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Page history last edited by Yahoo! Hack USA 14 years, 9 months ago

 

 

 

Welcome to the

Open Hack 2009

A Yahoo! Hack Day

in London

 

 

 

 

Event Info | Agenda | Checklist | FAQ | Partners | Judges

Join-a-Team | LightningTalks | Hacker Chat | Polls

 

 

 

 

Lost something? Please send a direct message tweet to @openhacklondon! 

 

 

 

Welcome! Some latest words from us....

Tech Talk Podcasts

Now up on the Agenda page

 

Hack Day Winners

Here are the 12 Hack Day Winners:

 

An Amazing Show put up by all you hackers who came, coded & demoed!!!

 

All the hacks are listed on http://developer.yahoo.com/hacku/show/2009/may/londonopenhack and are worth looking at and playing around with (hopefully the hackers will keep them alive & maybe even refine)

 

I'll put up some more stats shortly today and also how we plan to engage with you and your hacks Post Hack Day.

 

MetaMix

May 11th, 2009

 

Hack.Trackr Deadline approaching @ 11am

Remember to login to Yahoo! before adding your hack @ http://developer.yahoo.com/openhack/register/

By 11am your hack entry should be complete with as much detail you can provide in the description field, the platforms used, your team members and most importantly your Hack URL.

To Edit your hack

  1. http://developer.yahoo.com/hacku/show/2009/may/londonopenhack and
  2. Then click the [Edit] button next to your hack entry. You will need to login with the account that added the hack entry. After Edit you can save it to update.
  3. If you don't see the edit button then you most likely added this with another Yahoo! login (see #2 above) or not logged in at all. In this case I'd suggest to recreate a new hack entry and copy all the data and edits (please login this time before adding).

Thanks

 

Twitter Spam Filter Search Query

"openhacklondon -hi215 -thomaaaass -goobama11 -Blondie_Emily -kiiiiiiiiiiii -ErnestMel"

MetaMix

May 10th, 2009

 

Tech Talk Presos up on Agenda page

Posted most of them.

 

Hack Demo Day Flow - PLEASE READ

To edit your hack entry go to this url http://developer.yahoo.com/hacku/show/2009/may/londonopenhack

 

OK so now that you are close to getting your hack finished. What not yet!!! Don’t worry man you still have time and the night jitters are the most fun!

So lets go through the flow of events from now on. What is it that you need to keep a check on?

12am Midnight Sat – Hack.Trackr Entry

If you haven’t already entered your hack in the Hack.Trackr I would strongly recommend you to add your entry, even if it is not well defined or you aren’t ready to share all the details. Put something cryptic if you will but do submit your entries. It will help us plan for tomorrows demo sessions. Remember to login to yahoo! Before adding your hack @ http://developer.yahoo.com/openhack/register/

7am-9am Breakfast

Food is extremely important on Demo Day. We don’t want you to pass out of fatigue or starvation before or on the stage. Take care of yourselves.

11am Sun – Last hour call

This is the call reminding you that just over an hour remains for hacking as the clock is ticking down. Get ready for the demos.

By 11am Sun - Hack Submission in the Hack.Trackr

Ask yourself “Have we submitted our hack entry yet? Oh No! Fret not just go ahead and add your hack entry ASAP. Even if your hack is not finished just submit whatever details you can, you will be able to edit it later. We will use this to plan tomorrow’s demo schedule so the earlier you add your shell entry the better. Remember to login to Yahoo! before adding your hack @ http://developer.yahoo.com/openhack/register/

By 11am your hack entry should be complete with as much detail you can provide in the description field, the platforms used, your team members and most importantly your Hack URL. It would be ideal if your hack is hosted on an internet URL where we can point to for your bragging rights.

By 11am Sun - Hack Demo Planning

Begin to define your demo strategy NOW. Don’t wait for later. Demo your hack first and talk later about how you made it. Don’t even think of putting up a powerpoint slide, a flash demo or something. We want to see your working hack as much as possible live. You'll have a limited time – 90 seconds – to present. Here's what you need to SHOW in that time: 

  • The problem your hack solves (10sec suggested)
  • That it actually does solve the problem, right then and there (80 secs)
  • Only if there's time, how your hack works.

One of the most common Fatal Errors we see at Hack Day presentations is that our hackers, having spent the last 24+ hours getting their hack to work, want to cover Item Three first. (They've suffered for their art ... now it's our turn).

Please, whatever you do, don't do this. Say the problem, show the solution, and then talk about how you solved it, if there's still time. Remember the Judges already have details on the hack you entered in your submission on the Hack.Trackr.

12pm – 2pm Sun – Demo Setup - Test your Hack on the projection screen

This is time for you to test that your hack actually works on the projection screen as you expected. 

  • Make sure you have a laptop charged up for the demo
  • Set your laptop to 1024x768 screen size @ 60Hz refresh rate (this works with most projectors)
  • Practice your demo script on the demo laptop & projectors and make sure your demo takes no longer than 90 seconds (remember you could take longer with the real deal)
  • If you need some “special” arrangement to demo please let us know ASAP by email.

12:30pm Sun – Hacking Ends & Lunch Served

All hacking ends at 12:30pm. Pat yourself in the back, pat your friends back, you guys have done it! The challenge is over now its time to take a break, go get some quick Lunch and get ready for the demo.

2pm Sun – Hack Demos Begin

We will begin the hack demos going down the hack entries submitted in the order of the Hack #s on the list. If necessary we can switch with another team but please let us know before so that we can give you the right number. Please be ready near the stage with your demo laptops. Your hack # will be called out and you will need to quickly get setup after the previous demo.

Get in and Get out Fast is the Mantra.

5pm – Hack Demos end

After the demos are over the Judges will go into an evaluation discussion, while you all have the remaining drinks.

6pm Sun – Award Ceremony & Closing Band Show

The winners will be announced and we will thank you all for making this an event to remember.

 

Thanks

MetaMix

May 9th, 2009

 

Funny how this works out!

Last OpenHackDay in Bangalore India was on the weekend of Valentine's Day. This OpenHackLondon is on the weekend of Mother's day (at least in most parts of the world if not in UK). In Feb in Bangalore we had to battle with V-day and #hackdayindia tweets trended up till 4th place (first 3 were v-day related). Can we top that in London this weekend? #openhacklondon is the official hashtag for tweets through the event if you hackers / tweeters are up for the challenge against M-day.

 

MetaMix

May 8th, 2009

 

Blogging about Open Hack London?

If you are blogging about this event do link out to your blog post on the blog post list (top-right) so that we can collate all posts on the event. Also would be great if you could also link to this wiki in your post. In case we hit the 10 posts mark we'll try and keep it fresh by updating the Top 10 on a regular frequency.

 

[Update: Please enter the direct link to the post (permalink) so that it benefits other hackers who want to read about your blog post on it.]

 

Thanks

 

MetaMix

May 8th, 2009

 

Hacker's Choice Award

Hey Hacker Dudes & Gals,

We've decided to setup the extremely popular Hacker's Choice Award during the Hack Demos on Sunday. This will be your chance to select one hack from all the hacks you saw and vote your ballot on it. And yes you can vote on your own hack but you only get one vote per hacker.

 

And if you want your hack to be the popular hack then make sure you either dazzle all the other hackers with your hack demo OR schmooze them.

 

T-1 Days - Hack.Trackr

Hello Hackers,

I’ve seen many of you active on the Hackers Wiki forming teams, asking questions, answering our Polls (Thank You), some chatting, signing-up to give Lightning Talks, and hopefully consuming the information we have been posting to help you make the most of the Open Hack Day. This is now T-1 day to the event and I wanted to communicate to you a few things that would help you through the hacking.

  1. First I wanted to thank you for your responses to the polls which have been very helpful in tuning the hack day. We are very excited to have you all be part of this effort.
  2. Many of you have already been forming teams either on the site or off-site. Also many of you might have already begun to work on your hack. It’s great to see this energy. To further help you in both forming your teams officially and maybe beginning to create the shell of your hacks we are opening up the Hack.Trackr tool to you all. Since your hacks will not be fully fleshed out yet or still early in the inception you could put in a placeholder for your hack & team and as it gets more refined you can update your hack entries with the details. This tool will also allow us to help you on your hacks through the 24 hour hack day. Here are the 2 steps you need to do follow to properly enter your hack:
    1. Login to yahoo.com with your yahoo account so you can add/update your hack entries later as well (or click this link).
    2. Enter as much details as you can or want on the Hack.Trackr form (http://developer.yahoo.com/openhack/register).
    3. All hacks are listed here where you can also edit your own hack entry.
  3. Registration begins at 8:30am on Saturday. Please use the email address you signed up with on eventwax to register. You will be given a printed copy of our terms & conditions & event rules and will be asked to sign a T&C attached here as well for your reference.
  4. If you plan to take the Flickr Bikes for a spin you will need to bring a Photo ID and/or Credit Card as collatoral deposit. Please check out http://purplepedals.com/ for more info on the bikes.
  5. Tech Talks will start promptly at 9:30am and 24 hour hacking will be kicked off at 12:30pm Sat.
  6. 24 hour hacking will end at 12:30pm Sun. Only hacks that have been entered in the Hack.Trackr will be allowed to demo on Sunday 2pm. I will post details on the Demo Flows later and last time to register the hack.

 

I've posted a lot for you to digest for now. So will stop for now till the next update.

 

MetaMix

 

Hacking 101

For some of you who are attending for the first time or want to know more about Hacking here's a great presentation by Chris Heilmann on Hacking 101. Take a look.

 

Hackumentary - Video

Here's a very interesting video to watch. 

The "hackumentary" follows hackers throughout the Open Hack Day 2008 at Yahoo! Sunnyvale. We chronicle the entire event and it's attendees as they race to hack on Yahoo's API's for the ultimate hack challenge, all in less than 24hrs.

 

MetaMix

May 7th, 2009

 

International Hackers

We have people registered from all these European countries:

 

  • Belgium
  • Finland
  • France
  • Germany
  • Ireland
  • Italy
  • Netherlands
  • Portugal
  • Slovenia
  • Spain
  • Sweden
  • Turkey
  • UK

and we even have a few from further afield.  So get creative on how you want to show your country pride!

And look out for a few touches from our previous seven international Yahoo! hackdays throughout the event. 

 

Sophie Major

May 6th 2009


 

Open Hack Day Quickly Approaching…

It's all coming together and we're everso excited about the weekend!

A few updates from us this morning:

 

  • Reminder that Rasmus Lerdorf and Christian Heilmann will be hosting an IRC chat today at 5.30pm UK time
  • We've had a change of judge.  Simon Wardley has had to send his apologies due to an unexpectedly early new addition to his family.  Pascal Finette from Mozilla has very kindly stepped into the breach.  Read all about Pascal on our Judges page.
  • Look out from an email from us in the next day or so with more information about venue and logistics, registration, wifi etc.

 

Sophie Major

May 6th 2009 


 

Dundee University Hackers

 

The School of Computing at Dundee University teaches a  revitalised version of traditional computing:- computing with a contemporary real-world approach. We cover the time-honoured topics but our treatment of these long-established areas has an applied focus - we use  fundamental knowledge skills of computing in the real world, to solve real-world problems for real companies, special groups, and individuals. We also believe that being at university should be fun.  The School has around 250 undergraduate students.

 

Our University Hackday takes place over a 3 week period with the students free to itch any scratch they want  in the filed of internet programming.  Hardware hacks are welcomed as long as there is an internet component.  The final presentation day to members of the YDN team gives the students a chance to show off their work and get real world feedback from the experts at YDN.

 

This years winner IntelliSearch by Laurence Hole, Chris Brett, Matthew Ross. Intellisearch  combines Dasher, an on screen predictive keyboard  Yahoo!'s predictive search functionality, in an accessible manner.  Dasher (and hence IntelliSearch) provides the functionality of a keyboard, while only requiring an input device which can move in two axes. As such, it can be used by people with motor impairment with devices such as an eye tracker. IntelliSearch uses HTML 5's Canvas element, copious amounts of Javascript, a little AJAX and a few PHP calls to get the search suggestions and results.

 

The three winners are completing their 3rd year of a four year course at Dundee University and will be going on to complete their Honours year in September.  Laurence and Chris  are developing an online game (Zandrok.com) in their spare time while Matt is partial to the odd Multiplayer FPS games and interested in modified cars of 90's onwards and American muscle cars.  The team are keen to learn more about the APIs and see what the rest of the hackers can do.

 

We're delighted they've been invited to Open Hack Day and are really looking forward to meeting the other hackers.

 

Andy Cobley

Internet Programming Lecturer, University of Dundee

May 5th, 2009


 

Hackxpert Chat next Wednesday

 

We've arranged an IRC chat with Christian Heilmann and Rasmus Lerdorf next Wednesday at 5.30pm (UK time) for about an hour.  Just head over to the HackerChat page or IRC irc://irc.freenode.net/hackday and we'll be there to answer any questions you have in the run up to the event,

 

 

Sophie Major

May 1st 2009

 


 

Talk Abstracts & Speaker Bios

 

We just posted the talk abstracts and the speaker bios for you all. We have a great lineup here and guarantee you all eyeopening, earsplitting energy sessions. Check them out. They are all linked out from the Agenda page.

 

MetaMix

April 29th, 2009

 


 

Judges Announced

 

Our Hack Day judges will have the very difficult job of deciding which of your hacks come top of the pile.  We can confirm them as:

 

  • Daniel Ek – Spotify
  • Matt Biddulph - Dopplr
  • Simon Wardley
  • David Filo – Co-founder of Yahoo!
  • Tim O’Donoghue – VP Engineering, Yahoo! Europe
  • Sophie Major – Yahoo! Developer Network

 

Find out more about this distinguished bunch in our Judges page.

 

Matt and Simon will be speaking at the tech talks on Saturday so you'll be able to get to know them a little and all the Yahoos will be at the event throughout.  Plenty of opportunities for bribery, then ;-)

 

 

Sophie Major

April 28th, 2009

 


 

Our Partners

 

We want our hackday to showcase other cool technologies.  So we're really excited to announce the following:

 

Nick Weldin from tinker.it is joining us to run an Arduino workshop.  We'll have a few Arduino boards for you to play with, but do bring your own if you have the kit.  We'd love to see some hardware hacks :-)

 

Mark Birbeck works on standards and applications at the juncture of rich user interfaces and the semantic web. To help these two worlds communicate, he invented RDFa and he's coming to talk about RDFa: The semantic web's missing link.

 

The Guardian has opened up their platform so that everyone can benefit from their journalism, brand, and the technologies that power guardian.co.uk.  Simon Willison and Simon Rogers will be talking about the Guardian's Content API and Datastore.

 

BBC Backstage is the BBC's developer network to encourage innovation and support new talent, using content feeds and APIs from across the BBC's network.  Rain Ashford from the team will be joining us to tell you all about it.

 

Mozilla: Bespin is a Mozilla Labs Experiment to build a code editor in a web browser that Open Web and Open Source developers could love. Joe Walker who works on the project will be telling you what they've learnt, what they are working on next and find out what features you would love to see with Bespin.

 

Skills Matter:  Providers of Europe's largest selection of open source technology and agile software process training and events will be helping us out by filming all the tech talks.

 

Take a look at our Partner page for more information!

 

Sophie Major

April 27th, 2009

 


Rasmus Lerdorf

 

We're absolutely delighted to confirm that Rasmus Lerdorf will be joining us at Hack Day.  Rasmus Lerdorf is known for having gotten the PHP project off the ground in 1995 and has contributed to a number of other open source projects over the years. For our event, he'll be giving a talk on "Hacking with PhP".  This will be a fun dive into the basic concepts you will need to know about PHP in order to consume open apis and build cool hacks quickly.  Some of the topics covered include

XML, JSON, YQL, YUI and OAuth. He has also kindly offered to host an IRC chat in the run-up to Hack Day.  Please let us know if you'd be interested in this by voting in our poll.

 

Sophie Major

April 24th, 2009

 


 

Hacksplorers - Join / Create a Team

We added the page Join-a-Team for people to begin grouping up if they want to. You could be hacking individually or as a team and you could be creating more than one hack or be part of many teams.

 

Use this as your page to express areas of interest and if you are interested in some of the hacksplorers to be part of your great hacksperiment. Or if you like someone's area of interest and want to help make it a winner then put in your name.

 

MetaMix

April 22nd, 2009

 


 

Previous Hackxamples

I will update this entry with links to examples of hacks that I find on the net (I am not promoting any hacks or products here).

 

MetaMix

April 22nd, 2009


“Hack-a-Break” 

 

There will be some serious hacking going on during the event, but it’s not all fun :-)

 

We are planning a number of activities during the two days to ensure that you have some time to remove yourselves from your machines.

 

We’re excited to announce that we will have a couple of Flickr Bikes during the two day which you will be able to take out onto the streets of London. The bikes are not only sleek in design, but they also have camera phones mounted on the handlebars that takes a photo every 60 seconds whilst the bike is in motion. The photos then get uploaded, along with their geodata, to a special Flickr account.

 

Read more here: http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/09/flickr-bikes-sh.html

 

Anil Patel

April 20th, 2009

 


Tom Coates & Seth Fitzsimmons from FireEagle team are attending hackday

 

We’re very excited to announce that Tom and Seth from FireEagle are going to be joining us!  Some of you may know Tom from the last Hack Day in London where he did a star turn as MC.  He had so much fun we couldn’t keep him away and this time he is bringing Seth Fitzsimmons, lead engineer for FireEagle.  Tom and Seth are doing a tech talk on Saturday morning and will be around for the whole weekend to help out your FireEagle hacks.

 

For more about FireEagle, Yahoo’s geolocation brokering platform, please check out http://developer.yahoo.com/fireeagle/

 

Sophie Major

Apr 20th, 2009


Dav Glass speaks on YUI3

 

We're excited to announce that Dav Glass is coming over for the event to talk about YUI3 and help you out throughout the hacking.

 

For those of you who don’t know Dav, he is the YUI engineer behind the Rich Text Editor, Resize Utility, Layout Manager and Drag and Drop. He is also a core team member for the YUI3 project. He completely re-architected DragDrop for YUI3 and helped design and extend the new core interface.

 

YUI3 was architected from the ground up based on the things we learned while building YUI2. It's designed to be faster, lighter and easier than YUI2.

 

Dav doesn't want to bore you with a "flashy" presentation – he’s looking to cover the tools needed to quickly build a great Hack.

 

Dav has written hundreds of a la carte YUI examples on his blog at davglass.com, one of the best community resources on YUI anywhere on the web.  Video with Dav: http://video.yahoo.com/watch/2359450/7378948

 

More about YUI:

 

  • There are 12,000 active community members in the YUI Community Forum
  • More than 2 billion YUI files served per week from yui.yahooapis.com, plus billions more from self-hosted locations and from other CDNs like Google's
  • YUI has been downloaded by developers more than 1 million times
  • Its examples are visited by more than 10,000 developers every day
  • YUI is used by companies big and small - including by big companies like NASA, Ernst and Young, Merrill Lynch, and - yes - Google (on their iGoogle portal, their Election Center, and as a prototyping tool in their UED group)
  • YUI has global reach - the YUI Community awards for 2008 went to an Argentinian retiree living in Spain, a Chinese freelancer near Shanghai, and a Cuban who had just emigrated to Miami (and who'd gotten his first job there via the YUI Community forum)

 

Sophie Major

Apr 20th, 2009


 

Tech talks announced 

 

On the Saturday, we’ll be giving a series of tech talks about Yahoo! and other technologies to inspire and educate you for your hacks.

 

Topics we're announcing today are:

 

 

These will be technical deep dives, given in many cases by the engineers who wrote the code.

 

Stay tuned for more tech talks to come from our partners!

 

Sophie Major

Apr 17th, 2009


 

Polls & Comments

 

Hey folks, as we are gearing up for the Hack Day we'd like to hear from you and get some inputs. We will put up polls on the sidebar regularly to ping your unused grey cells that will help us create an awesome experience for you here. Please help us by giving us your frank inputs.

 

Additionally you can of course add comments, ask questions and generally chat & team-up with other hackers to make this an event you would want to have.

 

MetaMix

Apr 17th, 2009


 

Welcome Hackers

 

Thank you all for registering to attend the second Open Hack Day in London. If you have received an email granting you access as a writer to this pbwiki, then you have been accepted to attend the event in May

 

 

This wiki is an informal channel for us to reach out to all the hackers and send you critical information such as agenda updates, technology updates, FAQ, Hacker Checklist... We will be posting all our communications here as well. Please use this site as your collaboration tool with us and with the other fellow hackers.

 

Anil Patel

Apr 16th, 2009

 

 

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