Alexander Blanc on social software, PHP, some Ruby, MMS, online-communities and more

Getting command line calls from ffmpegX

With over six hundred movies to convert, Tom and I really needed to find out what shell commands ffmpegX was issuing behind the scenes. ffmpegX is fine with a handful of clips, but having to manually enter the setting for each file was never going to work for us. If we could only get the shell commands we could write a script to loop over the movie files. Simply yes? Apparently not. Sadly (and rather un-helpfully) ffmpegX does not offer a way to see what commands are being called, nor it would seem is there any intention to add such a feature.

It struck me that I could write a PHP script

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Add comment February 21st, 2006

PHP code to split a string into a list of tags

I wrote this code for a project I have been working on and figured it might be useful for others. The function splits a string into tags (i.e. the sort that can be attached to blog posts or social bookmarks etc.)

Tags are written as a comma seperated list, can have multiple words and contain commas if encapsulated by double quotes. Hope someone finds it useful!

< ?php
    function explodeTagString ($subject)
    {
        // split the string, populates the $tags array
        preg_match_all('/[^,]*\".*\"|[^,]\s*[^,]+\s*[^,]/',
            $subject, $tags);
	
        // loop through $tags and trims spaces and double
        // quote (\") chars this is a bit of a hack (I am
        // sure it could be built into the regex above).
        foreach ($tags[0] as $k=>$t) {
            $tags[$k] = trim($t, ‘” ‘);
        }
	
        return $tags;
    }
	
    // A little test case
    $test_tag_string = ‘test tag, “x, y and z”, foo, bar’;
    $tags = explodeTagString($test_tag_string);
    print_r($tags);
    /*
        Should output:
        Array
        (
            [0] => test tag
            [1] => x, y and z
            [2] => foo
            [3] => bar
        )
    /*
?>

Add comment February 13th, 2006

Blog comments

I will be sorting out the ‘post a comment’ function very soon (basically when I get around to downloading and installing something to deal with spam.) Please bear with me!

6 comments February 12th, 2006

MVC model (and ORM) frameworks in PHP

I have been researching several MVC frameworks (in particular the Model components of these packages) as well as some separate ORM libraries for PHP. I have been getting more and more into Ruby on Rails ActiveRecord use, and have been interested to see how PHP libraries compare.

So far I have looked at Propel, Biscuit, TaniPHP, WASP, Symphony, Cake, Solar, PHP on Trax, Prado and a few more to boot. The truth is, I just cannot find one that ticks all of the boxes for me.

Many suffer from too little documentation, several seem to be too complicated for their own good, and to be blunt there are just too many separate products trying to be the same thing. Of them all, Biscuit caught my eye but I cannot remember why … perhaps because I like the name and I wanted a cup of tea by that point.

I think the problem for me is that most of the frameworks try to follow Rails too closely, and end up suffering as a result. Now - I may well eat those words after some more research - so don’t blow any fuses yet. I will keep the feedback coming as I find out more over the next couple of weeks.

5 comments February 9th, 2006

Web2.0 … its about money search.

Web2.0. I hate the label, but its here to stay (at least for the short term). What is it all about you ask? Well I guess that depends on who you talk to.

I would like to think its about accessibility and useful, easy to use standards-based web applications. But I fear its not about that at all. Its actually about search. More specifically its about developers building services with the sole aim of getting bought by Google. Or Yahoo.

Nifty search and sort algorithms can only do so much, but people can do an awful lot more. People are the sorting algorithms of the future, making meaningful associations between online content. Thats why we are seeing a lot of things like Squidoo, Rollyo, ma.gnolia.com and del.icio.us: they all ask *you* to layer over and draw themes across otherwise hard to link web content. Enough people put the same content under the same tag, and a pattern emerges. A pattern that the aforementioned search-engine lot will be very keen to get their grubby little mitts on.

Now, I am not necessarily against this. As long as the applications offer utility and are easy to use then I am all in favor. But what happens when every developer vies for the same space … not all will survive. Now thats my worry. Whats going to happen when services dissapear (read ‘cash runs out’)? What will happen to my stuff that was in it? Will it be lost? Time will tell.

Add comment February 6th, 2006