Over the past few weeks I’ve been spending my free time taking part in the Google AI competition (organised by the university of waterloo).
While I didn’t end up doing so well (I was disqualified for taking just over the 1 second per move permitted in one of my games), I thought I’d post how I went about the problem. Many of the other contestants used similar algorithms, but for those who haven’t been following here’s the full thinking behind it:
Yesterday, I attended the Open Mobile Innovation Camp at the innovation centre in Bath. The event was hosted by Chris Book and had talks from Giles Turnball (Freelance Journalist), Bruce Lawson and Patrick Lauke (both from Opera). The focus of the day revolved around the current trends in mobile app development and the tensions between Native, Web and Widget apps.
The day kicked off with tech writer Giles Turnball talking about how technology has turned the press industry upside down. He recounted tales from the 90s of infra-red modems, Palm Pilots and GoType keyboards, and being one of the first journalists to actively embrace remote reporting and email. Although initially laughed at, remote journalism is now standard and Giles encouraged us not to neglect advancing technologies, but to learn about them and look to integrate them into our businesses and working lives.
Next up was Richard Spence who ‘controversially’ spoke about non-iPhone development. He reminded us that only 8% of the mobile market is iPhone whereas 71% is browser based. Richard didn’t slag of the iPhone, on the contrary, he “thanked Apple from the bottom of his heart” and agreed with Stephen Fry’s eloquent observation:
Does anybody seriously believe that Android, Nokia, Samsung, Palm, BlackBerry and a dozen others would since have produced the product line they have without the 100,000 volt taser shot up the jacksie that the iPhone delivered to the entire market?
Richard went on to give a brief history of mobile development platforms and where they are at now. J2ME, Blackberry and Symbian were all covered and commended for their recent improvements in the light of the ‘iPhone effect‘.
The final talk of the morning was from Bruce Lawson from Opera. Bruce was in jovial mood and was quick to evangelise the latest Opera Beta which claims to be the current fastest Javascript engine. Bruce championed the W3C Mobile Web Best Practices and also highlighted some of the UX and accessibility challenges that await. Bruce emphasized the importance of optimization and minimising HTTP requests. He went on to talk about future advancements in HTML5 and CSS3 and the features that the latest Opera already supports. One particular point of interest for me was the use of Media Queries to change CSS layouts dependent on screen size, without JS sniffing. Bruce finally talked about the potential of Widgets, that Opera are involved with in editing the W3C standard.
After a lunch at the local chinese and heated debate on technology, we broke into smaller groups for our barCamp sessions. The philosophy of barCamp is to create open group dialogues about an agreed topic and to work / explore collaboratively. I attended a discussion on HTML / CSS3 with the guys from Opera, and for my second session W3C Standards for Mobile Web. Both sessions were really insightful and was particularly interesting to hear peoples’ comments from the mobile industry on mobile web.
I also picked up a couple of useful tools:
Native Mobile Development Platforms for Web Developers
W3C Mobile Validator
http://validator.w3.org/mobile/
Perhaps most surprising, coming to the event as a pure Web Developer (with past dabblings in mobile), I certainly didn’t feel like an outsider or feel like the technology was flying over my head. In fact, I came away with an increasing awareness that, whether I like it or not, Web Development is not simply going to be solely about the Desktop. As hopes of an archaic browser death is on the horizon, another friend is also lurking. In our discussions on Mobile Web Standards, we were reminded that the largest mobile usage is not in China, the US, or Europe, but in developing countries. If the days of IE6 support is numbered, then the days of mobile WAP support may be coming back from the dead!
Next year sees the launch of an entirely new Primary School National Curriculum. Our friends at E3 have been working with the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency (QCDA) and the COI to relaunch the National Curriculum site. Phase one of the site was launched last week with a second phase due in March. The site is designed to be a resource for teachers in planning lessons and interact with other teachers using collaboration tools.
It’s always good to see our friends in Bristol involved in national projects and producing engaging, collaborative online content.
With so much chat and buzz at the moment (and rightly so) about Tim Berners-Lee et al’s data.gov.uk, I thought it’d be timely to say a bit about how we’ll be doing our bit towards publishing online consultation information as Linked Data (Steph Gray has recently blogged on a similar subject).
We’ve built (and are continuing to iteratively improve) Opinion Suite, an open-source online consultation management and creation system designed primarily for local authorities and other governing bodies. It’s currently being used by Bristol City Council, Sutton Borough Council and a large partnership led by Cumbria County Council, with more rollouts hopefully coming soon.
Through Opinion Suite, organisations can store, organise and publish details of all their consultations – hopefully, exactly the kind of information that it’d be really useful to be able to access from a variety of sources, to include in apps and to run analyses/queries on.
As you probably know, that’s what Linked Data is designed to facilitate; it’s a way of marking up web pages semantically so that software (like browsers, search spiders etc) can understand more about the content and so that it’s easier for citizens to ‘cut and combine’ the information in ways that are relevant to them. The Government’s into it in a big way: all central government consultations need to include this markup as of the start of 2010 and DirectGov already uses it to pull consultation details into its listings.
We’re currently making a few changes to the code of Opinion Suite so that all consultation details entered using the system are marked up as Linked Data – using RDFa, to be precise. This means that all consultations inputted into Opinion Suite will include this additional metadata, making the information therein more readily and widely available. So, for example, DirectGov could pick up all of a local authority’s consultation details and pull them directly into the ‘local consultations’ part of their site, or someone could make an app to compare consultation activity with other data, such as population or earnings surveys. That’s a lot of potential added value for something that’s really not that hard to do – and it won’t affect the appearance or user experience of Opinion Suite for end users or administrators as the data will be taken from existing fields.
It might also be worth mentioning that this is in addition to the existing RSS functionality built into Opinion Suite – for example, you can create an RSS feed from any search query in Consultation Finder, meaning you can take the content and embed it into a blog or community website.
Basically, we like sharing and we like making the most of data – so we reckon RDFa’s a good thing all round and an easy win in many ways.
I laughed when Alan sent me a link to a video of how to tie shoes properly. It turns out that Jason Fitzpatrick, the guy who posted article and video showed me! I am now more efficient at tying my shoes and I know the difference between the granny knot and the reef knot. Impressive I know.
Some really good ‘Rules of Production’ from our compatriots at Thought Den in their The art of flash game production (with some baggage bowling fun thrown in) post.
It was written after the Suitcase Skittles development that we did with them last year for IHG in which we all learnt a lot. But that seems to be the case with most Flash game developments…
Yes.
It did happen.
We won. In the match that I introduced in my last post, we turned up and we scored a goal and didn’t concede any. Now that’s winning. We’re now joint second in the league and on good form so we should win the league, definitely.
Team Rubber in second place, still.
Following a string of good results and pretty consistent set of players, Team Rubber has been holding down the second spot on their Soccer-Sixes-Pro-Star-FA-AnotherSponsorProbably premier Thursday 6-a-side league. The one we all know and love:
Team Rubber FC in second place
We’re currently behind the holders and previous season’s winners and the-season-before-that’s winners and the season-before-that-one’s winners and some more wins, Brucey Boys. It just so happens we’re playing them in 2 weeks in what has been dubbed as “a game between first and second on the 17th of December”.
Adam Cardew, Team Rubber FC’s newest recruit from Delib, sums it up perfectly: “I wish I had some new size 9 football boots so that I could play but I haven’t got time to buy any”.
Storing, changing, buying, repairing and inspiring
I just noticed on the Guardian site that the Government has recently launched a new cycling incentive on top of their already successful (at Team Rubber anyway) Cyclescheme tax saving initiative.
What they seem to be doing is not to offer any more savings on buying a bike – this will remain the same – but offering more support and kudos for companies to actually provide the infrastructure required to allows employees to cycle to work everyday. They are segmenting this infrastructure into 5 main areas:
You can read all about all of these on the Cycle to Work Guarantee site.
Now while these are all great words that would make any type of travel a more successful experience, what I am personally interested in is the ‘Inspiring’ bit.
This is the part that I find the most difficult and have put the most effort into in getting people out of cars and onto bikes. You can read what they’re proposing on the site and all I should really say is good luck!
