0 | Comments (2)

StarWars - Mistrovo tajemství

May 25, 2007 – 6:47 pm

Připravovaná parodie na Hvězdné války mého souseda Radka a jeho kamarádů má nové stránky. Zatím neobsahují trailery, jen několik obrázků z natáčení a encyklopedii postav a vybavení. Nicméně i z obrázků je vidět, že kluci začínají dobře zvládat filmové efekty světelných mečů, mají pěkné kostýmy a hlavně pěkné poctivé kovové světelné meče. Takže já už se těším na hotové dílo.

By Vaclav Synacek | Posted in film, Česky | Comments Off

Deep tagging

May 20, 2007 – 7:02 pm

Tak jsem zase jednou zjistil, že jsem dlouho žil v nevědomosti. Tagy znám, ale hluboké tagy? Už dávno psali na TechCrunch “All The Cool Kids Are Deep Tagging“. Jak mě to mohlo minout? Deep tagging není nějaká novinka ani úplná blbost, soudě podle milionových investic do společností, které se tím hodlají živit.

Takže ve zkratce: Deep Tagging je tagování částí obrázků, zvukových nahrávek a videa a odkazování na tyto části. Něco jako #relativní odkazy v HTML, které lze navíc otagovat.

Kromě veotag (výše zmíněná investice) se tímto konceptem zabývá více webů. flickr a Zooomr umožňují tagovat části obrázků. Pro video se mi zdá nejlepší služba SceneMaker, která umí otagovat scény z videí na Google Video, YouTube, Metacafe a DailyMotion, takže je možné otagovat filměčky už dávno uploadnuté bez jejich migrace na jinou službu à la veotag. Například scénu z 66 Seconds, kde hraju.

By Vaclav Synacek | Posted in web2.0, Česky | Comments (0)

Blogging harder than seems

May 20, 2007 – 6:14 pm

Yeah, yeah, I have not posted anything for last two months. TWO MONTHS! Yes, I know some of my friends told me this would happen. I just never believed it would come so fast. Looking at the access statistics, there is about 15 visits per day on the blog. What are the people reading? The same nothing over and over again?

I’m not going to promise any regular post from now on, but still I don’t want to close this site down. Why? Because if I did, I may start to wonder again: “Shouldn’t I start a blog”.

I still have one or two ideas for posts, but not much time to work on them. So maybe this year I will write a few more little posts. And that’s a reason not to close this down too.

By Vaclav Synacek | Posted in English, useless | Comments (0)

ClaimID goes social

March 22, 2007 – 12:56 am

ClaimID has announced new feature: contacts (see also Fred’s blog post). This makes ClaimID, originally an elegant service for keeping and verifying links about oneself, a social network a bit like LinkedIn, Orkut, Myspace… The big difference is, that to connect with someone, he does not have to be a ClaimID user, he just needs to have an OpenID. This makes the social network possibly very open, depending on the OpenID adoption.

I have always wanted this kind of openness in social networks. I thought that FOAF will eventually evolve in this kind of network (I even wrote a scraper transforming LinkedIn account data into FOAF). Now I have to admit, that maybe ClaimID’s approach is more user friendly and also more secure and verified (after all, anyone can write FOAF about anyone, but stealing OpenID is difficult).

The only disadvantage compared to FOAF distributed files is the little lock-in. In ClaimID, you don’t have to lock yourself or your contacts in the service, but you still lock the relationships in. If one day ClaimID disappears, so will the relationships. Even worse, if you want to build similar competing service, although both will be open to all OpenID users, the relationships will never mix-every user will have some of them in one service and other ones in the other service never seeing them all at once.

XFN solves the problem a bit. Still I think marking the relationships with FOAF and RDFa would make the service even more transparent, allowing anyone to make SPARQL queries over the social network and possibly several social networks following the same approach, making the social networks part of the semantic web.

Even without FOAF/RDFa integration, ClaimID seems like a very good social network offering. The problem is, most of the people I know, don’t use OpenID, so my ClaimID will stay contact-less until OpenID goes massive in this part of the world. Considering most of my friends are only recently discovering LinkedIn and using it as their first social network, this might take a long time. Or does the sudden interest in LinkedIn among my peers have something to do with the actual situational relevance as most of them are now (like me) graduating and starting careers?

By Vaclav Synacek | Posted in English, OpenID, rdf, web2.0 | Comments (0)

Twitter v Čechách

March 21, 2007 – 12:09 am

Tak to vypadá, že převážně anglofonní blogosféra žije twitterem, kolem 7-mi až 8-mi set blog postů denně je docela dost, myslím. Určitě doporučuji především dva posty na Unit Structures.
A v Čechách? Zatím relativně mrtvo, ikdyž první vlaštovky už se objevují.
Otázkou je, k čemu je twitter vůbec dobrej. Já zatím nevím a ani nemám účet. Co bych tam taky dával, že? V práci, doma, v práci, doma,…. , víkend, v práci, doma,….
Abych trochu poodhalil, jak to s twitterem je v Čechách, hledal jsem na twittermap (pozor, varuji před svým lehkým pragocentrismem), což je mash-up google maps a twitteru, který zobrazuje geokódované twitterposty na mapě. V době psaní tohoto postu jsou tam v Praze a v Čechách (v tomto případě se v Praze opravdu rovná v Čechách) celkem 3 twitterposty. Takže na to, že od poledne do půlnoci by měla podle mě být ta aktivnější 12-ti hodinovka dne, celkem nic moc. No uvidíme, jak se to bude vyvíjet.
Pro mě osobně velmi zajímavé zjištění je, že jeden ze těch 3 aktivních postů je od defeho, což je můj vzdálený bratranec. Tímto zdravím Šimona a lehce populisticky dodávám, že nejen, že 100% teď aktivních twitterpostů je z Prahy, ale 33% je z rodiny.

Update po 24 hodinách: dneska to vypadá tak, že na technorati padl nový rekord-1500 blogpostů o twitteru za dnešek a na twittermaps jsou 4 twitterposty z Čech-50% Praha, 25% Roudnice nad Labem, 25% Kladno a 0% rodina. Lehká progrese, ale zatím předčasné z toho dělat závěry.

By Vaclav Synacek | Posted in web2.0, Česky | Comments (0)