BeeBCamp

BeeBCamp sessions (morning)

Morning Sessions - I picked the tricky ‘just before lunch’ slot.
. photo: Roo Reynolds

I was at BeeBCamp (an internal unconference) earlier this week. I took part in discussions on ’should we have a beta.bbc.co.uk’, learned about BBC Worldwide’s experience with syndication widgets and APIs, and heard the secrets of the BBC Internet Blog’s success from Jem Stone (more sessions and write-ups from : Roo, Phillip, Dan, Tom, Rain and Jason).

I brought a slightly-too-technical slant to the proceedings with my big list of tools and technologies the Media Playout group can’t live without :

  1. Firebug is an indispensable debugging plugin for Firefox. We use it to check REST service calls, that far-future expires headers are being set and for stepping through JavaScript interactions - for example the call which updates your iPlayer last played list.
  2. Greasemonkey (another plugin for Firefox) lets you use simple scripts to alter HTML pages. We use this to swap out the current embedded media player with a pre-release candidate across a selection of 100’s of live sites to check that a new release will work as expected.
  3. Eggplant does for Flash what Selenium can do for HTML - an automated functional tester obediently clicking through some of the hundreds of thousands of possible permutations of the player overnight, using VNC to remotely connect to different operating systems, and using image and character matching to alert the team to anything that has gone astray.
  4. RelaxNG is an elegant schema language for describing XML - especially useful for sharing the media playlist format. The compact syntax also lends itself to illustrating specifications (as seen in the Atom Feed specification)
  5. ffmpeg is the Swiss Army knife of video transcoding. We used this to try out a variety of bitrates and dimensions to optimise iPlayer for Wii.
  6. Charles Proxy often picks up traffic which is missed by Firebug. It also allows throttling to test low bandwidth situations.
  7. FLV MetaData Viewer (also FLMDI, VLC and FLVPlayer) - Occasionally we find content that hasn’t been encoded correctly - all these tools help view or fix metadata in Flash video.
  8. PHP - coming to the BBC’s live sites soon as part of a tech refresh - the development group all use local Apache instances running a variety of tools and test harnesses
  9. Prince XML - turns ordinary XHTML and CSS into beautiful PDF documents and includes advanced typesetting options previously available only in tools like LaTeX.
  10. SWF Intruder - We’re always on the look out for security vulnerabilities - this tool tries tests for a number of known cross-site issues. (See also Simon Willison great presentation to the <HEAD> conference last week : Web security horror stories)

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Published:
10.31.08 / 12am
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