Archive for the ‘xbox’ tag
UPnP Wizardry
You may notice an Xbox360 related theme in my current posts, as after getting one, most of my technology thought process is involved in something to do with it. Hence the Xbox Live Gamercard API I wrote about before. Now we get on to UPnP.
Universal Plug and Play is used for 2 mains things as far as I can tell.
- Dynamically opening holes in firewalls/NAT configurations for inbound connections to services. (bad!
- Media Discover/playback/control on a local network. (good!)
The first is bad in my opinion. I don’t want the ability for some software behind my firewall to allow connections into my network. It might make some software function a little more smoothly, but if it’s that important that connections can be made inbound I would have set up a port-forward myself.
So I am only concerned with the second scenario.
Xbox Live Gamercard API
So, got decided to join most of my friends and I got an Xbox 360. Me being me though, I got interested in the way that all the information about your “Gamertag” is stored an accessible on the xbox.com website. Wouldn’t it be fun to do something with this data!
As it turns out, I was beaten to the post by Duncan MacKensie (http://duncanmackenzie.net/Blog/put-up-a-rest-api-for-xbox-gamertag-data) who hosts a webservice to retrieve gamer data from Microsoft. I could find no details about how this service works, where the data comes from or anything! Either he has a relationship with Microsoft, or he scrapes xbox.com but either way, the data seems pretty consistent and reliable. Actually it turns out this information was right there on his website… http://www.duncanmackenzie.net/Blog/if-you-are-wondering-where-i-get-my-xbox-live-info So he gets it as part of his membership to the Xbox Community Developer Program.
However, the webservice is great, and returns XML which is fine, but I thought it would be more useful to me to have a PHP API for this data. So I wrote one which retrieves data from Duncans webservice.