updated : added links to octobastard video and PrimeSky slides

I'm back in Bournemouth after 2 days in London at overtheair at Imperial College. overtheair was an interesting change in conference formats, as it was a hybrid of a more traditional speaker led conference, followed by a hack day, combined with the sleep-over common to Barcamps.

overtheair was, overall an excellent conference. I saw some excellent talks - in particular a UX panel which I found interesting. I also got the chance to get the new Nokia Web Runtime running on my N95.

Mobile and the Web

I really believe that as applications based on web technologies (HTML, Javascript, CSS, SVG, et al) become first class citizens on mobile devices, there will be more and more crossover between people working in web and mobile. I have directly experienced this working on a new astronomical web and mobile calendar service for the Royal Observatory with Future Platforms. I was excited that Tom Hume and Bryan Rieger got a chance to present on our experiences building this application.

Their presentation went really well, and it was nice that afterwards lots of people came and spoke to us with their questions about the project. I hope that some people left inspired to create web applications that work equally well on mobile, and start designing with mobile in mind.

I spent the night hacking around with the web runtime, starting to build a twitter client (isn't this like mobile "Hello World" now ?) and playing werewolf - where I was a seer for the first time!

Octobastard

In the morning, I saw that the Future Platforms crew had been working hard on their competition entry all night and needed help killing a few problems at the end. I helped them out a bit.

Some more on their evil creation. Thom Hopper has quite a penchant for hardware hacking - I've seen some crazy things he's bought into the office. A nintendo DS with bits of circuit board hanging out of the back of it running his own games, for example. So, when he was introduced to Arduino, he decided to do what any of us would do - make a robot arm !

They somehow went from a robot arm controlled by a wii nunchuk to a robot arm with a camera on it controlled by a Sony Ericsson phone with accelerometers via a J2ME app via several hops of port forwarding and tunneling to a Java servlet telling the Arduino to move the robot arm based upon the orientation of the phone then taking a photo and uploading it to yet another server whereupon a flash lite client or a web browser could see an image that the robot had taken after it had moved. phew.

Just for fun, I added an automated flickr stream, nokia web runtime and iPhone clients to the mix. At some point it was noticed that we had 8 distinct parts of this project, and Tom christened the robot "octobastard". Afterwards, we decided to add more distinct parts, but the name stuck.

This was shown to everyone, and we rather expected we might win the "over-engineered" prize category. Much to our surprise, we won the best overall prototype instead (despite the utterly excellent "phone fight" application the guys from lastminute labs made - and, in fact, the general high quality of many of the entries).

I met a lot of interesting unfamiliar and familiar faces at overtheair (and somehow ended up going home with 8 beanbags that various attendees couldn't be bothered to carry home in my car !). I'd encourage anyone I met there to stay in touch. Also, if I can get links to some of the video and slides to do with these, I will add them later.

As a side note - a couple of friends of mine made an utterly silly and hilarious torchwood parody while at the conference.