Final one from Hack Day

Taking photos of people taking photos of people taking photos at Hack Day London

This is going to be my final Hack Day post - I’ve said about as much as I’ve got to say about it and have posted a mass of media and links pointing to other places saying a lot more about it.

I was trying to think of one word or image that said the most about the weekend for me - other than lightning, dunkirk or hacking or even the brilliant chance to watch Doctor Who and (see source code) with several hundred other geeks.

No the one thing that summed up the weekend for me can be seen in the photo at the top of this post - TAKING PHOTOS - everybody had a camera and there are thousands of photos from the event on flickr.

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Land of the Living

OK boys and girls I’m finally back in the land of the living (well almost). I’ve been at Hack Day London all weekend, finally getting back to Jersey around lunchtime on Monday - but after being awake for nearly 48 hour, I wasn’t capable of much on Monday - especially blogging.

But today I’m managing to catch up on things - like e-mail, uploading photos to flickr and posting my videos to You Tube - oh and not to forget blogging - adding a roundup post from my weekend away.

Lets start with the show and tell - here is a playlist of videos from You Tube taken over the weekend - I didn’t get my video camera out very much so most are from other people.

In the feed above you could see a selection of videos from the pre-party on the day before to one showing the vents in the ceiling opening up to let the rain fall on a massive amount of computer gear.

In the video below by Matt Mcallister (Yahoo) you can see a quick roundup of the whole day and if you look VERY carefully you can just about see me on stage behind Chad Dickerson during the presentation of Hacks.
Of course you can get a much clearer view of the day through photos - and given that this was a geek event with people from Flickr in the building - EVERYONE had a camera - within half a day there were over 2000 photos on Flickr tagged with hackdaylondon.

Created with Paul’s flickrSLiDR.
The selection above are just the photos I’ve taken of the day - you can see many more by searching flickr for hackdaylondon and a few by going to the Hack Day London group.

Created with Paul’s flickrSLiDR.
As well as what’s on Flickr and You Tube there are also videos posted to Vox (I can’t find the embed link and can’t be bothered to go through source code) including one of the roof opening.

You can also view some of the web based prototypes and see what people have to say on the event by going to del.icio.us and looking for the hackdaylondon tag or even doing the same thing on Technorati and Google Blogs.

You’ve read what I thought of the event in previous posts but I’ll just say that I hope it happens again - although I was very busy and had no sleep for two days - I loved the event, I had one of the best times of my life and it’s re-inspired my love of getting down and dirty with code.

I had a couple of ideas for hacks but due to being too tired, not eligible for prizes and too busy I didn’t get a chance to build them - but I did see some cool stuff other people where doing and hear a few VERY good talks on various future techs.

If you’re interested - my ideas involved flickr, twitter and bbc weather. The first was to take BBC Weather data for a specific place and then pull in a photo from Flickr taken at the same time and place to see how accurate the weather forecast was.

The other was to create a timeline of flickr photos taken at Hack Day London then pull in Tweets posted at exactly the same time as the photo was taken - this would need a scrape and processing of the Tweets to check for terms like Hack Day, raining indoors, no wifi and allypally.

I didn’t stay for the band as I was about to fall asleep on my feet - I left about 19:00 but I loved every second of what I saw.

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Hack Day hit by lightning

As you know, given I’ve mentioned nothing but this for months, I’m currently at Hack Day London and, despite being on registration this morning, it’s been pretty good.

What made the event though was the indoor rain. Yup thats right - only at a British event could we have trouble with the rain - INDOORS!

The building was hit by lightning which caused the fire proceedure to kick in which opened the fire ven cats and let the rain in - then they couldn’t get them closed.

This was down to a computer fault apparently - the system threw a bit of a wobbler and it took a while to get it back.

You’d think, given that it was a room full of geeks, coders and general all around computer legends they’d be able to sort a little computer problem quickly - well it was done eventually.

What was ost impressive though, despite being evacuated from the main hall and having no power or WiFi they still got on with hacking - using pens, paper, card and anything else they could find to plan their mashup.

It was a real Dunkirk Spirit moment and it will be great fun to see what they come up with now they’re back in the main hall and with power.

I’ll try to post a video of the 90 second presentations tommorow at 2pm.

Oh and there’s still no sign of WiFi.

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Hack Day Content

I’ll write something more detailed on Hack Day when I haven’t got to be up in four hours - I really should be going to bed but I want to get this out first.

While you’re waiting for the text - here are some photos from the Health and Safety plus Staff/Contributor pre Hack Day party evening (Friday).

Created with Paul’s flickrSLiDR.

I also have a quick video. There will be a lot more where they came from as well - I’ve equiped myself with a still camera, a video camera that records to SD card, an audio recording device and a laptop to put it all online as I go along.

If I get the chance I’m hoping to do a couple of quick interviews with people there (audio) and if I do I’ll make them available creative commons as MP3s so you can do what you want with them.

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One week to Hack Day

Well Hack Day London is now less than a week away and things are really starting to hot up - quite literally as I’m currently working in an office with no air con, in the attic of an old town house on the hottest day of the year so far - but that’s not the point.

The point is I’ve been boring my work mates with talk of Hack Day for weeks and as I got an e-mail from Matthew Cashmore explaining what’s happening when, what I’ll be doing and when I’ll be doing it today - I’ve got worse than ever.

So I thought, for my own safety (I saw one of the people on my desk unit holding a large stapler) I decided to blog the excitement instead.

Not only will there be lots of pizza (I don’t drink alcohol but apparently they will be lots of that as well if that’s what you’re into) and 24 hours (overnight) of hack-heaven BUT there will also be some amazing speakers on a range of topics AND a top band on Sunday evening AS WELL AS the chance to meet some of the coolest people in tech right now.

Aaron Straup Cope, Bradley Wright, Cal Henderson, Chad Dickerson, Chris Bowley, Christian Heilmann, Dan Theurer, Dan Catt, George Wright, Ian Forrester, Jonathan Trevor, Kent Brewster, Matt Cashmore, Mirek Grymuza, Mor Naaman, Nate Koechley, Ryan Kennedy, Tom Coates and Tristan Ferne.

I can’t hear you saying right now ‘Who are all those people and what are they talking about?’ but I’ll tell you anyway - well I’ll tell you how to find out.

Go to the Hack Day London Back Network speaker page.

The weekend will see sessions on building a BBC News Search App, the Cutting Edge of Interactive TV, Yahoo APIs: BBC Auth and Yahoo Mail (assume Yahoo has the ! even though I haven’t typed it - it would have been easier to type it than explain why I haven’t but hey ho!) as well as Building with BBC APIs and more.

And more isn’t a session by the way - but Machine Tags is and so is Things to Make and Do, Flickr APIs and Yahoo Pipes.

I love the idea of the three main areas for sessions are ‘Main Stage’, ‘Bean Bags’ and ‘Sofas’ - Obviously the first thing I did was look at whether the sessions I like the idea of the most are on the Sofas - not a fan of bean bags and main stage usually means plastic chairs.

If I only go for the Sofas I will hear The Cutting Edge of Interactive TV, Machine Tags, Things to Make and Do and Using Yahoo Pipes - all things that look really good.

So assuming I’m not going to be needed too much in my role as (let me just look it up) Tech Leader then I will base my session choices on 1) being with the sofas and 2) not being already full.

Being a Tech Leader seems a little complicated to me but Matthew Cashmore has more faith in me and my abilities than I obviously do - here is a quick extract of our e-mail conversation earlier:

ME: Tech  Leader or Steward? Steward?

Matthew: You’re gonna be a tech leader

ME:  Fair enough - I didn’t want to say it myself - after all I am British - can’t be doing with all that self promotion nonsense

Obviously reading that back while posting it to a blog that’s pretty much all about me and my opinions does seem a little um… wrong… but … hey ho!

Anyway - if you’re going to Hack Day then ‘See you there’ and if you go and I don’t see you then tag your posts, photos and anything else (if it’s physical take some parcel tape and brown paper) with hackdaylondon.

If you want to tags stuff on Flickr using machine tags then the correct term is upcoming:event=173371.

Thanks Tom Coates.

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Hack Day Idea

As you probably already know, given that I’ve been talking about it constantly on Jaiku for weeks, I’m going to the BBC/Yahoo Hack Day in London on 16/17 June.

I’m not going as one of the designer/developers building stuff, I’m going as a steward for the BBC so I’m not sure I’ll get much of a chance to build anything but I do have a couple of ideas.

As I’m a generous kind of guy, and the ideas aren’t really that great, I thought I’d share a few of them with you, my wonderful blog readers, and you, the not quite as wonderful casual browsers.

The first idea I plan to share is called Grumpy Geeks - Ofload the moan and it’s one I’ve been toying with working on for a year or so but never got around to.

It’s part Twitter, part therapy, part time waste and all fun.

Offload the Moan

So we take a web full of grumpy geeks, people annoyed with every aspect of 21st Century life and not enough time to write a blog post about it (like that will ever happen).

Mr Grump arrives at a webpage and is shown a simple box with a question above it “What’s bugging you today”. Mr Grump offloads his moan into the box and pushes send.

Underneath the box the moan is shown and two options - Happy or Sad (Annoy me More or Cheer me Up).

If Mr Grump clicks Happy he’ll be shown photos from flickr that are the opposite of his complaint - if he says “I hate cats, one scratched me” he’ll be shown a photo of a cat being thrown across the room.

He’ll also be shown grumps from other people with the same moan and a conversation can be started (other info could be pulled in from other sources as well).

IF Mr Grump decided to be further annoyed (geeks are weird creatures), he’ll be shown photos of fluffy kittens looking all cute and annoying from flickr.

He’ll also be shown comments pulled in from the blogosphere from people that LIKE/LOVE cats and are all gooey about them (again other info could be pulled in).

So there you go - a simple idea to play with - what do you think?

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