Blog

Pycon 2013 - This Old Video Site: How PBS streams video - and you can too!

Overview of how the Public Broadcasting Service streams video online. Learn how PBS uses python and other services to provide video streaming online. Talk will discuss lessons learned, explanation of video formats, and experiences with mobile device support. Talk will include recommendations for others to easily adopt similar practices to quickly host their own online video site.

pycaption: PBS's open-source caption converter

PBS's newest offering for the open-source community: a Python-based closed caption conversion module.

Localization Webinar-20120725

Using Python to access Amazon Simple Workflow (SWF)

I started experimenting using Python and boto to start communicating with Amazon Web Services' new Simple Workflow (SWF).  So I wanted to share some of the examples.

2012 AWS Summit

I had the unique opportunity to share the stage with Dr. Werner Vogels, CTO for Amazon, at yesterday's AWS Summit held in NYC.  There were more than 3000 registered attendees and many thousands more watching via AmazonLive streaming.

Pycon 2012 - PBS Kids GO! Login

Cosimo Felline from the PBS Kids GO! team presented at PyCon 2012.  His presentation was "PBS KIDS: Building a login system for kids and teens in Python."

Our challenge was to create a login system for little people who might barely read, maybe no email, perhaps no home computer. And we had to watch out for privacy laws - especially tough for minors. But these kids want to play games, write stories, and create online avatars to share and compete against their buddies. Listen to how we developed the PBS KIDS login and moderation system in Django

These are his slides from the talk.

PBSi App Days 2012: Enter the Dragon - and the winner is ....

The picture should give you a clue, but you are going to have to click to the blog post to find out as it would be a spoiler if I put it here. So go ahead, click the image and open the page....

Going Batty

On October 27, 2011 the PBS KIDS GO! team launched the gesture-based game GOING BATTY (http://pbskids.org/wildkratts/games/going-batty/) for the hit children's television series Wild Kratts. The web-based Flash game was created and developed under the PBS KIDS GO! grant and uses your computers camera as a controller for gameplay.  This style of motion-detection gaming and the technology to support it was already out in the market, but the PBS KIDS GO! team needed a more accurate way of detecting motion. In searching for this solution the team took development in-house and in turn ended up refining previously available ActionScript motion detecting classes.   

App Days 2012 proposals were awesome

SQL Injection Defense in Python

Architecture at PBS

Mobile Keynote at PBS Tech Con 2011

Jon Brendsel and Damiam Perry (mobile product manager at NPR) presented the latest news, stats, and plans for mobile in public media.

2011 PBS TechCon Slides

I had the pleasure of presenting the PBS Interactive APIs during a workshop at TechCon 2011. My goal was to give an overview of the capabilities, data format, and typical workflows for using them. Of course, I hope that more creative people than I will hop on the API train and build all new experiences. The presentation covers tvschedules v1 and COVE API v1

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) with Python

With all the AWS services that are now available, our opportunities in the cloud are virtually unlimited. But using any of these services requires access to your AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY and unfortunately, these keys provides complete access to the kingdom. This may not be a problem for some, but for large enterprises, granular access control is a necessity. Up until recently, we would have been out of luck. But fortunately Amazon released Identity and Access Management (IAM) which makes flexible access control possible. And boto makes it easy in Python.