Category: Sessions

Day 3 at dev8D 2010

Posted on by Tessa (the external)

Some quick notes about the lightening talks I attended.

Archiving Tweets with Twapper Keeper

Why archive tweets?

  • Twitters search limits results by number (1500) or time, approx 7 days
  • You may want to capture an events output and ensure this data is not lost

Linked data in the web

We should integrate more, it’s not all or nothing. Where do I start:
  • model your stuff
  • identity with cool URIs
  • link your html together
  • link to machine friendly formats
  • use RDF to make your database structure available on the web
Comment from audience: Use RDFa to annotate link relationships easily.

Mendeley

  • an endnote alternative
  • last.fm for researchers papers
  • startup working with several partner universities
Future plans for an OpenAPI with various export formats
  • REST
  • oAuth
  • JSON
  • Export groups:
    • open ‘anonymised’ data due March 2010
    • user data due April 2010

Finding Nero

  • about collections/repositories
  • Culture24 API available, they want feedback about output format
  • CultureGrid – aggregator

Collaborative tools project

A talk about a new project being under taken at the University of York
  • LifeRay – portal builder
  • Network Thinking
  • JISC – People Project – people recommendations

Mistakes I have made building web applications

By Juliette Culver, Open University

  • Not dealing with character encoding from the start
  • Not establishing which web browsers you support
  • Bad choices about 3rd party code (not using them when I should have)
  • Under estimating time required for legal and acquiring domain names
  • Not dotting i’s and cross t’s
  • Admin and stats most often get the extra change requests
  • Asking permission from non techies for time for refactoring, accessibility, web security – add non as these elements are essential, a no  techie will always say no
  • Not colour contrast testing on design work
  • Putting off usability testing
  • Underestimating the problem of spam, see Mollum
  • Not protecting programming time – turn off other messenging for example/block off programming time from meetings, see makers schedule article
  • Stop expecting anyone to appreciate what you do

Comments from audience

  • Under estimating the time it takes to go from prototype to production
Visualising Data with Processing
by Ross McFarlane
  • Processing is a Java related language for graphics
  • 3D – OPENGL less buggy than the built in

Day 2 at dev8D 2010 – Lightening talks and Ruby on Rails coding lab

Posted on by Tessa (the external)

I attended the Ruby on Rails code lab and the following lightening talks:

Top tips

  • Stay out of core code at all costs, extend using plugins
  • Check out OWASP top 10 tips web security tips
  • Don’t save back up config files in the web root, for instance config.php.bak will be readable
  • Symbian apps are easy to make
  • RepRap rocks!
  • Django handles configuring paths better than Ruby on Rails

Manufacturing for the masses, RepRap notes

A fantastic 3D printer that can create plastic mouldings.

  • can print 50% of own parts (in 2.5 days)
  • most non plastic parts are widely available
  • GPL
  • costs approx €350
  • future aims to be able to shred and recycle your own plastic bottles or use starch based sources

More info:

Some commercial outlets, such as Bits from bites, make t machines that don’t replicate themselves, but can replicate parts for a RepRap machine.

Day 1 at dev8D 2010 – Pipes lab and lightening talks

Posted on by Tessa (the external)

I attended the first half of the Pipes lab and following up by catching some of the lightening talks.

Yahoo Pipes notes

About

  • will mash up various data formats; e.g. RSS1, RSS2, atom
  • will normalise out from multiple input formats
  • can output as XML, JSON, stub of PHP, image/media version of feed, etc.
  • each pipe has a unique URI
  • uses a GUI interface, with flow chart style objects, to create new feeds
  • requires a Yahoo account
  • pipes can be claimed or cloned, NB: only an owner can only delete a pipe
  • could a useful tool for useful for examining feeds

Sources of data

  • RSS
  • CSV
  • HTML
  • Yahoo searches/queries
  • existing pipes

Downsides

  • Don’t seem to be able to export the structure of the feed mash up
  • A third party hosted service

Alternatives

The open source version, Deri pipes, can be locally hosted.

Notes on uses of modules Can mash up search RSS feeds (e.g. Plone/WordPress search results) and pass in arguments
– see url builder and user input modules

Bear in mind if using search RSS results these feeds may be paginated or limited to n number of output
– example uses uses search term – url builder – fetch feed – output

Can compound your feeds, i.e. call a search feed for each search result of another feed – see loop function

Private input – protects for instance API keys from cloned pipes
– remember there can be many levels of caching – at source, in yahoo pipes, in your own application

Lightening Talks

I attending lightening talks about WordPress, Teaching programming to non programmers and building Android applications.

Android phone application notes

  • Use Eclipse IDE (plugin may be necessary)
  • Install Android SDK, includes
    • emulator
    • command line tool
    • demo code
  • Uses a locked version of Linux
  • API demos is good demo code to look at

Description of 3D modelling in Android

KSS, Ajax development with style

Posted on by Tessa (the external)

Brief notes made during Mr. Jeroen VLOOTHUIS’s talk at EuroPython 2007

KSS – Generic JavaScript AJAX framework

  • Removes the need to write lots of JavaScript
  • Separates HTML & JavaScript
  • Additional support for Python
  • Easy to create new plugins for custom functionality
  • Deflated adds 20-30k after compression [verify]

More info: http://KSSProject.org