Author: Ianforrester

Senior firestarter at BBC R&D, emergent technology expert and serial social geek event organiser. Can be found at cubicgarden@mas.to, cubicgarden@twit.social and cubicgarden@blacktwitter.io

Powerpoint Karaoke, what a wicked night!

Powerpoint Karaoke

Not many people turned up (maybe because of this thing)  for Powerpoint Karaoke but those who did really enjoyed the night of belly aching laughter and ever so odd presentations. I have a few photos which I've uploaded to Flickr but better still I have quite a few videos which I'll be uploading to Blip.tv.

Everyone agreed this is hysterical entertainment and can not wait for the next one. So if your one of the unlucky ones to miss out this time around, look out for the next one in maybe May/June. Its truly geek entertainment by geeks for geeks.

meta-technorati-tags=powerpointkaraoke, karaoke, powerpoint, presentation, ppt, funny, hysterical, geek, geekentertainment

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Hackday officially live – sign up now

hackday in Sunnyville

As previously mentioned on the backstage blog. Hackday.org is now official and you can sign up and grab yourself a ticket now.

The dates are the weekend of the 16th – 17th June at Alexander Palace (yes now it makes sense why I had pictures of the venue on my flickr stream)

Its a partnership between Yahoo! Developer Network and BBC Backstage, which we've been developing for quite sometime. Matthew Cashmore, Tom Coates, Matt McAlister and many others have been involved in this from the start.

As the hackday.org site says, stimulation will be provided in Food, Drinks, Feeds and APIs. Like BarCamp, you are welcome to play werewolf sorry hack or (sleep) through-out the night. Tomski's already offered his shower for Sunday morning. Its going to be a very cool event. No I won't
be doing a live DJ session from stage 1 afterwards but nor will Beck this time around.

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Want to explore the BBC archive?

Film cans

From Backstage

The BBC is looking for people to join a six-month trial in which 20,000 UK residents will get free access to hundreds of programmes from the BBC archive, including reports of historic events as they happened, ground-breaking documentaries, soaps, action-packed children's shows, sumptuous dramas, and comedy shows that thrilled the nation.

Interested? then you can now register your interest on the BBC Archive site

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Geekdinners, Werewolf, Delicious and Karaoke

Tom Loosemore plays ppt karakoe

There's changes on the way for geekdinners. Starting with PPT Karaoke

  1. The dinners are not changing, we're still planning on having them but maybe one every 1-2 months. I also won't be the only one hosting them now. I'm seeking keen and genuine volunteers to be involved with geekinners and its other events.
  2. We're going to put on a werewolf night every other month. Its such great fun and we always get a good turn out, so rather that doing adhoc, we're going to try putting them on regularly. If every other month is too little, we'll bump it up to every month.
  3. New geek games. Werewolf as we play it came back from O'reilly's FooCamp with Simon Willison and a couple others. They posed it at BarCampLondon, and its now become a stable diet for evening geek events and UK Barcamps. But there is more games out there which we could try, hence the next point.
  4. A Powerpoint Karaoke session happened at Etech 07 and Heatherscent was talking about how well it went down at BarCampLA3. So first time in the UK we're going to try it out and if it goes well, who knows it might become a regular night. Its gone down well other places too.
  5. Not forgetting the talent we have here in the UK, we're also going to play Del.icio.us Pecha Kucha, maybe along side PPT Karaoke. It was created and built for BarCampLondon and went down a storm in BarCampLondon2. I have got to link to the video of Meri Williams, Tom Coates and the rest playing this…
  6. We're planning to do more short notice dinners (yes real dinners) for when people are over but we can't get a venue in the short period of time we sometimes have. Like the dinner we had for Howard Rheingold. .

So in short we're getting more organized and more regular. But expect even more…

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Just discovered Xbox Media Centre has a Webish API

xbmc web interface on a psp

I was searching for the new Ajaxy Xbox media centre web interface, but came across documentation for the Xbox media centre's HTTPAPI. Which means I can completely control my xbox via a pipeline interface. However there are issues.

  1. Its all HTML
  2. Its not valid HTML
  3. It seems a little temperamental on Action commands

For example here's how to get what the Xbox is playing right now.

http://xbox/xbmcCmds/xbmcHttp?command=getcurrentlyplaying

But it comes back like this.

<html>
<li>Filename:smb://stratrix/downloads/podcasts/The 1UP Show/041307.m4v
<li>SongNo:0
<li>Type:Video
<li>Title:041307.m4v
<li>Thumb:defaultVideoCover.png
<li>PlayStatus/images/emoticons/silly.giflaying
<li>Time:00:02:40
<li>Duration:00:43:56
<li>Percentage:6
<li>File size:475954023
</html>

Although this is nasty, its still useful. How many media devices under your TV have some kind of API? How many devices around our house support some addressable API?

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Its all about the Metadata?

I like what this is saying, however I'd like to see some more examples…From those good people at NewTeeVee.

“What’s metadata?,” you might ask. Think of it as a layer of data describing content. In Joost’s example this could be anything from a simple timeline to tags to a full-grown programing guide.

The notion of using this type of data for some creative mashups first came up on the Ironic Sans blog, where a Joost fan by the name of David Friedman brainstormed about a feature that he would like to see in the client: The ability to share comments on the programming based on each show’s timeline. Says Friedman:

“Imagine watching a show like Heroes once, and then watching it again with comments turned on to see what other people caught that you missed.”

The concept of annotated television is definitely intriguing – especially if you package it into an easy-to-use application. But it wasn’t just the idea itself that made Friedman’s post interesting. Notable was also the first comment, made by someone who identified himself as Matt Hall:

“We’re already working on it. So far we have a rough passive version — a few bits of content have “trivia” that pops up at specified timestamps — but we plan eventually to allow timestamped tagging, commenting, annotation, etc.”

To be fair, we can’t know for sure if this is the same Matt Hall who works as a software engineer at Joost’s offices in Leiden. We do however know that Joost also hired Dan Brickley, who is one of the inventors of FOAF – a RDF-based metadata framework that makes it possible to transform simple web pages into machine-readable social networking nodes.

We also know that Joost makes extensive use of such metadata frameworks to build the programming and community features of its service. To quote Joost developer Leo Simons: “Not a day goes by without some of our developers swearing about ‘RDF’ or ‘metadata.’”

So what can these metadata frameworks be used for? Timestamped comments and tags are certainly one interesting possibility. Combine this with FOAF-like social networking structures, and you got yourself a whole new way to explore TV programming.

Oh by the way, we're planning a little festival in Edinburgh around the end of August . More details to come but if your interested in video, moving image and storytelling in the web space and the state of TV on line, brings you out in rants and raves. Drop me a email or look out for posts soon about the Edinburgh Fringe TV festival.

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I was thinking eRDF while reading about machine tags

Well not only eRDF but RDF generally, while reading Jeremy Keith's post about machine tags.

For now, I’ve gone ahead and integrated Flickr machine tagging here… but this works from the opposite direction. Instead of tagging my blog posts with flickr:photo=[ID], I’m pulling in any photos on Flickr tagged with adactio:post=[ID].

Now, I’ve already been integrating Flickr pictures with my blog posts using regular “human” tags, but this is a bit different. For a start, to see the associations using the regular tags, you need to click a link (then the Hijax-y goodness takes over and shows any of my tagged photos without a page refresh). Also, this searches specifically for any of my photos that share a tag with my blog post. If I were to run a search on everyone’s photos, the amount of false positives would get really high. That’s not a bug; it’s a feature of the gloriously emergent nature of human tagging.

For the machine tagging, I can be a bit more confident. If a picture is tagged with adactio:post=1245, I can be pretty confident that it should be associated with http://adactio.com/journal/1245. If any matches are found, thumbnails of the photos are shown right after the blog post: no click required.

I’m not restricting the search to just my photos, either. Any photos tagged with adactio:post=[ID] will show up on http://adactio.com/journal/[ID]. In a way, I’m enabling comments on all my posts. But instead of text comments, anyone now has the ability to add photos that they think are related to a blog post of mine. Remember, it doesn’t even need to be your Flickr picture that you’re machine tagging: you can also machine tag photos from your contacts or anyone else who is allowing their pictures to be tagged.

I like the idea of using your blog entry url as the predicate for the N3 triple (sorry) machine tag.

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Switching to Ubuntu on Desktop for real this time

The other day I was installing some new wireless points around the house. My very 1st generation Linksys 802.11b access point had pretty much had enough and needed to be put out of its pain. And the pocket Asus wireless point (smaller that a Airport express) wasn't really made for constant use.

Anyhow, I happen to flip the switch on the Belkin 10 way power supply under my desk. Off went the Desktop machine. Thought damm it, and switched the 10 way back on. Well Windows was screwed, so screwed that I had to reinstall it again. Only this time when I reinstalled it, it kept getting upset about the hardware and would restart its self.In the end I got so pissed off with the whole thing, that I threw the Windows CD across the room and went looking for my Ubuntu CD.

Within a few hours I had Ubuntu 6.10 dapper installed (had to do some data shifting with partition magic) and before you knew it all the applications I needed, thanks very much to Nat's guide to Ubuntu she sent me over Twitter. I had a few problems on the way including writing to NTFS partitions and getting Azureus to run correctly. However this evening I got all those working without too much work. Now I just need to clean things up, get Hamachi running and sort out the Samba shares.

So far, its all god…

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London XSL user group

Its been a long time coming but finally there is a London XSL user group starting. Its thankfully not run or setup by myself, instead Nic Ferrier and Otu Ekanem have taken it upon themselves to foster this user group.

We met at the Prince Regents Pub yesterday and there seemed to be agreement that a group meeting every month to discuss things happening in the XSL space outside of actual code was a good idea. No one wants to discuss the memory differences between using xsl:for-each in Xalan vs Saxon, so the group will centre around improving the image of XSL and helping people get into XSL in the first place.

It was reassuring to hear Thompson and BT were having the same issues hiring good XSL people as we are in the BBC. The fact is that most computer science university courses don't teach XSL and if they do its placed next to odd languages like Pascal (god I hope they don't still teach that) and Lisp for a couple of day.

Another interesting fact came out of the night, 2 out of the 6 of us came to XSL through a design background. Anyway expect to see more about the group at xslug.org

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