tijs.org

The popular photo sharing site Flickr.com just announced that they are now offering prints and backup dvd’s through third party suppliers, which is pretty neat. Even cooler is that they made a commercial API (Application Programmer’s Interface) to service these partners which allows them to open negotiations with anyone that thinks they could sell a service to Flickr users. Which in turn allows them to add a licensing model to a ’selling subscriptions’ model, which might make Flickr the first (the first successful example at least) for a new business model in which you create a service that many people people use and then sell the right to sell extra services to your user base through a ‘closed’ API. Although not many services will be able to repeat this feat it is a pretty cool stunt that many failed to achive back in the web 1.0 days. For effect just let me repeat:

You can make money offering stuff on the web for free (or next to nothing).

Th snag is in the ‘closed’ API of course. Flickr flourished in part because the API was open to all and developers around the world built nice applications that extended the functionality of the basic service. With the extra functionality only appearing for paying commercial partners the incentive to build cool stuff for Flickr quickly vanishes. On the other hand, if they manage to keep both unpaid enthousiastic developers and paying customers happy they have created a very successful, and cool, web service indeed.

Now even those who insist on using stored procedures and other such ‘enterprise grade’ technology no longer have an excuse to use Oracle: MySQL 5.0 Downloads. I must say i tend towards the school of thought which thinks that a well designed application is best served by staying away from such database ’shortcuts’.

update: David has a much more nicely worded explanation of my viewpoint. And the discussion it raises is rather interesting too if you like that sort of thing.

There is a really simple way to calculate the total results a MySQL SQL query with minimal overhead. This saves an extra call to the database in which you calculate the total yourself. Just use SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS in your query like this:


$sql = "select SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS a.id, a.title,
from articles a
left join sections s on a.section_id = s.id
where t.name_short = '$type'";

// run the query (i use a db object in this example)
$db->query($sql);


As you can see you can use this in any type of select query. And then you can request the total like this:


// ask MySQL for the result total
$db->query("select found_rows() as total");
// assign to variable
$total = $db->get('total');


You still call the database a second time but the variable is already in memory so there is no overhead.

p.s.
If you come here more often you are probably not used to seeing code here but i in the future i want to try and share some more solutions to common coding problems on this blog. Mostly PHP and SQL, hopefully some more Ruby/Rails in the near future.

BarCamp AMS 2005 Day 2 Post Dinner - 4

Originally uploaded by roland.

I just returned from the first night of BARCAMP at the mediamatic headquarters here in amsterdam. I went there with James and Peter and i guess we all had some worthwhile conversations there. Lots of cool americans and canadians, lots of geeks and mostly lots of smart people on the same floor. The Flock browser, which adds interfaces to most social software tools to firefox, was presented and subsequently released (the download link doesn’t work in Safari people!). The guys who make drupal (and bryght) work were there. Rasmus was there. Felix who made the excellent (rad even) plazes was there. And many other friendly people too. How’s that for a review eh, i’ll just catch some sleep now.

p.s. for more photos just check the Flickr tag barcampamsterdam

I’m in the process of adding some automatically gathered meta information such as flickr photo’s, del.icio.us links and my current location (through plazes) to this weblog. I currently use their javascript badge although it is rather buggy and won’t actually show up on IE which is a bit of a shame. I tried to wrap the functionality of PlazesPHPBlog in a wordpress plugin but the xmlrpc class it uses tells me the xml that plazes is returning is not well formed so i’ll have to look into that some more later. It’s suppossed to show my current location together with some photo’s grabbed of off flickr with that location, which should be pretty cool. To be continued…

The idea of course is that all the data i already generate just by using some of the web apps out there should be enough to fill this blog, relieving me of the duty of coming up with things to post

Altough it escaped all the buzz Matt makes a point of pointing out how Apple succesfully redesigned a tool that has been bugging households for a long time; the remote. A streamlined remote from Apple

Running high in the iTunes music store is the TikiBarTV Vodcast. A silly little show in which a cocktail is made. It’s funny (mostly), produced well enough (for a home made show) and with 5 minutes is nice to view while really doing something else. One of the first examples i’ve seen that shows community television published using the internet could a

ctually work.
The dutch broadcasting company VPRO will start publishing some of their programming on iTunes and the BBC is experimenting with this as well so things are, finally, getting interesting in this arena.

Na de must-have plugin voor safari met de zelfde naam komt David Watanabe nu met inquisitor ~ instant search. Een super handige search engine die, net als de safari plugin, je zoek opdracht aanvult terwijl je typt gebruik makend van zijn kennis over voorgaande zoek opdrachten.

update: This web service was of course based on the safari plugin which did something similar and which has just been upgraded to 2.0. I actually like the simplicity of 1.0 better but this new release is a must have if you use safari anyway. The donate and download system is a really nice model for software delivery in it’s own right by the way. Clean simple and effective.