ETech: Ignite ETech Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

After a quick break we're back for Ignite ETech.

If you had 5 minutes on stage what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds?

Brady is back and introducing Ignite. We've got nine speakers, and at least one t-shirt that's going to be fired from a cannon. Ignite talks are 20 slides for 15 seconds a slide for a five minute.


Jan McGonigal
The first speaker is Jane McGonigal who is speaking about Free Space, a new forecasting game to be played this week at ETech.

The year is 2019. Personal satellites are cheap and accessible at $100. What would you use yours for?

Tom Gomez
Next up is Tom Gomez, deputy editor of wired, who is talking about a writing his book, the Decision Tree. Medicine as an algorithm...


Molly Steenson
Next up is Molly Steenson, who is talking about the history of pneumatic tubes for sending messages and packages in the 19th century. Interesting, Ted Stevens was right, just 100 years late.


Niall Kennedy
The next speaker Niall Kennedy is talking about measuring cloud efficiency.


Rose White
A change of pace, Rose White talking about knitting, and knitting as graffiti...

It's not your grandmother's knitting!

Knitting was once proprietary, reserved for the nobility, and was reverse engineered and made available to everyone.


Tom Igoe
An Arduino interlude by Tom Igoe and what's going on with the Arduino today. Most of what has been going on has been incremental improvements. There are not enough pins, memory, or serial ports.


The new Arduino MEGA
He's announcing the release of the Arduino MEGA, with a lot more capability. It should be available sometime next week.


Tariq Korula
Our next speaker is Tariq Korula, talking about the Ybike - the solar powered, Flickr uploading, geo-tagging photo bike. That's 20 bikes, 11 cites, 5 continents, 63,718+ photos. Search for the ybike tag on Flickr. Ghosts in the machine, or a million monkeys?


Brad Templeton
Our penultimate speaker is Brad Templeton from the EFF, talking on evil. We started with time sharing, moved to personal computers, and now we're back to time sharing. Your data is our of your hands, again. Ease of use can be a bug, if you make it easy to do, people will do it more.


Bill Gurstelle
Our final speaker of the evening was Bill Gurstelle who talked about the art of living dangerously. It's not a good thing to blow up things, but you should live dangerously...


Bill Gurstelle and his t-shirt cannon
...and we're done!

ETech: Monday evening keynote Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

After a very quick dinner I'm sitting in the Monday evening keynote waiting for Tim O'Reilly's to give his annual O'Reilly Radar...


Brady Forrest introducing Tim O'Reilly
Brady Forrest opened the show and introduced Tim, who is here to talk about the pilosophy that drives O'Reilly and stuff that matters...


Tim O'Reilly and stuff that matters...

These are pretty tough times... some things are being preserved, while some things are falling into ruin...

But what are our best and brightest doing? Throwing sheep on Facebook. Last year at the Web 2.0 conference Tim told people to work on stuff that matters,

Alot of people thought I was saying to work on non-profits, or maybe social ventures... I'm actually sauing that the world's great challenges is also the world's greatest opportunities.

But he's pointing to Better Place who are attempting the pioneer an new business model for electric cars,

Some of the things we think are so important today, are actually getting in our way...

He's talking about other power and energy companies like his son-in-law's company that's just come out of stealth, Makani Power working on high-altitude wind power systems. We have to get rid of about 8 terrawatts of fossil fuel energy and replace with renewables. Just because it's worthwhile, doesn't mean it isn't going to make money.

This attitude has started to bubble up form small companies to larger companies and agencies, like Google, and the NASA-Cisco climate project to flash the "planetary skin'. IBM has made it a center point of their new advertising campaign, a smarter planet, and instrumented, interconnected planet.

The idea of tackling big challenges, and bringing people along with us is what we have to do...

Talking about "big hairy audacious goals" Tim is now talking about public access to government data and has announced a new conference called the gov2.0 Summit which will be in Washington DC in September.

If you're not paying attention to what's happening to open government data, we have an opportunity that is unprecedented. We have a great challenge, but also a great opportunity. We have about 2 years to make a difference in the current administration...

He's talking about long term goals and the Long Now Foundation and scenarios for future planning, and the idea that there can be discontinuities, and we're in the middle of one just now. Both a financial one, and an environmental one.

The core of scenario planning is to develop a strategy that will be robust against any of the extreme strategy. Tim is urging us to think that way, think about what are the extremes in our lives, our business and figure out what are things that will be worth doing in the face of any of those extremes.

We're entering an era of choose your own adventure...

We're being told to find a place where you can make a difference, but make it count, like the $100 house...

Work on something that matters to you more than money. That's in the realm of things that matter.

Like deliberately unsustainable business models. If you're thinking about startups, stop thinking about whether it's going to succeed or not, and start thinking about what you're going to do instead. You need to create more value than you capture.

You guys are inventing the future, and what we want to do is help you spread the world, take on those giant challenges and eventually change the world.

Be minimal, leave places for other people to do things, and be friendly to people that extend you.

Update: Slides from Tim's keynote talk are now up on slideshare.net.

View more presentations from Tim O’reilly.

ETech: Hands-on RFID for Makers Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

My afternoon tutorial is Hands-on RFID for Makers given by Tom Igoe and Brian Jepson. We've been given, well purchased, but you know what I mean, an Arduino mini pro, a bread board and a SonMicro SM-130 module to allow us to read and write to the Mifare RFID tags that O'Reilly are using here at ETech.



The finished tag readers
We kicked off by accessing the card reader directly from our laptops using Processing and Tom's SonMicro library, first to just read from the card and then to write to it...

Once we got that working we moved to an Arduino-based reader that reads Mifare tags and stores them. From there we moved on to the hooking our RFID readers up to the to web and the O'Reilly conference database, with Processing providing a GUI interface to the Arduino code.


Long time readers of this blog will know that I have some, lets call it philosophical problems, with some of the proposed uses of RFID technology. But that said, there are some really interesting things you can do with tags, and while I approached this tutorial in a "know your enemy" frame of mind it was really fun, and I'm probably going to try and play with tags some more when I get back home. For instance, I can see some uses for the technology in the distributed sensors stuff I'm working on these days...

...of course that was all probably helped by the fact that Tom ran one of the clearest, well documented, hands-on tutorials I've seen. If you've got the opportunity to take a course with him, do it, you'll enjoy yourself.

Update: Pat was also blogging this one...

ETech: The LilyPad Sweatshop Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

I'm sitting in Leah Buechley's Lilypad Electronic Fashion tutorial. Where we'll be playing with Lilypad Arduino kits, a collection of sewable electronic pieces that lets you build soft electronic devices. Essentially it's a specially packaged Arduino, a sewable computer.

The materials are strange and hard to work with... - Leah Buechley

Hacking (and sewing) electronics

The aim for the workshop was to produce a "soundie", a garment which produes a sound when touched in a certain place, or different sounds when touched in different ways. Issued with a SparkFun LilyPad Pro Kit, some conductive thread, conductive material for the touch sensors, and of course a needle, we set to work. Well after the obligatory jokes about how this was going to look on our expense reports obviously...


The LilyPad t-shirt
Despite my awful stitching I actually managed to get my garment working, and if you see me around ETech wearing my conference t-shirt, slap me on the shoulder. The t-shirt will scream for me, so I don't have to...

ETech: Unevenly distributing the future again Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

I'm currently in San Jose for the 2009 O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, and much like last year we're unevenly distributing the future yet again. We'll be talking about synthetic biology, sensors and smart content, urban homesteading, making art with lasers and high tech chocolate.

...there are somewhere between six and ten billion people. At any given time, most of them are making mud bricks or field-stripping their AK-47s. - Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash p.26

Suffice to say that we're not going to be in the majority, unless things go very wrong there won't be a mud brick or an AK-47 to be seen all week.

ETech is one of those rare conferences where you get to hole up in a nice hotel and sit down and think about things for a week. Day-to-day you very rarely get time to do that, I'm going to try and not waste the opportunity...

The perils of provider lock-in Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

I run a consulting and contracting company. I do some Perl, Objective-C, the odd bit of hardware, and write apps for the iPhone. My business cards all have the same phone number on them, which is a dial-in number attached to a VoIP account with the Gizmo Project.

Up until a week ago this worked fairly well. When I was on the move I either picked up calls from my laptop, or if I missed them, voice mail got forwarded to me via email. When I was at home I used a hardware SIP phone on my desktop, and voicemail still got emailed to me if I missed a call.

What's gone wrong? Well the number doesn't work anymore and, at least according to customer support, Gizmo doesn't have a clue as to when it might start working;

Our provider for your number in the United Kingdom is experiencing technical problems with their numbers. They are working on this issue but have been unable to provide us with a time frame for when these numbers will be functional.

To remedy this situation we have 2 options for our customers:

1. Offer you a replacement number
2. If you would like to keep your number, we will extend your expiration date to cover the time it was down once the numbers are restored and functioning normally.

Please respond to this email to let us know of your decision. We are sorry for the inconvenience this may have caused and look forward to getting this resolved quickly.

This is not the best customer service I've ever experienced. It wouldn't be quite so bad if the number just dropped straight to answer phone, but it doesn't even do that. Effectively, if you want to reach me by phone about my business, you have to already be doing business with me and have my mobile number. This isn't great, it's all about first impression after all.

After talking with a friend who does this sort of stuff for a living it looks like I'm pretty much stuck at this point, number portability for landlines is in its infancy in the UK. My guess? The provider has gone bust in the current recession and I'm not getting my number back.

Lesson learned. For something as important as a phone number, provider lock-in is a real problem.

New for the iPhone, AWS Calculate Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

Following on from my previous iPhone application which allows you to monitor the status of various cloud computing backend services, and continuing with the Cloud Computing themed applications. I'd like to announce the release of my next iPhone application onto the App Store...


AWS Calc for the iPhone 3G and iPod touch.
Cloud Computing makes it easy to build applications that run reliably, even under heavy loads. But the larger the load, the higher your cost.

The AWS Calc application allows you to estimate your monthly costs based on your current Amazon Web Services (AWS) usage levels, and then lets you estimate how much a sudden usage spike could cost.

Tinker.it Toy Hacking Workshop Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

I'm in the depths of central London for this years Tinker.it Toy Hacking Workshop.


Toy Hacking Lab from Matt Biddulph.
The pictures from last years workshop make this look like a fun event, and I'm looking forward to getting my soldering iron out and playing with toys. Both the grown-up and not-so-grown-up kinds.

Judiciously plundering my pile of junk at home I came up with a RC controlled micro-helicopter, an old Nokia 6100, a rather ancient USB web camera, a Bluetooth GPS module and an LED torch. Adding a couple of Arduinos, a LV-MaxSonar-EZ1 range finder and a 16×2 serial LCD panel to the pile I threw everything into a box, hoping they might come in useful. But no, I have no idea what I want to build. Hopefully I'll come up with something during the course of the weekend...

Update (24/Jan): We spent the the first day of the workshop playing around with radio controllers and some simple toys, and formulating our nefarious plans for world domination...

Posted on Flickr by aallan.

Hacking radio-controlled bumper cars...

...and you only had to look at evil Harmony Bear and Bubbles the Dog to know that our twisted minds were working at a feverish pace.

Update (25/Jan): Sunday was project day and I'd already decided I wanted to hack the radio-controlled micro-helicopter I'd brought with me...

My original plan was to hook the controller unit into an Arduino and try and control the copter from the command line. But Chris Loxton, the man behind evil Harmony Bear, had brought a Wii Nunchuk controller with him, so in the end I had a better plan. I hooked the Nunchuk up to the Arduino, making use of Tod Kurt's nunchuck_funcs.h library code, and then the Arduino in turn to the helicopters controller unit.

Posted on Flickr by aallan.

The hacked helicopter and Wii nunchuck controller

After hacking some code out the helicopter was, at least in theory, going to be controllable using the Nunchuk's 3-axis accelerometer.

The controller for the helicopter was fairly interesting, with the power and direction controls turning out to be digital rather than analog. Presumably to save money the rotor power control was digitally encoded into four bits using multiple contacts on the control lever, removing the need to provide any analog-to-digital circuitry, and as it happens simplifying the hack enormously.

By the end of the day, sure enough, I had actually successfully managed to get fairly rough control over the helicopter and I was pretty pleased with myself...

If I get another free weekend, I think I can move this hack forward quite a long way. Removing the excess foam from the helicopter itself will probably save enough weight to allow me to attach an accelerometer and an XBee module directly onto the helicopter. The data from the accelerometer can then be transmitted via the XBee to an XBee enabled Arduino which is also hooked to the hacked radio controller so that it can send commands back to the micro-helicopter, closing the control loop. Effectively I should be able to build a self-stabilising helicopter. Unless I'm explicitly sending a command to move the micro-copter, it should just hove in place, correcting any random movements cause by trim or other nagging problems like drafts and air-conditioning.

New for the iPhone, Cloud Status Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

Paul Graham, one of my favourite dispensers of wisdom, argues that the arrival of web based software has changed not just the user experience, but the developer experience as well.

One of the most important changes in this new world is the way you do releases. In the desktop software business, doing a release is a huge trauma, in which the whole company sweats and strains to push out a single, giant piece of code. Obvious comparisons suggest themselves, both to the process and the resulting product. - "The Other Road Ahead", Paul Graham

Which is exactly right. Working in the cloud you rarely make a software release in the old sense of the word. Despite the benefits I must admit I actually somewhat miss the "big push" where, usually with a great deal of trepidation, you roll out a new improved version of a piece of software.

So it's with a certain sense of nostalgia, about the days before web applications started killing off the desktop, that I'd like to announce the release of my first iPhone application onto the App Store...


Cloud Status for the iPhone 3G and iPod touch.
Cloud computing makes it easy to build applications that run reliably, even under heavy loads. However as a developer you need to know if and when the cloud, and hence your application, is having problems.

Cloud Status allows you to monitor the status of Google App Engine, Amazon Web Services and Twitter in real time. When they know they have problems, you are the next to know.

The dark side of the cloud Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

More than ever these days I'm living in the cloud. Google has my mail, Apple has my calendar, del.icio.us has my bookmarks, Flickr has my photographs, and Amazon S3 has my files.

Day-to-day I rely on a lot of cloud infrastructure, and while I'm old enough to remember having to wade though card catalogues, and still know five fun things to do with microfiche, I no longer go to the library when I need a journal article. NASA's ADS and Cornell's pre-print archive provide instant semantically tagged access to both the historic and latest literature. I haven't physically set foot in a library in several years now.

I've moved away from my old arrangement, where I had a desktop machine in the office, and then a laptop for traveling. My main machine is now one of the new 13-inch Aluminium Macbooks, when I'm in the office I hook this up to one of Apple's new LED displays; off of which hangs several 500GB disks for backup and scratch space, a full sized keyboard, and a mouse. So whether I'm on a plane, a train, or siting in my office, everything is just the same. The screen gets a bit bigger or smaller, and my desktop background changes, but that's about it.

That said when I'm travelling long haul, rather than lugging my Macbook around, I've even started to leave that behind. I'm using my Dell mini 9 netbook as a thin client to the cloud and, at least for short trips, this seems to be going fairly well.

I'm on tender-hooks to see whether Apple is going to venture into the netbook territory, after all, I've been waiting for a replacement for my old 12-inch Powerbook for a long time now. However if an officially sanctioned Apple netbook doesn't show up in the next few months I might get round to installing OSX on my mini9. Then again, I might not. It's surprising how tolerable Windows XP turns out to be, at least if all you're using it as is a platform to run Google Chrome and some web applications.

But there is a dark side of the cloud, it isn't always there, and here I'm not talking about the offline problem. After all, that what Gears is there to fix...

Recently I had my AdSense account shut down. Totally ignoring the loss in future revenue, Google also locked me away from my data. The information about what ads sold, on which page, when. I'm paranoid about backups, and expect other people to be too, but that isn't data I had elsewhere. While I could have exported it, I didn't. Mainly because it would be fairly hard to analyse outside of Google's own infrastructure.

Google also hosts my email and my blog, and its RSS feed now that they've acquired Feedburner. Which puts them locking me away from my own data in a very different light. Blogger doesn't have an export function, and it's not alone. With Yahoo in trouble I've started to worry about all the pictures I have hosted on Flickr. They also don't have any way to back up your content.

To be clear, I'm not just talking about the raw content. Especially in the case of Flickr the meta-data attached to the content; the date, time, geo-location and associated tags are as equally important as the content itself. If you can't export the content with the meta-data attached, it's hardly worth doing. Even worse, there are services where taking your own data out of the context of the service makes it worthless. Exporting my data from Twitter, taking it out of the Twitter timeline, is fairly pointless.

Which of course brings me to the well trodden path of data portability. My calendar, address book and email are all portable because they are in standard formats. I can easily migrate between services, and some of those services even encourage me to do so...

Other content is not as portable, and that is of course because there aren't any standards to make it portable. How would you go about writing the export service for Flickr, or Blogger? Especially one that made sure it exported all the meta-data in a decently digestible format. Who would implement code to read from the format. Could the network even support thousands of users making a run on Flickr, for instance, and grabbing all their archived pictures?

This is a problem we're all going to face as our lives, and the data trail we generate, move into the cloud. Because that's our data I'm talking about. It doesn't belong to the companies that host it. They may be providing the services that display it, but the data is ours. They really need to remember that...