A very good, long weekend at HackDay in London – many thanks to Yahoo! and the BBC for staging the event, the Alexandra Palace staff, BT and Cisco for the facilities, and all of the people who attended for making it a success.
I’d hoped to run a short breakout session yesterday if we hadn’t been interrupted by the dual lightning bolts (clearly there was a message right there)… I’d put together a short presentation on what we were doing there as IBM developerWorks, but we met a few folks anyway whilst out in the Palm Court… unfortunately we probably weren’t able to show off some of the stuff that we had to demonstrate thanks to the earlier instability in the network, and by today when we were all fixed up, everyone was very busy with their hacks – our team included!
Anyhow, it was amazing to see just what people had hacked together and we were stunned by the number and the quality of the hacks. I have to say that I missed a number of the presentations due to getting ours ready at the side of the stage where the acoustics were not good, and because I was popping in and out of the hall during some of the talks. However, here are just a few of the ones that particularly caught my eye:
Flickr Captcha, using Flickr tags to retrieve images and then asking the user to “select the image that looks like…” rather than the mangled text that we all know and hate.
The Plazes bunny / MyBlogBunny hack that caused the Nabaztag to speak the owner’s location and who had visited his blog lately. Very cool. I want a Nabaztag. Anyone want to donate me one? 😉
Yowl, like Growl for OS X but using the YUI to build the notifications.
The antispam filter for Yahoo! Pipes.
FlickrTunes, which raked in 3 awards (I think).
iWondr, the Twitter bot that is also omniscient. Maybe.
(unfortunately you’ll note that some of the ones I found especially interesting are the ones without links in the wiki!)
And the 2 non-technical, but very cool hacks… Beagle3, the planned multistage rocket, which ingeniously incorporated the Yahoo!/BBC APIs by putting them on a USB memory stick inside the rocket… and the Top Gun paper-based user interface with built in “zoom” (click with a pen, and flip to a drawing of the area of the image in more detail!) and “downloads” (roll up ball of paper and throw into the audience!). I loved those 🙂
I’m sure I’ve missed so much that was exceedingly cool, and I need to explore the HackDay site in more detail to find out what the other hacks were.
Since I went home overnight, I missed the cameraderie, the Doctor Who showing which did actually happen later in the evening, the music that apparently woke people up, and finding out what a lot of the teams were up to. Huge respect to those who hacked through the night! I hope you all get a decent rest now.
It was a shame to miss the band as they sounded great in rehearsal. I’ll be checking for photos and reports later. It was also a shame to miss meeting people. One suggestion I’d have is for the registration to include badges next time – it wasn’t always easy to meet or find people without a means of identifying them. In particular I did want to say hello to Jem Stone… I saw him in the West Hall before the lightning hit on Saturday morning, but couldn’t find him after that. Another time.
Now, I wonder what I missed at Interesting 2007…?
Technorati Tags: Flickr, HackDay, hackdaylondon, IBM, London, Plazes, interesting2007
[…] with, amongst others, Matt and Katherine Cashmore. Matt is from BBC Backstage and ran the BBC/Yahoo! HackDay in London. I’d seen him on stage at the event, but hadn’t had the opportunity to connect with […]
[…] in, too. It was created by Natalie Downes and Simon Willison – I’ve known of Nat since the BBC/Yahoo! Hackday in 2007; I can’t remember whether I’ve met Simon. Lanyrd was something small and experimental, […]
[…] need your stuff!), @TheArduinoGuy (great kit for Arduinos) and, for the first time in person since the Slorpedo triumph of Yahoo/BBC HackDay back in 2007, @jimpurbrick! It was far from a “usual crowd” collective though – […]