Rattle News.
Date: 15 Aug 08
Roberto
We're pleased to announce that Frankie Roberto is joining us from the Science Museum. Frankie does good stuff like this, which looks dry but is actually really, er, cool. It's no small move for him either as he's moving from London to the north, a switch which goes against recent policy thinking. Financially ruinous for him then but at least he'll now be able to get chips with gravy, a decent pint and (develop) a sense of humour :)
This gives me the excuse to play one of my favourite tracks of all time, from The Fall: "Leave the Capitol". Top stuff.
Date: 29 Jun 08
Rattle @ Euro Railsconf 2008
I'm pleased to announce that I'll be speaking at Euro Railsconf 2008 in September this year. The details of the talk are here, it's titled "Adding Semantic Markup to Your Rails Application with DBpedia and ActiveRDF", a little snappier than the title for my XTech talk :)
Euro Railsconf is in Berlin this year and I'll be trying to attend : Starling + Workling: Simple Distributed Background Jobs with Twitter's Queuing System, Modeling Denormalization - The Speed You Need, the Order You Crave and EC2, MapReduce, and Distributed Processing. I'll post the talk up when it's done.
Date: 01 Jun 08
Arduino workshop roundup
I'm just on the train back from the two day Arduino Wireless Workshop run by tinker.it. It was a terrific two days with lots of hands-on wireless hacking. We convered using the Bluetooth Arduino board and the XBee Arduino Shields allowing us to create wireless sensor mesh networks.
I concentrated on getting a wireless Bluetooth scanner working with my partner in crime, Camille. The Bluetooth board is a tricky one to interact with as it requires programming via Bluetooth which is notorious for interoperability problems. We resorted to programming it using an avr programmer which made it a snap to work with. Massimo helped us out with some software to run the scanner and we created a breadboard prototype :
Camille then showed his soldering skills and we moved the breadboard prototype onto an Arduino Shield which left us with a (semi) portable unit:
This is the fully portable version sitting in it's box :
There's also some shaky iPhone videos of it in action, you can see the names of Bluetooth devices flashing up on the LCD here (mp4) and here (mp4).
I'll be doing some more with this in the near future and it will be lurking somewhere in the office in a slightly different form, so keep an eye out if you come to visit !
Date: 27 May 08
A Tale of Two Titles
Rob spoke at xtech earlier in the month with a title taken straight from the 'keep-it-snappy school of speaking'. The talk covered some of the ground of Muddy Boots phase 1 and also the current work we're doing with phase 2. We hope to say a little bit more about Phase II soon. We got lots of good feedback and the general thrust of the talk, around creating semantic richness for a given piece of content from existing web resources, is topical judging by some of the other talks at xtech. Consistent and well architected data [e.g. wikipedia and its offshoots] are providing good building blocks and we seem to be finally all moving on from talking about the semantic web to creating [a loosely joined] version.
May also saw another BBC project kick off. Followme came out of the BBC Labs in Masham in April. Rob's thinking through a catchy, technical working title for the project at the moment :) More to come later in the summer.
Date: 13 May 08
Museum Memories
We've recently been working with the Science Museum to help produce the ObjectWiki. It's described as :
"The Science Museum 'Object Wiki' is a website with information about some of the objects within the Science Museum's collections. To help improve the information, we've opened up the pages so that anyone can edit them."
It's been quite an interesting project and we've even seen it used as a reference site on ebay which demonstrates the strength of the Science Museum as a trusted brand and also shows you can never predict how this kind of information is going to be used once it's opened up and made accessible outside of the museum.
The Science Museum are working on a number of approaches to make the data as available as possible, including licensing the content under a creative commons license and attempting to link the wiki to other sources such as Wikipedia. They have also opened up the mediawiki api allowing developers to build services against the WIki.
As a (small) demonstration of the kinds of things you can do using this, I've created a ruby script that posts the latest memories submitted by people from the wiki to a twitter account, allowing people to browse old submitted memories and get notifications as new ones come through. You can view/follow it at museummemories, let us know if you find it enjoyable ...