Phil Leggetter's posterous

FilmFlex hiring .NET developer (Playready, Silverlight & probably Azure)

I know a few guys at FilmFlex so they've asked me to put some feelers out for a job. Here are what I think are the core details followed by the standard blurb. If you are interested just drop an email to phil@leggetter.co.uk.

Key details

  • Based in London
  • .NET
  • Silverlight & Playready
  • BizTalk
  • SQL Server
  • Future: Azure, HTML5, Windows 8 and Windows Mobile

The Blurb

FilmFlex is one of the most successful movies-on-demand service providers in Europe.

FilmFlex is a joint venture between Sony Pictures Television and The Walt Disney Company. Launched in 2005 on UK cable, FilmFlex has managed over 70,000,000 buys to date and processed over 5,000 films through its services. The company has active movie content supply deals with over 30 distributors, including all of the Hollywood Majors and UKs leading Independent distributors. FilmFlex currently operates services in the UK territory for major retail and media brands, and is negotiating with several other potential partners for expansion onto a variety of devices and territories in 2012.

In the last two years, the company has developed an online platform with leading technology partner Ioko (now Kit Digital), and in the last 12 months partnered with Virgin Media (UK online portal),  Film4 (C4 FTV broadcasters) and HMV (major high street retailer) this month. For these ‘white-label’ services, FilmFlex manages a turn-key online solution covering the website and platform operation, all content management, billing and customer service. FilmFlex’s ‘white label’ services currently have more new release movies to rent than iTunes, Lovefilm or Blinkbox, and are already looking at adding other content types (TV series, Music, Games, E-books, etc) to their content offer.

The platform has exclusively been written using Microsoft technologies. It is a properly tiered .net application employing the services of Biztalk, SQL Server,  Silverlight and Playready. At present the application is hosted on a private cloud which affords some elasticity in terms of performance, geography and storage, but for some opportunities not enough. FilmFlex has developed a healthy working relationship with Microsoft over the last 18 months, participating in a number of new development showpieces (HTML 5.0 and recently Windows 8.0, Windows Mobile Apps)

With this mind we have been exploring the possibilities of porting the application onto the public cloud. Given our application is predominantly constructed of Microsoft products it seemed natural to explore the cloud services offered by Microsoft. In essence we are looking for a developer to join our team who has wide experience of Microsoft technology described above to assist in these projects .

 

Questions about the GiveCampUK apps

Here couple of questions I'm interested in knowing the answers to: 

1. Do Microsoft offer discounted licences for Charities?

A lot of use are, for obvious reasons, using Microsoft technologies to build our GiveCampUK solution. What will the licensing costs be per year for the charity to host and run their solution?

Where can we find out more information on this? I think it would be good for the charity representatives to know this now.

2. How easy will it be for the charity to maintain the solution that's being built?

If we don't manage to build a 100% solution over the weekend how easy will it be for the charity to get the required technical resource to complete the project? How easy will it be for them to maintain and upgrade the solution that's being built?

These things will depend on the chosen technology, the going rate to hire a contractor in the area the charity is based and whether or not some of the members of the GiveCampUK team will continue to work on the project after the weekend. How will your charity maintain their solution?

Walking around Dollar Glen

Yesterday I went for a long walk with the missus, Max and Dexter. It absolutely fantastic that we now live in an area where there are so many interesting walks just outside our front door. It makes the move all worth while.

Note: Apparantly the walk we went on yesterday was a bit dangerous. We didn't know that until we reached the our destination and saw the warning notices.

Anyway, here are some photos and a video from the walk.

(download)
(download)

Fixer-Upper Gypsy Caravan available for free

Just been on a walk and came across an old and knackered gypsy caravan. Then we bumped into the guy that owned it. He purchased it as a fixer-upper but has never got around to it. It's very knackered now but he said it was free to anybody who would collect it and take it away.

It's definitely seen better days but *might* interest somebody. If nothing else it was interesting to look at. I didn't go in as the floor didn't look safer. I just peered in.

(download)

[Poll] Home Report Question

I'd really appreciate it if you could spare 20 seconds to read the statement below and answer the Yes/No question beneath it. 

Given the following statement:

The Indicative River & Coastal Flood Map (Scotland) has been reviewed and Property X is just shown to be within the 0.5% annual probability or 1 in 200 year flood extent and as such is at medium to high risk of fluvial flooding.

What would be your answer to the following question about Property X?

The Results:

Screen_shot_2011-09-01_at_10

4 Foo Fighters Tickets For Sale, Milton Keynes Bowl, Sat 2nd July

A friend of mine has 4 Foo Fighter tickets for the gig at Milton Keynes Bowl on Saturday 2nd July. Unfortunately he's struggling to make it so wants to sell them.

Supporting act is Biffy Clyro.

Cost price was £210 for all 4. Happy to sell individually for £52.50 or as a group for £210. Will send via recorded delivery at cost price also which will probably be £2 or so.

Please get in touch with Grant if you are interested.

Improving customer communications

I've just been sent this by a previous work colleague. This response is good and I'm sure the letter to which this is a reply is also laugh out loud. Apparently this was reprinted in the Guardian newspaper. I don't have a copy to check though.

 

Dear Mr Addison,

I am writing to you to express our thanks for your more than prompt reply to our latest communication, and also to answer some of the points you raise.   I will address them, as ever, in order.

Firstly, I must take issue with your description of our last as a "begging letter".   It might perhaps more properly be referred to as a "tax demand".   This is how we at the Inland Revenue have always, for reasons of accuracy,  traditionally referred to such documents.

Secondly, your frustration at our adding to the "endless stream of crapulent whining and panhandling vomited daily through the letterbox on to the doormat" has been noted.   However, whilst I have naturally not seen the other letters to which you refer I would cautiously suggest that their being from "pauper councils, Lombardy pirate banking houses and pissant gas-mongerers" might indicate that your decision to "file them next to the toilet in case of emergencies"  is at best a little ill-advised.    In common with my own organisation, it is unlikely that the senders of these letters do see you as a "lackwit bumpkin" or, come to that, a "sodding charity".    More likely they see you as a citizen of Great Britain, with a responsibility to contribute to the upkeep of the nation as a whole.

Which brings me to my next point.   Whilst there may be some spirit of truth in your assertion that the taxes you pay  "go to shore up the canker-blighted, toppling folly that is the Public Services", a moment's rudimentary calculation ought to disabuse you of the notion that the government in any way expects you to "stump up for the whole damned party" yourself.    The estimates you provide for the Chancellor's disbursement of the funds levied by taxation, whilst colourful, are, in fairness, a little off the mark.    Less than you seem to imagine is spent on "junkets for Bunterish lickspittles" and "dancing whores" whilst far more than you have accounted for is allocated to, for example, "that box-ticking facade of a university system."

A couple of technical points arising from direct queries:

1. The reason we don't simply write "Muggins" on the envelope has to do with the vagaries of the postal system;

2. You can rest assured that "sucking the very marrow of those with nothing else to give" has never been considered as a practice because even if the Personal Allowance didn't render it irrelevant, the sheer medical logistics involved would make it financially unviable.

I trust this has helped.   In the meantime, whilst I would not in any way wish to influence your decision one way or the other, I ought to point out that even if you did choose to "give the whole foul jamboree up and go and live in India" you would still owe us the money.

Please send it to us by Friday.

Yours sincerely,

H J Lee
Customer Relations
Inland Revenue

 

Phil Leggetter

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Silverlight, WebSockets, clientaccesspolicy.xml, port restrictions and error messages

I've been playing around with the Microsoft prototype implementation of WebSockets in Silverlight. It's been fun I can tell you ;) At one point I got the error:

An attempt was made to access a socket in a way forbidden by its access permissions.

And had no idea what it mean. I thought I had a clientaccesspolicy.xml in place on the destination server that allowed access from any client:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> 
<access-policy> 
  <cross-domain-access> 
    <policy> 
      <allow-from http-request-headers="*"> 
        <domain uri="*"/> 
      </allow-from> 
      <grant-to> 
        <resource path="/" include-subpaths="true"/> 
      </grant-to> 
    </policy> 
  </cross-domain-access> 
</access-policy> 

Apparently not.

If you want to use WebSockets you need to specifically grant access to a socket resource covering the allowed ports from within the Silverlight networking stack. The port range is 4502-4534.

<access-policy>
  <cross-domain-access>
    <policy>
      <allow-from http-request-headers="*">
        <domain uri="*" />
      </allow-from>
      <grant-to>
        <resource path="/" include-subpaths="true" />
        <socket-resource port="4502-4530" protocol="tcp" />
      </grant-to>
    </policy>
  </cross-domain-access>
</access-policy>

More information about this can be found here: