Saturday 13 November 2010

BarCamp London 8: British Sign Language

@lallyd http://www.learningbsl.com

More details may be available on lanyrd

  • learning level 2 at the moment
  • Deaf with big D is about how you would like to communicate, not about hearing
  • some words look similar but mean very different things…
    • facial expression / shitty
    • black / prostitute
  • dialects also differ across the UK
    • you can have a northern accent in BSL…
    • “live” (asin “I live in…”) in London is stroking shoulder
    • in Blackpool, the same sign means “toilet”…
  • vowels are RH pointing at fingers on LH
    • i.e. A is RH pointing at thumb; U is pointing at pinkie
  • computer: screen LH, RH typing
  • engineer: two hands together as cogs
  • please and thank you use the same sign, but different lips
  • resources:

BarCamp London 8: A Beginner's Guide To Whisky

Billy Abbot @cowfish

Billy’s Booze Blog

Slides available via lanyrd

  • Colour comes from the cask
  • Grain whisky has other grains as well as malted barley
    • also distilled in fractional towers
    • comes out much lighter
    • often used as the base for other products
  • whisky flavours change mostly due to tradition
  • campbeltown do briny salty whiskies
  • master of malt — sell 3cl sample jars so you can try before you buy a whole bottle
  • many distillers are teetotal
    • including half the staff of one distillery
    • don’t need to drink to check the whisky — can nose it
  • Richard Paterson is chief taster of Whyte & Mackay
  • Port Charlotte — bought by Bruichladdich
    • had a lot of stock which was boring
    • doing experimental things with it
    • Port Charlotte is very peaty
  • nosing:
    • stick your nose in, move it around a bit
  • taiwanese whisky comes out black as it evaporates so fast
  • watering down changes flavour
    1. partly reveals flavours amongst very strong flavour
    2. also has a chemical change
  • can get whisky barrel speakers!
    • a Japanese company will do so…
  • biggest single malt market in the world is… France!

BarCamp London 8: One year running it all on the cloud

Alistair Hann — runs Zoombu

More detail may be available on lanyrd

  • started off running a dedicated host, LAMP stack
  • started using flexiant (FlexiScale)
  • moved to AWS to have images (flexiant didn’t have them -- though it does now)
  • use ElasticFox to manage instances
  • elastic IP can be moved from machine to machine within a few minutes
    • useful for IP-restricted services
  • zoombu have four servers running continually
    • 1 front end
    • 1 Java services
    • 2 MySql servers
  • failures can be grim — make sure you have redundancy
    • backups of EBS volumes
    • backups of images

BarCamp London 8: giffgaff - getting what you want from Mobile network APIs

Heather Taylor @giffgaff & Vincent Boon @vincentboon

  • starting to open APIs
  • giffgaff is:
    • SIM only
    • 100% online
    • mutual — give & take
    • no call centres — only 16 full time staff!
  • “goodybag” data is currently completely unlimited, no fair use policy!
    • have agreed a charge with community for when they do start to charge
  • customers generally get an answer from community in under 3 minutes!
  • current plan for APIs (steps 1 & 2 pretty much done!):
    1. info services: read-only >
      • balance
      • goodybags
      • points
      • call records
    2. get services:
      • order SIM
      • top up
      • purchase goodybag
    3. non giffgaff
      • status update
      • share links
      • email/SMS
  • working with O2 Litmus and HashBlue guys to integrate their work (giffgaff is an MVNO on top of O2)

BarCamp London 8: Windows Phone 7 & app development

Jess Meats

More details may be available later on lanyrd

  • Marketplace purchases
    • can link to an existing Live ID with a credit card
    • or can register card details on the phone
  • development kit for phone
    • get templates for visual studio & expression blend
    • get an emulator (includes IE mobile)
  • visual design all done in XAML
  • can use Expression Blend for design
    • allows you to drag & drop and design animations visually too
  • when registering as a developer, have to go through XBox Live…
    • in order to sign up to terms and conditions
  • app submission:
    • testing happens overnight
    • if there are test failures, get a report in the developer dashboard
    • problems may happen with GeoTrust…
    • need a notary to sign and stamp a physical document
    • getting paid requires you talking to US Embassy in London…
  • @simonmaddox: SDK works in Fusion, but not Parallels
    • requires a VM inside a VM
  • can register a device for development
  • sync to Google only gets main calendar at the moment
  • background processes can now put things on the lock screen (recent change)
    • as before, can also change the home screen tile and put toast notifications in the status bar

BarCamp London 8: wheelmap.org

Holger Dieterich@holgerd

More details on lanyrd

  • http://wheelmap.org — find wheelchair accessible places to eat & drink
  • Made by http://sozialhelden.de — Social Heroes
    • one of the founders is in a wheelchair
    • problem is not how to get somewhere, but how to find somewhere suitable
    • is there a step? is the toilet accessible?
  • databases in Germany have 30,000 places, but they’re not so easy to use (mostly commercial)
  • had a wheelchair tag in OpenStreetMap before they started, but only about 5,000 places were tagged
  • now have about 18,000 places in germany
    • 300-400 places edited a day!
  • website finds your location by IP and offers you places to edit/add
  • also an iPhone app
    • using OpenLayers to display
  • CloudMade is good, but is read-only and not updated regularly (once a month!)
    • want to have immediate update
    • don’t yet have immediate, but 3 minutes is close
    • OpenStreetMap itself is sometimes down (for three days at one point), so had to implement caching and their own intermediate API
  • also approaching companies to share their data…
    • they’re really scared… so talking with Berlin government to convince them
  • having slight issues with OSM community as wheelmap data is added anonymously by a pseudonymous user
    • but it’s better that data gets added
    • and there’s no real chance of spam since the data is added automatically