Premasagar

Great day at #fullfrontal09. Well done @rem and co. Full steam ahead to the JS movement.

@codepo8 Just saying open-source would be great. That's all.

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 09:51:37 -0800

@codepo8 Just saying open-source would be great. That's all.

Really inspired by @simonw's talk on server-side JavaScript development with nodejs, couchdb and reddis. Want to use it NOW. #fullfrontal09

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 09:48:24 -0800

Really inspired by @simonw's talk on server-side JavaScript development with nodejs, couchdb and reddis. Want to use it NOW. #fullfrontal09

Brilliant talk on JavaScript performance by @jaffathecake at #fullfrontal09.

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:54:48 -0800

Brilliant talk on JavaScript performance by @jaffathecake at #fullfrontal09.

Moving on with HTML5 - watching a well-rounded presentation by @sil. #fullfrontal09 http://twitpic.com/q8c6w

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 07:00:20 -0800

Moving on with HTML5 - watching a well-rounded presentation by @sil. #fullfrontal09 http://twitpic.com/q8c6w

Dec 2, 2009: £5 App Meet at Hectors House

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 09:07:34 -0800

Upcoming:

A meet-up for programmers, web developers and designers to discuss and showcase their "£5 apps" - lightweight software created by one or two people who take a simple idea and run with it.

The discussion will range from technical (what tools/languages were used during development) to business (building communities, spreading the word, costs and rewards).

This years Christmas special £5app will be held at Hector's House and has a music theme (much like the gaming theme of last year's Christmas special (http://fivepoundapp.com/meetup/14/) ).

We've got quite a busy line-up, so we expect everything to run for a bit longer than usual:

* Seb Lee-Delisle (http://sebleedelisle.com/) – "My life as a wannabe rock star at the birth of the internet music boom"
* Toby Cole (http://www.55th.co.uk/) – "Zero to Theremin in 20 days" – How BuildBrighton built a feature rich, ultrasonic, laser etched MIDI controller in under three weeks
* Tom Hume (http://tomhume.org/) – "You're all an orchestra, get over it" – Bluetooth devices will interact with the audience to create changing ambient music, created by Future Platforms for a Hack Day
* lastminute.com labs (http://www.lastminute.com/site/labs) present Bottle-Rock-It, a music game for n iPhones where (with any luck) n > 3.
* Jim Purbrick (http://jimpurbrick.com/) – A short talk on the Mrmr/LiveAPI guitar mounted iPhone Ableton live interface by the head of Second Life Europe (and later a demo with 100Robots)
* 100Robots (http://www.myspace.com/onehundredrobots) – Jim and Max Williams (http://webcrisps.wordpress.com/) play live and loud for us

Seb has the main talk:

"Before Seb Lee-Delisle was peddling his digital creations, he had an entirely different life. He spent most of his 20s setting up Solar Records and promoting his band Stargirl (later Laine). Investing over £50,000 of their own money, they released their own CDs, made it onto the radio and TV, played in front of 30,000 people, recorded at George Martin’s Air Studios and had full page spreads in the nationals."

"They were at the forefront internet music boom of the late 90s. The future was looking rosy for this group of dynamic 20-somethings. So come and find out what it was like, how the hell they got the £50K, and why their plans didn’t quite reach fruition…"

Beer – several of us who are doing well this year will put up some bar-money (Alan of SensibleDevelopment (http://www.sensibledevelopment.com/) and Ian's ProCasts (http://procasts.co.uk/) so far, several more to come, get in contact if you want to share the love). We may also get mulled wine if we're lucky.

Food – maybe nibbles. Hopefully either cake or cookies too.

Getting Real book

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 09:22:02 -0700

Getting Real is the business, design, programming, and marketing philosophies of 37signals, who used the unconventional Getting Real process to launch five successful web-based applications (Basecamp, Campfire, Backpack, Writeboard, Ta-da List), and Ruby on Rails, an open-source web application framework, in just two years with no funding, no debt, and only 7 people. Read the book for free online.

jQuery.Collection

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 14:18:43 -0700

This plugin generates generic collection classes, that work almost exactly as jQuery does. These collections include all those jQuery functions, that are used to manipulate the collection itself. The supported functions are: add, andSelf, attr, each, end, eq, extend, filter, get, implement, include, index, init, is, map, not, pushStack, setArray, size and slice.

Practices for Speeding Up jQuery

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 10:23:26 -0700

Once upon a time, all we needed to worry about was reducing Bytes and Requests and playing around with load order to make things faster. Nowadays, we are increasingly impacting one more major component in performance - CPU utilization. Using jQuery and other frameworks that make selecting nodes and DOM manipulation easy can have adverse affects if you’re not careful and follow some simple practices for reducing the work the browser has to do.

John Resig - Simple JavaScript Inheritance

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 05:00:59 -0700

John Resig's JavaScript classical-inheritance-simulating code. Based on implementations employed by Base2 and Prototype. * Creating a constructor is simple (by providing an 'init' method) * To create a new 'class' you extend (sub-class) an existing class * All of the 'classes' inherit from a single ancestor: Class * Access to overridden methods is provided (with their context properly set) E.g. var Person = Class.extend({ init: function(isDancing){ this.dancing = isDancing; }, dance: function(){ return this.dancing; } }); var Ninja = Person.extend({ init: function(){ this._super( false ); }, dance: function(){ // Call the inherited version of dance() return this._super(); }, swingSword: function(){ return true; } });

BrowserLab

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 08:33:52 -0700

Cross-browser screenshots for debugging web development, from Adobe.

Festive Geekery

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 14:26:23 -0700

It’s geek festival season, down here in Brighton. First up is dConstruct, a one-day conference on the cutting edge of interface design and user engagement.

And then it’s good old BarCamp Brighton, now into its fourth incarnation. BarCamp, always a favourite, is a handmade 2-day conference, pulled together by its community of participants. Everyone gives a talk on something they feel (geekily) passionate about, and they bring sleeping bags to spend the night at the donated event space. This time, we’ll be moving into the old Music Library for the weekend.

Dharmafly is again a proud sponsor of BarCamp. I had in mind a fun little game to give away to the attendees, but not quite had the time to pull it off. Next time, next time. (And no more crunchy spirulina, like last time). See our BarCamp archive for more.

If you’re at either of these events, do roll up and say hi.

Update: At BarCamp, I gave a talk called “Indestructible JavaScript Widgets“, about the pitfalls and solutions when developing widgets to embed in third-party websites (like our widget for BBC World Service). No pretty slides, but my notes are at: dharmafly.com/bcb4.

Teen Hackers Take Over Google

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 05:01:24 -0700

At the weekend, I helped mentor a group of tech-minded teenagers at the community-led event, “Young Rewired State“. Held at Google’s London HQ , this was a two-day, action-packed programme for 15-18 year olds to build something better with government data on the web. And the results were truly impressive.

Young people are sometimes written-off as being apathetic, or handed patronising websites and services to interact with. Here was their chance to show the kinds of services they really want and to demonstrate that, given access to the right kinds of data and a little support along the way, they are more than capable of building it themselves.

In just two days, they created a plethora of new web apps: a mobile service to give real-time info on London buses (”TFHell“), interactive maps with routes to school that avoid local crime hotspots (”SchoolRoutr” and “Step Safe”), sexual health advice (”Blab to Betty”), a service matching new tech talent with employers (”Will Work For Peanuts“) and many others.

The team I assisted were a politically minded trio. Ben, Joe and Richard came down from Manchester and built a website that grabs the latest bills passing through parliament and attempts to show the emotional response to these bills from blogs around the web. The results are shown graphically, using the Google Charts API. The result of this blogs / politics experiment is: “Blog-o-tics“.

Although they weren’t awarded a prize, Blog-o-tics was given a “special mention” by the panel of judges, who had come from government, the tech industry and beyond.

The field of “sentimental analysis” is growing and, although Blog-o-tics was just a quick proof-of-concept, it does hint at the possibilities. Craig Elder noted its similarities with the concept for YourOwnDemocracy.

Other mentors came from Last.fm, the BBC, Yahoo, Moo, My Society and small businesses around the country. I think we were all pretty much blown away by, not only the standard and focus of the work produced, but how entirely natural everyone seemed with the stack of technologies being used. Here is a generation of people who have grown up with computers, the ubiquitous Web and the programming languages used to harness it. Government could really benefit from their input.

The original Rewired State event, dubbed “National Hack the Government Day“, had been held at the Guardian’s offices earlier this year. It was such a success that many of us who attended were invited to the Cabinet Office to explain just what the government should be doing with its web properties, and we were given suggestions on ways through what can sometimes seem like a maze of bureaucracies.

Since then, no less than Tim Berners-Lee (the inventor of the Web) has been invited by the prime minister to help open up government data, to help bring transparency and to simply help those who want to solve problems get access to the data they need. The young hackers from Rewired State are off to a fine start.

Other reports on Young Rewired State

Made With 100% Love

Premasagar (no-spam@premasagar.com) — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 14:15:19 -0700

It's true.

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April 2009

Beachlings

Premasagar (no-spam@premasagar.com) — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 14:12:45 -0700

Roshnii and Surya - and two more...

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April 2009

Looking at You

Premasagar (no-spam@premasagar.com) — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 14:11:00 -0700

Surya has perfected the back-handed finger suck. To a tee.

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April 2009

Jyoti and Ayan

Premasagar (no-spam@premasagar.com) — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 14:08:55 -0700

At Easter, friends with families came to stay for a time of meditation and play.

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April 2009

Dive

Premasagar (no-spam@premasagar.com) — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 14:06:20 -0700

Mayadhiisha diving.
...
"Keep off the groynes", they say.

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April 2009

BBC World Service Widget Launched

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 03:05:32 -0700

We recently completed an exciting project for BBC World Service: the World Service Widget, which lets people share BBC World Service content on their websites, blogs or computer desktops.

It's being released on a number of web platforms (WordPress, iGoogle, Adobe Air, Facebook, Netvibes, Mac Dashboard, Vista Sidebar and as a simple snippet of HTML code). These are being rolled out over the coming days.

The widget is available in a multitude of different languages and content networks. (This was one of the trickiest aspects of development - although there were other, perhaps even stickier issues). Below, for example, are the English and Farsi flavours. (Farsi is the language spoken in Iran. It is written right-to-left, and it has a special widget: click on a news story to open the "Lightbox" window).

Soon on this blog, we'll share some of the secrets of how we built it, and explain how widgets are finding their way all across the web, from browsers, to the desktop and on to mobile phones.

We've already started thinking about what the widget could do better, so do tell us your thoughts.

English:

Farsi:

[inline] [/inline]

OpenFreecycle won at OpenHackLondon!

Fri, 15 May 2009 08:20:35 -0700