Hackday

Posted by stephen on Sunday, 17th June, 2007 @ 23:16

Hackday was great fun! I'm immensely proud of our team, Monkey Tennis, and our hack Nwsr24 which is currently available as a screenshot but hopefully will be a livesque demo soon!

I was really happy to find that everyone we talked to seemed to love the idea. We were really fortunate that it was a project we could divide quite neatly into four pieces, and once we'd agreed a few things we could all get working on our part. And with a little trial and error everything came together in the end.

Somehow I ended up being nominated to give the 90 second presentation of our project to the audience and judges, which I found excruciatingly nerve-racking! Luckily the technology didn't fail me despite my laptop being massively overloaded with a Linux VM processing the subtitles, a MAMP install of PHP/MySQL filtering out useful words and Safari busy displaying a 4Mbit MPEG2 stream whilst moving around a Yahoo map, refreshing a grid of Flickr photos every few seconds and a stream of BBC News Online links being updated every few seconds too. And all with a meagre 768Mb of RAM as my 1Gb stick died a couple of weeks ago! And apparently the presentation went pretty well, I even had 15 seconds to spare and got a laugh at the end, courtesy of Tom's indoor weather widget.

Handily, the concept was pretty easy to explain, our major data source (DVB subtitles) was a pretty unique one, and I think the end result looks great. And luckily for us, the judges seemed to agree as it scooped us the Best BBC Tech prize and we now have an Apple TV to share between us, woohoo! And apologies to Chris, David and Tom for pointing out the flaws of our project while we collected the prize, you probably shouldn't have passed me the mic a second time! And if anyone there wondered why I was going on about Yahoo! Pipes, I meant to say Yahoo! Term Extract. D'oh.