On april 21th, Google announced that the Google Analytics Data Export API beta is now publicly available to all Analytics users. The API will allow developers to extend Google Analytics in new and creative ways that benefit developers, organizations and end users.
A list of featured examples from Google customers is available at the Google developer website. All the documentation needed to use the API is found on the same website.
Last update : December 28, 2011
To integrate rss (Really Simple Syndication) feeds in a webpage, different technical solutions are available.
XSL Transformations
rss feeds are xml documents. To transform xml documents into another format like XHTML or HTML, XSL Transformations (XSLT) are used. XSL stands for Extensible Stylesheet Language. I tried this technique in 2006 with the artpet.lu website and I run into several problems with browser incompatibilities needing browser specific code selectors in the related javascript file.
Javascript widgets
A second possibility is to use a Javascript widget displaying the parsed rss data provided by a third party rss to HTML service.
The following list shows a few rss to javascript providers :
Flash Widgets
Some rss to HTML providers offer Flash widgets to display the parsed rss data.
PHP
PHP coupled up with HTML is the favored method for showing RSS feeds on a website when it comes to search engine optimization.
Among the php scripts, Magpie RSS, published by Kellan Elliot-Mcrea under a GPL licence, is widely considered to be the most robust option, with SimplePie coming as a second best with the less restrictive BSD license and a few additional features. SimplePie is a fast and easy to use PHP library for parsing RSS and Atom, written by Ryan Parman and Geoffrey Sneddon. There are a number of alternative RSS-Libraries for PHP, including lastRSS.php, PEAR::XML_Feed_Parser, PEAR::XML_RSS, rss2array and PHP RSS News Parser.
I installed SimplePie on my hosted webserver a few years ago. The provided testscript to ensure that the basic requirements have been addressed by the server and that you have everything you need to run SimplePie properly is very helpful.
simplepie
I use the php technique at the www.lesliesartgallery.eu website.
Late 2011, I prefer the Google Feed API solution to quickly integrate feeds on my websites.
During the creation of a new website, I was able to have a closer look on the internal working of Google Analytics. Four computers were used to test the first layout of the new website connected to three different IP adresses. The setup was the following :
Google Analytics reported 18 visits from 8 unique visitors during two days, which is correct if every used browser is considered as a unique visitor (use of cookies). The reported screen resolutions, operating systems, browser versions and flash versions were correct.
The unique pageviews can not be higher than the total number of unique visitors, which was the case. The 18 visits were segmented in 8 visits from new visitors and 10 visits from returning customers.
Customer loyalty
In the visitor loyalty report, the visits were indicated as :
To be sure that a newsletter with innocent words and formatting get not trapped in people’s or ISP’s spam filters, it’s useful to check it with an appropriated tool. Site Build It offers a free SpamCheck tool by form on the web or by e-mail.
I use the free MailingCheck software (version 104) from eDisplay to analyse my newsletters before sending them to the recipients. The test-email file has to be in .eml or .htm format. MailingCheck, as most spam check tools, use the open-source Apache SpamAssassin Project.
Another tool used by ISP’s to prevent spam are blacklists. A useful guide about this topic is available at the SpamLinks website. Blacklists or blocklists are lists of IP addresses, domain names, email addresses or content of the headers or the body, or some combination of these different types, that can be used to help identify spam. A special subset of IP address and domain name lists exist which can be queried using DNS, which are called DNS Blackhole Lists or DNSBLs. Blacklists can be unverified and cause “collateral damage”; their criteria for listing may not be clear.
I use the free Anti-Spam Blacklist Thing software from BlacklistPatrol/SpamButcher.
Antispam
Blacklist Patrol offers also a paid service to proactively monitor major anti-spam blacklists to see if an email server has been listed on any of them.
More informations about spam and blacklists can be found on wikipedia.
GWT-Ext is a powerful widget library that provides rich widgets like Grid with sort, paging and filtering, Tree’s with Drag & Drop support, highly customizable ComboBoxes, Tab Panels, Menus & Toolbars, Dialogs, Forms and a lot more right out of the box with a powerful and easy to use API. It uses GWT and Ext. GWT-Ext has a LGPL license option.
“What IDE is the best : Eclipse or NetBeans ?” is an often discussed topic among developpers.
NetBeans is a free, open-source Integrated Development Environment for software developers with all the tools you need to create professional desktop, enterprise, web, and mobile applications with the Java language, C/C++, and even dynamic languages such as PHP, JavaScript, Groovy, and Ruby. The actual version of NetBeans is 6.5.
Twitter has received a lot of attention from developpers. A very useful list of all available applications, bots, scripts, programs and other informations related to Twitter is published on the Twitter Fan Wiki.
The Twitter API wiki documentation currently divides the API into two categories: the REST API Documentation and the Search API Documentation. The Search API uses a slightly different syntax and is documented separately because it was developed independently at Summize, a company that Twitter has since acquired; while the Search API is still pretty straightforward and RESTful, plans are underway to make it more consistent with Twitter’s other REST API methods. More informations are available on the DevX.com website.
For most popular programming languages, there exist a Twitter API library that lets you send and receive tweets and other Twitter-related information using the syntax and data structures of those programming languages. Libraries for the Twitter Api for different programming languages are listed on the Twitter Development Google Groups website and on the Twitter website.
There are six Java projects kwown related to the Twitter Api :
Paul Mutton, who graduated at the University of Kent at Canterbury in 2001 with first class honours in Computer Science (BSc Hons), created a very small standalone web server written in Java (less than 4 KByte). A more advanced version has less than 10 KByte and is called Jibble Web Server.
The softwares are OSI Certified Open Source Software, available under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Commercial licences are also available.
Other useful Java projects from Paul Mutton are :
updated: 2.8.2010
Nabaztag choreographies contains led control and ear control. Each of the five leds can be controlled to have RGB values from 0-255. Ears can be moved to certain positions from 0x0 to 0x12 forwards or backwards. Also there is a possibility to move an ear forwards a certain step count. These files are made from three parts. First there is a header which contains the length of bytes and in middle there is the data and at the end four zero bytes.
| 00 | 00 | 00 | 08 | 00 | 07 | 02 | 255 | 00 | 00 | 00 | 00 | 00 | 00 | 00 | 00 |
Choreography files are timed and this reflects also to the command bytes. First byte of command bytes tells how long to wait before playing a new command from the beginning of last command (ts = timesteps). Second byte tells the type of command. After these two bytes there can be any amount of bytes relative to the command.
The different commands (orange data) are :
| ts | 01 | 10 |
| ts | 07 | 02 | FF | FF | 00 | 00 | 00 |
| ts | 08 | 00 | 05 | 01 |
| ts | 11 | 01 | 0A |
| ts | 10 |
| ts | 0E | 01 | F0 |
Nabaztag Flash
There are different choreography editors available (none with support of MIDI or CHOR command) :
Choreography Maker
Bunny Messenger
Last update : March 1, 2017
JNabServer is an open-source server software which handles communication with Nabaztag/tags, Wi-Fi enabled robotic rabbits that can be used as physical user-agents in human-computer interaction.
JNabServer is a part of a project by SPI -Research Group from University of Tampere in Finland. It is the base on a research on how Nabaztag could be used as an multimodal user-agent. The project is a part of Speech-based & Pervasive Interaction Group research.
JNabServer is written in j2se 6 (Java Standard edition) so it is platform independent. Main idea is that people can develop their applications and ideas more freely on jNabServer platform. By releasing this code as an Open-Source Project the developers want to give this extendible platform to be used in various projects including her own research in the university of Tampere.
The jNab server is started with the following command from the jNab folder
java -cp libjNab.jar jNab
in the command prompt window with a Java 6 environment.
The customization of the server is done in the configuration file jNab.conf. I set the following parameters:
# Ip address to which the server will be bound
jNab.server.ip=192.168.1.2
# Port to which the server will be bound to listen for Nabaztag’s
jNab.server.port=81
# Ip address to which the configuration server will be bound
jNab.conf.ip=192.168.1.2
# Port to which the configuration server will be bound to listen to a Telnet client
jNab.conf.port=6969
To manage the jNab.Server, a Telnet session is established with the telnet program which is usually located in the C:/WINDOWS/system32/ folder. The telnet program is started with the following command from the WINDOWS/system32/ folder
telnet.exe 192.168.1.2 6969
in the command prompt window (or use the telnet command o [ip-address] [port]). If the connection is succesful, the server will answer with a welcome message :
MicroServer configuration front-end. v1.0
An example is shown in the following figure :
Telnet
If the connection fails, possible reasons are :
A recommended solution to solve the problems is to verify the correct working of the server and the telnet client on the same computer with the IP-address “localhost” or “127.0.0.1”. If the computer running the jNabServer is managed by DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol), the IP-address attributed by the router is to be used.
To connect the Nabaztag’s to the server, you have to modify his connection parameters. To activate the wireless access-point of the Nabaztag, press down and hold the button between his ears while plugging the power cord. When all the lights of the Nabaztag turn blue, you can release the button. Catch the wireless network of the Nabaztag with the name nabaztag## on your laptop and click Connect.
Enter the Nabaztag IP address http://192.168.0.1 in the browser to access the Nabaztag configuration page. Go to the advanced configuration page and change the address of the Violet platform from r.nabaztag.com/vl to 192.168.1.4:81/vl. Click Update and Start and the Nabaztag will connect to the jNab-server.
The Nabaztag will request the bc.jsp webpage from the server with a HTTP-GET command and receive as answer the file bootcode.bin (59 KByte) with the binary boot code. It’s the initial bootcode from Violet before the protocol was changed to XMPP (Jabber).
The hardware of the Nabaztag consist of two moving ears which positions are tracked with optical sensors, a button, a microphone, a speaker and a rfid-reader. The rfid-reader reads tags of type ISO 14443 B. These tags operate on 13,56mhz and have a 4096-bit EEPROM.
The loaded byte code inside Nabaztag operates the following actions :
The GET/POST requests used by the Nabaztag are the following :
A more detailed information is available at the website of the university of Tampere in Finland.
The implemented commands to send via the Telnet protocol to the jNab-server are (my Nabaztag “Aenderhues” and “Ouschterhues” with serial numbers “0013d3845819” and “0019db01e01f” are used as example) :
The available plugin’s are :
The processing requests treated by the worker java class are :
I installed the jNab-server on my Desktop (wired) and run the Telnet client on my Laptop (wireless), both are connected to a Thomson Speedtouch Router 585i of my Home Network (LAN). The following informations are displayed on the console during normal operation:
<jNab/server> new connection from /192.168.1.34:12933
<jNab/server/worker: /192.168.1.34:12933> Request received:
Request with params : {tc=7fffffff v=65808 st=1 requestfile = /vl/p4.jsp h=4 sd=0 sn=0013d3845819}
<jNab/server/worker: /192.168.1.34:12933> Processing request
<bunny /0013d3845819> Handling a ping event
<jNab/server/worker :/192.168.1.34:12933> Packet to send is a default packet
<jNab/server/worker:/192.168.1.34:12933> Sending packet:
Packet:
[Data block type: 3 size: 1]
[Raw data :20]
[Ping interval block set for 20 seconds]
[Data block type: 4 size: 23]
[Raw data 127 -1 -1 -1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 ]
The server sends a packet to the Nabaztag when it request a ping command. The answer packets are custom byte arrays. These byte arrays start with byte 7F and end with FF and 0A bytes. In between there can be any amount of blocks. Blocks consists of three parts. First there is a byte telling the type of the block(03 , 04 , 09 and 0A). Next three bytes are reserved to indicate the length of data in the blocks. After the length bytes there is the data for the block. The following figure shows an example :
Nabaztag packet
There are four different block types :
There are eight possible commands in a message block :
Choreographies are files that can be played by calling them from message blocks with CH command.