mashed08

Home Camp TV - CurrentCost Live mashup with Rich Cumbers

rss@youtube.com (andypiperuk) — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 07:31:59 -0800

Author: andypiperuk
Keywords: cclive currentcost home camp home camp tv rich cumbers webapp dashboard game mashed energy efficiency
Added: February 16, 2009

Mashed 08 - Microsoft Robotics excerpt

rss@youtube.com (jools1) — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 11:07:07 -0700

Author: jools1
Keywords: mashed08
Added: June 24, 2008

Mashed 08 - Andy Hume Multimap

rss@youtube.com (jools1) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 08:04:38 -0700

Author: jools1
Keywords: mashed08
Added: June 23, 2008

Mashed 08 - Saturday morning

rss@youtube.com (jools1) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 07:20:42 -0700

Author: jools1
Keywords: mashed08
Added: June 23, 2008

Carbon Goggles

rss@youtube.com (JimPurbrick) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 05:46:43 -0700

Author: JimPurbrick
Keywords: co2 carbon emissions computer global warming visualisation hud virtual reality worlds secondlife amee mashed08
Added: June 23, 2008

Dale Lanes winning hack at Mashed08

rss@youtube.com (chrisdpcooke) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 03:46:51 -0700

Author: chrisdpcooke
Keywords: mashed08 dalelane currentcost
Added: June 23, 2008

Mashed08 MashRoc

rss@youtube.com (CustardCat) — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 15:57:11 -0700

Author: CustardCat
Keywords: mashed08 mashed bbc rocket mashroc camera video alexandra palace
Added: June 22, 2008

Shevek of Adventure in Technology Talks to O'ReillyGMT

rss@youtube.com (OReillyGMT) — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 15:50:38 -0700

Author: OReillyGMT
Keywords: oreillygmt mashed08 BBC adventure technology bristol
Added: June 22, 2008

Neil Crosby of SearchMonkey talks to O'ReillyGMT Mashed08

rss@youtube.com (OReillyGMT) — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 15:34:33 -0700

Author: OReillyGMT
Keywords: oreillygmt Neil Crosby Mashed08
Added: June 22, 2008

Spence 2x07 [Mashed 08] Social Flight Simulator Presentation

rss@youtube.com (EwanSpence) — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 15:24:37 -0700

Author: EwanSpence
Keywords: mashed mashed08 mashed2008 socialflightsim 90second hackday presentation pyrotechnics sylvestermccoy ewanspence
Added: June 22, 2008

Matthew Cashmore - BBC Backstage - O'ReillyGMT Mashed08

rss@youtube.com (OReillyGMT) — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 15:18:45 -0700

Author: OReillyGMT
Keywords: oreillygmt Matthew Cashmore Mashed BBC Backstage mashed08 hack day
Added: June 22, 2008

Ant Miller Launches a Rocket - Mashed08 at Alexandra Palace

rss@youtube.com (OReillyGMT) — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 14:49:15 -0700

Author: OReillyGMT
Keywords: oreillygmt rocket launch Mashed08 Ant Miller
Added: June 22, 2008

Chris Heilmann of Yahoo! talks to O'ReillyGMT at Mashed08

rss@youtube.com (OReillyGMT) — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 14:28:22 -0700

Author: OReillyGMT
Keywords: oreillygmt Chris Heillman Mashed08 Yahoo alexandra palace london
Added: June 22, 2008

Milverton Wallace talks to O'ReillyGMT at Mashed08

rss@youtube.com (OReillyGMT) — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 17:33:21 -0700

Author: OReillyGMT
Keywords: oreillygmt Milverton Wallace Mashed08 HackDay Events
Added: June 21, 2008

Phil Wilson talks to O'ReillyGMT at Mashed08

rss@youtube.com (OReillyGMT) — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 17:27:17 -0700

Author: OReillyGMT
Keywords: oreillygmt Phil Wilson Mashed08 Python Bath University
Added: June 21, 2008

O'Reilly Makezine Weekend Projects Projected Big at Mashed08

rss@youtube.com (OReillyGMT) — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 16:59:33 -0700

Author: OReillyGMT
Keywords: oreillygmt Mashed08 O'Reilly Makezine Weekend Projects
Added: June 21, 2008

O'Reilly Makezine Weekend Projects Projected Big at Mashed08

rss@youtube.com (OReillyGMT) — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 16:57:09 -0700

Author: OReillyGMT
Keywords: oreillygmt O'Reilly Makezine Weekend Projects Mashed08
Added: June 21, 2008

Alia Sheikh talks to Craig Smith of O'Reilly GMT at Mashed08

rss@youtube.com (OReillyGMT) — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 13:46:36 -0700

Author: OReillyGMT
Keywords: oreillygmt Alia Sheikh Mashed08 Kingswood Warren
Added: June 21, 2008

Paul Johnston talks to Craig Smith, O'ReillyGMT at Mashed08

rss@youtube.com (OReillyGMT) — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 13:17:23 -0700

Author: OReillyGMT
Keywords: oreillygmt Paul Johnston Mashed08 O'ReillyGMT
Added: June 21, 2008

Glyn Wintle of the Open Rights Group at Mashed08

rss@youtube.com (OReillyGMT) — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 12:54:30 -0700

Author: OReillyGMT
Keywords: oreillygmt Glyn Wintle Mashed08 DoctorWho BBC
Added: June 21, 2008

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Echonest Artist Graph

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 04:10:00 -0800

I've just recently had a chance to mess around with the Echonest data set that Paul Lamere and Justin Donaldson presented in their tutorial on Music Visualization at ISMIR 2009. Unfortunately I wasn't able to attend the tutorial because we were in the other room talking about Linked Data and music. But I'm a big fan music viz. I wanted to do a "remote hack" using the data set for Boston Music Hackday ala Adam Lindsay's Remix Shell but alas the weekend got away from me.

But finally I made some pretty pictures.

I suppose first we had better discuss the data set. This is a "small" dump from the Echonest API that includes about 70k artists and their connections to "similar artists" as decided by Echonest (which in my experience does a pretty good job). The dataset also includes Echonest's notions for hotttness and familiarity values for each artist.

Now about the picture. We take the largest connected component (turns out that includes about 54k artists) and create an undirected graph where each artist is a node and each similarity relation is an edge. We use the awesome igraph library to handle the graph structure. Luckily igraph includes some nice graph layout options including the super fast Dynamic Recursive graph Layout algorithm (DrL) which we use here. This is similar to what Tamas did for the Last.fm graph. Also note the color corresponds to the "hotness" - hotter artists are more red - and the size corresponds to "familiarity" - the more familiar artists are larger.

Of course it would be nice to see some artist names and some more interactivity, but hopefully that's coming soon along with some interesting details about the structure of the Echonest artist network. But now it's turkey time :-)

Beams collide in Big Bang machine

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 14:44:39 -0800

Engineers operating the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have smashed together proton beams in the machine for the first time.

Cockermouth starts journey back from flood devastation

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 02:53:00 -0800

Cumbria police urge thorough checks as owners return to 900 homes and businesses

Get the latest on the floods with our live blog

Cumbria police are reopening 900 homes and business in Cockermouth to residents this morning as the county faces up to the aftermath of the most severe flooding in its history.

Thousands remain affected by the devastation, with roads and bridges closed and several schools shut. Six bridges have been destroyed, with the Calva bridge in Workington reportedly on the verge of collapse. Sixteen bridges are closed or destroyed in the county, with 25 roads out of use.

Other parts of Britain have been badly hit. Police in Wales are searching for a 21-year-old woman believed to have been swept away by a swollen river on Saturday night.

The woman went into the river Usk near Watergate Bridge, Brecon, and yesterday police, fire brigades and mountain rescue teams searched a mile long stretch of fast flowing water.

Homes and businesses affected by floods in Cockermouth would be reopened to residents this morning, Cumbria police said, but they warned that thorough checks must take place before people are allowed to re-enter.

"Many homes will be contaminated, some walls and structures may be unstable and electricity supplies may be dangerous," said a police spokeswoman. "All of these things must be checked before you can re-enter your property."

Residents wanting to return to damaged buildings will be allocated a United Utilities officer and structural engineer to ensure the property is safe for entry.

"They will also be providing rubber gloves and an information pack with emergency contact numbers and advice for those returning to damaged property," the spokeswoman said.

The chief constable of Cumbria police, Craig Mackey, praised the "real sense of community spirit" shown in Cumbria and paid tribute to PC Bill Barker, who died when Northside bridge collapsed on Friday.

"Bill is a hero who died saving the lives of others and our thoughts are with his family at this devastating time," Mackey said.

"He was an inspiration to everyone he knew and will be sadly missed by all his friends here in the constabulary."

The chief constable said more than 12,000 tributes had been left for Barker on a Facebook tribute page.

"I am touched by the real sense of community spirit that has been shown during this difficult time in Cumbria - which has seemed to spread across the UK," he said.

"We have had an incredible amount of support offered to us by volunteers and partners from around the country, and I have no doubt that together we'll be able to rebuild our communities and steadily restore a degree of normality for the people of Cumbria."

The chief executive of Cumbria county council, Jill Stannard, said the damage from the floods had run into "tens of millions of pounds". She pledged that authorities would be able to deliver prescriptions to people stranded in the county.

"We are confident we can reach everyone," she said. "We have been reaching people over the weekend. People get very frightened - totally understandably because this is very traumatic. It is important that people listen to advice through the media and don't listen to rumour and gossip."

Hundreds of police, soldiers and volunteers were in action along Britain's western coast as a second slow-moving weather front unloaded hours more rain from Dartmoor to the Scottish border, with more expected this week.

A canoeist died on Saturday after being trapped under a fallen tree in the river Dart. Chris Wheeler's body was recovered after a mountain rescue team trekked for two hours through storms.

RAF helicopters remained on alert near Workington and Cockermouth. The latter town's main street finally emerged from 2.5m (8ft) deep floodwaters. It was littered with smashed trees, abandoned cars and ruined goods from local shops.

Army Bailey bridges are likely to be installed temporarily to relieve Northside where MP Tony Cunningham said the police station was out of action and the medical centre was down to its last supplies. "Until we can get bridges, people are having to take a 90-mile round trip to reach their former neighbours."

Canon Bryan Rowe, of St Michael's Church in Workington, said: "We are isolated. We are a long way from a motorway now. We can't even go to the other side of the river. It's going to take months to put right. But you won't hear any twining [Cumbrian dialect for moaning]. Nobody is going: 'Woe is us'. Everybody is just trying to help somebody else."

Police taped off the whole centre of Cockermouth yesterday as 13 buildings were declared in imminent danger of collapse and engineers struggled to restore street lighting in pouring rain. About 60 people remain at emergency centres in the town and Workington, but more than 250 are staying with friends, relatives or at hotels and B&Bs, most of them unlikely to return home before Christmas.

The speed and strength of the flood tore down a 3m wall around the front garden of Wordsworth's birthplace in Cockermouth. The handsome Georgian townhouse is intact but no one is being allowed access because of possible structural problems. The town's statue of the sixth Earl of Mayo in the centre of Main Street survived on its pedestal, as did the Christmas tree.

"We are determined to pick ourselves up as much as we can in time for Christmas," said local town and county councillor Eric Nicholson.

Martin Wainwright

Adam Gabbatt

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Flooding claims second victim as emergency supplies sent in

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 16:09:27 -0800

. Canoeist dies and woman is swept away by river
. Checks on 1,800 Cumbria bridges after six collapse

Torrential downpours claimed a second victim today in Devon as emergency medical supplies and food parcels were sent to communities marooned by floods in Cumbria, and rescue teams searched the swollen river Usk in Wales for a missing woman.

Hundreds of police, soldiers and volunteers were in action along Britain's western seaboard, as a second slow-moving weather front unloaded hours' more rain from Dartmoor to the Scottish border, with even more expected this week.

Engineers are examining 1,800 bridges in Cumbria, where six have collapsed after the floods on the rivers Cocker and Derwent, which meet at Cockermouth. The county council estimates damage to property and infrastructure as at least £75m, with detailed surveys likely to take weeks to reach a final bill. The eventual insurance bill for Cumbria could reach £100m.

The port of Workington, already inundated by Thursday's record downpour, was cut in half when a crack in the central arch of Calva bridge widened to six inches and the road slumped by a foot. Hundreds of people have been left stranded on the Northside housing estate, where the area's Labour MP, John Cunningham, appealed for food and medical supplies.

A canoeist died after being trapped under a fallen tree in the river Dart. Chris Wheeler's body was recovered after a mountain rescue team had trekked for two hours through storms.

Two inshore rescue craft were launched on the Usk near Brecon after witnesses saw a woman being swept away by floodwater. A Sea King helicopter and dog teams joined the search, while other RAF helicopters remained on alert near Workington and Cockermouth, whose main street finally emerged from 2.5 metre (8ft) floods, littered with smashed trees, abandoned cars and ruined goods from local shops.

Military Bailey bridges are likely to be installed temporarily to relieve Northside, where Cunningham said the police station was out of action and the medical centre was down to its last nappies and other supplies. He said: "Until we can get bridges, people are having to take a 90-mile round trip to reach their former neighbours."

Canon Bryan Rowe, of St Michael's Church in Workington, said: "We are isolated. We are a long way from a motorway now. We can't even go to the other side of the river. It's going to take months to put right. But you won't hear any twining [Cumbrian dialect for moaning]. Nobody is going, 'Woe is us', everybody is just trying to help somebody else."

Police taped off the whole centre of Cockermouth, as 13 buildings were declared in imminent danger of collapse and engineers struggled to restore street lighting in pouring rain. About 60 people remain at emergency centres in the town and Workington, but more than 250 are staying with friends, relatives or at hotels and B&Bs, most of them unlikely to return home before Christmas.

The speed and strength of the flood tore down a 3 metre wall round the front garden of Wordsworth's birthplace in Cockermouth, and although the handsome Georgian townhouse is intact, no one is being allowed access because of possible structural problems. The town's statue of the sixth Earl of Mayo, which surveys the centre of Main Street, survived on its pedestal, as did the Christmas tree.

"We are determined to pick ourselves up as much as we can in time for Christmas," said local town and county councillor Eric Nicholson. Hospital manager Chris Holland, helping police direct traffic as a Churches Together in Cumbria volunteer, said: "We want to get the band to play in the centre, sort out the Christmas tree and lay something on as soon as it's practicable."Debris was being cleared from the town and Workington, and a lone pheasant stalking Cockermouth's Main Street had to look hard for remains of groceries swept from a local deli.

The Association of British Insurers estimated the insurance bill in Cumbria at £100m. More than 500 claims have already been received and processing will take place urgently, the organisation said. The government has promised an extra £1m emergency reconstruction aid, matching a pledge from the North West regional development association.

Proposals are gathering pace to rename the replacement for Workington's vanished Northside bridge after PC Bill Barker, the father of four who was swept into the Derwent while directing traffic away.

The Environment Agency said four severe flood warnings had been issued for Cumbria, though this was later reduced to one. In the rest of the UK rain and strong winds are set to continue throughout the early week, according to the Met Office. Tomorrow the showers will be most widespread and heaviest in the west.

Martin Wainwright

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Country diary: Lake District

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 16:06:15 -0800

Lake District

The luminous crescent moon glimmering against the silhouette of Ambleside church spire on Thursday belied the driving rain that had just fallen during the day. The heavens had opened, causing the biggest downpour in Britain's history with more than a foot of rain (12.3in) falling in 24 hours. The Environment Agency gauge at Seathwaite, for long known as the wettest spot in England, recorded the new "high" - 314.4mm. The deluge triggered mayhem, having already been primed by earlier rain. Sheets of precipitation ran off the waterlogged ground and into the becks and rivers, which stampeded downhill causing landslides and destroying bridges and collapsing embankments. From Buttermere with its landslips of shale spilling across the road above Crummock Water (and with two bridges destroyed near Lorton) to Thirlmere where the A591 was blocked by a landslide, few Lakeland valleys escaped. Waterfalls cascaded down crags, sweeping scree on to roads so that rocks litter the tarmac, some big enough to have smashed through drystone walls and leave gouges in the fellsides in their wake.

The roads in many valleys are closed, with bridges at the time of writing awaiting safety checks. Great Langdale has been cut off, with its locals having to negotiate the challenge of notorious Red Bank, a car's width wide on its one-in-four gradient, for what would ordinarily be everyday journeys. All this pales into insignificance against the flood damage in the towns of Keswick, Cockermouth and Workington caused by torrenting rivers booming down from the hills. Hundreds have been made homeless and PC Bill Barker was killed guiding people away from the Workington bridge, which was about to be swept away by the combined force of the rivers Derwent and Cocker, the town now split from its component part of Seaton. It is in accepting things could have been still worse that Lakeland folk, saddened by events, keep on keeping calm and carrying on in the traditional spirit among these capricious fells.

Tony Greenbank

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Fig wasps travel further than any other insect

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 16:05:04 -0800

The tiny creatures can cover 100 miles in two days

At just 1.5mm in size, the fig wasp is easily missed. But new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals it is a world champion among insects. The previous longest recorded distance for an insect transporting pollen was roughly six miles. But the fig wasp has smashed that record. A genetic study of Namibian figs conducted by Sophia Ahmed, Roger Butlin, Stephen Compton and Philip Gilmartin of Leeds University has found that in less than a 48-hour period - call that a lifetime for a fig wasp - the insect can travel well over 100 miles.

Or rather the female of the species does. Females do all the hard work here, travelling, producing offspring and pollinating figs. The males are around only for mating. But the way the females get from tree to tree over such astonishing distances is no aerodynamic phenomenon of genetic engineering. "Their wings aren't that strong and they are not very good fliers," says Compton. "What happens is that they get caught up in an air column and get swept along by the wind, which in this part of the Ugab river valley in the Namib Desert can gust up to more than 30kph [17mph]."

Given that it's hard enough to spot a fig wasp (or Ceratosolen arabicus), let alone tag it, the research team relied on the distance between trees as a form of measurement. Due to the harsh climate, only 79 trees survive along a 155-miles stretch of the river bed, and a DNA sample of each tree and some of their seeds enabled Ahmed and Butlin to identify which trees had mated with which. As the trees are only pollinated by the fig wasp, it was possible to measure the distance travelled by the insects that had delivered the pollen.

Compton says that "more birds and animals feed on fig trees than on any other plant in the rainforest. These trees have a good chance of surviving if they become isolated through deforestation." And if they do, they'll have a tiny wasp to thank.

John Crace

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

After the deluge, a sodden Cumbria begins to clear up

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 16:05:44 -0800

It was two days after the heaviest rainfall in British history and with more rain starting to fall some residents of Cockermouth were only just being rescued from their homes. Many were glad simply to have survived. Others were left wondering what could have been done to prevent such a disaster - and why crucial new flood defences were not completed last summer

They began the search at midday, just as the new rains came. Teams of RAF personnel were ordered to search flood-hit Cockermouth and check its streets for signs of life. The men knocked loudly on the doors of homes whose ground floors had hours earlier been under water and shouted for replies at empty buildings.

Early reports indicated that some residents were still stranded at the Old Mill homes just outside the town, but that a police boat team had managed to feed them the night before. The military personnel were told to expect anything, even bodies, and that people found trapped in their homes were likely to be suffering from shock and hypothermia.

For the residents of the west Cumbrian town, hopes that they might be allowed to return home yesterday quickly faded as police prevented them entering potentially unsafe houses. The collapse of four local bridges - one killing a police officer - following the heaviest rainfall ever recorded in 24 hours last Thursday had led to deep concern over the structural safety of scores of Cockermouth's terraced granite homes.

Frantic attempts to secure a temporary place to live for the hundreds affected will begin this week. Yesterday, families were already discussing moving into local holiday lets, hotels and even caravan parks.

Ken Sugden, who waded from his home on Waterloo Street on Thursday night as the flood waters from the Derwent and Cocker began to rise, said: "The big thing now is where everyone is going to stay. There is going to be a hell of a scramble. Are there enough beds locally?"

As the rains intensified yesterday afternoon, the search of the town's houses went on, starting at the west end and moving east. Meanwhile, officials from the Environment Agency started checking Cockermouth's flood defences, aware that debris such as tree trunks carried downstream during the flooding would have damaged even the most robust of them.

Although most locals accept that the storm was of such a magnitude that little could have been done to prevent the damage, scrutiny will now focus on planned improvements to the town's flood defence.

A key set of flood defence improvements in the centre of Cockermouth were crucially delayed over the summer, leaving the town vulnerable, the Observer can disclose.

The improvements were part of a package agreed after the great storms of 2005 flooded the town and nearby Carlisle. Although two phases have been completed - around Waterloo Street, which was inundated during the recent floods, and a culvert around Bitterbeck - a third component of the strategy called the Gote was not started. According to documents from a Cockermouth town council meeting, the work was scheduled for last summer.

An Environment Agency spokesman could not give a start date for work to the Gote, but doubted it would have been sufficient to cope with a "once-in-a-1,000-years" event, as last week's flooding has been described. Most residents, drinking tea in Cockermouth's makeshift soup kitchen, were phlegmatic about the unfinished flood defence scheme.

"I doubt the Gote would have made much difference, and it's a tricky drainage system because it runs underground and then bends up," said Keith Fitton, 59. He and his wife Liz simply wanted their dogs back - the animals had been stranded for almost 30 hours on the top floor of their home in Waterloo Street. Ironically, he hoped that Molly, a Portuguese mountain dog, and Smudge, a border collie Labrador cross, had something to drink.

Fitton said he remembered lying in bed, waiting for the end. With only one good arm - his other was paralysed in a motorcycle accident - he was helpless as the water rose up his staircase. "There were nine stairs left, then seven, then five. The noise, the gusts of the wind and the torrent of the water. It was like Armageddon," he said.

Eventually, at 8am on Friday, an RAF winchman came through his skylight and hoisted him to safety.

Around the corner, National Trust officials were staring balefully at the imposing building on Main Street beyond the police cordon. There, looming over the thoroughfare, stood William's Wordsworth's birthplace.

Jeremy Barton, project manager for Wordsworth House, listed what had gone missing. "The wrought iron gates at the front have completely gone, they've been lifted away and dumped well into the Irish Sea by now. The front garden wall has also gone."

The National Trust shop next door had suffered even greater damage. Barton said staff - many of whom would lose their own homes in the sudden flood - fought waist deep in freezing water as they tried to shift stock from the basement and ground floor. But Barton admitted he was trying hard not to be too downbeat - after all, the river that had created so much chaos was the same funnel of water that Wordsworth so adored. "Wordsworth loved that river," said Barton. It was that building - a water line visible around its lower midriff yesterday - from which Wordsworth, born in 1770, had watched the Derwent as a boy and which he wrote about in The Prelude.

Beside the police cordon, a purple canoe lay stranded on the road. Throughout the town, scarlet lifeboats were parked up on dry roads as the flood waters sank by two inches an hour until, not long after 9am, Main Street appeared in its entirety for the first time since the floods arrived. A town in ruins emerged. Shops had been smashed completely. Mills Newsagents had its front window missing and its contents had been scooped out by the torrent. Greggs bakery seemed fine, as did Boots. The front of the Marmaris restaurant was, like most of the others, smudged with the stain of dirty floodwater. Across the way, a car was parked across the road, its front bumpers ripped off. Geese waddled down the town's major artery for the first time in anyone's memory. On the side streets, returning business owners began assessing the damage. Inside turf accountants Chas Kendall, the floor was littered with sodden newspapers and rolled-up rolls of carpet. Outside, a battered tree trunk lay across the pavement.

The talk across town was of insurance; if you had it the floods were awful, if not, the damage was total. "My life's stopped," said one shopkeeper who did not want to be named. But as the rains grew stronger while the search continued, talk concentrated on getting anyone who was trapped out before the rivers rose again. Resident Alan Smith said: "The thing with the Cocker is it can fall as quickly as it can rise."

RAF warrant officer Dave Taylor said: "If people are still out there, chances are they would be suffering from hypothermia." Local radio stations carried reassuring messages from the Environment Agency that the "worst is over", as panic began rising and the rains rolled in. Phone-in programmes swopped eulogies to Bill Barker, the police officer who was directing motorists away from Northside bridge in nearby Workington when it collapsed and he disappeared into the swollen waters of the Derwent.

Elsewhere, mountain rescue officers more used to tramping the fells - smothered in thick grey cloud throughout yesterday - were down in the town helping the search. Most locals stood by and watched, exchanging tales of luck.

Former military officer Daniel Bancroft, 29, an imposing figure, described how he pushed boatloads of people through the streets while tiptoeing in water up to his neck. Yesterday, he could not find his van, which had been parked near to the Derwent. But he had saved his grandmother. "Her place was flooded and I just picked her up and carried her towards higher land."

Sugden, meanwhile, circulated news around Cockermouth's soup kitchen that a nine-month-old baby belonging to Chris and Rachel Freer was doing fine after being rescued by lifeboats.

Later, as night approached, Chris appeared, beaming as he described how the family had been trapped upstairs at their home in Waterloo Street for 24 hours. "We managed to get some tinned food out and the camping stove, but then you hear Radio Cumbria and the level is due to rise another metre and it starts getting pretty scary. We were starting to think that maybe even upstairs is not going to be enough."

Thankfully, he said, his son Ben had slept through most of the commotion and seemed unscathed. "He even managed to sleep through the sound of the rescue helicopters."

For now, such tales lift the spirits of the people of Cockermouth, but many appreciate that their nightmare has just begun.

Mark Townsend

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Frontloaded and zipped up - the Full Frontal 2009 keynote

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 08:45:25 -0800

Here are the slides, the audio recording and my notes for the keynote of the full frontal conference held yesterday in Brighton, England. It was a blast, thank you Remy and Julie!

Slides on Slideshare

Frontloaded and zipped up - the full frontal keynote

Audio recording

You can get the recording of the talk over at archive.org - recorded on my macbook, so there are some volume fluctuations.

Talk description

The following was the description of the talk introducing the ideas to the attendees of full frontal.

Frontloaded and zipped up - do loose types sink ships?

JavaScript had a bumpy ride up to now, from its origins as a CGI-replacement, initiator of countless popups and annoying effects over the renaissance as Ajax enabler up to becoming wrapped up in libraries to work around the hell that is browser differences. With the ubiquity of JavaScript comes a new challenge. How do we keep JavaScript safe when browsers don't really distinguish between different sources and give them all the same rights? Why do we still judge the usefulness of JavaScript by how badly browsers speak it? Learn about some environments you can use JavaScript in securely and marvel at the magic and annoyances that are technologies that try to put a lock on the issue of JavaScript security.

A quick trip down memory lane.

When I first encountered JavaScript it was mainly used to do simple calculators, window manipulation and simple form validation. The main interface used was the browser object model with window being the main object and form and element being the collections to manipulate. You added content either by changing the value of a form field or by using document.write() with the latter being different from browser to browser. The other thing you had was the images array and this is what we used extensively to create rollovers.

Event handling was done with on{event} inline handlers and the body always had an onload handler on it.

Bring on the bling!

That however did not stop us from already abusing JavaScript to create pointless bells and whistles. Status bar tickers, title changing scripts and moving popup windows were the first to annoy the end user and they were just the start.

More bling.

With browsers starting to allow you to manipulate more of the document (via document.all and document.layers) and new and bespoke CSS extensions we had even more options to do very annoying and pointless things. Animated menus, rainbow cycling scrollbars, the floating (and flickering) Geocities logo, mousetrails and other abominations were built to bling up our sites and subsequently the audience got sick of JavaScript and discarded it as a toy.

Ajax for the win!

This all changed when Ajax came around and there was no way not to have some way or another you load content on demand using XMLhttpRequest - if you wanted to have a cool web site that is. And of course people used it wrongly.

Security scares.

As people used JavaScript to load information that should not be visible to the world and it is easy to intercept and see everything that happens in a browser in JavaScript we have more and more security scares coming up.

Is JavaScript a security problem?

This bears the question if JavaScript in itself is a security problem and if we should discard it at all.

Security flaws start at the backend but JavaScript gets the blame.

Last week I came across an interesting survey by the security company Cenzic - get the PDF here. They looked at the state of the web and the main security problems in the first two quarters of 2009. The survey showed that the browser was responsible for only 8% of the overall security issues.

One thing that is interesting is that most security flaws start with a problem on the backend but get blamed on JavaScript. XSS is a backend problem, but it becomes a problem as JavaScript is designed to give scripts too many rights.

JavaScript implementation vs. JavaScript

The problem is not JavaScript itself - well, not exclusively - it is mostly the implementation of it in browsers. And funnily enough this is how we measure the quality of the language. It is like judging the quality of a book by its movie.

Browsers don't care where JavaScript comes from.

To a browser, every JavaScript has the same rights to the content of the page and other things JavaScript can reach - and that includes cookies. When I can steal your cookies I can steal your users' identities and this is a big security issue.

Browsers are full of security holes.

The other issue is that browsers are full of security faults. This can be interesting as people complain about IE6 and its flaws, but the survey actually ranked Firefox and Safari as the most vulnerable browsers. The reasons are plugins in the case of Firefox and - in Safari's case - the iPhone. Interesting targets are always successful platforms.

Plugins have and still are a main source for security issues. Especially in the case of IE Flash and PDF display was always a problem. The reason is simple - plugins extend the reach of the browser into the file system and that is an interesting attack vector. So if you offer PDF documents and you want to keep your system secure it might be a good idea to loop them through a script that sets a header that forces user download - this also allows you to add statistics to the PDF downloads.

So we can't use JavaScript, right?

Which brings a lot of people not to trust JavaScript at all and see it as the source of all evil. Plugins like NoScript are all the rage and the security-conscious are happy to call JavaScript the source of all evil.

It is about spreading the joy of JavaScript.

JavaScript is an amazingly useful part of the interfaces we give our end users. Totally turning it off or not using it means we give up on a lot of things that our users should get and expect from an interface in 2009. I like that I can write a message while an attachment uploads in the background.

Learning JavaScript

The first thing to remember is that this is not 1997. We don't have to learn JavaScript by looking at other people's source code. Opera's web standards curriculum and The Yahoo video theatre are great resources to take your first steps into the JavaScript world.

What to use JavaScript for

The main thing is to remember what we should use JavaScript for:

slicker interfaces (autocomplete, asynchronous uploading)
warning users about flawed entries (password strength for example)
extending the interface options of HTML to become an application language (sliders, maps, comboboxes.)
Any visual effect that cannot be done safely with CSS (animation, menus.)

CSS has come a long way but unless you can control the animation and be sure it works cross-browser it is not a replacement. Menu systems using CSS only are a gimmick as they cannot be made keyboard accessible.

What not to use JavaScript for

Sensitive information (credit card numbers, any real user data)
Cookie handling containing session data
Trying to protect content (right-click scripts, email obfuscation)
Replacing your server / saving on server traffic without a fallback

What if you need more?

All this becomes an issue when you get into developing large web products where you push the envelope of what can be done with the web and the technologies right now. The new Yahoo homepage is one of these examples - in it we wanted to allow third party developers to build own applications and run them safely inside ours without endangering the privacy of our users.

You can limit yourself

One thing you can do is to limit yourself to the "safe" parts of a language. Douglas Crockford's AdSafe takes this approach and is meant as a guideline for ad providers.

You can pre-process JavaScript

The other option is to enforce the limitation of the language by pre-processing JavaScript and converting it to a safer subset. The main tool for this nowadays is Caja which has been invented by Google and now made workable by Google and Yahoo for the Open Social platform. Caja converts JavaScript to a safe subset - either on the client or on the server.

Things Caja doesn't allow you to do

To ensure the security of our applications, Caja stops you from using some things you might have gotten accustomed to using in the last few years.

Caja and HTML

Here are the things you cannot use in HTML:

name attributes
custom attributes
custom tags
unclosed tags
embed
iframe
link rel="."
javascript:void(0)
radio buttons in IE
relative URLs

Caja and JavaScript

Things you need to keep out of your JavaScript:

eval()
new Function()
strings as event handlers (node.onclick = '.';)
names ending with double / triple underscores
with function (with (obj) { . })
implicit global variables (specify var variable)
calling a method as a function
document.write
window.event
ajax requests returning JS

Caja and CSS

And last but not least things deemed dangerous in CSS are:

star hacks
underscore hacks
IE conditionals
Insert-after clear fix
expression()
*@import

Caja ready code examples

You can find a good collection of Caja ready code examples in the Yahoo Application Platform documentation.

Caja problems and making it easier

Whilst Caja is a great idea to ensure the security of widgets it is not without its problems. If you chose client-side conversion it means a massive dent in the performance of your application and even with server-side conversion it becomes harder to build new systems. For starters, Caja-converted code is very hard to read and therefore debug and in many cases it means that as a developer you need to change your ways.

Libraries and Caja compliance

Much like we fix browsers, we can also use libraries to make our Caja-compliant development easier. The first library to be fully Caja compliant is the Yahoo User Interface library and other libraries like jQuery have also shown interest in compliance.

Abstracting the issue with an own language - YML

The other way to make it easier to write secure code is to abstract most of th changes to our normal development ways out into an own markup language. Facebook had done this and in Yahoo's case there is the Yahoo Markup language or short YML. Using this language in a widget for the Yahoo homepage you can do Ajax requests and dig into the Yahoo social graph without having to write any JavaScript or server-side code.

Extending browsers

Another interesting way to make JavaScript development more interesting is to think about browser extensions. This starts with GreaseMonkey which allows Firefox users to extend any web site out there with new functionality using a few lines of Dom Scripting - a great way for example to do quick prototyping. Google Gears, Yahoo Browser Plus and and Mozilla Jetpack kick this idea up a notch and give you new APIs to extend the reach of the browser into local storage, allow for database access in JavaScript and give you worker threads to do heavy computations without slowing down the main interface. These extensions give browsers the power we would love to have to be able to deliver real applications inside browsers.

Moving out of the browser

The other thing you can do with JavaScript these days is to move outside the browser and take your HTML, CSS and JavaScript solutions to other platforms.

Widget frameworks

Widget frameworks have been around for a while with Konfabulator and Apple Dashboard widgets leading the way. Opera also allows you to run small applications outside the confines of a browser window. The interesting thing about widgets is that they always looked much prettier than most web solutions - mainly because PNG support was a given and not something you had to hack for MSIE.

W3C widgets

W3C widgets are a standard that allows you to zip up an HTML document with CSS, JavaScript and images and run it as a self-contained widget. Peter-Paul Koch has written a great introduction to W3C widgets and several mobile phone providers (first and foremost Vodafone) offer a way to run these widgets on handsets without the need to learn any mobile OS language or tools.

Adobe Air

Adobe Air has made it possible for web developers to write full-blown installable applications that run across several operating systems and have access to databases and the file system. Probably the most successful apps are Twitter clients and music apps like Spotify.

Command line JavaScript - Rhino

If you don't like all the fancy visual stuff and you want to use JavaScript to do some heavy data conversion you can use JavaScript on the command line using Rhino which is a Java implementation of JavaScript. The really cool thing about writing JavaScript for the command line is that it supports all the features of the language and you are not at the mercy of a browser to do it right.

Turning JavaScript Mashups into web services.

One rather new opportunity for developers is that you can use YQL or Yahoo Query Language to easily mash-up and filter data from several data sources on the web. YQL allows you to:

mashup data with a SQL-style syntax
filter down to the absolutely necessary data
return as XML, JSON, JSON-P and JSON-P-X
use Yahoo as a high-speed proxy to retrieve data from various sources.
use Yahoo as a rate limiting and caching proxy when providing data.

Retrieving data from an HTML document and choosing the right output format

Using YQL it is dead easy for example to retrieve the headlines from an HTML document with the following statement.

select * from html where url=&quot;http://2009.fullfrontal.org&quot; and xpath=&quot;//h3&quot;

YQL is a web service in itself and you can retrieve the data returned from this request in different formats.

XML returns the data as an XML file which is not that useful in a JavaScript environment.
JSON is natively supported and therefore much easier to parse.
JSON-P wraps the returned JSON object in a JavaScript function call and thereby makes it very easy to use in a script node (either hardcoded or created on the fly).
JSON-P-X wraps the returned JSON object in a JavaScript function call and returns the XML content (in this case the scraped HTML) as a string. This makes it very easy to use innerHTML to render the data in a browser without having to loop through the JSON object and re-assemble the string.

Retrieving photos for a certain geographical location

As a demo, try this out. In order to retrieve photos for a certain geographical location you can use the geo and Flickr APIs in a single YQL statement:

select farm,id,secret,owner.realname,server,title,urls.url.content from flickr.photos.info where photo_id in( select id from flickr.photos.search where woe_id in( select woeid from geo.places where text=&quot;london&quot; )
)

Try it out in your browser to see the resulting data.

Using a few lines of DOM scripting you can turn this into a nice web site showing these photos.

&lt;script type=&quot;text/javascript&quot;&gt;
function flickrgeophotos(o){ var f = document.getElementById('flickr'); var out = ''; var photos = o.query.results.photo; for(var i=0,j=photos.length;i&lt;j;i++){ var cur = photos[i]; out += '&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;' + cur.urls.url + '&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://farm' + cur.farm + '.static.flickr.com/' + cur.server + '/' + cur.id + '_' + cur.secret + '_s.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;' + cur.title + '&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;'; } f.innerHTML = out;
}
&lt;/script&gt;
&lt;script type=&quot;text/javascript&quot; src=&quot;http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=select%20farm%2Cid%2Csecret%2Cowner.realname%2Cserver%2Ctitle%2Curls.url.content%20from%20flickr.photos.info%20where%20photo_id%20in%20(select%20id%20from%20flickr.photos.search%20where%20woe_id%20in%20(select%20woeid%20from%20geo.places%20where%20text%3D'london%2Cuk')%20and%20license%3D4)&amp;format=json&amp;callback=flickrgeophotos&quot;&gt;&lt;/script&gt;

Moving JavaScript solutions into YQL to turn them into web services

The problem with the solution above is that you make yourself dependent on JavaScript to show these photos. If you want to still use JavaScript but allow users without it to see these photos you can use a YQL open table with embedded JavaScript to do the conversion. YQL uses Rhino to run and execute your JavaScript server-side and returns you the content you created inside an XML or JSON file. As JavaScript is executed on the server, you have full E4X support to make the use of XML painless and you can use advanced JavaScript like for each:

var amt = amount || 10;
var query = 'select farm,id,secret,owner.realname,server,title,'+ 'urls.url.content from flickr.photos.info where '+ 'photo_id in (select id from flickr.photos.search('+ amount + ') where ';
if(location!==null){ query += 'woe_id in (select woeid from geo.places where text=&quot;' + location+'&quot;) and ';
}
query += ' text=&quot;' + text + '&quot; and license=4)'
var x = y.query(query);
var out = &lt;ul/&gt;;
for each(var cur in x.results.photo){ var li = &lt;li/&gt;; var a = &lt;a/&gt;; a.@[&quot;href&quot;] = cur.urls.url; var img = &lt;img/&gt;; var url = 'http://farm' + cur.@farm + '.static.flickr.com/' + cur.@server + '/'+cur.@id + '_' + cur.@secret + '_s.jpg'; img.@[&quot;src&quot;] = url; img.@[&quot;alt&quot;] = cur.title; a.img = img; li.a = a; out.li += li;
}
response.object = out;

This, embedded in an open table means you can retrieve photos from Flickr as a UL now using the following YQL statement:

select * from flickr.photolist where text=&quot;me&quot; and location=&quot;uk&quot; and amount=20

You can then display the photos returned with PHP:

&lt;?php
$url = 'http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=use%20%22http://github.com/codepo8/yql-tables/raw/master/flickr/flickr.photolist.xml%22%20as%20flickr;%20select%20*%20from%20flickr%20where%20text=%22me%22%20and%20location=%22uk%22%20and%20amount=20&amp;format=xml&amp;diagnostics=false';
$ch = curl_init(); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETRNTRANSFER, 1); $output = curl_exec($ch); curl_close($ch);
$output = preg_replace('/.*&lt;ul&gt;/','&lt;ul&gt;',$output);
$output = preg_replace('/&lt;\/ul&gt;.*/','&lt;/ul&gt;',$output);
$output = preg_replace('/&lt;\?.*\?&gt;/','',$output);
$output = preg_replace('//','',$output);
echo $output;
?&gt;

Or with a very simple JavaScript, thanks to the JSON-P-X output format:

&lt;div id=&quot;jsflickr&quot;&gt;&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;script type=&quot;text/javascript&quot; charset=&quot;utf-8&quot;&gt;
function flickrlist(o){ var ct = document.getElementById('jsflickr'); ct.innerHTML = o.results;
}
&lt;/script&gt;
&lt;script type=&quot;text/javascript&quot; src=&quot;http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=use%20%22http://github.com/codepo8/yql-tables/raw/master/flickr/flickr.photolist.xml%22%20as%20flickr;%20select%20*%20from%20flickr%20where%20text=%22me%22%20and%20location=%22uk%22%20and%20amount=20&amp;format=xml&amp;diagnostics=false&amp;callback=flickrlist&quot;&gt;
&lt;/script&gt;

Another example - scraping HTML from web pages that need POST data

Another powerful example of what you can do with JavaScript when you embed it into a YQL table is the following:

&lt;?xml version=&quot;1.0&quot; encoding=&quot;UTF-8&quot;?&gt;
&lt;table xmlns=&quot;http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/schema/table.xsd&quot;&gt; &lt;meta&gt; &lt;author&gt;Christian Heilmann&lt;/author&gt; &lt;description&gt;HTML pages that need post data&lt;/description&gt; &lt;sampleQuery&gt;&lt;![CDATA[ select * from {table} where
url='http://isithackday.com/hacks/htmlpost/index.php' and postdata=&quot;foo=foo&amp;bar=bar&quot; and xpath=&quot;//p&quot;]]&gt;&lt;/sampleQuery&gt; &lt;documentationURL&gt;http://www.wait-till-i.com/2009/11/16/using-yql-to-read-html-from-a-document-that-requires-post-data/&lt;/documentationURL&gt; &lt;/meta&gt; &lt;bindings&gt; &lt;select itemPath=&quot;&quot; produces=&quot;XML&quot;&gt; &lt;urls&gt; &lt;url&gt;{url}&lt;/url&gt; &lt;/urls&gt; &lt;inputs&gt; &lt;key id=&quot;url&quot; type=&quot;xs:string&quot; required=&quot;true&quot; paramType=&quot;variable&quot;/&gt; &lt;key id=&quot;postdata&quot; type=&quot;xs:string&quot; required=&quot;true&quot; paramType=&quot;variable&quot;/&gt; &lt;key id=&quot;xpath&quot; type=&quot;xs:string&quot; required=&quot;true&quot; paramType=&quot;variable&quot;/&gt; &lt;/inputs&gt; &lt;execute&gt; &lt;![CDATA[ var myRequest = y.rest(url); var data = myRequest.accept('text/html'). contentType(&quot;application/x-www-form-urlencoded&quot;). post(postdata).response; var xdata = y.xpath(data,xpath); response.object = &lt;postresult&gt;{xdata}&lt;/postresult&gt;; ]]&gt; &lt;/execute&gt; &lt;/select&gt; &lt;/bindings&gt;
&lt;/table&gt;

As explained in detail in this blog post this JavaScript extends the HTML scraping option of YQL to allow for POST data to be sent to a document before retrieving the HTML:

select * from htmlpost where
url='http://isithackday.com/hacks/htmlpost/index.php' and postdata=&quot;foo=foo&amp;bar=bar&quot; and xpath=&quot;//p&quot;

Notice that YQL execute gives you full REST and HTTP support and has the xpath conversion built-in as a on own function.

oAuth in JavaScript - the netflix example

Another interesting example is the open table provided by Netflix, which shows you how you can use oAuth in JavaScript:

// Include the OAuth libraries from oauth.net
y.include(&quot;http://oauth.googlecode.com/svn/code/javascript/oauth.js&quot;);
y.include(&quot;http://oauth.googlecode.com/svn/code/javascript/sha1.js&quot;); // Collect all the parameters
var encodedurl = request.url;
var accessor = { consumerSecret: cks, tokenSecret: &quot;&quot;};
var message = { action: encodedurl, method: &quot;GET&quot;, parameters: [[&quot;oauth_consumer_key&quot;,ck],[&quot;oauth_version&quot;,&quot;1.0&quot;]]};
OAuth.setTimestampAndNonce(message); // Sign the request
OAuth.SignatureMethod.sign(message, accessor); try { // get the content from service along with the OAuth header, and return the result back out response.object = request.contentType('application/xml').header(&quot;Authorization&quot;, OAuth.getAuthorizationHeader(&quot;netflix.com&quot;, message.parameters)).get().response;
} catch(err) { response.object = {'result':'failure', 'error': err};
}

Liberating our JavaScript

As you can see switching environments liberates our JavaScript solutions and gives us much tighter security. So open your minds and don't judge JavaScript by its implementation. Instead have fun with it and use it wisely. With great power comes great responsibility.

Using YQL to read HTML from a document that requires POST data

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 11:37:26 -0800

YQL is a very cool tool to extract data from HTML documents on the web. Let's face facts: HTML is a terrible data format as far too many documents out there are either broken, have a wrong encoding or simply are not structured the way they should be. Therefore it can be quite a mess to try to read a HTML document and then find what you were looking for using regular expressions or tools that expect XML compatible HTML documents. Python fans will know about beautiful soup for example that does quite a good job working around most of these issues.

Using YQL you can however use a simple web service to extract data from HTML documents. As an added bonus, the YQL engine will remove falsely encoded characters and run the data retrieved through HTML Tidy to get valid HTML back. For example to get the body content of CNN.com all you'd need to do is a:

select * from HTML where url=&quot;http://cnn.com&quot;

The really cool thing about YQL is that it allows you to XPATH to filter down the data you want to extract. For example to get all the links from cnn.com you can use:

select * from html where xpath=&quot;//a&quot; and url=&quot;http://cnn.com&quot;

If you only want to have the text content of the links you can do the following:

select content from html where xpath=&quot;//a&quot; and url=&quot;http://cnn.com&quot;

You could use this for example to translate links using the Google translation API:

select * from google.translate where q in ( select content from html where url=&quot;http://cnn.com&quot; and xpath=&quot;//a&quot;
) and target=&quot;fr&quot;

Now, the other day my esteemed colleague Dirk Ginader came up with a bit of a brain teaser for me. His question was what to do when the HTML document you try to get needs POST data sent to it for it to render properly? You can append GET parameters to the URL, but not POST so the normal HTML document is not enough.

The good news is that YQL allows you to extend it in many ways, one of them is using an execute block in an open table to convert data with JavaScript on the server. The JavaScript has full e4x support and allows you to do any HTTP request. So the first step to solve Dirk's dilemma was to write a demo page (the form was added to test it out):

&lt;!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC &quot;-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN&quot; &quot;http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd&quot;&gt;
&lt;html&gt; &lt;title&gt;Test for HTML POST table&lt;/title&gt; &lt;body&gt; &lt;p&gt;Below this should be a &quot;yay!&quot; when the right POST data was submitted.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;?php if(isset($_POST['foo']) &amp;&amp; isset($_POST['bar'])){ echo &quot;&lt;p&gt;yay!&lt;/p&gt;&quot;;
}?&gt;
&lt;form action=&quot;index.php&quot; method=&quot;post&quot; accept-charset=&quot;utf-8&quot;&gt; &lt;input type=&quot;text&quot; name=&quot;foo&quot; value=&quot;is&quot;&gt; &lt;input type=&quot;text&quot; name=&quot;bar&quot; value=&quot;set&quot;&gt; &lt;input type=&quot;submit&quot; value=&quot;Continue &amp;rarr;&quot;&gt;
&lt;/form&gt; &lt;/body&gt;
&lt;/html&gt;

The next step was to write an open table for YQL that does the necessary request and transformations.

&lt;?xml version=&quot;1.0&quot; encoding=&quot;UTF-8&quot;?&gt;
&lt;table xmlns=&quot;http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/schema/table.xsd&quot;&gt; &lt;meta&gt; &lt;author&gt;Christian Heilmann&lt;/author&gt; &lt;description&gt;HTML pages that need post data&lt;/description&gt; &lt;sampleQuery&gt;&lt;![CDATA[
select * from {table} where
url='http://isithackday.com/hacks/htmlpost/index.php' and postdata=&quot;foo=foo&amp;bar=bar&quot; and xpath=&quot;//p&quot;]]&gt;&lt;/sampleQuery&gt; &lt;documentationURL&gt;&lt;/documentationURL&gt; &lt;/meta&gt; &lt;bindings&gt; &lt;select itemPath=&quot;&quot; produces=&quot;XML&quot;&gt; &lt;urls&gt; &lt;url&gt;{url}&lt;/url&gt; &lt;/urls&gt; &lt;inputs&gt; &lt;key id=&quot;url&quot; type=&quot;xs:string&quot; required=&quot;true&quot; paramType=&quot;variable&quot;/&gt; &lt;key id=&quot;postdata&quot; type=&quot;xs:string&quot; required=&quot;true&quot; paramType=&quot;variable&quot;/&gt; &lt;key id=&quot;xpath&quot; type=&quot;xs:string&quot; required=&quot;true&quot; paramType=&quot;variable&quot;/&gt; &lt;/inputs&gt; &lt;execute&gt; &lt;![CDATA[ var myRequest = y.rest(url); var data = myRequest.accept('text/html'). contentType(&quot;application/x-www-form-urlencoded&quot;). post(postdata).response; var xdata = y.xpath(data,xpath); response.object = &lt;postresult&gt;{xdata}&lt;/postresult&gt;; ]]&gt; &lt;/execute&gt; &lt;/select&gt; &lt;/bindings&gt;
&lt;/table&gt;

Using this, you can now send POST data to any HTML document (unless its robots.txt blocks the YQL server or it needs authentication) and get the HTML content back. To make it work, you define the table using the "use" command:

use &quot;http://isithackday.com/hacks/htmlpost/htmlpost.xml&quot; as htmlpost;
select * from htmlpost where
url='http://isithackday.com/hacks/htmlpost/index.php'
and postdata=&quot;foo=foo&amp;bar=bar&quot; and xpath=&quot;//p&quot;

You can try this example in the console.

I've also added the table to the open YQL tables repository on github so it should show up sooner or later in the console.

Here's a quick explanation what is going on:

&lt;?xml version=&quot;1.0&quot; encoding=&quot;UTF-8&quot;?&gt;
&lt;table xmlns=&quot;http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/schema/table.xsd&quot;&gt; &lt;meta&gt; &lt;author&gt;Christian Heilmann&lt;/author&gt; &lt;description&gt;HTML pages that need post data&lt;/description&gt; &lt;sampleQuery&gt;&lt;![CDATA[
select * from {table} where
url='http://isithackday.com/hacks/htmlpost/index.php' and postdata=&quot;foo=foo&amp;bar=bar&quot; and xpath=&quot;//p&quot;]]&gt;&lt;/sampleQuery&gt; &lt;documentationURL&gt;&lt;/documentationURL&gt; &lt;/meta&gt;

You define the schema and add meta data like the author, a description and a sample query. The latter is really important as that will show up in the YQL console when people click the table. You should normally also provide a documentation URL, but this post wasn't written when I wrote the table so I kept it empty.

 &lt;bindings&gt; &lt;select itemPath=&quot;&quot; produces=&quot;XML&quot;&gt; &lt;urls&gt; &lt;url&gt;{url}&lt;/url&gt; &lt;/urls&gt;

The bindings of the table describe the real API data endpoints the table points to. You have select, insert, update and delete - much like any other database. You provide an itemPath to cut down on the data returned and tell YQL if the data returned is XML or JSON.

 &lt;inputs&gt; &lt;key id=&quot;url&quot; type=&quot;xs:string&quot; required=&quot;true&quot; paramType=&quot;variable&quot;/&gt; &lt;key id=&quot;postdata&quot; type=&quot;xs:string&quot; required=&quot;true&quot; paramType=&quot;variable&quot;/&gt; &lt;key id=&quot;xpath&quot; type=&quot;xs:string&quot; required=&quot;true&quot; paramType=&quot;variable&quot;/&gt; &lt;/inputs&gt;

The inputs section defines what variables are expected, if they are required and what their IDs are. These IDs will be available for you as variables in the embedded JavaScript block and are normally defined by the API your table points to.

 &lt;execute&gt; &lt;![CDATA[ var myRequest = y.rest(url); var data = myRequest.accept('text/html'). contentType(&quot;application/x-www-form-urlencoded&quot;). post(postdata).response; var xdata = y.xpath(data,xpath); response.object = &lt;postresult&gt;{xdata}&lt;/postresult&gt;; ]]&gt; &lt;/execute&gt;

Here comes the JavaScript magic inside the execute block. The y.rest(url) command sends a REST query to the URL. in the easiest form this would just mean to get the data back but in our case we need to define a few more things. We expect html back so we set the request accept header to text/html. This also ensures that the result is run through HTML Tidy before it is returned. The content type has to be like a form submission and we need to send the string postdata as a post request. The response then contains whatever our request brings back.

As we want to have the handy functionality of the original HTML table, we also need to do an xpath transformation which is done with the method of the same name.

Any JavaScript in the execute block needs to define a response.object which will become the result of the YQL query. As you can see, the E4X support of YQL allows you to simply write XML blocks without any DOM pains and you can embed any JavaScript variables inside curly braces.

 &lt;/select&gt; &lt;/bindings&gt;
&lt;/table&gt;

And we're done. Using YQL execute you can move a lot of JavaScript that does complex transformations to the Yahoo server farm without slowing down your end user's computers. And you have a secure environment to boot as there are no DOM vulnerabilities.

Malt whisky ruling may mean the end for green distillery

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 16:05:07 -0800

Changes to what defines single malt whisky could lead to huge losses at an environmentally friendly distillery near Glasgow

An environmentally friendly distillery in Scotland may be forced to cut jobs and abandon efforts to reduce energy use because of new rules defining how traditional malt whisky is made.

The award-winning Loch Lomond Distillery, which makes the UK's third most popular blended whisky, may have to close or change more than half of its production if plans to define malt whisky as spirit made only from old-fashioned pot stills are passed in parliament. Loch Lomond, which produces more than 20 million bottles of High Commissioner whisky a year, has been at the forefront of attempts to modernise a traditional industry with the use of more efficient distillation methods.

It already uses lightweight glass to reduce the amount of packaging sent to landfill and was recently awarded a prize for outstanding achievement by the Carbon Trust after installing a revolutionary system that recycles heat and water used in the distilling process.

For the past two years the company, based in Alexandria near Glasgow, has been producing almost 12m litres of grain alcohol and 4m litres of single malt annually. Some has been produced using a single-still method that cuts CO₂ emissions by thousands of tonnes every year. Distillery bosses say they have already smashed government climate change targets for 2011 by cutting energy use by 7%.

However, under the new definition of what constitutes "Scotch malt whisky", due to come into force on 23 November, Loch Lomond will have to close the still or see millions knocked off the value of its product because it can no longer be classified as malt whisky. According to the Scotch Whisky Association (SWA), which helped draw up the amendments to the Scotch Whisky Order 1990, a true malt will only be classed as such if it is made "by batch distillation in pot stills".

Even though Loch Lomond's light medium-weight Speyside-style malt is made with malted barley and looks, tastes and is matured like malt, it cannot be classed as such.

"We have a method that produces a very good malt spirit but are being penalised because we are innovators," said John Peterson, distilling director of Loch Lomond. "We want to make the process better and save considerable amounts of energy. As it is, we prevent more than 1,400 tonnes of CO₂ being released every year and they want us to go back to the old inefficient ways.

"The SWA wants us to call it grain whisky, but it's not; if anything that's an even more misleading description. Politicians are quick to shout about climate change and how industry has to find new ways to reduce carbon output, but when we try to do something innovative we get slapped down for it."

However, a spokesman for the SWA said the government had considered every representation made during consultation on the new regulations and concluded such a practice was not traditional.

"The new regulations help to ensure that consumers get clear and consistent information," he said. "It helps to protect Scotch whisky around the world from unfair competition and that will bring significant economic benefits.

"Producing a malt mash in a single still as Loch Lomond Distillery does is simply not traditional practice. Consumers understand that single malt Scotch whisky is produced in a copper pot still and therefore a malt mash distilled in a column still will not be able to continue after the regulations come into force."

Environmental groups, however, have applauded Loch Lomond Distillery and the whisky industry for trying to address the climate change issue. "The Scottish whisky industry is becoming a hotbed of innovation for the adoption of renewable and low-energy technologies, and it's essential that it does so as a major employer and exporter," said Duncan McLaren, chief executive of Friends of the Earth Scotland.

Paul Kelbie

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Your data. Mobile. (a hackday hack)

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 02:09:17 -0800

What do the following have in common?

Weather Channel Max - an iPhone weather app. StockWatch - an iPhone stock prices app. CNN Mobile - an iPhone news app. FlightTrack - an iPhone flight updates app. Tweetie - an iPhone twitter app.

They are all apps which provide users with updates to their phone when some information changes. The information in question is different. But they're all ways for users to get information that they are interested in, while they are on the move.

Having a dedicated hard-coded app for each type of data is great for information that a large number of people are interested in.

For example, there are enough people who are interested in the weather that it's worth having an app dedicated to it.

But what if you want updates for information that isn't so widely needed? What about niche interests?

We're all different. There is going to be something that you're interested in that not everyone else is. Or at least a particular set of interests that noone else exactly shares.

People's needs and interests are almost infinitely varied, so we can't come up with enough applications to meet everyone's unique needs. Particularly for more esoteric topics, which are too long tail to each justify a specific mobile app.

For these situations, we need something generic that individual users can customise.

This was an idea I played with on the last IBM HackDay. I managed to get a proof-of-concept working on the day, but not had the chance to share it before now.

What I tried to create was:

a generic mobile application - something that can display an arbitrary number of bits of information
a browser extension approach - some way that a user can pick any bit of any webpage, adding it to their list of information that will be pushed to their mobile

I've recorded a video of it running. (Difficult to see without full-screen - sorry!)

To summarise, the steps involved are:

User visits a webpage at their computer
User highlights a portion of the page, and uses a Firefox extension to register this with my notifications server
The notifications server informs the mobile app of the new topic of interest
The notifications server continues to monitor the webpage
When the highlighted portion of the webpage changes, the updated contents are pushed to the phone
The mobile app notifies the user of the change

The video shows several examples of this, such as tracking:

Current score for a particular sports match taken from a news site
(if you want to follow a game and be notified on your phone when someone scores)
You could visit BBC Sport Online, find the page for the match you are interested in, and highlight the text where the score is displayed
Whether a particular product is in stock at on online retailer
(if you want to buy something where supply is limited, and want to be notified as soon as it becomes available)
You could visit Amazon, find the page for the product you are interested in, and highlight the div where the stock status is displayed
Latest weather forecast for a particular town
(if you want to keep an eye on the weather for where you work, and want to be notified on your phone if the forecast changes)
You could visit BBC Weather, find the page for the town you are interested in, and highlight where the text forecast is displayed
The latest sale price for a particular product
(if you're waiting for the price to drop and want to be notified when it changes)
You could visit Amazon, find the page for the product you are interested in, and highlight the price

I've got more examples in the video, but in short: any bit of information that can be accessed online could be monitored by my notifications server, and pushed to the phone of the user who requested it.

I want the system to be simple enough that it would be suitable for short-term things, like the score of a football match.

The resulting set of information is unique to a particular user: a set of information that it is unlikely any other user would have wanted. And this can include information from any website, without needing the individual websites to make data available in a feed or API.

The result is a way for a user to be notified of information that they are interested in. And without any need for them to pay the network costs or battery life costs to repeatedly poll multiple web sites. Or even to have to remember to visit (and keep refreshing) the webpages.

This post is already too long, so I'll save writing about how I've done this for another post. In the meantime, I should clarify that I didn't write all of the Firefox extension by myself - I used the brilliant XPather to do the tricky bit of extracting a bit of webpages.

"Your data. Mobile. (a hackday hack)" was posted by Dale Lane to http://dalelane.co.uk/blog/?p=1112.
Feed footer idea nicked from 43 Folders using the FeedEntryHeader WordPress plugin.

GovHack, MelHack and Hack Days in Australia

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:56:32 -0800

I'm just now resurfacing after a mammoth run of Hack Days here in Australia. First there was the pre-govhack briefing run by Deloitte Digital. Then there was the GovHack itself up in Canberra, and finally this weekend there was MelHack run out of Lonely Planet.

I made it up to Canberra for GovHack and had an incredibly inspiring time - we heard from Dr Nicholas Gruen (chair Gov Internet 2.0 task force) on the reasons Government were engaging in this area, we heard from John Allsopp (organiser) about the reasons for running the event and how he'd managed to pull it all together in just 3 weeks - seriously amazing.

I was lucky enough to be asked to deliver the keynote - I preached - I used the words piffle and tosh and I said something about this being an important inflection point in history, where we, the geeks, had for the first time the power to actually change the world - and that we can do it without throwing stools through starbucks windows (however tempting that may be). I talked about the fact the government were in the room with us giving us the data - that they were positively encouraging us to take it and use it to better inform the electorate - how bloody impressive is that? So we mustn't sit here and play, we need to change the world.

They did it - the winners were an amazing gang who'd not met before the event but got together and built one of the most disruptive ideas I've ever seen. image a world in which you could easily see and understand the links between lobbying companies, companies bidding for work and government departments.. it would make government types squirm right? It did. Lobby Clue took the main prize - there were some really impressive builds from the rest of the group that you can see over on the wiki.

Move on a week and we're back in Melbourne at the joint Lonely Planet / GovHack hack day - called MelHack. Phew.. first external hack day I've run since Over The Air in London a few months ago and I'd already forgotten how much work is involved in keeping a group of about 30 people fed, watered, inspired and cool in a building that's air-con is playing up.

Melbourne is a cool town. It's full of the types of people that like to go to interesting events like Trampoline. But this was the first external event I'd run here, and whilst in London I'm confident enough to stick my neck out and say we'll comfortably get 400+ people to a hack day given the budget and space - I really wasn't sure how it was going to fly here. We didn't have a mass of space - we ran the event at the Lonely Planet HQ in footscray - and we certainly didn't have a massive budget - so I concentrated on quality rather than size.. and boy did we get that. Over 50 people came through the door over the weekend and 12 ideas were presented by both staff and external devs. The quality of the people and ideas was massive.

The winners built a day trip generator using Lonely Planet POI (Point of Information) data. The application is live and working - but it does tend to struggle at the moment as it's using the anon LP API access which is heavily throttled.. but when that's fixed it's stunning.. all the other ideas are listed over on the wiki - and are well worth a read and a play. The presentations are also worth a watch and they're up on YouTube now.

I've been asked a lot here in Oz how you organise one of these events and if it's only certain companies that can run them - not true. Hack Days are a lot of work, but easy enough if you think about the logistics in advance and you remember one thing above all others.. it's all about the developers. Ross Hill took a short video interview with me talking about this very point - and if you're interested in gettting your own hack day off the ground it might be worth a watch.

Smashing!

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 01:39:54 -0800

Rugby Mad Girl posted a photo:

The smashed crockery after Hugh Dennis' departure from the stage. Ref: D524-031

Writing an offline wiki client

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 16:32:22 -0700

Friday was the seventh IBM Hack Day, and I again got the chance to spend a day playing with some random ideas.

As Hack Days go, I had a surprisingly productive day! I had four ideas on the day:

two mobile hacks (both of which I wrote a chunk of code for),
a twitter hack (which never got off the scribbled diagram stage, but it's an idea I definitely want to come back to), and
a hack to extend an IBM product (which I created an alpha version of)

In this post, I'll describe what I did for the last of these ideas: writing a client app for the wiki that comes with IBM's Lotus Connections.

The idea

In the same way that I am writing this post in an offline blogging client, I wanted the same for using wikis: read and make changes to a wiki while offline, with changes uploaded to the online wiki the next time you are online.

This wasn't a new idea. In fact, I tried it at IBM HackDay 4 back in 2007 but the wiki we used at work at the time had no API access for retrieving or updating wiki pages. So I sort of gave up and forgot about the idea.

But now I use Lotus Connections wikis at work. And Lotus Connections does have an API - an AtomPub API that gives you feeds to know when pages are changed, and a way to publish changes.

So I decided to revisit the idea.

The "finished" (ish) hack

It's still very rough around the edges (this was a HackDay - I wrote the client code in under a day!) but it already shows the basic idea.

The top left view shows the list of your wikis.

Clicking on this fills the list below - a list of pages in the selected wiki. Clicking on a page in that list opens the contents of the page in the main view on the right.

There are a few design decisions perhaps worth mentioning.

Java - for cross-platform

I thought it'd be good to write something that (might?) run on Windows, Linux or Mac, so I went with Java. (I did consider basing the hack on my .NET personal wiki app, but I wanted to avoid a Windows-only solution.)

SQLite - for storing pages offline

I did consider using Derby, as this seems to be Sun's preferred embeddable database of choice for Java apps. But in the end, I still went with SQLite because I've used it before and quite like it.

Yeah. should probably have thought of a more technical rationale. But for the purposes of a Hack Day, I didn't really care - just wanted something I could cache text in!

MQTT - for being useful while online

At a starting point, I could make something which just sucks in a copy of a wiki, so you can read and edit it while you're offline.

But I was feeling adventurous on Friday. I wanted more than that. I wanted the client to still be useful while you are online, too.

The main improvement is that the app is (or should be!) quicker to open pages than the web-based version.

But to make it a compelling online client, it needed to be able to keep up-to-date.

If someone else creates a page in a wiki while you are online, it should appear in your list of pages automatically. If a page is edited online, the client app should receive this in the background and download the updated page.

So if you use the client app while online, it should just show you up-to-date (ish?) pages as if you were using the web interface.

(Sorry, I suck at video editing, so this video demo is longer than it really needs to be!)

First idea: polling.

The client app could just poll the Lotus Connections API to know when things change.

Bad idea.

On the (okay, remote!) chance that this app gets used by a large number of people, I'm guessing the server admins wouldn't appreciate thousands of clients hammering their poor server every few minutes.

And infrequent polling (e.g. every 30 minutes) wouldn't give me the responsiveness I wanted.

Second idea: compromise.

Write one app that polls the API reasonablly frequently (not too frequently, server admins - honest!) and put that on a server somewhere. It publishes notifications when there are changes. The wiki client apps can subscribe to receive these notifications.

Multiple (thousands of?) clients get the client GUI benefits of frequently polling, for the cost of only one app polling the Lotus Connections server.

My server app sucks in the ATOM feed for modified wikis, and uses MQTT to publish any changes. It only publishes the name and modified time for each change - just enough to tell the wiki client apps that they need to download the page again.

But I didn't want all the (thousands of - am I being optimistic? ) wiki client apps to all instantly then hammer the Lotus Connections server to download the modified page at the same time.

Instead, on receiving the notification MQTT message, the wiki client app marks the page as "dirty" in the SQLite database. It will then periodically download an updated copy of all "dirty" pages using the Lotus Connections API - so I'm sort of rate-limiting myself from within the GUI.

The other plus-side to this approach is that I had most of the code to do the server agent piece already to hand from a previous hackday.

What now?

That's pretty much what I did on the day. There is more that I want to do on the app, such as:

Add something to the GUI to let you enter your username and password - at the moment, my username and password is hard-coded in there, so it will submit all edits as me!
Add support for more functions from the GUI - such as adding or deleting pages
Do more to handle conflicts - at the moment, the GUI highlights if a page changes while you have it open if you are online. But there are other conflict scenarios I'm ignoring - like what happens if you change a page while offline, but the original page changes before you come back online.
Make the wiki page editor more user-friendly - at the moment, it is a plain text editor for editing HTML. This is mainly because I couldn't figure out how to read or write wiki markup using the Lotus Connections API. If I can find a rich SWT widget for reading and editing HTML, that might be good.
Make the push server agent bit optional - if you have a private wiki, then this approach will only work if you let the user who runs the server polling agent (i.e. me) have read-access to your wiki. So I want to make sure the client will work okay without it.

Even so, I think it's a decent start

"Writing an offline wiki client" was posted by Dale Lane to http://dalelane.co.uk/blog/?p=969.
Feed footer idea nicked from 43 Folders using the FeedEntryHeader WordPress plugin.

Datarama 6

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 12:48:32 -0700

People and Projects shown

Alistair (http://agm.me : A PhP flight simulator (as shown at Hackday 2008)
Richard(http://www.myspace.com/roadtorimini): An excerpt from music he is composing influenced by We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
Pete(http://pete.hindle.com : The art of Subtitling Hacking, with example. Subtexts and subtitles
Derrick Welsh(http://www.handheldlearning2009.com/handheld-learning-conference-and-exhibition/confirmed-speakers/908-confirmed-speakers/238-derrick-welsh-artist) : Pictures by children from Derricks picture drawing sessions. Kids are keen to play with devices(such as touch screen phones. The sessions are run in the Library, and the children can book them out.
Dave Hughs(from http://infectionmusic.com : demoed his Bach hybrid digitla/analogue music synth tonight (he has talked about the ZEIT Step Synth at Datarama #4), influenced by Sequential Circuits Pro One and Moog. The nice thing is that they are nice, marketable, individual. A nice description of the design, and a version of the protoype/implementation. Barge Board is great. Cheap cost, not pretty yet but it works. (very Heath Robinson). Its going to be very nice AVR based keyboard when it is finished.

Open Hack Day New York City 9th to 10th of October

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 00:23:39 -0700

Just a quick reminder that there are still lots of spaces left for the Open Hack Day in New York city on the 9th and 10th of October. Much like Yahoo's other open hack days you'll get 24 hours time to play with any API and built something amazing with people you always wanted to work or got to know there.

If your company doesn't allow you to play much, this is your chance. The event is free, and you'll get to play not only with the things you already see here or on developer.yahoo.com but also with the new Yahoo Application Platform for apps running on the homepage and the new TV widgets.

HackNorth Cancelled but will be back in new year!

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 05:11:02 -0700

Today we received the news which we were dreading, after some access issues with the venue we were emailed this morning with the news that AQL the owners of the venue and one of Hacknorth sponsor were unable to supply the building citing " contractor" over runs. Our first hint of problems was only when we were unable to enter the building without signing an NDA something neither of us were willing to do.

Whatever the reason only two weeks before the event is not enough time to find a suitable replacement so we have had to cancel the event. Myself and Dom are still commited to HackNorth and plan on finding a venue to run it in the new year.

We want to apologise to people who have tickets and who have paid trainfares we are as you can imagine utterly gutted!

The website will be updated shortly with

Dear All,

Earlier today we were told by the venue owners AQL that the venue for HackNorth would not be ready in time to host the event.
This close to the event starting we are utterly devastated as we do not believe we will be able to find a venue that can hold 200+ with WiFi in time and so have had to cancel the event.

At this point we want to thank the amazing sponsors, Yahoo Developer Network, Sun StartUps, Paypal, Haribo, Yorkshire Forward, 4IP, BBC Backstage and eBuyer who have been amazing
We plan to source a new venue and look to plan HackNorth 2 for early next year so don't despair HackNorth will happen just with a little delay. For people who have gotten tickets fear not they are safe and should you wish to come next year will be valid. For those who have booked trains etc we are so sorry that we had to cancel so late in the day but it really is beyond our control.

While we would be happy to run such an event in an unfinished space we did need it to have basic requirements such as sanitation that could stand up to 200 people use over 24 hours.

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to ask

Cheers
Tim and Dom

Morte info on Doms post HackNorth Cancelled

Think Visibility 2 and Charity Hack 09

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 19:45:03 -0700

Thought I would quickly give a round up of events I have been attending, speaking etc as well as where to catch me in the next month or so!

Think Visibility

Think Visibility is a conference unlike any other its informal style but high calibre speaker list plus low price makes it a real winner doubled with it being in Leeds and not London its no wonder its so popular. This time around I had a slightly larger role over 2 days rather then just the day itself and while I was feeling under the weather it was unrelated to the conference.

I really wish I could have seen all the talks, and hopefully will when the DVD comes out (barring a couple) but the two that I did get to see bits from which really stood out were Fiona from Simple Usability eye tracking talk and Karyn from Tinderbox on Business bloging talk.

Behaviour Modelling Seminar

For Think Visibility attendees on the Friday before, you may well have seen me pushing this on the blog and twitter but the seminar went really well. It was very much an experiment to see if the format and content would work and the feedback was positive. Hopefully the attendees learnt a lot and indeed so did I.

The "Secret Panel"

Image Credit: sk8geek

Originally envisioned as QI meets the house party the lunch time panel was scaled down due to my other commitments and the previous days seminar. Instead I moderated a panel consisting of ChrisG, Al Carlton, Kieron "share my playlist" Donoghue and Dom Hodgson. The original brief was to make it fun but interesting and I think we did so with a range of audience questions.

Link Worth

My main talk of the day was on the value of links, not in terms of link building but actual metric values. Which covered some basic ideas for valuing individual links on various factors including some future where search engines could be working in particular through page segementation. While a few complaints were made that I declared relevancy to be irrelevant (apparently it was sensationalist and contreversial me I thought it was a rather obvious given) the talk did seem to go down well with people asking questions after.

Sadly due to feeling unwell I wasn't really able to mingle much and went and hid in my room for most of Drink Visibility which from the tales sounds awesome. Overall the event was a success I think with people seeming to be enjoying and learning at the same time and hopefully will see everyone at think Visibility 3 in March 2010!

Charity Hack 09

So this weekend I went along to CharityHack a Hack Day sponsored by Paypal in their headquaters down in London and it was great. Now to be fair I could be saying that because I'm writing this while wearing a black warm fleece provided by them but I think I would be saying it regardless!

Photo by cyberdees - I managed to lose my Netbook Charger but thankfully a replacement was found

Sadly the turn out developers wise was a little underwealming but in many ways that was better because teams inter mingled and the atmosphere was great. The guys from Paypal kept everyone fed and watered, the office has what appears to be a seemingly endless vending machine which never ran out of coke.

While the name gives it away CharityHack was all about coming up with ideas and applications for charities and given Just Giving, Mission Fish and Paypal all released new APIs most hacks submitted were donation based ideas using one of the apis. Our hack which won the overall "grand" prize (a trip to Paypal Innovate) was a First Person Shooter game where users donate to the charity of the person who "frags" them. Run out of money the system kicks you off the server. It was quite addictive so much so that at 4am when the development team went to bed our "beta testers" will still providing valuable data.
Photo by cyberdees
The team consisted of Tim, Dom, Kevin, Leeky and Tom

The weekend was probably one of the smoothest running hackdays ever and kudos to John for managing to unblock a gazzilion ports on the network even if he did have to wake rather important execs up to do it. Likewise Alison spent the day running around and generally keeping us all fed. I'm looking forward to next years!

To Amsterdam for IBC

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 08:37:00 -0700

TTMMHTM: Apptember, fonts to embed, time API, mobile frameworks and charity hacks

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 04:41:30 -0700

Things that made me happy this morning:

There is a new cafe in my street:
Font Squirrel has a repository of free fonts to embed via @font-face
Apptember is a one-month hackathon, no rules, no business model, no prices - just build some good stuff
Man builds house from Lego - now this is dedication.
Some very impressive photorealistic Star Wars Illustrations
Blockchalk has an API now and I am impressed with the ease of approach to keep it totally open
Both jQTouch and Pretty Mobile are frameworks to make mobile web development easier
Baseline is a typographical CSS framework
The Time API is a very clever semantic API that understands natural language to turn it into timestamps
Browser for the better is a Microsoft campaign that provides food for homeless people when you upgrade to IE8. Seems a bit stretched, but hey upgrade is good!
Charity Hack is a hackday by Paypal an Justgiving on 19-20th of September in London
Top Trumps 3D is an interesting concept of Top Trumps with 2D barcodes that turn into augmented reality games.

YouTube - Glyn Wintle of the Open Rights Group at Mashed08

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 09:29:51 -0800

See Wolfram Alpha in Action: Our Screenshots - ReadWriteWeb

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 23:23:27 -0700

@ Mashed 2008: The final furlong | PDA: The Digital Content Blog | guardian.co.uk

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 03:26:59 -0700

Mashed 08 profiles

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 02:57:09 -0700

Lonely Planet Developer Network - Welcome to the Lonely Planet Developer Network!

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 21:27:09 -0700

BBC NEWS | Programmes | Click | Competing to create 'mash-up' apps

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 08:45:30 -0700

Hackers fan the flames of imagination at Mashed 08 | Technology | The Guardian

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 01:56:50 -0700

BBC NEWS | Programmes | Click | Competing to create 'mash-up' apps

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 09:24:48 -0700

nice reminder of Mashed08

http://chatbox.heavy-horse.co.uk/

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 12:24:15 -0700

Mashed! - DBTune blog

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 09:22:18 -0700

Yves report of their RDF/music/BBC hacking at Mashed

Guardian: Hackers fan the flames of imagination at Mashed - Bobbie Johnson

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 03:22:28 -0700

"The intent of Hack Day was always to provide an environment for creativity and to celebrate the idea of code as art," said Matt McAlister, head of the Guardian Developer Network

BBC NEWS | Technology | Hacking and mashing at the Palace

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 07:06:12 -0700

@ Mashed 2008: The final furlong | PDA: The Digital Content Blog | guardian.co.uk

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 15:16:14 -0700

@ Mashed 2008: The final furlong | PDA: The Digital Content Blog | guardian.co.uk

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 06:19:22 -0700

A list of all the show and tells at Mashed08

BBCi at Mashed

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 05:38:14 -0700

Sleeping On The Journey Home

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 00:48:22 -0700

Mashed08-110

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 15:52:03 -0700

Mashed08-139

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 15:54:04 -0700

Mashed08-104

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 15:51:39 -0700

Team Bob

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 10:17:02 -0700

Dylan Revisited - Mashed 2008

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 13:06:01 -0700

Mashed 2008 presentations

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 16:17:16 -0700

Mashed 2008 presentations

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 16:17:03 -0700

Mashed08-54

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 13:36:46 -0700

Mashed08-91

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 15:50:40 -0700

Nick_Wooler

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 05:31:43 -0700

img_2540.jpg

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 02:00:48 -0700

Mashed 2008 presentations

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 16:45:54 -0700

The Bean Bag Area

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 09:50:08 -0700

Jemima_and_Ewan

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 05:32:21 -0700

Mashed 08

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 08:28:59 -0700

Espresso Mugs - the contents of the mysterious box

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 03:22:09 -0700

Mash in progress

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 20:42:54 -0700

Mashed 08

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 04:46:04 -0700

Alexandra Palace

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 15:05:54 -0700

Mashed 2008 presentations

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 16:45:11 -0700

Mashed 2008 presentations

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 16:45:44 -0700

Mashed 08

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 04:46:17 -0700

Mashed 08 Hacker

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 15:08:56 -0700

Ewan's flight simulator

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 14:25:40 -0700

Mashed 2008 presentations

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 16:34:46 -0700

Ant Miller and the Mashed Rocket

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 15:07:51 -0700

Mashed 08

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 10:22:23 -0700

The Social Flight Sim has landed - Mashed 2008

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 13:09:19 -0700

Opening Times - Mashed 2008

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 13:09:03 -0700

Mashed 08

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 08:29:10 -0700

Deliberating

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 20:44:03 -0700

flying over fujiyama

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 05:32:09 -0700

Mashed08-125

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 15:53:07 -0700

Mashed08-82

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 15:50:01 -0700

Sparring

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 20:43:54 -0700

Mashed

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 02:28:03 -0700

Home of the maps

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 07:32:04 -0700

Mashed08-18

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 13:33:29 -0700

MM table - Past & present

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 07:31:03 -0700

Princess Christian

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 02:38:18 -0700

047/365 & #1/100 strangers

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 12:58:33 -0700

Look what I brought from mashed

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 02:47:03 -0700

Fellow people with beanbags on train home from mashed08.

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 14:18:49 -0700

Glyn, recumbent

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 03:04:54 -0700

The 7th Incarnation Of 'The Doctor'

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 14:50:06 -0700

Mashed

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 02:27:56 -0700

Ian on the sofa

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 15:56:09 -0700

Mashed 2008 presentations

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 16:30:42 -0700

48/365

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 13:01:29 -0700

Christian Heilmann

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 03:30:53 -0700

P1020929.JPG

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 15:56:01 -0700

P1020928.JPG

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 15:55:40 -0700

Filler

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 03:04:51 -0700

Mashed08-57

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 13:37:04 -0700

P1030105.JPG

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 17:00:50 -0700

P1030103.JPG

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 17:00:23 -0700

P1030106.JPG

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 17:01:14 -0700

Post-squeeze

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 03:04:47 -0700

Rockets

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 00:06:20 -0700

Motors

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 05:11:13 -0700

Mashed08-113

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 15:52:13 -0700

Mashed 2008 presentations

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 16:48:07 -0700

Ant aka Rocket Man

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 14:52:50 -0700

Outside Henry Wood House with our baggage

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 14:18:38 -0700

IXS_1988

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 10:05:26 -0700

Carbon Goggles Plan

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 09:07:56 -0700

Mashed 2008 presentations

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 16:17:31 -0700

Ed

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 14:35:23 -0700

Mashed 2008 presentations

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 16:30:07 -0700

Bomb Disposal? - Mashed 2008

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 13:02:11 -0700

Mashed08

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 20:42:47 -0700

img_0500.jpg

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 12:52:04 -0700

Mashed 2008 presentations

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 16:31:07 -0700

Mashed 2008 presentations

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 16:18:00 -0700

Mashed 2008 presentations

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 16:17:46 -0700

Mashed 2008 presentations

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 16:15:55 -0700

Mashed 2008 presentations

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 16:15:40 -0700

Ant and the rocket

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 05:43:59 -0700

Glyn rather relaxed

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 05:29:16 -0700

Watch, listen, learn

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 20:43:46 -0700

A kit

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 05:10:46 -0700

Eeeyyyyy

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 10:33:36 -0700

P1020875.JPG

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 15:33:35 -0700

Mashed 2008 presentations

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 16:20:17 -0700

Team World Service

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 20:42:19 -0700

CIMG3036.JPG

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 07:11:21 -0700

mashroc_unbox_8

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 05:11:25 -0700

Launch pad and the kits

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 05:11:01 -0700

DSCF0242

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 14:17:56 -0700

Mashed08-81

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 15:49:57 -0700

DSCF0246

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 14:18:31 -0700

DSCF0226

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 14:15:47 -0700

Frances will…

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 03:31:08 -0700

Mashed

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 02:28:08 -0700

Rockets!

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 15:20:23 -0700

Deep in the box

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 05:10:33 -0700

The Bean-bag Experiment: Progress Update

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 12:07:30 -0700

Mashed08-96

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 15:51:02 -0700

Mashed08-84

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 15:50:09 -0700