Blog

Front Row Plugin 2.0.6

2010/02/02

A new release of the DVDpedia Front Row Plugin is out! Here’s what’s new in version 2.0.6:

• Apple TV 3.0.1 support (not tested on 3.0.0)
• Fixed movie genre display
• Fixed movie genre filtering for movies with multiple genres
• Actors are now displayed
• Directors are now displayed
• Release date displayed is now the theatrical date

muBlip IGF Mobile Finalist

2010/02/01

To celebrate the nomination of muBlip as a finalist of the 2010 Independent Games Festival Mobile, we decided to reveal a short video of muBlip gameplay. The game is currently in beta. We plan to release muBlip to the App Store in March 2010. In the meantime, for details on development, beta, music and other news, follow muBlip on twitter.

Oh, this video was also an excuse to try out a technique to show the game content and hand movement at the same time. Neat isn’t it? Let us know what you think.

Make jrails_auto_complete work with Safari

2009/10/14

In the process of migrating an application from Prototype to jQuery, we used jRails as an intermediary step for our rjs templates. As a replacement to Rails’ autocomplete plugin we tried Marty Zalega’s jrails_auto_complete plugin. Unfortunately, there was a problem when using it with Safari: we were not able to move up and down the suggestion list using the up and down keys.

The plugin listens to keypress events instead of keydown events to decide when the up and down keys are pressed. Since Safari 3.1 a keypress event is no longer fired when a non-character key is pressed. We found the explanation in this Stack Overflow thread. The solution is not explicitly shown over there, so here it is…

In the jrails.autocomplete.js file, replace the call to keypress near line 61 with a call to keydown:

$(this.update).hide();
$(this.element).attr('autocomplete', 'off')
.blur(function(e) { autocomplete.onBlur(e); })
// .keypress(function(e) { autocomplete.onKeyPress(e); });
// Use keydown here. Safari >= 3.1 does fire keypress for
// non-character keypresses
.keydown(function(e) { autocomplete.onKeyPress(e); });

We tested the fix in Safari 4, Firefox 3, Internet Explorer 7 and 8.

For some background info, see John Resig’s post on that subject. There is also a nice writeup on Quirksmode describing the uses of both events.

Front Row Plugin 2.0.5

2009/09/07

Mathieu took some time during the long weekend to update the DVDpedia Front Row Plugin. The new release brings the much requested support to Snow Leopard and Apple TV 2.4.

Thanks to everyone who sent emails and made a donation. Your feedback and support is truly appreciated.

printf and Octal Values

2009/08/13

We came across a strange issue while using ActiveMerchant to connect Moneris’ eSelect Plus payment gateway in one of our projects. ActiveMerchant raised an exception every time an order had ‘08’ or ‘09’ as the credit card expiry month.

The culprit was the way ActiveMerchant uses sprintf to format the month value before sending it to the payment gateway. In the file lib/active_merchant/billing/gateways/moneris.rb (around line 80):

def expdate(creditcard)
  sprintf("%.4i", creditcard.year)[-2..-1] + 
                sprintf("%.2i", creditcard.month)
end

Let’s test that in irb.

>> sprintf("%.2i", '06')
=> "06"	
	
>> sprintf("%.2i", '07')
=> "07"

>> sprintf("%.2i", '10')
=> "10"
	
>> sprintf("%.2i", '08')
ArgumentError: invalid value for Integer: "08"
	from (irb):1:in `sprintf'
	from (irb):1
	from :0

>> sprintf("%.2i", '09')
ArgumentError: invalid value for Integer: "09"
	from (irb):2:in `sprintf'
	from (irb):2
	from :0

Weird, isn’t it?

It seems like sprintf won’t accept values ‘08’ and ‘09’. This ruby-talk message explains why. The leading zero tell Ruby to interpret 8 and 9 as octal numbers. Anything above 7 is obviously not a valid octal number.

For example:

irb(main):005:0> 07
=> 7

irb(main):006:0> 08
SyntaxError: compile error
(irb):6: Illegal octal digit
	from (irb):6
	from :0

The solution is quite simple: just make sure you cast the expiry month as an integer (using to_i) before creating an ActiveMerchant credit card object.

A QuickTime logo instead of a video

2009/05/17

A couple of weeks ago, I replaced the video showing what our Front Row DVDPedia plugin looks like. The original video was too big to be watched on a mobile device and loaded right away, wasting precious bandwidth.

While playing around with QuickTime pro, I found the solution I was looking for. QuickTime can export various versions of a movie and create a script that serves the most appropriate one depending on the bandwidth available and the device used to request the media. Plus, it gives you a “click to play” link for free !

A couple of minutes later, everything was working correctly on my laptop. Unfortunately, once the website was deployed on our web server, it did not work as I expected. A big QuickTime logo was displayed where I was expecting the video. The funny thing is that it worked on our staging server, but not on the production server. It obviously had something to do with the web server’s configuration but a quick look at Apache’s logs showed nothing conclusive.

If this happens to you, make sure you have the right mime types activated in Apache. Our web server sent the correct mime types for the .mov file we originally had but it did not know what to do with the .m4v and .3gp files generated by QuickTime.

If you don’t have access to Apache’s configuration file, you can use a htaccess file. The syntax looks like this:

# Correct Mime Types for delivery of QuickTime movies
AddType video/x-m4v m4v
AddType video/3gpp 3gp

Put the htaccess file at the root of your website and you should be good to go !

Of course, this is explained in detail on Apple’s website but it’s not easy to find.

Front Row Plugin 2.0.4

2009/03/27

We’ve just released an update to the DVDpedia Front Row Plugin. Apple TV users will be glad to learn that the most recent version of Apple TV (2.3.1) is now supported. As always, the Front Row Plugin is offered as a free download.

Announcing the Guichetier

2009/03/16

We’re pleased to announce that our iPhone/iPod touch app, the Guichetier, is now available on the App Store. The Guichetier is an ATM locator for Montreal, Laval and the urban agglomeration of Longueuil. By finding your bank’s ATMs, the app helps you avoid additional transaction fees.

The Guichetier is available for $1.99. Avoid transaction fees once and the application easily pays for itself! For more details, visit the product page or go directly to the App Store.

para9's new look

2009/03/15

With spring quickly approaching, we thought it was time to give para9 a new look. Please say hello to para9’s new logo and website.

We are also introducing our blog, so subscribe to the feed if you’d like to keep up with our latest musings. Heartfelt thanks to our friends at Ottoblix for the design of para9’s new visual identity.