TED talk API or workaround for data access - web-services

It is my understanding that TED likely is not looking at making a BlackBerry App. I have a few frameworks I've created already for parsing various types of API's/feeds/services and would like to know if there is a way for a third party developer to make a TED app. I've heard mention of an API via the Googles but cannot find it.

I know this is quite old, but I just came across it. I was searching for an API for TED Talks as well, but was unable to find one. They have announced that they'll open up the site with an API, but I don't know when.
Instead, I decided to use the XML RSS feed, which is easily parsable. It's only usable for the latest talks and you naturally can't do any server-side filtering, but if that's good enough for you, you should definitely check out the feed:
http://www.ted.com/talks/rss
There's also the higher definition version of that feed:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/TedtalksHD?fmt=xml

There is an unofficial API for all ted talks details (gathered from youtube and ted.com)
its updated weekly with the data
http://market.mashape.com/bestapi/ted
supports:
get talks by name
get talks by speaker
get talks by description
get talks by transcript / search transcript
and looks like they publish more end-points from time to time

If you guys are still looking for something, I just open-sourced about 5400 hundred TED talks (TEDx, TED, TEDEd). Check it out and build something cool.
https://github.com/saranyan/TED-talks

Related

Magic Software (uniPaaS)- get data from webservice

Can someone show me a simple example of how to get data from web service on Magic software.
Assume that I have WSDL file and the function I need called "getData()"
Well, it's been awhile since you asked, and hopefully you found an answer by now. But, I have not perused this site before. Anyway, the manual that comes with Magic XPA has a manual, called "Mastering Magic". In Chapter 34 is a step-by-step "how to" for consuming web services.
We (some of the users) also have meetings weekly and you are welcome to join us, to get live walkthroughs for debugging details:
http://unipaasusers.blogspot.com/p/meeting-schedule.html
By and large, web services are very easy in Magic. Being able to automatically define XML files or XML BLOBS as data sources saves a lot of time. The problems tend to occur when there are syntax issues with the XML, which can be "fun"!

Batch Geocoding with Garmin Mapsource

I lost track of this effort years ago but have need to geocode thousands of addresses nightly. I must use the very accurate database sitting on the machine, installed when the Nuvi map update installed Mapsource.
When I contacted Garmin years ago, they expressed an interest in providing an API for this, but then I heard nothing and did not follow up. Their database is provided by navtec? I believe. Anyone have experience with that format?
I posted on the Garmin Developer forum a while ago, but its a little lethargic over there :)
Has anyone done this?
Does anyone know how it might be done without an API; meaning database structure and calls?
I'll take a solution in any language.
Added:
Garmin has expressed an interest in making this available to me. They just have not done it.
I do not know the database format.
I am NOT looking for an online solution or any other "alternative". This question is very specific.
Talk to Navtec directly. They will sell you or license you their database directly. The database tables are clearly documented, then write your own Geocoder on top. Took me about a week 4 years ago, and I was marginally profficient in SQL at the time.
You can geocode up to 10,000/day by city with NN4D after you get their free application key.
You can geocode for $18 per 1,000 with CoreLogic (aka Proxix)
Yahoo looked most promising because it has the Hadoop feature, which is also currently being utilized at Navteq. I've contacted a guy at Navteq who uses Hadoop, and I'm awaiting his feedback. According to Ben Lorica's article on Datameer O'Reilly.com entitled "Big Data Tool for Business Analysts", Datameer can upload from spreadsheets to Hadoop. Hadoop is a pipeline to Navteq.
Starting point - a list of the tools at the GIS Dept at USC
(I can only have one link because I'm new, but I'll add the rest when I get my points up.
naveteq uses oracle format
BUT HOLD 1 SECOND:
doing 1000 lookups(per night) is easy,
doing 10000 lookups(per night) requires a good server,
doing 1000000 lookups(per night) requires a cluster
letting them do the searches requires less hardware(and more traffic) using xml-rpc or similar rpc would be the best( for everyone)
buy oracle db and start working
you can use almost anything BUT keeping in mind the volume you should use a compile language like c++
gpsbabel.org has lots of stuff on converting between lots of GPS formats, and a downloadable tool. My limited experience, mostly with google maps, streetview etc. is that geocoding is not very accurate.
cM
The free IBM DB2 Express-C DBMS comes with Spatial Extender that can be used to GEOcode US addresses. See a webinar on this. Don't know if this is exact fit but it can't hurt to take a look.
Also take a quick look the DB2 documentation http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/db2luw/v9r7/topic/com.ibm.db2.luw.spatial.topics.doc/doc/csbp3008.html

How to call an exchange 2010 web service to make appointments?

I would like to call an Exchange 2010 web service from a remote client such as an iPhone to book a meeting room / to know if a meeting room is available etc.
Does anyone has an example available please?
Thanks a lot,
I don't know of any easy to follow sample so this is just some information that might help you get started anyway.
This page has a sample for creating an appointment in C#. So I'd say that's part of the answer, the other part is to find out how to use SOAP from your language of choice. This SO question discusses just this.

What are some examples of how your company uses a wiki for development?

Do you use a wiki in your company? Who uses it and what for. Do you share information between projects / teams / departments or not?
We use ours to store
Coding Style docs
Setup and Deployment procedures for web servers and sites
Network diagrams (what are all the servers in Dev, Staging, QA and Production called etc.)
Project docs (pdfs, visios, excel, docs, etc.) are stored in SVN. For the non-techies we have links to those docs in the wiki that point to an up-to-date share on my box. (tip: some wikis provide source control integration but ours doesn't)
Installation and Setup procedures for development tools
Howto's on things like using our bug tracking system, our unit testing philosophy
When doing research on a topic I often capture the important information in a wiki page for others to learn from
I've seen them used to keep seating charts in medium to large size organizations for the new people
At my previous company all of the emergency contacts and procedures for handling a critical outage where available on the front page of the wiki
The best part about a wiki is that it's searchable. Some wiki's support searching inside uploaded or linked docs as well.
If you setup a wiki and encourage or even require people to use it the amount of information that will accumulate can be amazing. It's definately worth the effort especially if you have someone in IT with some spare time on their hands to set it up.
Do you use a wiki in your company?
= We use it for the purpose of a Knowlede Based. Basically it is a wiki but many more functionalities intagrated.
Who uses it and what for
= Employees. Knowledge Sharing, Preparation of collaborative-documents, etc.
Do you share information between projects / teams / departments or not?
= Depends on the requirements. It is possible to set permissions between users.
We use a wiki, for documenting our systems. It's updated gradually as things update and evolve. It should go without saying that there's benefit in that, however whether you use a wiki or other methods is worth thinking about.
A wiki is great for collarborative editing. The information shouldn't go stale in theory, because as people use the systems they have the opportunity to keep it up to date.
However we have found in our organisation that people struggle a little with wiki markup. Especially tables. I think a solution that has wysiwyg editing would be better if you have non-highly-technical people editing it. Sharepoint springs to mind, but it's expensive.
I use a wiki as my virtual "story wall" for agile development. All of my stories are written and organized in the wiki. While my customers are reasonably local (we can have face-to-face meetings), they aren't co-located. To enable better customer interaction I've resorted to a wiki instead of a wall-based story tracking mechanism. It also works a little better for me due to the fact that I often have multiple, concurrent projects and limited wall space in my cube. In a larger team with more focused projects and more wall area, I'm not sure I'd make the same choice.
My company uses a wiki for project-planing but also for storing documentation and ideas.
I have found that a wiki is a great way to link the programmers in the company with the business-people.
When someone who are not on the programming-team comes up with an idea or finds a bug, it's a loot simpler to let that person document it in the wiki.
I think it's an important aspect for a small company like mine to easily synchronize the business-team with the development-team. A wiki helps with that, since it gives the feeling of being a part of the development process, instead of having to ask the programmer directly about every little detail.
we have MediaWiki to store technical information that is not ready to be published in other formats - specification drafts, diagrams (via GraphViz extension), results of short investigations, etc.
I also think this question is a wiki too :)

Connecting to IMDB

Has any one done this before? It would seem to me that there should be a webservice but i can't find one. I am writing an application for personal use that would just show basic info from IMDB.
The libraries for IMDb seem quite unreliable at present and highly inefficient. I really wish IMDb would just create a webservice.
After a bit of searching I found a reasonable alternative to IMDb. It provides all the basic information such as overview, year, ratings, posters, trailers etc.:
The Movie Database (TMDb).
It provides a webservice with wrappers for several languages and seems reliable so far. The search results have been, for myself, more accurate as well.
There is no webservice available.
But there are enough html scrapers written in every language to suit your needs!
I've used the .NET 3.5 Imdb Services opensource project in a few personal projects.
1 minute google results:
Perl: IMDB-Film
Ruby: libimdb-ruby
Python: IMDbPY
The only "API" the IMDb publishes is a set of plain-text data files containing formatted lists of actors, directors, movies, etc. You would likely need to write your own parser unless somebody has released one for your language. Try Google searches like "imdb api" and "imdb parser".
A screen scraper might be useful, but they specifically prohibit scrapers in their terms of use.
Though this was posted over two years ago, here is a simple python code
import urllib2
movie_id = raw_input('Enter the ID of the movie: ')
json = urllib2.urlopen('http://imdbapi.com/?i=' + movie_id + '&r=json')
print json.read()
save as imdb.py and then run as in shell or terminal or whatever
if you want xml data just replace json with xml
please note that this is using the imdbapi.com website to return a json result visit that website to view more options.
Here is my own solution using RegEx:
private const string UglyMovieRegex = "(?<=5>|3>)(Cast|Director:|Fun\\sStuff|Genre:|Plot:|Runtime:|Tagline:|Writers:)"
+ "|href=\"[\\w\\d/]+?(Genres|name|character)/([\\w]+?)/\".*?>([.\\-\\s\\w]+)</a>"
+ "|(?<=h\\d>)([.\\w\\s'\\-\"]+)(?=<a\\sc|</d|\\|)";
Regex MovieData = new Regex (UglyMovieRegex, RegexOptions.Compiled | RegexOptions.Multiline | RegexOptions.Singleline );
IMDB prohibits scrapers, and change the page layout every once in a while, so parsing HTML is an option, but be prepared to adjust your code 2-3 times a year (been there, done that, given up). They do have a fee-based service giving the full access to the data, but you'll also need to explain what is it for, and convince them you are not building a competitive website (I had a link to that, but it seems to have changed and can't find it now).
Another alternative is to run the IMDB database on your local machine. Java Movie Database imports the IMDB database files, converts them and provides a locally-accessible copy of IMDB. IMDB has some functionality which Java Movie Database does not have and visa-versa but if what you're looking for is quick access to all the data it might be worth giving this a try.
Now there's is an (undocumented) API like http://www.imdb.com/xml/find?json=1&q=Harry+Potter. See Does IMDB provide an API?
TRYNT Heavy Technologies provides (for free) a web service for retrieving basic IMDb data -- check out their site at http://www.trynt.com/trynt-movie-imdb-api/. They also have a separate service for Television data.
There is at least one unofficial IMDb API called IMDb8. It has about 31 endpoints including
actors/list-born-today
actors/get-awards-summary
title/get-plots
title/get-top-crew
etc. Like any other API it is very straightforward to use. I used this API for building a fun trivia project. You can find a tutorial on how to get started here.