I've created a modified and updated version of Neolao's FLV Player. This is a very useful video player for FLV files that you can embed on your web site.

There were some features that I wanted added and some bugs that needed fixing, but there did not seem to be much activity on the original app's message board (at least the English language version), so I decided to make the changes myself.

I took the "MAXI" version of the player, and added in some more JavaScript support, improved some performance issues, and fixed a couple bugs.

Here is what I changed:

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I am excited to announce Chicken Wing Software's online multimedia presentation system. The pilot presentation, created by Christine Perfetti of Perfetti Media, is online now. Facilitating a Usability Test is the first in what will be a series of presentations on usability testing techniques gleaned from her ten-plus years of experience in the field.

The system combines video with PowerPoint slides and text, all tied together with Dynamic HTML and JavaScript for a fully interactive experience. You can click on a slide thumbnail to advance the video to that spot in the presentation, and the displayed slide stays in synch with the video.

Even now, with only the first presentation, the system's potential is inspiring, and we are brimming with ideas for new features to add!

If you would be interested in using this technology for your own presentations, please contact us.

» Watch the presentation.

As of version 0.6, click here for the new home of PayPal on Python.

Thanks!

My Texas Hold'em poker site is now fully operational! It's called Best Texas Hold'em and you can play now at www.bettorbest.com. Fun features include:

• Play online for FREE in your browser - no Flash or downloads required.
• Play against your friends, or meet new friends.
• Log in using your Twitter, Hotmail, or MySpace account.
• Challenge yourself against artificial intelligence robots.
• Get 1,000 free chips just for joining, plus another 500 chips for every day you log in.

In addition, there is a thorough help system where you can learn to play Texas Hold'em, learn all about the Moving Button rule, and even get some poker strategy tips. And check back often as new pages are constantly being added. And more great features to come! The site is still under active development, so you can expect lots of great changes and ideas.

After many months of hard work, I'm proud to announce that my new poker site, Best Texas Hold'em, is now up and ready for a Beta test. You can play now at www.bettorbest.com.

It's still in its early stages, but gameplay is working. You can log in with a Yahoo, MySpace, or Hotmail account, or your email address (Facebook support coming soon).

Since it's brand new, there may not be anybody to play against right away, so you may have to check back, or better yet invite a friend, if there is nobody there. Soon enough there will be artificial intelligence support to fill in when necessary.

For the technically interested, the site is programmed in the Python programming language using the Django web framework, and hosted on a Slicehost server. The front end is pure JavaScript with no downloads or plugins required.

Give it a try if you get a chance, and please let me know if you find any
problems.
Thanks!

I've been very busy lately working on my next project: an online Texas Hold'em poker site. It's been a lot of fun, and I have most of the actual gameplay functionality working. Now I'm working on the less-fun but just as necessary part: the authentication and login infrastructure.

Since I'm using Django, I can piggyback on its useful authentication module. That's a nice start, but users still need to choose a username and password before they can use the site, not to mention filling out their name, email address, and date of birth. My goal is to lower the barriers to potential users - both psychologically and in terms of effort. Folks are hesitant to sign up for yet another login and password, and to go through a lengthy registration process

Enter OpenID. OpenID sounds like a very promising standard. Unfortunately, the standard promises more than the implementations deliver. Or rather, the standard doesn't quite promise what it seems to. (more...)

Welcome to the third part in my series of posts about creating a Facebook application. I am using Django as my web development framework, and this post will focus on some of the backend techniques I have worked out to make this work easier. This is not a tutorial, but a set of tools that I have developed. This is a long post, with a lot of source code; I hope you find at least some of it useful.

Keep in mind as you read this that the Facebook platform is still very new, and likely to change. In fact, if you're a FB user, you are probably aware they recently completed a major transition to a new profile design. This included many changes behind the scenes for developers, some of which are still playing out. I recommend keeping up with the Facebook Platform Developer Forum and the Facebook Developer Blog.

Also, I will assume you have already read the API Documentation and the documentation for PyFacebook, and that you know how to create a web app using Django. If not, you will want to start there.

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Welcome to the second part in my series of posts about creating a Facebook application. I am using Django as my web development framework, but this post doesn't have much to do with Django, since it deals with the front end. In particular, it talks about how to write JavaScript that can work both in and out of Facebook.

As I mentioned last time, Facebook lets developers use a subset of JavaScript, which they call FBJS. The FBJS is transformed on the fly into JavaScript as the page is loaded. All variables and functions you define or reference are prepended with a string like "a123456789_", including calls to document.getElementById and setTimer and the like. This is done in order to restrict what you can do with DOM elements, to avoid cross-site-scripting attacks and unwanted user-hostile behavior. FBJS is fairly well documented, so if you plan to do some Facebook JavaScript development, you should start there.

The biggest restriction that FBJS imposes is that you can no longer access the attributes of DOM elements directly, but must go through an abstraction API consisting of a series of setters and getters. For example, instead of saying something like imageEl.src = myImageUrl, you instead need to call imageEl.setSrc(myImageUrl).

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Facebook made a splash a year or two ago when they opened up their API. Now developers could write applications that integrate with the site. Instantly, users -- many of whom had fled to Facebook from a spam-filled MySpace -- were inundated with Requests to battle ninjas and News Items bearing obscene pictures. To Facebook's credit, they did clamp down and put some restrictions on what apps can do. A few entertaining or useful applications have risen to the top, and the potential of the API is ready to be exploited. It's not an easy task for a developer, however. In the next few Chicken Scratches posts, I'll talk about my experience developing two Facebook apps from scratch: The Limerick Book, a site that works both in and outside of Facebook and allows users to share and rate Limericks, and Play Scopa, a traditional Italian card game that users can play against each other in realtime (this one is not yet launched to the public). This first post discusses some of the difficulties I have run into. In the next couple posts, I'll discuss how I dealt with them. First, to set the scene:

My setup

I am using the Django web framework for my backend development, the latest SVN version running with Python version 2.4 on a shared host at Dreamhost. In fact, it's the same server I use for this site and weblog. To connect Django to Facebook, I am using the nice PyFacebook library, which is pretty mature, though I had to modify the code to support some of the latest features of the Facebook API. And now, on to the perils. (more...)

I have written two previous articles about how I edit Django template files in Emacs and XEmacs. Here is How I edit Django templates. And here is More on editing Django templates in XEmacs. Here today is another little tip that can be used in conjunction with those two other posts or independently.

Django templates involve a lot of punctuation. Between the angle brackets and slashes of HTML and the curly braces and percent signs of the Django template language, it's enough to make your pinky fingers hurt just thinking about it. Therefore any little trick to reduce some of this typing burden can be helpful. Presented here is some Emacs Lisp code to provide auto-closing of Django template tags. So even if you still have to type things like curly-brace percent-sign space ifequal blah blah2 percent-sign close-curly-brace, you won't have to type the {% endifequal %}. (Of course, if you're using the abbrev tips I gave previously, you won't even need to type the opening tag very often, but sometimes you still do.)

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