Adaptive podcasting is now open source for all


Video: Created by Vicky Barlow / Voice over: Bronnie McCarthy / Licensed CC-BY-SA  | Music: Sleepwalking by Airtone

It brings me absolute joy to finally open source all the code of Adaptive/Perceptive podcasting.

This research project has run for a long time and at some time thought about pulling the plug. I always thought it had so much potential and needed to reach different people who will explore and use it for many more use cases than a research agenda.

If you are wondering what Adaptive podcasting is, check out the post from R&D and my own thoughts last year.

Podcast listener with headphones

Now the code base is public under a Apache 2 license, it means anyone can make changes to the code base including I hope,

There is so many people who had a hand in Adaptive podcasting, which are all named in the credits. This project couldn’t have happened without them and it speaks volumes about a future where collaboration is the default.

Adaptive podcasting editor

I am personally humbled by everything and if I wasn’t in Amsterdam during the Society 5.0 conference would be sending out lots of emails letting everyone and anyone know. There is a long long list of people to contact to let them know its all public now. Its also one of the research projects which has always been in the forefront of my mind and consumed many of my cycles. Its a great project and in the history makes clear the trajectory of progression. However wouldn’t existed without the community of practice, which kept me on my toes. Even now, I’m keen to see the community grow and built the amazing experiences which we dreamed about.

This is a clear sign of the power of public service. Many will ask why would the BBC open source this? Its in the BBC’s royal charter, helping build the UK economy. This is also a natural end to the Perceptive Media workstream for me, looking at implicit interaction to drive experiences and narratives.

Ultimately I’m hoping to further the ambition on podcasts and adaptive audio full stop. I have always said and stood behind the notion media has so much more potential. I do expect some enterprising individual to take the source code and port it to the Apple app store. Although I’m already looking at fdroid for the latest player too.

If you have any questions about Adaptive/Perceptive podcasting please do get in touch via email or github. This project is leaking so much potential be it public, commercial, etc.

I really look forward to seeing what people do with it all…

You can help us make it digital

BBC Sign - MediaCityUK

In 2015, the BBC’s Make it Digital initiative will shine a light on the world of digital creativity and coding. Why are we doing this? The BBC has already inspired a generation to get passionate about computing. Back in the Eighties the BBC broadcast hundreds of hours of TV, created a new coding language, and gave millions their first taste of computing with the BBC Micro.

As you may have heard, the BBC has finally decades after the BBC Micro phenomenon. To make 2015 the year of making it digital.

But the BBC can’t do this alone, we need partners…

As part of Make it Digital, we’d like to create a hands-on learning experience that allows any level of young coder from absolute beginner to advanced maker to get involved and be part of something exciting. We are looking for partners, large and small, who are both willing and able to contribute services and/or funding to the delivery of this project alongside the BBC. This initiative will involve the BBC working together with the market as a public value partnership…

Think this sounds like you?  Well time to get those expressions of interest emails in.

Please submit expressions of interest by email to learning.makeitdigital@bbc.co.uk at your earliest convenience and no later than 2pm 8th December 2014.

Inspiring the next generation of coders

Remember this in 2011? Remember BBC Micro for the 21st century? Heck do you remember BBC Code Club? Then finally it was announced

BBC Connected Studio are setting the challenge of a new way to teach Coding to Teenagers.

Inspiring young people to realise their creative potential through technology

This all links and is inspired by the amazing and tireless work (at times) people such as Ant Miller, Michael Sparks, Mo McRoberts, Alan O’DonohoeKeri Facer, Adrian Woolard, Jo Classens, Howard, etc, etc to name just a few. (maybe would be a good time to share that mindmap?)

If you’ve not been paying attention, here’s some background…

The UK is facing a severe skills shortage in the technology sector and the BBC wants to work with partners to help change that. Martha Lane Fox recently said: “We are going to need a million more people who can work in the technology sector over the next ten years. We don’t have them. We’ve got to help people be encouraged to go into that sector.” So we want to inspire Britain’s next generation of storytellers, problem solvers and entrepreneurs to get involved with technology and unlock the enormous creative potential it offers, both for each individual and for all corners of UK industry.

Digital literacy is a highly valuable skill – and in future could arguably become as essential to a successful career as reading or writing. Some young people in Britain have already discovered the power and range of their creative potential in coding, programming and digital technology, but many have yet to try these things.

Digital literacy is essential…

The call is out! And I’m expecting this to be one of the biggest BBC connected studios ever. Who would be interested in working with me to come together around a fantastic idea which could work for a wider audience that just the typical stereotypes.

Who’s with me? No seriously who’s interested in being part of my team?

Client side development now?


As they say, Serenity now? Insanity later?

A couple blogs which sum up the current state of front end development it would seem…

Tim’s software in 2014 and Chris’ what sucks about frontend development.

First Tim,

The client-side mess · Things are bad. You have to build everything three times: Web, iOS, Android. We’re talent-starved, this is egregious waste, and it’s really hurting us.

JavaScript is horrible.
> [5, 10, 1].sort();
[ 1, 10, 5 ]

Et cetera. Thus Coffeescript and Dart and other efforts to route around TheElephantInTheRoom.js.

The browser APIs suck too. Sufficiently so that jQuery (or equivalent) is regarded as the lowest level that any sane person would program to; in effect, the new Web assembler.

And from Chris

managing JavaScript dependencies still sucks, and Bower has fundamental flaws that limits it’s utility

table designs are bad, so why are we re-implementing them with non-semantic class names? We should use our CSS frameworks to have only abstract classes that we make concrete by extending them with semantic class names. Also, progressive enhancement isn’t dead and still has value.

…I only feel these issues because I’m comparing it directly to other parts of the software stack rather than considering the front-end in isolation, but front-end development still feels very immature and like the wild west, rather than the engineering discipline we’re striving to be. We need to make it better.

I will admit its been a while since I’ve done any front end development but to be fair I’m also wondering if developers are taking full advantage of whats available to them? For example in my twitter stream I saw someone link to a post about SVG and DOM manipulation for icons. And finally…

More or less everything is expected to talk HTTP, and it’s really easy to make things talk HTTP.
Its easy to under-estimate how great this is, specially as we move towards coding for the mobile, offline, internet of things and exotic screens/devices. REST won out and who was stupid enough to bet against this? Oh yes… where are they now? Dead! Good riddens SOAP and other craziness…

Hacking your input and outputs

Hacked... Learn, Build, Share

I had the pleasure of supporting and attending Hacked.io which was a hackday in the most traditional sense of the word. Run by the Geeks of London for 02 Labs, it couldn’t have been more fitting to hold it at the 02 arena (the old millennium dome). Now I knew the plans ahead of most people but I didn’t really think that I might have been a good part of the inspiration for the event.

Melinda broke it down for Ankur Oberoi at 5am.

“Ian use to run Geekdinners which we use to go to. Then went on to run BarCampLondon 1, 2 and 3. After which he ran the first hackday and over the air. Most of the Geeks of London went to the events and once Ian moved on, he passed on geekdinners to me and Cristiano. So we did that and formed the geeks of London. Then we took over Barcamplondon. Now I guess we are taking over hackday. Taking it back to the original idea of sharing ideas and knowledge” (power phrased of course)

On the walk back to the hotel at 5:30am I thought about this… Not only am I delighted to be a inspiration but I’m also over the moon that they have given these events a level of professionalism and sustainability which I could not. No matter what I say about hacked.io, I was blown away by the little things and the ultimate aim of open sharing.

I’m kind of gutted I didn’t hack something myself, but talking to people I learned a bunch of things and some of those things I’m following up with.

Hacked.io promised a lot and deliver much back many things…

Very long queue outside Hacked.io

Of course this is the same team which mainly wrote the controversial hackday manifesto. So it would make sense to compare Hacked.io against there own thoughts…

Announcing the event
Once you know when and how your event will take place, you’ll want to tell the world about it. At a bare minimum, you should decide on a canonical place where all public information about the event lives – this might be a dedicated web site, an event on an existing event online service or some other place which is publicly accessible.

Once you’ve decided where that location is, use tools like Twitter and Facebook to make people aware of the event, and also consider which Google Groups and mailing lists developers relevant to your event may be hanging out. Don’t spam them, though – nobody enjoys that.

On Announcing everything seemed perfect. Everything you needed to know was at hacked.io and the almanac seemed to have all FAQs ready to go. I also felt they hit the right level of communication. Not too much and not too little. Maybe from a supporter side a tiny bit more might not have gone a miss. But generally it was all good.

Registration was cool but my allergy information did get post in the mix. And I did feel sorry for those who were waiting in the massive line for a long while.

The venue should be relatively easy for people from outside of town to locate, with good public transport links. If it’s difficult to reach, try to provide alternative means of transportation, such as coaches to/from local transport hubs throughout the event. Provide a full address, and if necessary, additional instructions to all attendees well in advance of the event.

Include instructions/contacts/getting in arrangements, too (i.e., what to do at reception/security desks).

Print big signs that will guide your attendees to the venue (and in some case inside the venue).

Hacked.io starts

The venue was top class and a dream to be able to use. The transport links to the 02 are great and I do remember the first time Cristiano and Kevin told me they were looking to use the 02. I was gob smacked. How on earth did they pull that one off?  I had looked at the 02 when we were working on Hackday but it was far too expensive. Transport wise its got plenty going for it and heck its easy on the tube. Many signs and even billboards pointed people in the right direction. There were even helpers guiding people to the right place. Of course getting back was easy even at 5:30am due to the 24hour buses which run to central London when the tube stops.

Of course the venue was accessible with lifts and what not, maybe the stage needed a lift too? And I found the security staff quite firm but nice. I think they were a little bemused by the whole event.

Date clashes. One of the most frustrating things for attendees to see is two similar events on the same day in the same area. To avoid this, check places like Lanyrd, Eventbrite, Meetup, and ask on Twitter “is anything going on in X on X?”. Remember that people may be travelling long distances for hack days, so even if an event is a few hundred miles away, you are still diluting your potential audience.

Always a hard one to solve but they got it out there early enough and the only clash I saw was with Mozilla’s Party Hack which I believe was cancelled when the clash came to light.

If attendees are staying overnight, then a separate (dark, quiet) area should be available away from the hacking should people decide to sleep. If possible, this should be several areas potentially including dedicated areas, for example male/female/mixed, minors (+chaperones?), snorer/non-snorer, night-owls/early birds.

I didn’t check out the sleeping arrangements because I stayed up till 5:30am then walked to my hotel in Greenwich. I noticed there were areas upstairs for sleeping and I assume they were separated or whatever. While downstairs was a place for hacking all night. Of course some people fell a sleep at their computers.

2013-07-21%2003.24.50

The Network. Hack days have special requirements: don’t just trust anyone who tells you that “it’ll be fine”. Think about the networking issues, and verify that they work for the kind of capacity you are going to have. People from the venue or their commercial partner will tell you all sorts of things you want to hear but keep in the back of your mind that they may not have any clue what they are talking about. Given the importance of network access, if you are operating a commercial event consider requiring network performance as part of your contract with venues and suppliers.

One of the bug bears of almost any hackday event. Unfortunately hacked.io was effected pretty badly by 2.4ghz wireless problems. There was a figure banded around estimating 4 devices for every single person in the room. That means supplying wireless for 2000 devices! When we did hackday we estimated roughly 2 devices per person. There seems to be plenty of bandwidth in the backend pipe, because once plugged into a switches (the solution to most of the problems) it was fast and reliable. I had to download the JDK and I blinked and it was downloaded.

So what was the problem? Seems some device was spitting out packets into the 2.4ghz space and disrupting the network at the same time. I have some experience of this when the Nimba virus was prevalent and daily Ravensbourne IT staff would have to go find the suspect before they switched to 802.11x authentication. Nimba would just consume the network and all its resources, before you knew it. All spare 802.11 space was crammed with packets

They had the best guys involved in the networking and wireless. Nexus Global networking battled away till most of the machines were on wired network but it was a black eye on a perfectly run event.

Power wasn’t a problem thankfully, lots of spare power sockets all over the place.

Food & Drink…Not everyone in the technical community is hypercarnivorous. Be sure to check with your attendees for dietary requirements: food allergies, vegetarians, vegans and people with dietary restrictions. Make provisions to ensure they are provided for equally. If you’re on a budget, prioritise allergies and vegan alternatives; the vegan alternative will satisfy most non-allergy based requirements. Common food allergies include milk, eggs, nuts, fish, shellfish, soya, and wheat (gluten).

Food was good (mainly salad pots) and there was pizza as a midnight surprise. The dinner was good because there was tickets for 4 different restaurants in the dome. But most people said the portions were quite small and seeked out more food elsewhere. For example my work friends were lucky to get the thai silk tickets which I gather were in high demand. GBK seemed to be 2nd. Last place was dinner at the 02 lounge Which I got stuck with. The last thing I really wanted to eat was mash potatoes and sausages. Weirdly I couldn’t mix the food according to the lady serving!

For the midnight surprise Pizza hut delivered Pizzas but the word didn’t quite get out so quickly so most of the meat ones were gone and we were left with cold pizza. That will teach me to sit and chat upstairs.

There was some confusion over alcohol too but it worked it self out. There was plenty of Fruit and Chocolate, Crisps, Soda and Water around all day and night too.

2013-07-21%2002.16.34

APIs and Datasets was a interesting angle because unlike other hackathons, there was no set API or datasets to play with. You could use what ever you liked but there were challenges for those who couldn’t think of something themselves or needed to be challenged.

Hacked.io demos

Anyone who hacks should be a allowed to Demo at the end of the event, regardless of the quality or completeness.

Each demo should be given a fixed time limit, standard times are 60, 90, 180, and 300 seconds. Tell presenters ahead of time, let them know how much time remains (either half time cards or an on-screen count down), and don’t let them run over.

Try and communicate clear expectations for the demos to all attendees from the beginning of the event. Some attendees will become frustrated when they see others demo-ing paper prototypes or Photoshop mockups when they believed a working implementation was required. If hacks do not meet these base requirements, they should not be able to win a prize.

The demos were by the book. I was very impressed by the use of Hackerleague. Never used it before but I like it a lot. Now if Lanyrd and Hackerleague could connect together… 90 secs was about right for each hack. The only down side was being split up from the hackers presenting but honestly it was for a short time only.

I was really impressed with the range of hacks, I wrote some down which I’d like to follow up on from a BBC point of view and of course hackerleague makes it nice and easy to follow up.

Hacked.io demos

The amount of Philips Hue hacks was impressive and makes sense because I think a lot of people thought it was a totally closed system which was tied to Apple. The amount clearly points the fact Hacked.io was comfortable. People were willing to take more risks and actually learn something new. That makes hacked.io a success right? A return to the learn, build and share ethics of hackers.

I’d also like to say it was amazing all the extra effort the team put in. There was a theme of dogs over cats, be more curious, plus fun and fake facts in the toilets, magically boxes on the tables, the tag line everywhere and finally the first 100 through the door got a prize! Talk about attention to detail! Now thats how you run a hackday!

Massive thanks to the Geeks of London, 02 and everyone who attended and made it a great event. Like everyone asked me after hackday, so whens the next one?

2013-07-21%2016.42.45

 

More on that Youtube Video

After I got a automatic/robot take down for my intrusive TV demonstrate from the Black Mirror episode 2. I’ve decided to see what I can do to get the video back online, by going through the YouTube process instead of just posting it somewhere else.

However there seems to be little I can do…

Copyright Info: Intrusive TV?

Your video, Intrusive TV? , may include content that is owned or administered by these entities:

  • Entity: Channel 4 Content Type: Audiovisual content

As a result, your video has been blocked in these locations:

Guernsey, Ireland, Isle of Man, Jersey, United Kingdom

What should I do?

No action is required on your part. Your video is still available everywhere not listed above.

What can I do about my video’s status?

Please note that the video’s status can change if the policies chosen by the content owners change. You may want to check back periodically to see if you have new options available to you.

Under certain circumstances, you may dispute this copyright claim. These are:

  • if the content is mistakenly identified and is actually completely your original creation;
  • if you believe that your use does not infringe copyright (e.g. it is fair use under US law);
  • if you are actually licensed by the owner to use this content.

I need more information. I want to learn more about the dispute process.

Please take a few minutes to visit our Help Centre section on Policy and Copyright Guidelines, where you can learn more about copyright law and our Content Identification Service.

So as you can see its only blocked in the country of its origin, which strikes me as totally backwards…! Oh well, I could say a lot about this but to be totally fair, its not Channel4… Its some automated process doing automatic takedowns on behalf of Channel4. Who was it that said code is law?

Steve Gibson says Windows Metafile was a backdoor

So while in the shower today I was listening to Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson's Security now number 22. I almost fell in the shower after hearing the possibility that Microsoft maybe covered up a backdoor in Windows. Simply put Steve Gibson is suggesting that Microsoft or some people involved in the code for the Windows Metafile (WMF) put in a backdoor. Aka it was not a flaw or vunerability, a backdoor! If this is true I'm speechless.

Its easy to think of this as a conspiracy and put on your foil hats now but this deadly serious. Even Steve has admitted if he's wrong he will be the first to admit he's wrong but he really doesnt believe this. He's actually put a lot on the line for this. Personally I think this is just a long line of the mainstream lying to us. Think about it Sony and there badly written DRM and worst still badly written Rootkit. Lies and more damm lies. Even when there pants were down they tried to cover it up by saying people didnt even know what a rootkit was so why tell them. I remember quoting Miles in my post about the Rootkit saying Apple and Microsoft must be pissing themselves with laughter. Well its now Microsoft's time and Apple are not getting away clean. Theres lots of talk about iTunes in the context of useage patterns feedback and the reduction of uses of the sharing feature across the versions. So Apple users don't even laugh because Apple are hardly saints either.

But back to this claim of a backdoor in Windows. If it turns out to be true (and honestly Steve's explaining actually makes a lot of sense I have to say). We have to wonder how many more there are? Who put this backdoor there and who actually knows about it? I expect by the time this gets out there it will make the large news sources quickly. I've not looked on Digg, slashdot, boingboing yet because I'm on the 10am train into London Bridge. Tell a lie, I just did a search through Digg on the my aggregator and this came up (which is close but not the same) this came up.. I'll digg it when I get back online in about 20mins. Looking at the date of the Digg story (7:30am) its still too early for most of the Western world and may not have had time to circlate yet. Steve did say this was a exclusive to Security now and he's only known about it for about a day at most. Anyhow, we shall see what happens. By the way the people who came out of this smelling pretty sweet has to be Hackers. If it wasn't for hackers and reverse engineering we would never know. This is critical to remember no matter how it turns out.

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