Archive for February 2012

Easy “copy and paste” from the Web to LaTeX with SPARQL

February 20, 2012 Tech No comments

One thing I like about the Web is that content can be distributed, but still easily referenced and integrated using URIs. One this I don’t like about moving content from the Web to the desktop is copy and paste (actually, I also hate this when moving / syncing from one service to another).

Let’s take the example of my resume. I generally update my LinkedIn profile, but almost never the “desktop version” (LaTeX or doc) of my CV. So, when the time comes to forward an up-to-date resume in PDF, I used to copy and paste content from my LinkedIn. But wait, I also need to add my publications (even though bibtex makes the integration easy), the list of my research activities and talks, etc.

So, I’ve build sparqlTeX - a LaTeX class / python script to easily embed SPARQL results into TeX files. Using it, one can directly integrate data from SPARQL endpoints, from RDFa-enabled content (such as the previous talk pages), but also from any microformatted page (any Linkedin profile as they’re using hResume) into a LaTeX document. For the last one, I’m using any23 to convert such data into RDF (actually, any23 is used for any file-based query as it extracts RDF from HTML pages even if they’re not W3C-valid)

The scripts are available on github/sparqltex. They require roquet, and the SPARQLWrapper lib if you want to query remote endpoints. That’s a simple on-demand hack, so corner cases and complex structures are probably not managed directly, but feel free to clone the code, update (and push it back), this is public domain.

Here’s the kind of output that it generates, as you can see it’s synced with my LinkedIn profile or talk pages. And you can obviously also use hyperlinks in the templates, bringing the Web back to your resume !

Work section of my resume from LinkedIn to LaTeX through RDF+SPARQL

Talks section of my resume from RDFa-enabled content to LaTeX with SPARQL

SeatTrip – concert listing for your next trip (or “seatwave meets tripit”)

February 13, 2012 Tech 2 comments

Another week-end, another MusicHackDay. This time, I’ve tried to new APIs:

  • seatwave – that just launched few days and that gives access to a wide range of events, including (obviously) concerts. Search by location, time-frame, venue (including coordinates!), and redirect to seatwave website to get event tickets. Interestingly, they do rev-share if some tickets are bought in one’s app using their API.
  • SendGrid – cloud-based e-mail services. Sending mails, but also – the most interesting part – receiving ones and parsing them. Simply configure a MX, a callback URL, and parse any incoming e-mail, including header, content and attachements – all in a REST-ful way

So, with those 2 APIs in mind, I’ve build SeatTrip – it’s like seatwave meets tripit. Send your plane ticket by e-mail, and get a listing of events that will happen in the area a few minutes later.

Sending a AerLingus ticket about a trip to London, I got the following e-mail in my inbox a few minutes later. First, a featured artist. I’m using our own seevl data to identify the featured artist using its meta-data, and display her/his biography.

Featured artist for your next trip!

Then, the listing of all concerts for the city at that time.

All concerts happening during your trip

For each event, it provide additional information from the seatwave API. First, it features a Google Map link to the venue (useful to buy your hotel nearby!).

Use GoogleMap to display the venue map

Also, it links to the seatwave website so that you can directly book your concert – and lists the number of remaining tickets if the show is almost sold-out!

Buy tickets from the seatwave website

Here’s now the fun part, about how this hack works:

  • First, once the e-mail is sent to an address mapped to SendGrip API – a PHP script extracts the location and the timeframe of the trip from the e-mail. The extraction if airline-specific, and so far the hack works only on AerLingus ticket (however, an abstraction layer allows to easily create new wrappers – a similar strategy as used in TripIt).
  • Then, the seatwave API is used to get the list of all events in the area for that period, including all events details.
  • Once we have the events, seevl is used to identify the featured artist from the list of available concerts.
  • Finally, the e-mail id rendered in HTML, and send via SendGrid.

It takes around 2 minutes to do the whole processing, check this short video to see it in action. Note that I changed the trip date as that was an old trip ticket for which seatwave didn’t get any data, and that the video has been cut to avoid the delay of receiving the e-mail with the listing.

Also, don’t forget to check this impressive list of 62 hacks - especially Buddhafy (mind-control for Spotify !) and Concerts2021 – the future of live gigs (or not, thanksfully ;-) !

Mixture – real-word music-discovery

February 8, 2012 Tech No comments

MIDEM HackDay was – as expected – a wonderful event, where 18 hacks have been built over the week-end (screenshots on this MIDEM blog post).

In particular, I’d give my thumbs-up for Tourrent - helping bands to set-up their next tours based on Torrent downloads of their tracks, FlatDrop - Micropayments for Soundcloud tracks, and Badgify - audioscrobbler meets Arduino.

Together with Ian from rd.io and Guillaume from Webdoc, we’ve worked on a new music discovery approach, leveraging real-world data. Various 4-square hacks enabling geolocation-based discovery have been build on previous MHD, so we’ve decided to take another route: take a picture of anything, and play the songs that reference this thing. Whether it’s a bottle, some brown sugar, or a house.

So here’s Mixture, a simple hack / proof-of-concept of the approach, combining APIs from IQ Engines (image recognition – give it a try if you’re looking for something similar, even though queries can be a bit slow), musiXmatch (lyrics identification), rd.io (music streaming) and seevl (artist data). It may still be buggy (we’ll work on it) and some APIs have a daily-rate limit that could block the application, but you should be able to get the overall idea!