Home
June 16th 2007
Hack Day
My Day, by Craig Smith, Aged 41 and 3/4
Preface
I was hoping to blog Hack Day live but unfortunately because the wifi was working only sporadically, it wasn't possible. Ah well. What follows, therefore, is my notes written at the time in TextEdit and tweaked at home before heading off to bed.
10.25
A beautiful walk from the station up through the trees with
James from MySociety, whose advice, "Keep walking uphill" saw us
through those dark and difficult moments when Alexander Palace
disappeared into the copse. The last time I was up here was to see the
White Stripes a couple of winters ago, and it was night and I couldn't
see the view. The trouble with South London at times is you feel disconnected
with the rest of the city: up here you're in no doubt that you are
in the Metropolis of London. As always with this city, somehow you always feel 20% degrees
out of kilter - Docklands and the Gherkin are where the West End
should be, the Post Office Tower (as was) is where Kensington should be.
Through Registration, as civilised and friendly as Australian customs - if only Heathrow was as welcoming. I'm late, obviously, having had to do a quick O'Reilly-esque errand on the way, and find the first speaker just rounding off to a very generous sheen of applause, which I hadn't been expecting because I got the impression no one was listening with their heads down and with a murmur of conversation as old friends teamed up with colleagues met with acquaintances took a moment with long lost chums.
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Found a table and sat myself down, and in a pattern echoed by everyone here, got out my laptop. The wifi isn't working, but that doesn't stop people tapping away.
11.00
The wireless is up and running, and Matthew Cashmore
introduces Ian Forrester with a promise of a very cool announcement
later on in the presentation.
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"What is Backstage?"
"There are two views of the BBC. One is the
traditional view of centralised websites. The other is more open,
decentralised and a mess. That is Backstage, and in there is the future
of the BBC".
Backstage is Community
Lively discussion,idea submissions, prototype submissions.
In a few weeks launching their new website.
Ian continued while Matthew dashes off in search of a muffin.
Backstage is Data
Every single feed in the BBC website is open to be hacked
BBC News and Sport search
Traffic data bought from Traffic link
Programme catalogue every programme going back to 1947, information of who made the programmes
Matthew came back with a Mars Bar, which he shared with Ian
Rich API of TV and radio data: more to come
shed loads of data from BBC Vision which is available to be hacked to day:
http://72.249.74.104/
BBC is now also...
Wild West Servers = exciting announcement
Bought
servers outside of BBC, which are made available for code of outside
parties, (eg, anyone!) so hardware and bandwidth obstacles are removed
offering
root access to 3 external servers with dual processor quad core Xeons,
16G memory, 1 terabyte of Raid storage, virtualised using Xen
Install what you like
we can add more if needed
They are mamed after Wild West movies
BBC Backstage is changing the BBC
start-up teams
co-working
open coffee/lunch
teach-in
bbc teens
protoytype new
start-ups within the BBC
Went through a list of BBC Backstage mash-ups including Mood Memories,
Moving beyond prototypes
Things that might even get bought by someone
Got a weekend to try things, so ...
Hack with RIAs
Build an offline application
Try Canvas 3D
Compound your documents
Build a facebook application
Dabble with Semantic Markup
Experiment with Pipelines
get social with twitter (subscribe to hack day notices)
Try mobile Hacking
Hack a bunny
Squeeze some Joost
Visualise it differently
Go retro with your hacks
Play Werewolf
And as Ian and Matthew leave the stage, the wifi goes down. Surely, no coincidence.
12.00
Christian and Nate from YUI - Yahoo! User Interface
"You bring the skills, we bring the ingredients"
Christian up first:
Why should you use YUI?
Pragmatism
Everyone should read Steve Krug's 'Don't Make Me Think'
Christian wanted to write 'Don't Make Me Do It Again', for Developers
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Industrial strength solutions for everyday products, takes the random element out of web development
For
example, Hacker1 builds a Product, Hacker 2 gets the code, rewires it,
passes it to Hacker3, who does the same, soon you get spaghetti code
Hacker1 develops product for internet, the internet is scary, with different browser, etc, developing is 80% fixing for internet, 20% for product
In a Secret underground lair where all YUI products are developed,
hackers meet and make a standard before making a product, simple
collaboration by enforcing a strict namespace, by inventing own
namespace and sticking with it ensures it plays nicely with others.
Readable method names = half good comment
Nate up next:
YUI Goodies
DOM Utilty
Event Utility
Animation
Good for spicing up hacks:
Slider
Autocomplete
DragDrop
Menu/Tabs/Trees
Container
Reset/Fonts/Grids
Design Patterns
Interesting Moments Matrices
Providing a full pantry
web services and data
Getting started
Wide-open BSD License
Free hardcore hosting
Three versions of each file
A La Carte dependencies
Download full dist with all docs and examples
yui/download
Landing page quick start guides
Complete API Documentation
Examples and Tutorials
YUI Cheat Sheets
Things they are proud of:
Good page citizens
like Javascript
We care about accessibility and browser support
Graded browser support
12.40
Alexander Palace struck by lighting!
Ceiling fire vents opened.
Rain coming in.
13.00
While they try and close the Fire Vents, the stage is given over to anyone with announcements.
Francis
from MySociety announces someone has scraped all the United Nations web
site and they plan to make the web site this weekend. At last you'll be
able to see which countries are voting with the US.
13.30
While I was out helping Josette with boxes of Make, the Palm Court was cleared and we got back to find the lobby full of Geeks and my laptop in Lost Property, (thanks to the guys who looked after it for me). The organisers did a great job of keeping people happy while they sorted out the fire vents. Plates of
sandwiches, an ice cream truck outside and a pint of Guinness with Josette did the trick for me! When we got back in, everyone flipped open their machines and got hacking in the ad hoc teams they put together while the fire vents circuits were down. No harm done and everyone had a tale to tell! The Day Ally Pally Got Struck By Lightning!
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17.00
While the rest of the attendees are hacking away, I'm working as Josette's assistant on the Make stand, and I will be until the magazines are gone.
18.00
Matthew announces a free drink to everyone as a thank you for their
patience: this goes down particularly well, as you might expect. And
the pizza arrives.
Shevek happens by and makes some rather lovely bridges and geometric sculptures out of O'Reilly pencils. Josette tries in vain to emulate their ingenuity but sadly pencil bridge making remains absent from her CV.
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Beside us are the Maker guys and the Craft ladies, crazed inventors all, but wonderfully pleasant with it - thanks again for the Liquorice Allsorts and the breadsticks!
Leather Pong is a new one on me! James Larsson, on the left, takes on all challengers with this adult-orientated version of the classic tennis arcade game. The paddles are controlled by kinky leather boots and the loser of each point gets whacked with a riding crop:
One of the many clever pieces of work by the Cabaret Mechanical Theatre are autonoma made of everyday food: cheerios, ginger nuts, dried spaghetti and crackerbread being some of the staples of these marvellous pieces, as well as the fore-mentioned breadsticks and Liquorice Allsorts. They started four years ago and when they exhibit in schools they make sure they go in in the afternoon, otherwise the exhibits get trashed.
Mike Harrison's website, Mike's Electric Stuff contains some wonderful examples of the eccentric electrical devices, including the spark gaps with capacitors that he has on display at Hack Day, which slowly charge until the spark is triggered. The tubes are set to different lengths like organ pipes. When each capacitor discharges it affects the others, which causes an effect like a cat walking the keys of a pipe organ in an ethereal balloon rubbing factory.
Mike's other exhibit creates a downdraft via an electrostatic charge which causes a silver foil triangle to dance. It's lucky for us that Mike didn't bring along the BIG STUFF - health and safety, and all that - when the things he did bring still buzz with the force of a hundred woollen jumpers yanked from the heads of a hundred brittle-haired neurotics. He assures us the lightning strike had nothing to do with him, though I have my doubts!
I don't quite know what to make of Alex Zivanovic's Heath Robinson-esque contraption, but it's particularly entertaining - half barrel organ, half respirator, it plays the slide whistle like Sideshow Bob! Alex does a lot of work in schools, and as with all the Makers here, I can see kids being fascinated by his work.
Endnotes
Everyone was in fine spirits, though maybe a tad frustrated with the network connection being down. The organisers worked as hard as they could to get it up and running, and everyone could see that. It was one of those days when everybody was on the side of everybody else, and a lovely mood ran through the whole event. I'm back tomorrow, (and hopefully, so will the wireless be). It's going to be interesting to see what everyone has come up with, and what marvels we might see.
Signing off at bedtime,
Craig
Your blog is good! Generally when I visit blogs, I just come across nothing,
but this time I was really surprised when I got your blog containing wonderful information.
Thanks mate and keep this effort up.
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Posted by: James | July 16, 2010 at 06:26 PM