hackday – Terence Eden’s Blog

Hackday - Group Solar Forecasts

@edent — Sat, 15 Oct 2022 11:34:27 +0000

Last week, I attended BrumPropHack - a hackathon in Birmingham which looked at problems with retrofitting homes to make them more energy efficient.

There were some great talks about the scale of the problem - both in terms of the number of properties which need improving and the cost of retrofitting. A bunch of teams showed off some impressive demos which aimed to tackle the issues.

My demo was reasonably simple and (I thought) quite effective. It displayed a satellite view of a street in the local area. By clicking on rooftops, virtual solar panels are added to properties. Click a button and it shows your community how much CO₂ they will save, and how much money they will make.

The demo worked (phew!) and received good feedback. For something built in a couple of hours, I'm pretty pleased with it. The way it works is...

Draw an interactive map using Leaflet.
Use ESRI's satellite images.
A bit of JavaScript to detect click and draw a cool solar panel icon.
The EU has a great and free API for calculating solar irradiance. So this sends a request for each panel giving its latitude and longitude.
- TODO! At the moment, it assumes all panels face south. A future version should let each icon be rotated to the correct degree.
- TODO! Each icon represents 4kWp of solar. A future version should let each panel size be defined individually.
Use CORS Anywhere because making JS requests is hard now.
Do maths to work out the total installed capacity.
Do maths to calculate the CO₂ value.
- TODO! This is calculated as 0.256 Kg/kWh. I found that figure on a website. Might not be accurate for the UK.
Do maths to calculate the cost savings.
- TODO! It assumes 50% export at £0.25/kWh and 50% reduction in use at £0.50/kWh. That should be adjustable.
Display a link encouraging people to sign up
- TODO! Make the link go somewhere.
- TODO! Display the cost to install - with suitable discounts for bulk buy.
- TODO! Draw some pretty graphs
Uses Picnic CSS to make it look pretty.

It is a rough and ready demo, but it does work!

The code is freely available on GitHub if you want to build something more useful with it.

NHS Hack Day

@edent — Tue, 18 Jun 2019 11:34:06 +0000

It has been about 6 months since I started my new job at NHSX - I've loved getting stuck in to the Health Service culture. But there was one thing I was missing... a decent hack day!

I was delighted to get a ticket to NHS Hack Day. This is a quick post about the event, and what I learned.

What's the point of a hackday?

There were three common reactions from people when I said a bunch of geeks were going to an NHS Hack.

Ah! But the real problem is [some incredibly complicated thing] - please can you fix that?
OMG! Don't build anything fun! Isn't the NHS too important for that?
WTF? Are you using private patient data in your hacking?!

To answer these points in order

No. A weekend hack is suitable for building a sketch of something which might be useful. We can't fix systemic issues overnight.
No. Hackdays are about fun. Sometimes building something silly is the best way to demonstrate a point. We can only explore through creative play.
No. No one had access to private data. There are some public APIs which give things like waiting times, and prescription levels, but nothing sensitive.

We need to get better at explaining what the aims of a hackday are.

What worked

This was such a well organised event! Even had plenty of vegan food! Strong WiFi, decent seating and desks, and plug sockets everywhere.

Some of the hacks demonstrated were incredible. Everything from computer vision to online forms.

But, the best thing? The wide range of people! Need an epidemiologist? She's right over there! Want an API developer? Here's a couple! A great mix of ages, genders, skills, and backgrounds. It felt really well curated.

What didn't

Not much to complain about, so here's some constructive criticism. All minor points.

Make the 2nd day shorter. The event wrapped up at about 17:30. That's a little late on a Sunday, especially when people have work or school the next day.
Food was great, but the only thing to drink was coffee or tea. Luckily there was a supermarket nearby for some fruit juice and fizzy pop.
Because the teams were all in little rooms, it was hard to mix ideas and seek help. While big rooms are noisy, it does give you a chance to shout out "anyone here know Python" and get some help if you need it.

Result

We came second!

Winning a set of EXCLUSIVE t-shirts!

We developed an Alexa skill which could answer questions about hospitals like "what's the waiting time", "is there car parking", and "what rating is the hospital". Additionally, it could also answer questions about prescription charges.

All the code is on GitHub.

It was really hard to keep our demo short. We also had to resist the urge to add more and more features. When there is only 3 minutes to show off what you've learned, you've got to really concentrate on what it is you want to show off.

Anyway, huge thanks to everyone who attended and the organisers for making such an incredible weekend.

Alexa Skills - get custom slot names using Flask-Ask

@edent — Mon, 17 Jun 2019 07:22:32 +0000

Amazon encourages developers to use Flask-Ask - the handy Python library for working with Alexa. Sadly, the project has been abandoned. They no longer take pull requests, you can't raise bugs against it, and the documentation is incomplete.

So this is how I solved an annoying problem - how to get the name of a custom slot.

Here's the code, with a fuller explanation afterwards.

from flask import Flask, render_template, request
from flask_ask import Ask, statement, question, session
app = Flask(__name__)
ask = Ask(app, '/')

@ask.intent("YourIntentName")
def your_intent_name():
    content = request.get_json()
    name = content['request']['intent']['slots']['YOUR_SLOT_NAME']['resolutions']['resolutionsPerAuthority'][0]['values'][0]['value']['name']

Yeuch! What's going on?

Alexa lets us define custom slot names - these can be associated with any spoken text. For example, I might want the slot name "car" to be sent whether the user says "car" or "automobile" or "vehicle" or any other synonym.

In my case, I want to send my API the ID Code of a hospital.

If the user says "John Radcliff" or "Oxford" or "John Radcliff Hospital" - then my API should receive the ID RTH08. It can then use that ID in a separate API call.

Here's the JSON that Alexa sends our API (I've truncated it for ease of reading).

{
    "request": {
        "type": "IntentRequest",
        "requestId": "amzn1.echo-api.request.1234",
        "timestamp": "2019-06-17T06:54:52Z",
        "locale": "en-GB",
        "intent": {
            "name": "CarPark",
            "confirmationStatus": "NONE",
            "slots": {
                "hospital": {
                    "name": "hospital",
                    "value": "John radcliff",
                    "resolutions": {
                        "resolutionsPerAuthority": [
                            {
                                "authority": "amzn1.er-authority.echo-sdk.amzn1.ask.skill.1234.hospitals",
                                "status": {
                                    "code": "ER_SUCCESS_MATCH"
                                },
                                "values": [
                                    {
                                        "value": {
                                            "name": "RTH08",
                                            "id": "abc123"
                                        }
                                    }
                                ]
                            }
                        ]
                    },
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

A bit verbose, but easy enough to parse.

I've moaned before about Alexa skill development - but it is getting worse. As you can see from the above screenshot, the development website's contrast isn't great - which makes building a skill physically painful.

Add to that the outdated tutorials, the weird terminology, the multiple sites to use, broken links, and abandoned libraries... It's hard to feel enthusiastic about building more skills.

Amazon have gone down the classic route of paying developers to build for their platform. But I don't think that's enough.

The Alexa team need to work on the developer experience. A GUI like NODE-RED could be used to help build skills in one place. Why is it so complicated to deploy and test skills? Where are the official libraries which "just work"?

I honestly believe that one of the things holding back voice assistants from their full potential is the poor developer experience.

Make your hackday vegan

@edent — Wed, 29 Nov 2017 12:33:22 +0000

I go to lots of conferences, unconferences, hackdays, and tech events. As a vegetarian, I'm used to being relegated to second-class when it comes to event catering. If I'm lucky, I get some cheese sandwiches mingled with a plate of meaty snacks.

That's why I was overjoyed at ODF Plugfest Rome when the organisers made this announcement:

It was such a thoughtful thing for the event to do. We each got some fresh pasta, some salad, fruit, biscuits. Lovely!

(As an aside, yes, allergies and intolerances were catered for separately.)

Everyone I spoke to at the event was happy with the food. I didn't notice anyone sneaking off to one of the hundreds of pizza restaurants in the vicinity.

As someone who has run large scale events before, I think making an event mono-culinary is an excellent idea.

Cheaper. Vegan / Veggie food is cheaper than meaty alternatives. A huge consideration when running a community event trying to cater for a few hundred people.
Logistically easier. I've lost count of the number of events I've been to where organisers have misplaced the details of who has requested which meal, or where meat-eaters have accidentally polished off the food meant for veggies.
Suitable for nearly all dietary preferences - vegetarian, Kosher, Halal, Hinduism, Buddhism. Means not having to quiz people on their ethical beliefs.
Healthier. A typical hackathon just provides pizza and beer. That's fun, but not always the healthiest option available.

If you're planning on catering for a mass event, have a think about whether only providing vegan food will be a sensible and inclusive way to feed your attendees.

Here be dragons

Lots of people are psychologically addicted to meat. When you politely suggest they skip meat for a single meal, they have an extreme reaction. A huge amount of marketing money has been spent on associating meat with masculinity. This causes a form of castration-anxiety when people are "threatened" with a salad.

It's a little silly seeing grown adults tremble at the thought of vegetables, but that's the power of marketing!

Hackaday UK Unconference #HackadayUncon

@edent — Mon, 18 Sep 2017 16:15:31 +0000

A quick round up of the fascinating talks at the Hackaday London Unconference.

This was a slight twist on the usual unconference format. There was only one room - so it was a single track event. There were three invited speakers who had presentations of 15 minutes - everyone else pitched for 7 minute slots. The organisers chose the running order. A twist on the usual unconference, but it worked well. The organisers had curated a good set of talks, and were able to give the day a bit of structure.

Every talk I heard was great - some went a little over my head with the talk of MOSFETs (from Star Wars, I think) and NAND gates (popular chicken restaurant?) - but they were all delivered with enthusiasm.

Here are the talks which made an impression on me.

Dangerous Children

"Why is my son whittling with a knife? Because he had already felled a tree with an axe!"

This was Tanya Fish's plea to let kids get involved with some of the more dangerous/exciting aspects of making. Fire, electricity, sharp things. Please ensure your makerspace has child sized safety equipment!

Recreating Apollo

It turns out that the source code to the Apollo moon missions is available for free!

Meadow wants to build a computer capable of running it. What a cracking idea!

Beacons!

Catherine Jones gave us a quick run down of what Bluetooth Beacons are used for and, more importantly, where they are misused. You don't need beacons to tell people where the dinosaurs are in a museum; people will naturally gravitate towards them.

Telepresence

This was such a cool demo. Libby has built a little telepresence robot which allows her to interact with office-based staff.

Build out of a lamp and some scavenged computer parts, this is a cute little droid with a practical purpose.

Flashing Lights

There is a prize for making lights blink on and off in an interesting way. Who knew!?

An amusing talk about the perils of wiring stuff up to the mains, and getting people to think creatively about electronics.

Open Benches

Me! Presenting about OpenBenches.org - here's the 360 video:

How To Be A Full Time YouTuber

A candid and enlightening talk from James Bruton of Xrobots

Brits are notoriously terrible when it comes to discussing money. James walked us through how many subscribers he has, ad revenues, partnership deals, and how much hard work goes into turning YouTube into a full time job.

Please Like and Subscribe to my own channel!

Liquid Interfaces

The inimitable Phoenix Perry gave an illuminating talk into usability and ergonomics.

She's building a mix between a game and an art installation.

Upgrading a bike with LEDs

Alex from @RasPiTv has built indicators for his pedal bike using LEDs, Raspberry Pis, and clobbered together something beautiful and practical.

Hacking RSA Tokens

If you're as clever / evil as Joe Fitz you'll find that a typical RSA SecureID token can be disassembled and subverted.

There's space inside for Bluetooth and all sorts of other trickery.

Designing the Pi Zero

I could have listened to Roger Thornton speak for hours! A great talk about the practicalities of the designing the hardware for the Pi Zero.

There's a constant tension between cost, size, speed, and upgradeability. They didn't get it right first time so were forced to iterate & rethink.

Cider!

An unconference isn't complete without a non-technical talk! Jenny gave us the lowdown on Cider Making

Now I want cider!

I Speak Your Weight

Alistair once again showing that the most effective hack is a funny hack. Take a pair of Wii Fit scales, mix in some bluetooth and a quick whip of code - and you've got a sarcastic speak-your-weight machine.

In space, no one can hear your electronics scream

Nick Molo works on satellites. IN SPACE!

Turns out, there are a lot of commodity Arduino orbiting the planet.

Thanks

Massive thanks to all the organisers for a fantastic job - and to everyone who shared their stories. I'm looking forward to next year!

Introducing CAVE TEAM - a new board game #JanJam17

@edent — Sun, 15 Jan 2017 15:10:47 +0000

I'm a little obsessed with collaborative games. I'm bored with fighting against my friends, trying to bankrupt them, or simply beating them into submission.

I attended the Oxford Games Jam with one very specific aim in mind - help create a game where people had to work together as a team. It's a hard mindset to get into - almost all games are competitive. But with the help of an amazing team, and the frank feedback of several play-testers, I think we created something fun and original(ish).

This game is Open Source! We released the code and rules under the MIT licence, any additional artwork will be Creative Commons.

Get started at https://github.com/OxfordHackspace/CaveTeam - and please let us know what you think!

Here's one of our hand-made prototypes of our Roguelike game - CAVE TEAM:

As a team, you have to move from the "Start" tile, to the "Exit" tile. Teamwork is important, some tiles will require more than one player to successfully pass. It is impossible to win the game by yourself - but you may have to sacrifice some of the players in order to escape.

The map of the caves is a hexagonal grid - in homage to many classic games. Boards are procedurally generated - team member Thomas Kiley wrote a Python script to create valid boards

Here's a typical cave board:

All players start, unsurprisingly, on the "start" tile. In order to move to a new tile, the player tells the team which tile they're attempting to clear, and then rolls a single 🎲.

If they defeat the tile (that is, roll higher than the number on the tile) the tile is flipped over and the path is clear.

If they fail to clear the tile, there is a cave-in. The tile is removed from the board and the way is blocked.

Some tiles are impossible for a single player to clear - they will need the help of other players. A player can ask for assistance from any player adjacent to the tile they wish to clear.

In the demo version, we used white counters to represent a clear path - and red tiles to represent a cave in. But what are those mysterious green tiles, I hear you ask?

SLIME!

Lurking in the cave is luminous green slime. A deadly, mindless mould creeping though the board.

Every few turns (more on that later!) the slime gets a chance to roll the dice. If the slime is next to a tile with the same number as the dice, that tile is consumed. Any player on that tile is eaten alive, and removed from the game. Slime cannot get through a cave in - you will notice in the above board, players have managed to create a small defensive wall in the hope of protecting themselves.

The slime's advance is both relentless and random. In some games it won't bother you, in others it will consume you and the exit before you're partway across the board.

Once the slime hits the clear path, it will always advance, regardless of the score on the dice.

Thresholds

This is where things get a little complicated. In order to make the game exciting, we need to have the slime move rapidly - but it also needs to be balanced with the number of players.

Every time the dice is rolled, we add its score to the Slime Counter. Once the counter reaches a score of (Number of players * 3) it is time to roll the dice for the Slime's move.

We want the slime to happen fairly regularly, but not predictably. If players are lucky enough to roll low numbers, the Slime will not advance - but the players may not be able to get through the tiles that they need.

This adds an element of risk to the game. You might want three of your team to help you defeat a particularly hard tile - but that brings with it a greater risk of the Slime advancing.

Escape

In order to escape, a player has to be adjacent to the Exit tile and roll a score of the threshold or above. This will require help from your team. Each player adjacent to the exit tile can help, and they all escape if the roll is successful.

But what if all the players aren't by the exit? You have a choice - do you wait for your team and risk Death By Slime? Do some of you escape and leave the others to perish? Can you split your team?

Team Play

Your team might decide to send scouting parties in different directions - hoping to clear paths before the slime gets there. Or, you can stick together and blast through tiles all the while risking the slime speeding up to get you.

Perhaps you'll deliberately sacrifice players, or die heroically together.

One of the features of Roguelike games is rapid death. It is entirely possible that a cave becomes impenetrable after just a few turns. The majority of your team may die shortly before the end. You might be unlucky with your rolls and block yourself in.

No matter! Sweep the board clear and start again! The game is fairly rapid, generally taking around 20 minutes for a team of four to escape.

Variations and Rule Tuning

We played through the game half-a-dozen times - sometimes radically altering the rules to see if it improved the game.

How characters move has a massive impact on the game. Originally we had players roll for every move - even if they were going along a clear path. That makes the game too hard.

Then we said that players could move anywhere along a clear path for free - and only roll if they wanted to clear a tile. That makes it too easy.

We settled on being able to move one tile along the path for free. The next move - whether to a clear tile or a numbered tile - must be rolled for.

In some variants, the slime moves to all consecutive tiles of the same number.

Let's take this board as an example.

If the Slime rolled a five, the 5 tile next to the Slime would be consumed - as would the 5 tile adjacent to the consumed tile. The other 5 remains unaffected.

If a two were rolled... Youch!

Players which have escaped - should they be able to help rescue players stuck inside the cave?

Pieces

Because the event was taking place in the Oxford Hackspace, we were able to 3D print some playing pieces.

We used David Hagemann's incredible "Low Poly Fantasy Tabletop" pieces.

Pieces had to be reasonably small so that that several players can fit on one tile.

Play it!

This game is Open Source! We released the code and rules under the MIT licence, any additional artwork will be Creative Commons.

Get started at https://github.com/OxfordHackspace/CaveTeam - and please let us know what you think!

Credits

This game was built with with ❤ and 😘 by (in alphabetical order)

Jamie Bayne
Nick Brett
Terence Eden
Thomas Kiley
Jamie Lokier
And all the play testers at the January Games Jam.
Special thanks to Simon Roth for organising the event.

Shakespearean HackFest

@edent — Sun, 07 Dec 2014 10:23:08 +0000

On Saturday, I attended the Shakespearean HackFest organised by HiCor / TORCH at Oxford University.

I'd like to discuss the hack our team created and how the event differed (in a positive way) from other hack days I've been to.

The Event

On arrival at the Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, I was automatically assigned to a team. I think this is a great model for hackdays. To often, I find, anti-social nerds struggle to form teams - or they team up with people they came with - or non-hackers are left adrift without any technical help. The organisers had made sure that each team of four had at least one hacker, with the rest being made up of linguists, scholars, Shakespearean experts etc.

The first half of the day was a lecture! This isn't something I've experienced at a hackday before. Usually there an intro talk, someone thanks the sponsors, then everybody get cracking! Instead, we heard entertaining talks from Pip Willcox and Dr Emma Smith about the history of Shakespeare's First Folio - how it had arrived at Oxford, been lost, returned, and then digitised via crowd funding. Knowing the incredible provenance helped me feel closer to the data we would be working on.

We then had James Cummings talk us through the XML versions of the text, carefully explaining the somewhat esoteric TEI-C structure. He also gave us a huge data dump. We were given direct access to 2GB of high quality scans of the folio, a zip of all the XML they had available, and direct links to other useful bits of data. We were even encouraged to submit changes via GitHub. Much better organised than some hackdays where the advice is "just Google it."

Rather than getting lost in a vast sea of data, we were all told to work on a single play - Hamlet. Again, this was a sensible decision on the part of the organisers. I think we probably would have struggled if we were left to choose our own play.

Because of the layout of the rooms, there wasn't any real collaboration between the teams. With only a few hours in which to hack, this wasn't a serious problem, but did reduce those little sparks of creative cross-fertilisation you often get at these events.

Of particular interest to me was the gender ratio. Hackdays are usually male dominated affairs. This was decidedly the opposite with a F:M ratio of about 2:1! I don't know if the organisers did anything specific to achieve this, or whether it's a natural consequence of a "Humanities" event. Either way, it's a solid reminder to other event organisers that it can be done!

Our Hack - Too Many "To Be"s

Our team included... Sarah Ellis - the Head of Digital Development at Royal Shakespeare Company, Thomas Jo Johansen, Dr Erin Sullivan a Lecturer and Fellow at Birmingham's Shakespeare Institute, Michelle Morton also of the RSC, and me.

As with all good hacks, we went down several dead-ends before setting on something workable. Here are the ideas, in case you want to try them yourself!

Sentiment analysis of the text. Rejected because the corpus contains the original archaic spellings - e.g. "loue" for "love".
Multimedia collage. Can we extract tweets, videos, images, animated gifs, etc to match each line of the text? We couldn't find an automated way to do this, and our manual efforts were a bit disappointing.
Correcting transcription errors in the text. A bit dull - but the data are on GitHub if you want to do it!
How much time do characters stay on stage? The text has metadata to indicate stage directions, entrances, and exits - but it rarely indicates who has left. This could make for a nice animated visualisation and would also help improve the XML.
How does this 1st Folio scan differ from others? Can we average out the scans to see what unique features each one has?

Finally, we settled on a somewhat avant-garde sound piece. We were discussing placing links in the XML pointing directly at sound or video files - for example Richard Burton's Hamlet. The problem is, most recordings are taken from the modern text. And most modern products inevitably cut some of the text.

One thing we could be sure of, is that no-one in their right mind would cut "To Be Or Not To Be".

What are the different ways of performing that famous soliloquy? Is Richard Burton's performance notably different from, say, David Tennant's? Who is the best actor for the role? How many different ways can it be interpreted? What if you played every recording to "To Be" all at once?

The result? Noise! Glorious noise! Magnificent noise!

We ripped the audio of Burton, Tennant, William Shatner, amateurs on YouTube, women singing with a ukulele, and a dozen more. We trimmed the audio in Audacity, and used HTML5's audio element to play them all simultaneously. In the browser we were able to mix them - changing the volume on the fly, fading in and out, starting and stopping the performances.

Listening to several speakers at once is incredibly disorienting. As you start picking out one or two voices, you begin to understand the wild variance with which people perform. Take a listen to Richard Burton, David Tennant, and Kenneth Brannagh performing at the same time.

🔊
🎤 https://shkspr.mobi/

💾 Download this audio file.

Ok, that's three classically trained actors wringing every last drop of melancholy out of it. Even still, fascinating to hear how they approach it. Let's now hear it sung by Courtney Welbon and performed by Paul Scofield.

🔊
🎤 https://shkspr.mobi/

💾 Download this audio file.

For students coming to Shakespeare for the first time, it can often feel like there is only one way to perform Shakespeare. That it's a fixed point from which there can be no deviation. Nothing could be further from the truth! We can play it as a rap, as a Greek Chorus, as a man, a woman, or any variation that pleases us.

🔊
🎤 https://shkspr.mobi/

💾 Download this audio file.

It also calls into question our notion of "perfection". Many of the other hacks during the event were quantitative in nature - breaking down the text, extracting semantic meaning, adding metadata, analysing the work. Our is, I hope you'll agree, qualitative. Which is the "best" Hamlet? What makes the perfect performance? After listening to dozens of recording, I'm fairly confident I can tell a good performance from bad - but when they're mixed together it becomes less clear. Perhaps I like the sung "slings and arrows" and the spoken "outrageous fortune".

We can take this further. Splicing in recordings so that Burton's 1964 Hamlet is performing against Julia Stiles in 2000's film of Hamlet.

Taking It Further

Putting aside the tricky issue of copyright, everyone felt that it was a unique and interesting way to examine the works. For schools, it allows you to show that it isn't just dusty old men wandering around a stage. For actors, it's a resource to inspire you to take a performance in a different direction.

The Shakespearean HackFest was a hugely entertaining and a great success. Thanks to Kerri Russell and all the organisers for an amazing day and a fascinating set of data.

You can access the digital edition of the Bodleian's First Folio - and edit it on GitHub.

Why Can't Google Afford To Pay Its Startup Mentors?

@edent — Tue, 15 Jul 2014 11:05:46 +0000

So Google Ventures is swinging in to London Town, dragging one hundred meeeeeellion dollars with it.

Wow! What a way to reinvigorate the European tech scene. All that cash is sure to filter its way down into the economy. Viva la trickle-down economics!

Or, not so much.

Earlier last week, I was asked if I would mentor teams in a start-up hackathon - partly backed by Google. That, in itself, is nothing too unusual. I'm often asked by start-ups, early stage companies, and big business to advise on a range of things. They find my knowledge and expertise valuable and are happy to pay for my time.

It's a rewarding relationship. Companies take exciting steps into the unknown (for them) and I get a wodge of cash. Happy days!

The hackathon in question was for three days in London. The organisers contacted me directly, saying they wanted someone to mentor the teams involved, give them advice on their products, and generally encourage them. I replied with what I thought was a fairly reasonable quote - considering it was a long weekend's work out of town.

"Oh no!" Came the reply, "We can't afford to pay you!"

This was, to say the least, unexpected. The event is backed by Google for Entrepreneurs. The judges are another VC firm. These are wealthy companies. Which, of course, makes it all the more curious that they charge participants to attend... Ah well, that's their business.

Here's the thing. I attempt to give back as much as I can to the community. I open source much of my work, I donate time and money to charities, I teach kids to code, I participate in hackdays, and speak at BarCamps. Sadly, I can't always work for free and I have to charge for my time - especially when it's at the behest of multi-national corporations.

I explained this to the organisers, "We only need you for a few hours each day!" they pleaded.

That's all well and good, but it costs me at least £30 a day to get into London and takes two hours each way - even just for a couple of hours' work. So three days of mentoring is going to cost me at least £100 once I factor in travel and food - not to mention that my weekend is basically screwed.

So, let me get this straight... A billion dollar corporation, with a hundred million dollars in VC money - plus sundry other VCs - want three days of my time to mentor teams who they hope will turn in to billion dollar investments and they don't even want to pay my fricking travel expenses?

Now, I'm sure that they've routed everything via non-profits, utilised good-natured volunteers, and arranged everything to appeal to starry-eyed kids looking for a big break. But so what?

Forget that noise.

Kids Today

When you're starting out in an industry, it's probably a wise investment to give your time for free. It's great to get a name for yourself, build up contacts, and learn from the best.

It's also fun to be merely associated with big name companies. To tell your friends / family that you spent the day hacking at $MegaCorp and they loved your work is pretty damn intoxicating.

Having hackers learn your API in return for beer and pizza is a fairly equitable exchange, as far as these things go.

If you want to get involved in the technology scene, volunteering to run or help out at an event is a brilliant way to get your face known. You'll learn a huge amount about event management, meet thousands of people, and help your community.

Again, selling your time and effort in return for a free ticket to a high quality event is a good deal if you're new to the scene.

But when you start inviting professionals to attend in a professional capacity, the dynamic changes. You wouldn't ask the caterers to provide free food, or a networking team provide WiFi for free, or a venue to simply rent their premises for nothing.

Professionals don't need "exposure". Professionals don't get a vicarious thrill from being associated with Google. Professionals don't actually enjoy commuting on their personal time. Professionals do need to pay their mortgages and feed their families.

As a community, I completely believe it is right and proper to help each other. I also believe that we should refuse to devalue our labour to the point of penury for companies which can easily afford us.

If Google, or any other company, wants to hire skilled individuals to provide a service - it's simply unacceptable for them to plead poverty. If they ask you , may I politely suggest that you remind them that:

"A fair day's wages for a fair day's work": it is as just a demand as governed men ever made of governing. It is the everlasting right of man. Thomas Carlyle - Past and Present (1843)

3D Printed Letter Press

@edent — Fri, 11 Apr 2014 14:49:18 +0000

Rewired State have just announced "End Of The World Hack"

We know the earth is about to be bombarded with solar flares and magnetic storms of varying ferocity on July 4th, 5th and 6th 2014, by which time the infrastructure of the energy and communications networks will have been completely decimated across the entire planet.
You have 48 hours to best prepare the human race for survival, through the chaos, and on to a successful future. After which time there will be no electricity and no electronic technologies available.

That's such a cool idea for a hackathon! It got me thinking what I would do in that situation.

Well, obviously, printing out survival manuals and important parts of Wikipedia would be a good way to prep. Ok, but what do you do when that printed copy gets damaged or destroyed? How do you print out another one?

LET'S BUILD A PRINTING PRESS!

I have the square-root of naff-all experience in building a letter press, so I thought I'd do some experiments before attending the hackday and making an idiot of myself :-)

Firstly, I created a spreadsheet containing capital letters, numbers, and punctuation. No chance of Unicode - this barely covers ASCII!

The end result looks something like this:

The font is OCR-A - so that future computers can read our printed documents more easily.

The thick black borders give us nice separation when printing out.

Finally, the image is flipped horizontally.

I used png23d to convert the image into an .STL file

png23d -v -f surface -t 0 -l 32 -w 100 -d 5 -O 1 -o stl Letters.png Letters.stl

That ensures the black is "don't print", the white is the highest physical print point, and the greys are proportional in between.

After a few failed attempts, things started to take shape...

Leading to this lovely collection of letters:

As you can see - a few of them moved during printing, so it might be an idea to print it as a single bed and then snap the letters out.

You can download the .STL file from Thingiverse.

To Do

I'm not usually a fan of massive preparation before a hackday - but given the time involved in printing out these test pieces (3 hours including warm-up / down) I thought it prudent to experiment.

Still to do at the actual event (and do come along to help!)

Build scaffolds / trays for the letters to fit into.
Create ink. (Blueberries? Beetroot? Soot? How?!)
Actually put ink on the letters, then paper, then see if it works :-)
Work out how many of each letter is needed.
How small / large should they be to cover a sheet of A6?
Which fonts look best?
Are they durable enough? How much physical impact can they take?
Would it be better to create individual stamps rather than sets of letters?

Lots of work to do! Hope to see many of you at End Of The World Hack on 4 - 6 July 2014.

Can You Power an iBeacon with a Lemon?

@edent — Thu, 27 Mar 2014 12:34:08 +0000

This is a necropost - resurrected from the now defunct blog of a previous employer. Sadly, most of the photos have fallen down the memory hole. So use your imagination.

Energy efficiency is the next battleground for electronics. As the price of electricity soars, people will become less and less enamoured with charging their devices every single day. Even if cold-fusion brings us unlimited free energy - plugging your gadgets into a wall just seems so primitive!

That's where BlueTooth Low Energy (BLE) comes in. It's an ultra low powered transmitter which can be found in FitBits, iBeacons, pacemakers, and all sorts of other devices.

The key, as per its name, is that it uses very little energy. A simple watch battery should be enough to power an iBeacon for a year.

When Life Gives You Lemons…

Today was one of The Lab's regular hackdays. We challenge ourselves to spend a day playing with new technology, trying to get it to do something interesting.

I'm sure you remember from school building a simple power source using a lemon or potato. Zinc plated nails, copper wiring, an acid source, and - hey presto - a lightbulb comes on.

So, can we harness the awesome power of fruit to bring life to a little iBeacon?

We used RedBear Lab's BLE Mini board. It can be powered via USB (boring!) or via a direct electrical contact on the back.

Better BlueTooth Through Chemistry

It's been ages since any of us in The Lab did basic physics and chemistry at school, so we turned to the Mighty Internet for help.

With three lemons wired in parallel, we got approximately 0.5 Volts and 120μAmps.

According to Red Bear's support forum, we'd need about 3 volts and 340μAmps.

With 6 lemons, we were at ~200μAmps, closing in on the figure we needed.

It occurred to us that we may need to construct some kind of super-fruit mega battery in order to get the voltage up as well. I really wish I'd paid more attention in GCSE physics. Sorry Mrs Perkins…

10 is the Magic Number

With 10 C. limon in parallel, we hit 369μAmps! Perfect!

That still wasn't enough to get the BLE Mini board to power up - we needed to raise the voltage. But how?

Errr…. with difficulty…! Turns out it's really frickin' hard to get enough power out of a bunch of lemons to power modest hardware.

So we did what any enterprising startup does - pivot!

Power Extreme!

Ok, so can our juicers deliver sufficient juice to act as an emergency battery for your smartphone?

We found the lowest powered phone we could - the GeeksPhone Keon - running FireFox OS.

In keeping with our fruit theme, we butchered an old BlackBerry charger - and got to work…

Wires stripped, plugged into our lemon battery… What was the result?

Errr… The square root of nowt! Nothing happened. The power wasn't high enough for the phone's charging circuitry to register anything.

We grabbed a Nexus 5, installed a power monitor widget, and tried again.

Ooooooh!

This is the very definition of trickle charging. The amount of energy from 10 lemons, zinc plated nails, and copper wire is just enough to give you a few more minutes of talk time - nothing more. In a MacGyver situation, you're probably better off squeezing the lemons into your enemies' eyes.

Lessons Learned

Hackdays are a great way of playing about with technology and having a bit of experimental fun.

It's temping to think BLE is so efficient that it can be powered from harvested kinetic energy and stray WiFi beams - that's not the case. Modern battery technology is pretty complex - and that's why tiny button cells can power modern electronics and a whole bunch of lemons doesn't even get close.

One of the reasons The Lab exists in O2 is to develop a culture of "Fast Failure". We didn't spend millions of Euros and half-a-dozen months in planning meetings, requesting proposals from suppliers, and updating PowerPoint decks to do this - instead, two of us spend half a day actually trying to build something and finding out pretty quickly that it wasn't going to work.

For those of you wondering just how much of your monthly bill we spent on this? The cost was a couple of quid for the nails and wire, and we had the multimeter already. The lemons cost £3.00 for 10. I wonder if I should have splashed out on organic ones…. ;-)

What's Next

It's possible to power Xmas tree lights from hundreds of Brussels Sprouts. Would it be possible to set up a "Charge your Apple with apples" stand at one of O2's larger stores? Sure! It could make a great marketing stunt - and teach people a little basic science - but, for now, I'll stick to my wall socket.

Toodle pip!

Introducing Corkr at #NHTG14

@edent — Tue, 11 Mar 2014 20:14:23 +0000

What a crazy weekend! I made the last minute decision to attend Rewired State's "National Hack The Government 2014" hackathon.

Rather than hack on any of the provided datasets, I wanted to work on an interesting way to present all the security flaws I had found in Government websites.

I teamed up with Mark, Marcello, and Orlando - together we created "Corkr - Plugging the Government's Digital Holes"

We were looking for different and interesting ways to visualise the data. Interactive infographics, space-trees, leader boards, top-trumps - all classic staples of hackdays.

In the end, we thought what would be the most visually impressive would be to present the sites on a map. That way we could show the scale of the problems - and let local authorities know where they needed to target.

It's hard to quantify just how bad the bugs are - is a single SQL Injection worse than two XSS flaws, for example - so we settled on just doing a raw count. Marcello and Orlando were able to convert the wpscan results files into JSON - which made doing the calculations a lot easier.

Mark, our graphics / UI guy came up with a really strong design to help showcase just how bad some of the problems are. We decided against revealing the nature of the vulnerabilities and instead went for a traffic light system.

Using OpenStreetMap and LeafletJS meant it was incredibly easy to create lush looking maps which were zoomable. Adding markers to specific locations was also really easy.

Where In The Country Is A Website?

Some websites have a defined geographic location - a tiny Parish Council's website can reasonably be centred on a map.

The WHOIS data for *.gov.uk sites is not standardised. Very few of the sites spat out a Post Code when queried. Going to each website and looking for a "contact us" link was just too much work for a hackday - so we cheated!

Google has a pretty good API for getting the geographic location from a search query. So I manually converted all the domain names into something Google could use. For example "10downingstreet.gov.uk" became "10 downing street" (used as an example - it's not a vulnerable site).

Here's the PHP code:

$location = $argv[1];
$json = file_get_contents('https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address='.$location.',%20uk&sensor=false');
$obj = json_decode($json, true);
echo $obj["results"][0]["geometry"]["location"]["lat"] . ", " . $obj["results"][0]["geometry"]["location"]["lng"];

Now, obviously that requires a lot of copying and pasting. Luckily, Linux makes it very easy to automatically copy the output of a script onto the clipboard:

php -e locate.php West%20Byfleet | xclip -sel clip

And then we created a master JSON file which tallied up the number of flaws, where the sites were, and what they were named.

And then we did the same for the NHS sites!

In the end, due to time constraints, we only managed to get around 200 .gov.uk sites and 150 .nhs.uk sites.

And so, on very little sleep, we demo'd it...

The Competition

As ever with Rewired State, the standard of hacks was incredibly high. They ranged from the silly (dating MPs) to the serious (statistical comparisons of local areas). We presented towards the end, and were painfully aware of just how tough this was going to be. When you're up against a physicist using LIDAR calculated height data to infer shadow mapping and Pseudo-facial recognition using photoresistors, you know you're competing against the very best in the UK.

I am delighted to say that we were one of the four winners!

Some Thoughts On The Day

It was an absolutely amazing weekend. The food was good - and healthy - there was a wide range of people and some top notch government people there to talk with.

It might have been nice to have a bit more of a formal "what are people working on" session at the start. With 80ish hackers it may have taken some time, but it would have helped people introduce themselves and recruit for teams. All in all, a minor concern.

Prizes. I've written before about the corrupting influence of big money prizes. Luckily, the prizes on offer at #NHTG14 weren't jewel encrusted! About £30 - £40 worth of tech - plus some O’Reilly books. Just the right sort of level - not so extravagant that people would be gutted to lose, but expensive enough to make you go "Ooooh! What a lovely treat!".

Of course, the real value is in the taking part. And that's not just hokum; it really is.

For me, I think the real prize is making the government take notice and fix their broken sites. I think that is slowly happening - but a bit more on that later.

Congratulations to all the teams who took part - and many thanks to the judges for their impeccable taste.

Rewired State - UK Parliament 2012

@edent — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 10:30:12 +0000

This weekend, I went to Rewired State's Parliament hackday. I teamed up with amazing front end designer Max Bye and statistician par excellence John Sandall to create a data visualisation of Parliament's Demographics.

Are the houses representative of the people in terms of gender diversity? Are the Labour Party younger than the Conservatives? Are the parties in the Lords particularly dissimilar?

You can play with the hack or watch a video demonstration.

Each bubble represents a political party
The size of the bubble represents how many members they have
The Y-Axis (Vertical) represents the average age of MPs / Lords
The X-Axis (horizontal) represents how gender balanced the parties are

(As you can tell, the hack was heavily inspired by Hans Rosling)

Data

A quick word about the data we used.

The (beta) APIs had some reasonably good documentation - although the examples could have been better. It seemed to assume that a user was already intimately familiar with the (sometimes arcane) principles of Parliament.

It also only spat out XML, so that needed to be converted to JSON.

The main issue we had was with the quality of the data. Let's look at two examples.

First, Linda Perham (picked solely because she's a mate of my mum!)

{
  "FullTitle": "Linda Perham MP",
  "DateOfBirth": "1947-06-29T00:00:00",
  "DateOfDeath": {
    "-xsi:nil": "true",
  },
  "Gender": "F",
  "Party": {
    "-Id": "15",
    "#text": "Labour"
  },
  "House": "Commons",
  "MemberFrom": "Ilford North",
  "HouseStartDate": "1997-05-01T00:00:00",
  "HouseEndDate": "2005-05-05T00:00:00",
  "CurrentStatus": {
    "-IsActive": "False",
    "StartDate": {
      "-xsi:nil": "true",
    }
  }
},

That's pretty comprehensive. We can see when she joined, left, her age, that she's still alive, and who she represents.

Now, let's take George Galloway who has had an... interesting... Parliamentary career.

{
  "FullTitle": "Mr George Galloway MP",
  "DateOfBirth": "1954-08-16T00:00:00",
  "DateOfDeath": {
    "-xsi:nil": "true",
  },
  "Gender": "M",
  "Party": {
    "-Id": "26",
    "#text": "Respect"
  },
  "House": "Commons",
  "MemberFrom": "Bradford West",
  "HouseStartDate": "2012-03-30T00:00:00",
  "HouseEndDate": {
    "-xsi:nil": "true",
  },
  "CurrentStatus": {
    "-Id": "0",
    "-IsActive": "True",
    "Name": "Current Member",
    "StartDate": "2007-10-31T00:00:00"
  }
},

All we have is his current status. It doesn't mention his previous life as a Labour MP, nor does it mention that he was the Respect MP of Bethnal Green in 2005.

For MPs who have subsequently gone to the House of Lords, the data is also unhelpful.

Betty Boothroyd was a Labour MP (for two different constituencies), then became The Speaker of the House of Commons, then went to the House of Lords. This is all the information we have on her.

{
  "FullTitle": "The Rt Hon. the Baroness Boothroyd OM",
  "DateOfBirth": "1929-10-08T00:00:00",
  "DateOfDeath": {
    "-xsi:nil": "true",
  },
  "Gender": "F",
  "Party": {
    "-Id": "6",
    "#text": "Crossbench"
  },
  "House": "Lords",
  "MemberFrom": "Life peer",
  "HouseStartDate": "2001-01-15T00:00:00",
  "HouseEndDate": {
    "-xsi:nil": "true",
  },
  "CurrentStatus": {
    "-Id": "0",
    "-IsActive": "True",
    "Name": "Current Member",
    "StartDate": "2001-01-15T00:00:00"
  }
}

There's also a significant lack of historical data. There are some Lords & MPs in the dataset who were in Parliament in the 1940s - but only a few. It would be great to have a comprehensive record of, say, the last 100 years.

There needs to be a better representation of when a member has "changed" - whether that's affiliation, leaving and then returning, being elevated, changing constituency, or even gender. (Although, as far as I'm aware, there have been no Trans MPs. Nor any MPs with non ASCII characters in their name.)

The data represents a very monochromatic view of the world.

For examining broad trends, it was sufficient for a hackday. We had tried scraping Wikipedia to get full details of every election, but that was a bit beyond us (over 1000 people for every election, plus by-elections, for the last 50 years.)

What We Found

I was particularly surprised by how little gender diversity there is. 50% of the population is female, yet the Labour Party have roughly 33% women MPs. Caroline Lucas is the sole (female) representative of the Green Party - which doesn't quite balance out the entirely male Bishops in the House of Lords.

In our data, you can see the big jump after the 1997 election - where the number female MPs doubled.

Labour are consistently older than the Tories. That was completely against my expectations.

So, play with the hack and see what you notice.

Thanks

As well as my amazing team mates Max Bye and John Sandall, I must thank the team from Rewired State; they put on a storming hackathon. There was plenty of interesting data, a good mix of people, healthy food and drink (as well as the obligatory pizza).

While it would have been lovely to hold the event in Parliament - I appreciate that a hoard of geeks turning up with a panoply of dodgy electronics may not have best pleased the Serjeant-at-Arms. So The Hub Westminster was a fine substitute.

Special mention to Alex Blandford who was very helpful at explaining the data and helping us navigate through the peculiarities of the system.

Finally, massive thanks to the Speaker for this fine certificate.

Hackdays - How Much Preparation is Acceptable?

@edent — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 12:00:38 +0000

I don't watch much TV. During the last episode of The Apprentice, my Twitter-feed was suddenly flooded with people talking about Nick Holzherr's app "Whisk".

Apparently it was some kind of recipe / shopping / mash up thing called Whisk. Sounded good. Sounded familiar. Then I remembered this from CadburyHack

Now, I didn't see either the TV show or the final presentation at the Hack Day. For all I know, they're two completely separate apps. Indeed, quoth The Hodge

That last link points at http://www.foodient.com/ - a site co-founded by Nick Holzherr.

So, at the very least, the app was built off a back end that the team were intimately familiar with having created it.

I asked Nick, about it, and he cleared things up.

Now, the CadburyHack event had a top prize of £10,000. That's a hell of an incentive.

I wouldn't have been surprised if people had pre-built components, or even developed entire apps - I did some prep for my app.

But it just doesn't feel... sporting. Building a hack on top of your own product seems to me to be against the spirit of a hackday. But perhaps I'm just bitter that I didn't win!

How Much Is Too Much?

I suppose that the Platonic Ideal of a hackday is that one attends as a blank slate, sees the technology on offer, form a team with people you've never met, hack all through the night, and produce something groundbreaking.

That never happens. Most people have at least half an idea of what they want to build, they team up with their friends, re-use components they've build previously, and hack with an eye on the prize categories. "Doesn't seem to be much competition for best use of Erlang!"

Take, for example. my Android Theremin. I can honestly say that I didn't write a single line of code - or do any research on the Android sound APIs - until the second morning of the hackday. I didn't reuse any code that I'd previously written either. However, the idea had been buzzing around in my head for a month or so. I'd watch Theremin videos, and looked at the science behind them just to keep the idea percolating.

Is that too much prep?

My CadburyHack was a different affair:

The Twitter and FourSquare code were originally written by me for other projects - so I reused them (Yay for Object Oriented Programming!). I'd used XPath before to scrape a site - so adapting it for Cadbury's wasn't hard. The barcode scanning integration was ripped out of an existing project. Even the template from the page and the font embedding code was recycled.

Is there a difference between code you've previously written and code you've plundered from some Open Source project? Is there a difference between your prior knowledge of coding, and what you pick up on the day? Is there a difference between building on an API you've used a hundred times, and one you've only just seen?

Hackdays are fun. The prizes are a nice bonus. But, ultimately it's about showing off and proving yourself within a limited time in front of a crowd. If you "cheat" you're really only cheating yourself out of the pride of hacking something original.

Still, whether the prize is a new phone, or ten grand, then incentive to bend the spirit of a hackday is strong.

Or am I just making a fuss over nothing?

Homeless Hackday

@edent — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 11:40:21 +0000

I had a great time at the Homeless Hackday. This is a belated write up, because I wanted to let a few thoughts peculate.

The Problem

There has been a worrying rise in the number of people rough sleeping - especially in the capital. There are a number of charities and Government departments which are available to help people who are homeless.

They wanted a smartphone app / mobile web site which would help tackle homelessness. Either by helping people people directly or by allowing members of the public to get homeless people the support they need.

Language Matters

We quickly ran in to some language barriers.

"Report A Homeless Person" - it's not illegal to be homeless. They're not a nuisance which need reporting to officialdom.
"Tag a homeless hotspot" - tagging also has negative connotations.
"Alert the authorities" - again, these are people; not a chemical spill.

It becomes very tricky to find a neutral way that conveys to a user what the app is for, while still respecting the dignity of the homeless.

Our solution

We came up with an elegant solution. A simple mobile website which would geo-locate the user, allow them to input basic details about the homeless person they were trying to help, and then pass that information on to the council.

Here's our full presentation.

Mobile Payments / Donations

I coded up the donation part of the service. Using ImpulsePay, I was able to create a two-click donation form. The payments are processed by your mobile network provider, so there's no need to type in any credit card information. I also used jQuery to build a slider - this encouraged playability. A user can slide the bar to see what their donation will buy. This allows them to get a more personal sense of where their money is going and (hopefully) encourages them to donate more.

Understanding a Hackday

We received one piece of negative feedback which, on reflection, I think exposes one the inherent tensions in a hackday. I'd suggest reading both Thayer Prime's blog post and Emma Mulqueeny's blog post for some eloquently expressed thoughts about what Hackdays are and are not.

The Homeless Hackday was very up-front with developers with regard to intellectual property rights, and what was expected of us. What I'm less clear on was whether all the agencies who came understood what the purpose of a Hackday is.

During the building of the hack we were asked several times "oooh! Could you add....?" The answer to which is "Yes, given sufficient time and budget!"

In any project there's a dilemma concerning the amount of time allocated between planning and building. The crux of a Hackday is to keep the scope extremely limited. It should be possible to show how the product could evolve, but that doesn't mean building it or even taking it into account when designing.

On demoing the mobile donation part, the immediate feedback was

How do you determine the recipient of the donation? Not every charity is a good one - and some hinder rather than help.

That's a very fair question - but it leads to a complicated answer which you can't easily give in a 3 minute demo.

More than that, it assumes a huge amount of subject knowledge. The majority of developers came to the Hackday with zero sector knowledge and had to pick it up in the 8 hours they have to hack.

The politics of the situation is totally outside the scope of what anyone can be expected to build.

Furthermore, any hackday demo is - almost by its very nature - conceptual. It almost certainly won't deal with edge-cases, deviations from the happy-path, or even having two people use it simultaneously!

A Hackday demo is axiomatically a demonstration of a quick hack. It shows you what could be possible given limited information and minimal coding time.

Summary

Overall, the Homeless Hackday was a great experience. It took me out of my comfort zone, made me engage with an issue to which I previously had given very very little thought. It was wonderful working with people dedicated to helping those less fortunate.

In many respects, it was the perfect Hackay. A well defined problem, a solution which could improve the lives of many people, and a good set of data to work on. And the requisite amount of pizza and cake.

I just wish that the limits of what a Hackday can produce was made clear to everyone involved.

Over The Air 2012

@edent — Sun, 03 Jun 2012 08:22:49 +0000

Another brilliant event from Over The Air. The perfect mix of lectures, hacking, and relaxing in a country manor / museum. And, to top it off, my hack won a brace of prizes!

The Wifi just about held up. Although I think it's fundamentally impossible to provide decent connectivity to 200+ people. Especially when they're geeks.

Which, in turn, lead to this:

As per my post of two years ago, I tried to encourage people to record video or audio of the talks they were in. It was a reasonable success. We captured several great sessions, but others have been lost to the æther.

I honestly believe that BarCamps, unconferences, and hack-days are part of our culture and should be preserved. There's a selfish element in that I want to see the talks that I missed - but more than that, I want to ensure that what we're doing isn't lost forever.

So, here are my thoughts (and videos) of the day.

Everything You Know About QR Codes is WRONG!🔗

The devilishly handsome Terence Eden gave one of his excellent talks upon the subject of QR codes.

I was really pleased with how this went, a packed room and lots of great questions. Thanks to Craig Heath for videoing it.

Responsive Web Design - the Specs Behind the Sex 🔗

Bruce Lawson talked through some of the issues with RWD especially when it comes to adaptive images.

My thoughts on the subject are still developing, but I think that it ought to be the server / CDN which adapts the images, rather than the handset relying on JavaScript and CSS. I've two primary reasons for this,

There are billions of phones already on the market which don't support CSS or JS sufficiently to handle this. There's no realistic way to upgrade their browser.
Programmers and web designers are lazy. I don't believe that the more complex mark-up will be used, nor that they will generate several different images.

A Means to Interact: A Guided Tour of Arts Programming Platforms 🔗

I must confess, I misread the subject of this talk - I thought it would be about artistic APIs. Instead, it was a fascinating talk about different ways to create graphics programatically. Becky Stewart stepped us through the pros and cons of each platform and showed us how they worked. I love interactive sessions - so coding along was great fun. She wisely distributed Windows, Mac, and Linux versions of the SDKs on memory stick so we wouldn't spend half the session downloading them.

Mobile Websites Can Have Nice Fonts Too 🔗

I'm a bit of a philistine when it comes to fonts. I have the vague feeling they're important, but I don't really know why - nor how to implement them on a website. Laura Kalbag to the rescue then!

After the session, I was talking to my friend Saqib (who is blind) about fonts. He wanted a better understanding of how they affected the reading of text. I realised that fonts are like the background music in a film. It's the music which makes Star Wars as much as the dialogue and special effects. Imagine watching a Schindler's List with a jaunty comedy score - it would completely destroy the meaning of the film. As well as readability, picking a font changes the emotional engagement that a reader has with your text.

TheLab: Demo Cool Things!🔗

I say! Those chaps from O2's TheLab are rather clever, aren't they? Just goes to show what a bit of ingenuity can do when applied to a telco. We saw a demo which tracked which country people were in based on whether their phone was roaming, HashBlue which backs up your text messages and provides an API to access them, and O2 Connect which routes your calls over WiFi if you're out of signal. Evidently lots of smart thinking going on in Slough!

Connecting Microcontrollers to the Cloud 🔗

The guys from Vodafone were showing off mbed. It's a micro-controller similar to the Arduino. The idea is that you can rapidly prototype sensor data, send it via a data or SMS connection and do other cool stuff with it. The session I attended went into the C code behind it (which was a little over my head) as well as demoing practical uses for it. It's great to see kit electronics like this and the Raspberry Pi become popular - hopefully it will make hardware more accessible.

An Illustrated History of Computation 🔗

What a delightful session! Professor Bernie Cohen took us through a history of computing, mixed with personal anecdotes, and live algorithm solving. He seems to know a thing or two - I predict the lad'll go far!

ePatient 101: An Introduction to the Asymmetrical World of Technology and Healthcare 🔗

Mark Kramer (AKA Mamk) joined us via a dodgy Skype connection from the US, where he has just finished being treated for cancer. Fuck cancer. Seriously, fuck it. Mark was talking about the disparity between the technology which the medical profession has access to versus that of their patients. Doctors may have MRI machines - but they're often stuck with handwritten notes, or ancient PCs. Patients have more CPU power in their phones than a whole office full of medical staff.

Hacking

Over The Air is where geeks come to play. Some of the inventions on display were simply marvellous. I think there were 39 hacks presented - I'm going to highlight the ones I thought were exceptional.

Sam Machin built a tool to allow you to send tweets via a DNS lookup! As he said during his introduction:

Without going into too much detail, you do a lookup on my-message-is-this.example.com, when the server receives the NS, it tweets on your behalf. So, as long as you can do a DNS request - even if the response is blocked - you can tweet. Amazing!

🔊

💾 Download this audio file.

Tom Hume built an app which lets you post your call history on Facebook. It's not as creepy as it sounds! Remember "poking"? Well, a phone call is a private poke, in essence. So, your friends can see that you called X to wish them happy birthday.

Jatrobot was the scariest looking hack I'd seen! Herx The Vampire Slayer! The team had built a modern farming tool. It measured soil moisture, weather, gps, and a bunch of other stuff via mbed - then reported it all back via Android.

Finally, my hack! This was the first time I'd entered a hack at OTA and I was unusually nervous!

I took inspiration from Ariel Waldman's mesmerising keynote about creating accessible interfaces to science. I was reminded of the Music of the Spheres (not the Doctor Who episode!) - which is the idea that the movement of the planets and celestial bodies can be thought of as a musical arrangement. We can also tune in to the background radiation of the universe and turn that into music. My phone doesn't have a gamma ray detector - but it does have a solar radiation sensor - the Lux Meter! It also has a proximity sensor - so it can tell how far away my hand is from the screen.

So, I created an ersatz Theremin! Having created a musical instrument (despite having no musical talent) I set about composing a work to be played via the medium of light.

I'm chuffed to say it worked really well and the crowd seemed to like it!

The app won one of the awards for Best Android App and was crowned Best In Show! Utterly gobsmacked, truly humbled, and over-excited to receive a Galaxy Nexus and a Raspberry Pi.

You can download the theremin and read all about the technology behind it.

Massive thanks to Dan, Maggie, Matt, and all the others involved in the highlight of the mobile geek calendar.

I cannot wait for next year!

Choc In To Joyville - Cadbury's Hackday

@edent — Sun, 27 May 2012 20:37:44 +0000

Before Cadbury's inaugural hackday began there were a number of rumblings on the blogs about the extact nature of Cadbury's intentions. See Thayer Prime's and Emma Mulqueeny's thoughts on the subject.

As it happens, after a bit of gentle poking, some of the terms were clarified.

The event itself went rather well, but I'd like to point out a few points where it didn't quite live up to the Hack Day Manifesto.

Registration - due to some confusion with the registration form, some entrants were turned away.
Checking for clashes - sadly NHS Hack Day was also on. It's hard to avoid clashes, but both seemed well attended.
WiFi - a bit patchy and no security.
Power sockets - far too few, requiring the staff to go out and buy more.
Dietary requirements - lack vegetarian food. The catering staff seemed somewhat taken aback that veggie friendly fare was asked for. After a few polite comments, food was provided.
APIs - there were none on offer. We did get a bunch of nice Cadbury's assets to play with though.
Prizes - a contentious one this. The prizes were, if anything, too generous. £500 and new phone is quite an incentive. The top prize was £10,000! This lead to a number of professional teams entering, and some people bringing along pre-built apps to polish. Naturally, I'm just bitter because I didn't win anything.

That said, the event was very good - especially as a first effort from the team.

A specially mention on the "Accessibility" front - this was the first event I've been to where a sign language interpreter was provided.

Oh, and while some hackdays give away stickers, memory sticks, and even phones - Cadbury's provided basically unlimited chocolate! Including a 1KG bar of Dairy Milk for everyone!

My Hack

My hack allowed a user to scan a Cadbury's barcode, see nutrional information about their treat, as well as "checking in" to the chocolate on Twitter. I then added some gubbins about finding your local sports centre & tweeters near you. It looked a bit like this:

So, anyway, here's my 3 minute demo video:

Android

The Android aspect is pretty simple, it just calls ZXing and then throws the result to an HTML5 site. Which, should make it easy to port to any other system.

Cadbury's API

As I've discussed before, Xpath is a wonderful thing. I've turned Cadbury's Nutrition Information site into an ersatz API.

I used Yahoo's YQL Console to construct a JSON feed of the dietary info.

Which means we can display data like this for any of Cadbury's products:

What's Next

A number of people commented on how useful the dietary aspect was. As a vegetarian, I'm often a bit unsure as to which sweets are veggie friendly. I know coeliacs face similar issues.

Translating all of Cadbury's barcodes into their relevant ID numbers may prove a bit of a challenge - but it would be a good excuse to try every single one of Cadbury's products....

Dave Winer is Wrong About Hackdays

@edent — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 09:55:41 +0000

Dave Winer is totally off base when he says "Hackathons are how marketing guys wish software were made."

Perhaps it's different in his part of the world, but over here, hackdays are fun!

All the hackathon / hackdays I've been to are, essentially, Scrapheap Challenge⁰ for software people.

The last hackday I went to was about people learning, playing, relaxing, building, tinkering, bodging, faking, and innovating.

All without a design document, manager, brand police, or scrum master. And here's the thing - no one was expecting quality software. No one was expecting amazing things. No marketing guys (that's me!) thought "I wonder how we can leverage the synergies of the cross-cultural blahblahblahblahblahblah..."

And yet... Quality software got made. Innovation happened. Very little of it had usability, security, and scalability baked into it. But just like an artist's sketch can become a masterwork, or a film-maker's short can be developed into a blockbuster, the kernels of great software was laid down.

I don't know how many managers or marketing guys actually attend hackathons usually, but if they'd attened the one I went to at the weekend, they would have taken away a very important lesson.

Every team had to present what they'd built. Some had fully working software, others had prototypes, a few had a series of screenshots.

One team came up and showed their project plan! Seriously! All they had was a bit of paper showing the roles they were assigned, the plan for what each person was to do, a few vauge user flow diagrams, and no software.

It was plain to see that a hackday isn't how good software gets made. It's not even the ideal way to make software.

It's just a way to make software. The inventions on Scrapheap Challenge would never be released to the public after a weekend with a blow-torch - and yet some of the software built at the hackday was useful and ready to be released the next day.

With all the tools available to the competent programmer, it's now incredibly easy to write useful, scalable, high quality, innovative, beautiful, creative, playful, and helpful software in a weekend.

Or, you can just build a text to speech service which randomly calls your phone and says rude words to you.

Hackdays are about fun.

Note to Americans, Junkyard Wars is the US remake of Scrapheap Challenge. ↩︎

Video From GovCamp #ukgc12

@edent — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 17:18:01 +0000

The lovely people from UK Gov Camp have put up some of the videos from the barcamp.

Here's me chatting about mobile and the WordPress Mobile Pack - from Steph at Helpful Technology.

See my blog post about the day.

Gov Camp UK

@edent — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:50:27 +0000

As per the meme, here are my 20 points on Gov Camp UK.

I dawdled and so was only able to get a ticket for Saturday. I feel like I missed out on a lot of interesting conversations.

BarCamps should be recorded for posterity.

It's a point I've made before. Cameras and disk space are so cheap, we should record what we say and do at BarCamps by default. Now, that may inhibit some of the conversations and reduce the "Chatham House" aspect - but individuals can decide whether or not they're happy for their sessions to be recorded.

Take business cards.

Take lots of business cards. So many serendipitous meetings that it's hard to remember who's who. Make sure that your business card carries your Twitter name.

Don't take a laptop (or, at the very least, use it rarely).

As I sat down in one session, a woman said to me "Gosh! You can tell it's a techie event; every one is using their laptops and no one is talking to each other." She was absolutely right. The day is mostly about communication and - while Twitter is great for that - nothing beats turning to the person sitting next to you and having a natter.

Present.

I think it's an immutable law of BarCamp that everyone has to present. Even if it's just standing up and saying who you are.

Guaging interest is hard.

I ran two sessions, one only filled up about a fifth of the cavernous space I booked - which was pretty embarrassing. The other was so full it had people sitting on the floor. Don't be afraid of moving rooms - but make sure you let everyone know where you are going.

WordPress is really popular.

I was surprised by how many attendees were WordPress aficionados. It's good to see that Government isn't entirely tied up in proprietary crap.

QR codes generate a lot of interest.

The session I ran on QR was well attended and produced lots of positive feedback. Some people are just starting out with QR and there were loads of great ideas on how they could be used.

The police have an odd sense of humour.

One was wearing a shirt which read "Keep Calm and Carry Baton Rounds" the other, in his introduction, said "I work for the police, previously I was at Rentokill. It's basically the same job!" While I appreciate near the knuckle humour and value free expression, I found the two incidents made me really uncomfortable. Had I turned up wearing a "Burn down the Government" t-shirt, I doubt I would have received a positive welcome. Still, I'd rather people felt free to express themselves at a BarCamp than not.

HMRC will happily let you take the piss out of them.

They're very good sports and lovely people in real life.

Government needs more freedom to innovate.

That was a moan that I heard from several people. They wanted to do amazing things with the knowledge they'd gleaned - but getting sign off in a risk adverse, budget conscious department is tricky.

Building should mean building.

The second day was meant to be about getting people to build, create, or make stuff. In my WordPress session, I asked for volunteers to upgrade their blog to WordPress Mobile Pack live on stage. Amazingly, three did! Now, none of them were major Government sites(!) but it showed people were willing to take a risk and build things.

Perhaps the grid needs curating?

There were too many sessions in the first timeslot, and empty rooms later in the afternoon. There's no way of judging how popular a slot will be, so many sessions were in an room that didn't suit the attendees.

There's no such thing as a silly question.

As a presenter, it's really important not to dismiss a question. If someone hasn't understood something basic, it's more likely to be the presenter at fault than the person asking the question.

Government needs to celebrate their successes more loudly.

I saw some amazing websites, prototypes, and service - none of which I'd heard about. I think it's entirely appropriate for people to make some noise about things they've done well.

Gender Balance.

For a technology conference - there were more than 3 women! A lot more! It's a common moan in IT that the industry has trouble attracting women. Perhaps they all work in local government?

Not Many Female Presenters.

Perhaps it was the sessions I went to, or perhaps they all presented on day one - but there didn't seem to be many women presenting. I wonder if this is something which needs to be addressed?

Big Business Isn't Much different

Everyone goes on about how inefficient Government is and how they're usless at getting anything done. All the complaints I heard from Government people were the same as those that I've heard while working at big businesses. And start-ups. Every organisation has inefficiencies.

Take Photos

I was too busy chatting to snap anything. Luckily there's a rather good set on flickr.

Overall

A great day, thought provoking, useful. I hope I convinced some people about why mobile is important and how awesome QR codes are.