Well, that was the most bizarre day. A few days ago, Amanda Brock - the CEO of OpenUK - asked if I'd be on a podcast. I agreed, and offered up my office's media studio for the recording. Then she asked if it was OK if Bruce Perens came to record an episode.

Errr... OMG, yes!

So I got to spend 10 minutes showing Bruce around the GDS office, gushing about how much open source stuff we did - then got to watch him record a podcast.

Amanda - who has has a canny eye for when people are slightly star-struck - asked if I'd like to interview Bruce at the weekend. At the National Museum of Computing. For a new exhibition.

Errr... OMG, yes!

So me and Lowena Hull got to spend some time chatting to Bruce on camera about his involvement in open source, the early days of Debian, and why OSS is still relevant today.

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

Doing some filming with @BrucePerens & @LowenaHull for @openuk_uk. Thanks to @tnmoc for the great location! pic.x.com/nK4ihOhH0T

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We had a good rambling chat - the majority of which never made it off the cutting room flaw. He was such an eloquent speaker - always taking a moment to marshal his thoughts and knowing exactly when to finish his soliloquy.

It was a fairly long and tiring afternoon. But we had just enough time to take a wander through TNMOC. Bruce - like lots of elder-statesgeeks - seemed to be in 7th heaven. I got a running commentary of "Wow! You know, I had an early one of these..." and "I think I've still got the original one in my attic..." and "When I worked at Pixar, I was chatting to Steve [Jobs] about this and we both thought it was pretty nifty..." along with the obligatory "Why is a slide-rule in a museum?"

I watched him go toe-to-toe with the geeks who maintain Colossus - discussing the intricacies of synchronising tape speeds, various Baudot codes, and where valves / tubes could still be acquired from.

I saw him in a spirited discussion about various flavours of ALGOL and the mechanics of repairing a filesystem on hard-drives the same height as a man.

We had an interesting chat about IBM and their complicity in the Nazi regime's use of Hollerith cards. And I got to give him a précis of the BBC Micro's impact on the UK.

He asked me to take a few photos of him standing by ancient monuments of technology

Bruce Perens K6BP - I Stand with Ukraine

@BrucePerens

1/2 Somehow I walked all of the way through @bletchleypark today without noticing any mention that the machines they talk about are actually operating next door at @tnmoc, due to the effort of incredibly skilled volunteers. And there is no flow between the two museums. Please ... pic.x.com/w11orsCof9

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And, at the end of the day, he shook my hand and thanked me for showing him such a great time.

What a delightful person.

Thanks to The 405 for picking me as one of their favourites.

You can check out the other entrants on Facebook - don't worry, you don't have to vote for me!

You can also find GeekOfTheYearUK on Twitter.

Copyright Matt Jones used under a Creative Commons non-commercial, attribution, share-alike licence.

I attended last year's event which inspired me to create my "VoteUK" service for the 2010 general election. I had considered doing a talk about the trials and tribulations of using open - and not so open - data. Instead, I gave a more general talk about how to harness the power of the mobile web to empower people - and why iPhone apps are the wrong way to get data to the masses.

More details in a moment. First off, my thoughts on the rest of the presentations.

Mozilla Drumbeat

The new projects coming out of Mozilla Drumbeat look great - I'm particularly enamoured with Universal Subtitles. For too long, web video has been inaccessible to those with hearing difficulties - or who do not understand the language spoken.

Visionon.tv

A rather ramshackle presentation from VisionOn.tv. I fail to see what they're doing different than Miro in terms of getting activist video out to the masses. Their ideas of training Citizen Journalists seems to be a good one - but they failed to articulate what exactly their credentials were.

Openly Local

Chris Taggart gave an inspiring talk about Openly Local. His efforts in scraping inaccessible data and setting them free are truly heroic. The work he did to open up to obstinate Charities Commission should be the stuff of geek legend.

LinkedGov: Filling in the Gaps

Hadley Beeman took us through the intricacies of tying up hundreds of disparate data sets. Not a naturally exciting topic, but one which went to the very heart of the issue of open data. Thousands of separate databases, all containing indecipherable acronyms, frustrate even the hardiest geek.

Open Data in Clinical Trials

Ben Goldacre retains his title as most impassioned speaker. Working with Louise Crow, they are in the process of opening up clinical trial data. With this, they hope to be able to see which drug companies are withholding trial information from the public.

Rewiring the State

The speakers from Young Rewired State were the stars of the day. Seeing the dedication and enthusiasm of people - not yet school-leavers - as they hack away at open data was hugely uplifting. A full list of the projects is available.

The most impressive was Issy Long's site to display Government energy usage "GovSpark". I'm sure this young woman will go far.

Data.gov.uk

The data.gov.uk folks were out in strength. They announced data.gov.uk at OpenTech 2009. This presentation was a summary of where they have got to and where is left to go.

I demo'd VoteUK to Thayer Prime and won a swish t-shirt! Hurrah!

Wild Ducks - An Open Source Symbian Phone

Sebastian Brannstrom from Symbian took to the stage to talk about marrying Open Hardware with the newly opened Symbian Source Code. The (unfinished) result is Wild Ducks - a completely* open phone. Open hardware and open software.

If you are interested in helping, the group meets every Sunday to eat pizza and hack.

*The radio driver, has to be closed source for various legal and regulatory reasons.

Why Doesn't Your Site Work On My Mobile Phone

My presentation. Slides and further discussion are available. Unfair of me to comment - so I'll let twitter do the twalking.

Graham Bleach

@gdb_

Great talk from @edent at #opentech about not neglecting older phones when developing for mobile web.

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Dan Benton

@dogsbodyorg

If to are developing for mobile then I encourage you to look up @edent . Some great real stats and real world advice #opentech

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People Power in Your Pocket

Craig Heath lead an informative session around security and personal privacy. I'd advise anyone interested in mobile to take a look at Symbian's Security Roadmap and Strategy. This talk would have been more suited to the Over The Air conference - but for mobile wonks like me, was very interesting.

FrontlineSMS

This is exactly the sort of empowering technology I love hearing about. The FrontlineSMS project aims to be "Outlook for SMS". Using a cheap laptop, a GSM dongle and free software - anyone can become a campaigner. It's used for coordinating disaster relief, informing farmers about diseases in their area, telling trader the best prices. Its software has been expanded to work for medical, legal, business and political campaigns. Open Source - so hack away!

Apps for Good

I really admire the theory behind Apps for Good - teach disenfranchised young people how to make apps. However, I think their approach is 100% wrong. They'd clearly done no market research - they were trying to create Android apps when their target demographic are BlackBerry users (as they admitted). Some of the projects they showed off would have been much more successful and useful as mobile websites. For example, the Stop and Search app is only available on expensive Android handsets. I'm not saying they shouldn't have created the app - just that they should have created it as an enhancement for a mobile website.

That said, I'm filled with hope when I see what they are doing. Getting young people into programming, designing, creating is vital to raising their awareness of the opportunities out there.

Overall

A fantastic day - huge thanks to Sam Smith and all the organisers. It's really inspired me to get cracking on some of the open data ideas I've had bubbling away. Every Council Chief, Mayor and Senior Civil Servant should attend OpenTech 2011 and understand why we need Open Data and what magical things we will create using it.

Huge thanks to the Government for sponsoring the event and finally creating an open data platform. Data.gov.uk shows how to do a successful IT project which comes in quickly and cheaply. And is genuinely useful. Kudos.

It's a Panopticon '93 Officially licensed TARDIS - similar to this one on RetroTrader.

Click to embiggen images.

It's a little scuffed, but nothing a lick of paint can't fix. Of slight - very slight - annoyance is that it's a fraction too shallow to hold standard DVD cases and have the doors tightly shut.  So I've decided to keep them open to show off my collection.

By my reckoning, each shelf can hold about 34 DVDs - so 136 in total.  With around 11 completely missing serials, from a total of 157, it looks like I might have to find a way to make this one ever-so slightly bigger on the inside...

Thanks to my ever loving - and ever patient - wife, Liz, for putting up with me.  She's a far better companion than any the Doctor ever had :-)

Head mounted 3-megapixel video camera.  Seamlessly embedded within a pair of innocuous looking sun glasses.  At £250, they're not cheap.  While battery life looks good at 2.5 hours, they can only record one hour of video.

No method of playback means no deletion, so you're stuck until you can find a laptop.  No expandable memory.  Would it have been so hard to take microSD cards?

Regardless of any shortcomings, take a look at the video quality it provides.  Sound quality is mono - but good enough for capturing voices.

The only question I have is whether they use a standard USB socket, or whether they require some proprietary cable.

Compared to something like a FlipMino HD, the Immortal glasses are really pricey.  Mini HD cameras on Amazon are between £130 and £150. So you're paying a £100 premium to have the electronics shrunk into your glasses.  And you only get standard definition.

But enough about the downside - let's think of the amazing uses these could be put to.

Possible Uses

Documentary / Social Commentary.  Wearing an pair of sunglasses is relatively normal.  It would help documentary subject forget about the camera in the room.  Also as a method of quasi-covert filming, capturing people's attitudes and behaviours when they think no one is looking.

Protesters. Watch the video of Sgt Smellie striking a protester, it looks to me like police brutality - yet he was acquitted. Imagine how much more potent the images would have been if we'd had the protester's eye view of being assaulted.

Augmented Reality.  As much as I love Layar, it's a pain having to hold a phone up to the world.  Combined with Vuzix - video-screen glasses - you could have perfect augmented reality superimposed on what you were looking at. Of course, video glasses are pretty pricey but it's a combo we'll see before long.

Movie Piracy!  Although even the best anti-judder technology isn't going to mask someone chuckling.

What Next

I'd love to get my hands on this technology, but at this price-point it falls a little short.  I would expect either higher quality footage or a longer recording time.  No doubt the next version will have a basic HUD as well.

You can buy the Immortal Video Camera Glasses for £250.

Slight spoilers here, so wait until you've seen the show.

Towards the end, the Doctor is having a stand off with the Atari.  He's discussing the planet Earth and asks...

Is this world protected?

The Atari play a montage of various baddies the Doctor has seen off including the Silurians / Sea Devils!) - but take a look at these three images.

Ood

Everyone loves the Ood, right? But I don't remember them attacking Earth?  I suppose you could make the case that the Doctor saved the Earth when he stopped all the Ood going mad but a) we never saw what was happening on Earth and b) that was relative future to the episode and there's no indication the Atari can time travel.

Hath

The Hath are a different kettle of fish.  There is no indication that they were ever even on Earth, let alone a threat to it.  So what are they doing in the montage?

Library

Finally, I'm pretty sure that's the Vashta_Nerada - they exist on all worlds, sure, but they were only ever defeated in The Library.

That is literally the only thing I could find to complain about in the episode.  I thought the new titles were fab, loved the new assistant and think that Matt Smith - a fellow UEA alumnus - is outstanding.

Here's to the fifth 33rd season of Doctor Who!

#hashtag – As long has there has been a way to search Tweets* people have been adding information to make the easy to find. The #hashtag syntax has become the standard for attaching a succinct tag to Tweets.

<

p>The Twitter Engineering Blog

That's all well and good, but as I discovered yesterday, without standardisation the ability to search falls apart.

I'm not talking about whether you should use the #LondonFire tag rather than #FireOfLondon or #LDNfire. Rather; how does a computer recognise what a valid tag is?

Why Does This Matter?

Search and tracking quickly break down if they are inconsistent. For example, if you are using #Romeo&Juliet to mark all your conversations about the play you are watching, different Twitter clients will link through to either #Romeo, #Romeo&, or #Romeo&Juliet.  Each search returning potentially different conversations.

What's The Convention?

Twitter's website ought to be the definitive source of how hashtags work. This is their main site.

Yet, when we visit their mobile site - we get a completely different experience.

Application Confusion

Because there aren't any widely publicised definitions for what hashtags are, some applications have a significantly different attitude to hashtags

SocialScope Hashtags

UberTwitter's Hashtag Support

Standardisation

To be fair, the Twitter team do have a standard.  Even if they don't use it themselves.

They even have some limited test cases and libraries in Ruby and Java.

So, given that Twitter, their implementation and apps all disagree on what a hashtag is, let's try to work our what they should be.

Anatomy of a Tag

To begin at the beginning.  A hashtag starts with a hash. #.  Simple, no? No.

There are two different hash symbols! There's the # we all know and love, and there's ＃.  Looks pretty similar, but in fact it's the unicode symbol [U+FF03]

Actually, that's not the beginning.  What comes before the # of the hashtag?

Consider the following examples - which should be hashtags?

• #tag - the # starts off the Tweet
• This is my tweet #test - the # comes after a space.
• This is it.#tag - the # is pushed against some punctuation, perhaps for reasons of space.
• Here we go-#LiftOff - the # is pushed against a -
• I've run out of space#OhNo - the # is pushed against some text
• &#nbsp; - the # is part of an HTML entity
• text　#hashtag - the # comes after a "wide space" (U+3000)
• Should I use #tag/#hashtag? The # comes after a /
• Is this valid ##tag - there are two #s

So, we can see it's a little more complicated than we first thought.

The End

Let's skip over what's in a hashtag and as "how do we know that a tag has finished?"

Consider the following examples -

• New album #OMG! - should the ! be part of the hashtag?
• #BreakingNews: dog bites man - should the : be part of the hashtag?
• (is this a #tag) - should the ) be part of the hashtag?
• I like #tags#

We probably don't want to have any punctuation at the end of our tag.  Can you think of any counter examples?

Yummy Filling

Our language is more than just the letters A-Z. We've got punctuation, numbers, symbols and all manner of other glyphs.  Which of them count as part of a hashtag?

Take a look at these examples

• Vote Bush! #Don't
• My dog died #:-(
• Einstein #e=mc^2
• I'm on bus #123
• I'm giving #110%

Using Twitter's standards, none of the above render as complete tags.

Foreign Languages

We've mentioned accents above.  As we can see in the first example, "funny" characters can cause problems.  Broadly speaking, there are three issues.

1. Accents.  Should the é on #Café be linked?
2. Accents.  Is #Romeo the same as #Ŕöméø?
3. Japanese, and some other languages, don't use spaces.  Is #tagの valid? What about # 会議中 ?

Exhausted

These are a fraction of the possible problems.  It's exhausting trying to find all the possible textual combinations and permutations which could lead into a hashtag.  No wonder there is confusion!

Search is a complex, profitable, and useful business.  It's of vital importance that there is a legitimate, comprehensive standard which all sites and applications can follow.