bruno’s 5-a-day

I always tried to find some way of keeping me productive and focused, but obviously I spent more time looking for a system and adapting to it than actually ding work. Today I finally had an idea:

I’m going to make a list of 5 things I have to do each day, and not go to sleep until they’re all done. They can be passed down to following days, as long as everyday sees 5 items getting crossed off the list. 
Once the 5 tasks are done, rest of the day can be spent with tasks from the ‘future’, side projects, relaxing, sleeping whatever. 

The fact that I came up with this myself (I think..) gives me hope that I will actually follow it, should give me some spare time to work on other stuff, and will hopefully cut down on my procrastination. Although this post sort of automatically disproves the latter, it also forces me to be public to it and stick to my plan to avoid public shame, so I’m committing to write an update to this to record the results. Wish me luck!

Culture Hack Scotland 2011 Recap

Warning: the following post is long and geeky

It took about 2 days to completely recover from the lack of sleep and the caffeine overdose, but now I feel ready to share my experience at Culture Hack Scotland.
The event took place in the beautiful Inspace over the span of 24 hours, starting Friday (May 6th) at 5.30pm, and was sort of a hack day crossed with a culture data brainstorming workshop. Basically, the great guys over at Festival Labs managed to put together a load of interesting and exclusive datasets (including show, venue, artist listings from 2010 festivals; City of Edinburgh footfall data; National Museums collection data; Guardian festival reviews data; etc.) and a bunch of developers had free reign to use that data to create useful and entertaining projects and applications. 

To be fair, I had no idea what I was getting into. I signed up for the event only a few days earlier, knowing that some of my friends were participating and after it being heartily recommended by Rohan, one of the organizers. I thought I would be sitting through a couple of talks, getting some free beer and dinner, maybe taking part in a workshop or two in the morning..  I didn’t have a clue about how much more I was getting into! 

After sitting through a couple of interesting talks, the organizers took some time to explain what the deal was: they would give us desks, connectivity, electricity, food, drinks, caffeine and the data, and we had 24 hours to come up with a cool project. There would be a showcase at the end, with some of the projects (“hacks”) winning prizes. The whole thing made a lot more sense now, and it sounded like a lot of fun!

The event was full of familiar faces, and I ended up grouping up with canadians Jonathan and Robert, and my business partner Simon. During the first break I noticed that another canadian friend of mine Devon (publisher at the Journal) was there, and after a little chat he reminded me about a project he wanted to start that had to do with festival reviews. I introduced him to the others, and it took very little to have everybody on board. So the team was set, and the project was decided, but the most important thing still had to be figured out: the team name! After a couple of minutes of discussion, it was ruled that Canada would have any influence on the name, and we called ourselves team CHS Rock it!

After claiming the front table for ourselves and getting some dinner, we weren’t quite ready to delve into the main project yet, so we decided to warm up with a little side excercise. Jonathan pointed out this NSFW recipe site that you can visit when you need cooking inspiration, and it will very politely suggest a recipe for you to prepare. It will show you the recipe name, link to the instructions, and give you the chance to cycle through more recipes should you not like the current suggestion. It is a very simple website, that didn’t appear to be technically challenging, so we thought it would be a good idea to implement the same concept as a fringe show suggestion site. Thus, WTFringe was born:

It took us about 30 minutes to implement the whole thing (+/- another hour for Jonathan to get the show dates to display correctly). Simon dealt with the php that queried the fringe show database, Jonathan set up the CSS and js effects, I set out hunting for domains and setting up hosting space, while Robert and Devon (with input from everybody else) came up with the polite invitations that would welcome visitors to the site. It ended up being a really fast and fun warm up, and it also allowed us to set up the tools we would use to coordinate throughout the event.
Firstly, Jonathan created an organization repo on github where we could keep all of our code. It took a few minutes to get Robert and Devon up to date with git, but then it was smooth sailing for the rest of the night. Second we had to be able to quickly pass around files that we didn’t want to put in the repo (e.g. large data files), so I set up a shared Dropbox* folder for us to share files. Last, but not the least, we decided we needed a group communication tool to pass around code snippets, URLs and stuff. After trying GTalk group chats and Meebo rooms that somehow always managed not to work, we briefly flirted with the idea of setting up an IRC channel, and finally fell back on a Skype group conversation, which ended up being just perfect.

*If you don’t know what Dropbox is, do yourself (and me) a favor and get it here, so we both get some extra space!

After all the setting up and WTFringe-ing, it was already past eleven, and we needed to start working on our main effort. Devon’s idea was to aggregate festival shows reviews from all available sources, taking the scores they’ve been given and calculating an average. These scores can then be used to evaluate individual venues and festivals as well, and could be expanded with social features such as user recommendations, reviews, likes or whatever. The idea was great, surprisingly it hadn’t already been implemented anywhere, and it fit perfectly with some of the datasets we were given, so we were confident that apart from creating an interesting project for the hack day, we would also have something on which we could keep working on in the future.
Obviously there was no way we would be able to implement the whole thing in the remaining 16 hours, so we decided that the efforts would be concentrated on getting the basic scoring algorithm done, setting up a nice UI, and matching up as many reviews as we could.

Before starting we had to decide what stack to work on. Me and Simon were routing for the Python/Django solution, as it’s what we were familiar with, while Devon and Jonathan were more into Ruby/Rails. In the end we went for Ruby as Devon already had the models and some of the logic already written up for Rails and it seemed pointless to do the same work again. It took Simon a wee while to set his stack up, Jonathan only had to make sure he was using the same versions, while I was having problems getting Rails and MySQL to talk, so it was decided that Robert and I would deal with non-Ruby stuff, and the others would be in charge of the front-end and algorithms.

And so we began! We decided on the name festivalsreview right away. Devon already had the .co.uk domain, so I bought the .com to complement it.
The first thing we had to do was get the show list and the reviews. We got the show list from the Fringe API, and had API access to the Guardian reviews, that Devon dealt with. We also built some simple scrapers to get data from The List, FestMag (Simon), and ThreeWeeks (me). In the meantime Jonathan, Devon and Robert made sure we had a proper database model and started populating it.
The complicated part was matching reviews to shows, but after some time I managed to write a script that had between 80% and 90% success rate (thanks to Joe for the tips!). Robert had some php scripts ready to clean the data up, and write the matches to the db, so once that was done it was only a matter of presentation.

At this point we’d already moved into the Informatics Forum next door for a few hours and the hacking was on at full speed. We had been one of the only two teams that had stayed up all night working (most of the others leaving around or before 3am), and had enjoyed the nighttime silence (and storm), intervalled with random shows from drunken kids sprinting in the middle of the street, making faces in our direction and other random happenings. The morning had brought a completely different atmosphere. The room was full by 9am (breakfast time!) and everybody was buzzing about exchanging data and ideas or just randomly chatting. It was easy to tell we were all having fun and putting in our best efforts. But hard work required concentration, so it was time to put some hardcore coding music on!

So it was time to get the actual site up and running. Devon had written the scoring algorithm and was debugging it with Jonathan, who in the meantime had set up an Amazon instance for the site. Simon had produced yet another kick-ass theme, but was fighting fiercely to keep the homepage as empty as possible. Luckily I managed to convince him otherwise so we worked on adding some more elements to fill the site up. 
I am proud to present you the alpha alpha alpha version of festivalsreview: 

It was time for the showcase, and some truly amazing apps were displayed. It was fun to see how the twitter feed came to life during this time, with conversations sparking both online and offline! One interesting thing I noticed was how the room was split into two: the hackers and the ‘cultural’ people (who had participated in other events during the morning), and that whenever someone presenting would make a joke, only one half of the room would laugh, depending on whether it was a geeky remark or not!
Anyway, our apps were warmly welcomed and loads of people shared our links, with both sites getting more than 100 hits on saturday and more than 50 on sunday. We even won a prize albeit not winning one of the category awards.

Culture Hack Scotland was great fun. It was our first hack day and we all enjoyed it. We had fun with our projects and we definitely want to keep working on festivalsreview! And especially it was a great opportunity to meet some really interesting people, work with them, and spend some time together making something cool!
I’m really looking forward to the 2012 edition, but I hear a 2011:part 2 culture hack might take place sometime this winter, and I definitely recommend you sign up for it. I’ll see you there!

Props:
-to FestivalsLab for setting the awesome even up
-to Rohan for staying up all night to make sure we didn’t destroy Inspace
-to Informatics for providing awesome spaces
-to CHS Rock It! because we rocked!
-to everyone who came because it was a great event

Slops:
-to MySQL and Ruby not wanting to collaborate on my laptop
-to me not being prepared (would’ve rested more beforehand!)
-to whoever didn’t make it because you missed out! 

Getting rid of Apathy

I agree 100% with this guy, we should all be doing something to drive change

Collection of Tsunami links

I’m coming across loads of interesting/scary links, pictures, videos about the tsunami, so I thought it might be worthwhile to collect them all in one place.

Note that this post will likely get updated with time. Latest update: 12/04/2011

Scariest video so far: 6 minutes from when you can see the wave approaching, to when it drags along containers, then cars, and finally starts uprooting entire buildings!!

next up, video of the wave seen from the side as it floods Sendai airport:

some sites with high resolution photo galleries:

• selection from boston.com’s big picture:

• Some that I already posted from the mail online:

and finally a few interesting links:

• this site shows all of the earthquakes that happened in and near Japan since the 11th of March (the day of the tsunami), showing their relative strengths. Try guessing how many before clicking..
• ABC News Australia has a gallery of before/after satellite pictures. Gives you an idea of the scale of the destruction. There’s a second part linked to at the bottom as well.
• list of facts and some interesting videos from the Vancouver Sun

Update 1 - 18/03/2011

Two new videos. In the first one a guy is walking around a park near tokyo and is filming as cracks create in the ground and water comes out of them! (middle minute is the most impressive).

In the second one there’s a recording taken from inside a car driving along the coast when it gets hit by the tsunami! Images are repeated and beginning and end, a guy is speaking in japanese in between.

Update 2 - 22/03/2011

• it took the Japanese just four days after the quake to start properly rebuilding

• some cool graphs on how Japan MOVED during the earthquake. This is one of the videos on the page: its cool to see the seismic waves move along the island, and how the parts closer to the epicenter have been shifted permanently! More here. 

• a graph from xkcd that puts radiation amounts in perspective

Update 3 - 8/04/2011  

Two guys (idiots?) drive all the way to 1.5km to the fukushima reactor and witness the devastated landscapes (and experience high levels of radiations)

Update 4 - 12/04/2011  

Skyscrapers rocking during the March 11 earthquake

Tsunami Destruction

Some frightening pictures of post-tsunami Japan

Wiped out: Rescue workers are dwarfed by the scale of the rubble as they pick their way through the shattered city of Otsuchi
Eerie: Cars drive along one of the few passable roads in the devastated Minamisanriku where 10,000 people are feared dead
Heart of the wasteland: Japanese survivors of Friday’s earthquake and tsunami walk under umbrellas through the leveled city of Minamisanriku
Vanished: An astounding aerial view of the tsunami-devastated town of Rikuzentakata shows the full scale of the damage. Very little remains
A ship is seen perched on top of a house in the tsunami devastated remains of Otsuchi, Iwate prefecture

more pictures here