Category: Ramblings

Last weekend (Friday 21^st-Sunday 23^rd Mar 2014) I went to the second Open Glasgow hackathon, which was based on the theme of Energy. Every one of the four events carries a £20,000 prize for the winning team to develop their idea to commercial application.
I have a fair bit of past experience of working in the subject so was particularly interested to see what ideas came out of it but a five-figure grant to implement an idea definitely helped!

The structure was a bit different from what I was expecting; the organisers seem to be going through a process to find a structure that works best.
On Friday evening, everyone was expected to turn up having thought of an idea and go through a process of “speed dating” it: explaining your idea to another person in a fixed amount of time, listening to them explain their idea and negotiating to assign points to the two ideas up to a combined maximum of seven points. After five iterations of this, if your idea had at least twenty points you had the chance to pitch your idea to the crowd and they had the option of joining a team to work on your idea. Ideas which recruited a team smaller than four were culled.

This filtered out some of the poorly considered ideas but the surviving concepts seemed a bit homogeneous — of the nine surviving concepts the majority were variations on a theme of using the provided data ((there were significant volumes of data provided and a strong suggestion that the winning idea had to use some of it)) on electricity consumption and applying some analysis, which was a bit disappointing — I’d heard more different ideas pitched but they hadn’t survived the process. Speaking to some of the other participants, they agreed with this also.

The idea I pitched, titled Happy Homes (or Happy Buildings), fitted into the common theme too: trying to put a face ((if I got £1 every time I said that, I’d have more than the £20,000 prize)) to energy consumption with the theory being that this might be more accessible than the standard graphs and numbers.
After working out “normal” electricity usage for Glasgow City Council buildings this could be compared to current use, with “abnormal” usage represented with either a sad (above normal) or happy (below normal) face. From that point it would be trivial to replace the provided data with input data from a Current Cost or smart meter, for a more domestic application.

It survived both stages of the pitching process and five of us built a working prototype, plotting a map of the locations available, simulating the current power consumption and doing the comparison to “normality” to decide which face to show.
This was done using Node.js to construct an API, backed by MySQL, and a web front-end (using the Hackathon Starter) which plotted the locations on a map. One of the team members built an Android app which showed a similar visualisation.

We didn’t win but it was still a good weekend. The winning concept appeared broadly similar but focussed more on the idea of encouraging action — notifications would be sent out to responsible parties (caretakers, etc.) if consumption fell outside “normal” so that they could check that, for example, lights hadn’t been left on.

As far as future development goes, one  significant functional requirement would be getting automated data ingestion working. I’d experimented with adding D3.js-based graphs on the Sunday afternoon but didn’t have enough time to get them integrated with the Jade templates the front end used.
I’m also inclined to re-implement the server-side components in Rails — Node.js was good enough for getting a working prototype built in the short time available but I want to experiment with Resque or delayed_job.

Looking at my Flickr stats, I discovered that this photo had been pinched by some cycling blog:

At least they’ve linked back to the photo on Flickr. What gets me is, I think it’s a pretty shit photo!

Second photo-related thing today. According to Shutterstock, this is a trademarked artwork and I need to get a release:

It’s a robin Christmas tree decoration. Trademark, really?

Partly out of my own curiosity and partly because a friend is planning to buy herself/be bought one as a birthday present, I’ve been playing around with the idea of an Apple laptop.

Along the way, I’ve noticed a few interesting things.

Macbook – bit old?

Firstly, the MacBook seems ridiculously underpowered low-spec compared to its 13″ Pro cousin and, at least with Higher Education discount, doesn’t seem to be as much cheaper as it is lower-specced. The differences:

[table id=1 /]

There’s also a collection of other bits missing from the MacBook:

• Thunderbolt and Firewire 800 (no real loss in most cases, I’d suggest)
• SDXC slot (useful if you have a camera that uses SD cards)
• FaceTime HD camera (I’ve never used the webcam on any of my laptops, someone probably does).

Before someone goes all [citation-needed] on those claimed differences between the CPUs and GPUs, Geekbench source and forum post with NotebookCheck graphics benchmark.

Now fair enough, there’s a difference of £130-150 between the two and the weight and thickness differences are arguably minute, but you’re still getting a slower CPU, less memory and a smaller hard drive (you could argue that either CPU is more than powerful enough for most people but it’s been claimed OSX Lion wants at least 2GB, you don’t really want to be at the minimum; just about everyone seems to be able to fill disk space with video, music and crap).

Adding the missing 2GB of RAM and getting a bigger hard disk in a Macbook costs a total of £121 (£80 for the RAM alone ((yes, you could get RAM cheaper elsewhere; that’s beside the point))) retail and £103.20 (£68.40/£34.80) in the HE store, bringing the Macbook price up to £808.40 or £988 retail. That’s still including the other differences I’ve already mentioned.

Given all of this, it’s probably no surprise that they’ve been listed as “Don’t Buy! – Updates Soon” for a while now.

HE Software – huh?

After that, the really strange thing:

At the non-discount prices, iWork is £72 whether you buy it separately or as a build option.

Similarly for MS Office Home and Student 2011,

• on the normal store: £89.95 build to order, £109.95 family pack separately
• HE store: £76.80 BTO, £109.94 family pack separately
• £58.40 from Amazon, £37.89 from “Software4Students”, even if the site looks a bit iffy though they say they’re a MS Partner.

How does that make any sense?

The weekend before last I did the unthinkable and bought one of those fruity tablet things – for what it matters, the 16 GB WiFi model ((I didn’t see much point paying the extra for 3G; I have a phone that will work as a wifi hotspot and a tablet’s not something I can see me taking out of the house *that* often anyway)).

It bought it from the store in Glasgow and it has to be said that the “experience” ((Not the best term; I’m exchanging money for a product not getting married)) was remarkably good. I’d reserved one online to collect on a Saturday and it was obviously going to be pretty busy but despite being warned I might need to wait it took a few minutes at most to find someone who was free. The person I got was partcularly helpful and all told I spent around an hour in there.

The actual collection process was a faff about. She needed to find a free computer and go to some webpage ((I hope it was internal, not that I can recall the address either way)) to get one of their stockroom imps to bring it out before we go and wait for them at the location specified then finally it’s to be paid for ((What happened to the combined iPhone/card reader devices? This was a standard PIN pad)).

She went through setting up email, a quick demo of some of the features (things like the multitasking bar weren’t immediately obvious if I hadn’t RTFM) and a few suggestions (things like http://ipad.tvcatchup.com/ and saving a bookmark of the user guide to the home screen). All basic stuff, but it was nice to get that introduction rather than “here it is, give us your money, go away”. Vertical integration FTW, I suppose.

On to the device itself – in general I’m surprised to say I actually quite like it! Beforehand, I’d been researching the return policy and, at least subconsciously, expecting I’d hate it and want to get rid.

If I had to change one thing it would be the screen – a higher resolution would make text a lot nicer to read. On the other hand, no other device does any better (for example, the Motorola Xoom: near enough the same pixel density albeit at a different aspect ratio).
I still don’t get why you’d want to watch videos on it (besides the sort of casual YouTube browsing that works on a phone). The screen’s AR is just wrong and although it doesn’t eat up battery power quite like I expected it to, it just seems like a bad idea. I know some people do it, though.

One real surprise, having used (and written apps for) an Android phone, is the size of apps. The storage space appears to be contiguous (rather than internal/external but built in/SD like on Android) so it seems less of an issue for iOS apps to be much bigger. For example, I’ve got Angry Birds installed on both devices: on Android, the app is <20MB (dropping to ~2MB if the "move to SD" option is used) whereas the iOS version is ~50MB. There are video cookbook apps which are coming on for 1GB! The title's partly inspired by the reaction I've had from some people -- someone described it as a "dirty little secret" , another seems to have gone running ((To her mother of all people...long story!)) saying I'd "abandoned my principles" (?!). One last thing – 670MB software update, for a point release (4.3.2), what the hell?

Every other year, Duncan Smeed holds “Gunk Dunc” — having water, wet sponges and the titular “gunk” chucked at him — to raise money for Comic Relief.

Some photos were taken ((500, circa 6GB’s worth!)):

Although after tipping this ((gelatine, Irn Bru, custard powder, Bovril, food colouring, cornflour, golden syrup)):

some payback was had:

…and £770 was raised. All very good fun!