hackdiary

XTech 2007 in Paris: get your proposal in this weekend

The call for proposals for XTech 2007 is closing this weekend. Last year's conference was superb, and if you've got anything to say about making the web then you'll definitely want to be part of next year's lineup.

The theme for this year's conference is "The Ubiquitous Web". As the web reaches further into our lives, we will consider the increasing ubiquity of connectivity, what it means for real world objects to connect to the web, and the increasing blurring of the lines between virtual worlds and our own.

The technologies underpinning these developments include mobile devices, RFID, ultra-wideband, Second Life, location-aware services, Google Earth and more. The issues surrounding them include privacy, intellectual property, activism, politics, regulation and standards.

A special mention for some of the talks I particularly liked last year:

• An open (data) can of worms by Paul Hammond, Yahoo
• Hijax: Progressive Enhancement with Ajax by Jeremy Keith, Clearleft
• The power of declarative thinking by Steven Pemberton, W3C
• Ignorance is not a defense by Suw Charman, Open Rights Group

Stemtags is back, thanks to Camping

Nearly two years ago, I wrote a utility to check your del.icio.us tags for duplication using Porter stemming. Until today, the application had stopped working completely due to the fragility of the screenscraping code it was using. For fun, I've done a rewrite using Ruby and Hpricot, with all-new fragile screenscraping code based on the del.icio.us JSON feeds (thanks to Lenny Domnitser for pointer those out to me). I web-enabled it using Camping, a nice mini-framework for when webapps don't need all the bells and whistles of Rails.

Here's the result.

Thanks to camping, the code is compact - only 105 98 lines including templates:

If you want to run it yourself, you'll also need stemmable.rb.

Video of a lightning-talk on my Second Life work for Nature

Last month I went along to the Google Open Source Jam in London. It was a very entertaining evening with a great crowd. At the last minute I decided to give a quick show-and-tell on the work in progress at Nature.

Jeremy Rayner was kind enough to upload some videos that he took from the evening's talks. Here is my two minutes:

The work went down pretty well and I had a lot of productive conversations afterwards. In particular, Ben Laurie from Google has since donated some excellent mathematical data for us to use. The project is finished for now and deserves a full writeup. Until that's done, here are some screenshots of the final state of the system: