We've been playing giant faceball with space hoppers at Google. We had to change the official rules a bit since the ball is so big it's too easy at 10 feet, so we scaled it up.

Anything Yahoo do, Google do better! It did hurt a bit though.

Labels: barcamp, barcamplondon, barcamplondon3, faceball

Here are the slides from my presentation at BarCampBrighton. The aim of this talk was to show the common ways that web applications are compromised that the web developer must take responsibility for. The slides aren't actually much without the talk, but if you want more info on anything in particular let me know

Labels: barcamp, barcampbrighton, hack, hacking

I'm only just starting to feel like I'm recovered from that weekend, I had about 4 hours sleep on Friday night and the same again on Saturday. This BarCamp was probably about 3 times the size of the last one, the venue was impressive, they had a proper little auditorium. There still wasn't anywhere very comfy to sleep, although I think I found the best spot (the only sofa in the building!) next time I'm going to pack some sort of inflatable bed.

This time round the presentations had a different feel, it seemed that the more seasoned speakers were dominating, but that was probably just because I was attending talks by names I recognised! Also with it being much bigger it lost the feeling of intimacy. It was still a great event though, big respects to Ian and the other organisers, and BT really put a lot into it too (nice pizza and way more beer than 200 geeks could drink!)

I've been thinking about trying to kick one off up north since last time, but I've heard that the guys from GeekUp are working on that already. So instead I'm planning to try and gather together some people from the Liverpool area, all the folk that can't make it into Manchester very easily. I'll write up a bit more in another post shortly.

Labels: barcamp, barcamplondon2

It's back! The last one was great and I totally recommend it to everyone even slightly interested in the web. Don't be put off by the fact that you're expect to lead a session, everyone is very chilled out and the groups are small, there's also a lot of other first timers or nervous speakers. The great thing is the mix you get of the seasoned conference folk, like Jeremy Keith, Andy Budd, Aral Balkan, Matt Webb and more, along with the newer people who still have plenty of things to say. At BarCamp everyone is equal, we're all speakers and we're all delegates, and it makes it so much more interactive and rewarding for everyone. Thanks to Ian for sorting this all out, as far as I know it's just him organising at the moment.
Ian has this logo in a few formats on his blog, so go and post one up.

Labels: barcamp, barcamplondon

I'm in a presentation with Matt Webb who's just been talking about his ideas of web applications in the next five years or so. He's made some very good observations about the way things are going, I'm going to list each of his points and try and expand on them a bit. 1. The next Mac OSX is going to ship with RoR, you will be able to run your web app locally and host it in a heavily customised browser interface, you can allow script in the app to get access to things that are usually protected, such as the file system. Well it's not just OSX with that stuff, IE has had HTA since IE4, .net has the casini web server, which is lightweight and won't conflict with other instances or iis. You also have XAML for building very powerful app interfaces in IE, or XUL for firefox and flex for flash if you want cross platform. (More of flex after Arals presentation coming up next) 2. Massive, Scalable, Affordable Need lots of storage, lots of processor power? Amazon have it all, and your users can just pay per use. Say you want to build a photo management site, if you ask your users for their S3 details you can back all the image storage onto their account and they pay for it. If they want to run face recognition across their entire photo library you can farm that out to EC2. There are many other similar services such as Alexa for indexing and searching. Personally I see these technologies as a way for quickly growing an application, once you have the ad revenue you'd want to host all this stuff yourself, latency will always be a problem, as will the bandwidth bills. 3. Location and context intelligent applications Matts point was that if your laptop knows pretty much where it is, based on wifi network etc, it should be able to change its interface to what you need, depending whether you're at work or home. I think this is something we could start using now, based on a users IP, imagine being able to mark photos or groups in your flickr to never show up when you're at work. You could do this with cookies so people choose per computer, or based on IP so they choose per network connection. 4. Ambient applications not interrupting Matt worked on some really interesting continous partial attention prototypes, someone else mentioned Growl, which looks a lot like the little popups office and other windows applications are starting adopt instead of that bloody blinking taskbar button, a popup, or a noise. 5. Web Pipes I'm sure most of us are familiar with pipes in unix, I'm a windows user but I love my windows ports of all those great unix utils like grep and less. Matt mentioned apps like filtr and scanr, that process images and allow you to send them on. There is also preloadr that gives you loads of image processing online before passing on to flickr. And of course you can pipe your feeds through the likes of feedburner. Daisy chaining these things together allows a none techy user to build some very powerful customisable applications. One point Matt made is that it can be quite difficult to monetise these things when its just one step in a long pipe, they can't all insert an ad! 6. Interactive RSS We're seeing more of those little links down at the bottom of items on feeds, like digg me (look down). Matt thinks we're going to see more of this, such as embedded forms, so when you get a new bug added to your bug tracker, you see it in your reader, choose the developer to assign to, click and its done. Some of the things he talked about have been around for quite a while, and we're going to see a lot more of it in a lot sooner than 5 years.

Labels: barcamp, barcamplondon, barcamplondon06, future, matt webb