It’s been about a day since I’ve returned from Brighton and I’m still slightly reeling from from the whirlwind of web-wonder that was d.construct06. It was a great chance to meet a whole load of web people, drink, learn about some really interesting stuff (web related of course) and then meet more people and drink some more. What more could you ask for!
It all started well with a pre-conference knees-up at the supperfiacially gothic “Heist” bar on Thursday. There, my comrade from NEP/A.N.D. Duncan and I met some great people within minutes – including Phil Winstanley, Dave Sussman and Dave Verwer. For starters, most of them were Microsoft developers and mostly from up North! So, at a conference where the most common latop was an iBook/powerbook we weren’t alone. We had a few beers and good gas about techy and non-techy things – including me blabing on about the wonders of Reveal Records (in Derby) and the mighty Tunng – sorry guys! Even though I lightweight-ed and left pretty early I still woke up feeling pretty damn rough the next day!
So, we trundled round the corner to the Corn Exchange, only to be met by a queue of eager “geeks” – some already clutching their goody bags. The anticipation mounted and the queues lengthened. When inside the pretty spatious, laden with the said bags of stuff and refreshed by tea/coffee the real thing started, so here’s the real review:
Session 1 : “Web Services: Fuelling Innovation and Entrepreneurship” by Jeff Barr
This was largely about the various Amazon Web Services. Most notably:
- The Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) – Essentially a huge online, distributed binary storage facility that you can use to store almost anything and get it back easily.
- The Amazon Mechanical Turk – described as “Atificial Artificial Intelligence”. The idea is that you have a task you want a real human to do, you submit it into the “turk”, someone (anywhere in the world) does it, sends the results back, and (if you’re happy) you pay them. Brilliant!
- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) – basicly, lots of computing power for hire.
Mr.Barr’s session was pretty interesting, despite largely being a sales pitch for Amazon. It’s unlikely many us there would have access to the raw computing power needed for applications at that scale, but there’s a few possible ideas and a few wow’s to be had in looking at them. Also, the brilliant Sheep Market project – a collection of 10,000 (count them!) drawings of sheep gathered using the Mechanical Turk!
Whilst this was going on I managed to make use of the free wireless internet access to upload my first batch of pics to Flickr. As has been noted elsewhere the laptop of choice was of the Apple brand – so I guess I was in the minority there! But it was great to have this facility.
So far, so good, and my head was starting to clear!
More fun in part 2 later…
Technorati Tags : dconstruct06 web 2.0 conference brighton
For a long time I’ve tended to do the majority of my DOM manipulation using the innerHTML properties on existing DIVs pre-placed into an HTML document. This seems to have been fine on the whole – and (I believe) can have some performance advantages.
However, recently, I’ve been building a paged “list view” widget thingamy to go along side a Google Map result display – i.e. plot the points on the map and list the results next to it too. I wanted to build up the list as a block of HTML added into a pre-existing DIV using statements of the style :
$(“myListDiv”).innerHTML += “[the list control HTML]“;
But I also thought I could use Prototype’s ‘Insertion’ class to insert certain blocks into the flow – in this case the div that contains the status information in the form “You are viewing page x of y” and the navigation links (the first/previous/next/last”)
I tried for ages using Insertion.Top(), Insertion.Before(), Insertion.After() etc. and the divs just kept appearing on the page in the same place…. grrrrrrrr!!!
Then I realised that if you use innerHTML concatination like this:
$(“myOuterDiv”).innerHTML += “<div id=\”myInnerDiv\”>”;
$(“myOuterDiv”).innerHTML += “A whole load of content”;
$(“myOuterDiv”).innerHTML += “</div>”;
The div I openned at the start automatically gets closed straight away by the browser’s DOM engine – I didn’t expect that! So, the easy way around that is to build up the HTML into a string, then concatenate this in using the ‘.inerHTML +=’ way, everything is cool and groovy.
I guess this may be obvious, but it left me cursing Prototype for a while, and wondering whether I had the latest version.
On an asside to this I wonder why the Prototype site still says the current version is only 1.4.0, when script.aculo.us uses at least version V1.5_rc5?!
After buying out Geobloggers it seems like Yahoo! have done something really great with Dan Catt’s “technology” for putting pictures on a map (i.e. Geotagging).
Whilst frappr has been around for a while using the (supperior) Google Maps, Yahoo! seem to have been playing catch-up. However, now, by glueing this Geotagging concept into Flickr Flickr/Yahoo! now have a truelly awesome interface (following on from their truly great Organizr update earlier this year) that really makes Geotagging and browsing for Geotagged pictures fantasticly easy.
They seem to reeling from the sucess too – about 1.6m pictures Geotagging with 24hours! Having worked on mapping applications where data is being searched on spatially from very large databases (e.g. www.housepricemaps.co.uk) I know this is no mean feat! My only grumble is that the detail on Yahoo! maps is rubbish compared to Google maps for the UK – still can’t have everything straight away.
Either:
1 – Firefox has been developed by a higher intelligence.
OR
2 – It incorporates alien technology and there’s a conpiracy in there somewhere
Thanks to Dan for bringing this to my attention – I can forgive him now for being so devoted to Microsoft 
Original page here .
Looks like it might be a tad wet this year at the festival – the BBC says big rain in Sunday… boo hoo.. not such sunny weather for Norman Jay’s this year – still pack the wellies and waterproof and we’ll be fine.
There’s plenty to get excited about – E.S.T., Coldcut, Dollboy and Tonto’s Expanding Head Band to name a few… can’t wait!
Expect a torrent of new pics on Flickr with any luck.
A few “shouts”…
Firstly my ex-Djing partner Alasdair from my days in cardiff – also famed feature write at gair rhydd (Cardiff’s long running student newspaper that I took a few pictures for and wrote a few reviews while I was there). Anyways, he has an excellent blog(Livejournal) that I have just got round to reading after meeting up for a pleasant evening down by the Thames towards the end of June. It’s titled “mostlyharmless” – a clue to a keen interest in the works of Douglas Adams, but confusingly addressed “strictlytrue” – why? I do not know. It’s an interest mix of general blog-tattle and accounts of his experiences working for Hansards at the House of Commons.
Share and enjoy!
BTW – Alasdair – my Thames sunset picture turned out quite well in the end.
Secondly, and more locally (we like local things here!) is the new, and fast growing blog of one Mr.Darren Holden (of Belper). Entitled ‘For Queen and Country’, it’s name could me mis-construed, but anyone keeping up with the recent exploits of The Doctor will recognise it’s origin. It’s a good read, and has a far better header than mine!
Yesterday, whilst doing some entirely legitimate work related to MediaWiki, I stumbled on the completely stupid, and quite funny Uncyclopedia – a kind of alter-ego/evil-twin to Wikipedia. Containing a largely spurious, made-up, untruths and just plain ridiculous nonsense – it includes the UnNews (see ‘Potatoes launch non-violent take-over’ for instance). Unfortunately this lead me on the Wookiepedia – which (guess what) a whole wiki about Star Wars…. where will it end.
I say – Wikis Rule!
Finally I’m just getting into Last.fm – more on this later…
On the suggest of Chris (of NBTNO) we went to see Circular City at the Nag’s Head in Ripley last night.
They had a good following of friends and the local’s took a shine to their accoustic/rock/indie bongos bizniss – especially when they threw in a couple of Irish numbers towards the end. Highlights had to include their superb (accoustic) version of Hendrix’s “Fire”. My slightly drunken demands for “Ace of Spades” were not (unfortunately) fulfilled on this occasion, but I shall look forward to their set at Cris and Jo’s wedding next week.
Go Loz Go! Indeed!
A while back I mentioned my brother Andrew’s pretty serious medical situation. – unfortunately, a complication has occured a month or so ago, that has seem him bloat like he’s pregnant with quads. Therefore, he’s back in Glenfield Hospital in Leicester bored out his brain while they try to sort him out. So we decided to go and visit him to try and cheer him up a bit…
On the way over (sort of), and following a recommendation from Mrs.Lactose (Jema), Kathy and I called in at Heather Pick Your Own Fruit Farm near Ibstock.
We picked nearly 5kg (10lbs in old money) of Raspberries and a load of blackcurrants, redcurrants and gooseberries so we ccould make a load of jam (more to follow on this one).
It was sweltering and I lost my favourite new shades in a bush somewhere and developed a stupidly back head-ache, but it was worth the effort. It’s a great shame there’s not a lot round our kneck of the woods in the way of fruit farms… ho hum.
After that a quick visit to my folks in Leicester for a (very) late lunch, then back to see Andrew.
He was just tucking into the regular Saturday meal of Macaroni Cheese – one of my all-time favourite comfort foods, and apparently one of the best meals he gets there.
He’s in good spirits, despite being stuck in the hospital for at least another month now with a pretty scary clot stuck in one he main veins. He’s just had a clot busting drug that paramedics give to heart-attack victims administered to him, and they are hoping this will bust the clot – which seems to have gotten bigger! Erk!
Thinking of you Andrew – will call by again soon…
Yes… I have been lazy.
But hey! I’m back, hiatus over….
And what better time than a celebration of my first crop of summer fruit.
Although I only managed to get the raspberries in in the nick of time in late March – they’ve manged to produce a few pretty large (a rather tasty) fruits. Hopefully with a mit of nuturing, next year we’ll be wading through them.
It does seem to be a bonanza year for british soft fruit this year – picked up some superb strawberries on the market (from Ted’s stall) from Litchfield and some great Kentish cherries… mmmm…cherries.
Now the mission is to find a self-pick farm this weekend and get a tonne of raspberries, redcurrants, blackcurrants and maybe even gooseberries for jamming. Updates will follow on the that one.