Tag Archives: demolition derby

General Update on Demolition Derby Efforts

It is time to post a general update to my demolition derby project, Jason at the Derby, although these types of updates are generally reserved for the mailing list (see the derby Web site for instructions on how to join the mailing list).

Driving
This is my first real go at driving stick, and I picked it up quickly. It helped that I was driving at least once a week for about 30 minutes–anymore makes me car sick because I zip around my neighborhood and practice driving in reverse, as well. For the past few weeks, though, I have been otherwise occupied. I did drive today, but it is obvious that I need to maintain a once-per-week training schedule. This is good, but not troubling, information.

Car Prep
Preparing the car for the Montgomery County Agricultural Fair’s demolition derby should be relatively straightforward. Given that my specialty is lots of stuff other than cars, I assembled a team of people with various interests and skills to lead the preparations. The various modifications can be divided into two categories: required and desired.

Required mods are those that must be made to meet the derby’s rules. The 2009 rules serve as our guide until the 2010 rules are published, which tends to happen right before (one of a few factors that favor the standard derby demos). RP leads the mod effort and expects the changes to be relatively easy, which is good given our lack of experience and the number of other interests I/we have. To get the ball rolling, I sent an e-mail to him today to schedule the first mod session, which will focus on reviewing the car and going through the change list to prep for their implementation.

The list of desired mods is relatively short, but expected to grow as we develop ideas. MB is investigating horn customization. All of us were inspired by the recent starting horn at horse races, so expect that it be one of several sounds blaring from the car on the night of the derby. A major effort is also to stream video from the car during the derby. BS has said he has this under control, and PMS is also working on it. In the near term, I need to figure out each person’s plan and decide on the best course of action. Ideally, we want a camera on me while I drive and a camera pointing out the back of the car to catch the action. In addition, PMS has said he would like to ride in the car to provide color commentary. At first glance, I don’t see anything in the rules to prevent this. RP also mentioned wanting to be in the car.

Party Time
Another major component of the derby is to gather a large crowd and have some sort of celebration. The logistical side of this effort can wait, but we do not have a social coordinator. Anyone in Web-land interested?

In a different sense of logistics, we also need to think about transportation for the fans (as well as the car). In a recent bit of great news, a company for which I do work has said they will charter a bus for their employees. I bet none of the other competitors have deep pockets like this!

Conclusion
In general, we continue to be in a strong place, despite April’s events and May’s slow pace. As with any project, we could use more brains and bodies, whether that is to develop additional ideas or to help with the execution of current plans. If you are interested, visit jasonatthederby.com to contact me.

Futzing and Displaying Unruly RSS Feeds

I am currently working on a Web site for my latest and absolutely greatest adventure of competing in the 2010 Montgomery Country Agricultural Fair‘s demolition derby. I want this Web site to provide multimedia content, descriptions and plans, as well as nicely displayed RSS feeds of my blog and SMS systems relevant to my demolition derby effort. Probably because of my own ignorance and lack of knowledge (remember, I’m a political/economic analyst, not a developer) but possibly because of a(nother) bug with StatusNet, I had difficulty using PHP to repost posts that contain a certain hashtag. After trying to do it the “correct” way for an hour or two, I decided to do it the easy hacky way and did so in five minutes. Here’s the deal in case you come across a similar problem:

For my homepage, I swiped Matt Thommes’ PHP to display RSS/ATOM feeds in another page. It took some tweaking (and learning), but I used his structure/framework to get my blog and sms sites to load. This works well, is clear, and allows for a good degree of flexibility.

For the demolition derby Web site, I want to post notices from my sms site that contain the #demoderby hashtag. That way, I can continue to use whatever information delivery methods I prefer (e.g., blog or sms) with it all being delivered to one place for people who want to follow the destruction. At first, I played with the various badges (for StatusNet systems) that exist out there, but I could not get the first two I tried to work and none of them seemed well configured for limiting posts to certain hashtags. The next step was to use Thommes’ PHP structure to use the RSS feed a StatusNet install provides for a given hashtag. This, however, wouldn’t work because–I think–of the URL StatusNet uses for hashtags’ RSS feeds.

After about two hours of total hunting and searching (starting from the badge search), I gave up and decided to add a tweak to Thommes’ code. I essentially include a line that checks to see if a given notice contains the hashtag. If it doesn’t, do nothing and move on to the next notice. If it does, then display the tag. It took me five minutes to do, and should have been how I started. Oh well.

Here’s the tweaked code:

# INSTANTIATE CURL.
$curl = curl_init();

# CURL SETTINGS.
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, "http://sms.jasonkoepke.com/api/statuses/user_timeline/1.atom");
Curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 0);

# GRAB THE XML FILE.
$xmlSMSFeed = curl_exec($curl);

curl_close($curl);

# SET UP XML OBJECT.
$xmlObjSMSFeed = simplexml_load_string($xmlSMSFeed);

$tempCounter = 0;

#Specify the hash you care about
$hashofconcern = "#demoderby";

foreach ($xmlObjSMSFeed->entry as $smsitem)
{
# DISPLAY ONLY 3 ITEMS.
if ( $tempCounter < 3 )
{
$pos = strpos($smsitem->title, $hashofconcern);
if ($pos === false)
{
#We don't want to display non-hashtagged posts, so this if statment has nothing.
}
else
{
echo " id."">".$smsitem -> published.": ".$smsitem -> title."

";
}
}

$tempCounter += 1;
}

Hope that helps someone, or someone comments the obvious and easier way of doing all this.