Expanding horizons: 2010-11-07

Saturday, 13 November 2010

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:
- learn how to flirt in BSL: http://videojug.com/tag/british-sign-language
- BSL music videos: http://youtube.com/user/lovesbth

Billy Abbot @cowfish

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!

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

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)

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

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