Today I went to BarCamb. It was pretty awesome.

I saw the following presentations:

• AlertMe.Com
• Semantic science: a guide to microformats, Matt Wood, WTSI
• Creating "Papers", rapid development of great applications using Cocoa on MacOSX, Alexander Griekspoor (EBI), mekentosj.com
• HTML 5 and the future of markup on the web, James Graham
• Rapid Prototyping stuff with microcontrollers, Simon Ford
• Text mining for science (or chemistry, at least), Peter Corbett
• Making multiuser PCs easy and affordable for all - Quentin & Michael from ndiyo.org

Because I was feeling a little under the weather I missed:

• Multilingual programming - Mixing programming languages, Lars GT Jorgensen, WTSI
• Introduction to jQuery (sorry, no science, but you can win a book!) - Matthew Pennell

Hopefully those presentations will appear online so I can take a look at the ones I missed.

AlertMe.Com is pretty interesting. It's a Cambridge start up who provide a home monitoring system using ZigBee. They have a whole bunch of devices (like motion sensor, button, key fob, etc) and a hub device. The hub device plugs in to your broadband, then you can configure the behaviour of the devices (using their website). So if your door is opened when your key fob isn't around that's probably bad, or if you go to leave the building (your keyfob leaves the area) while one of the windows is open that's probably also bad. These events then have configurable actions like sending an email or a text message.

It was all very groovy, but for me the devil would be in the details. The final pricing hasn't been worked out, nor has how open the system would be. I really like the idea of the system, it's the kind of thing I'd buy because it would solve so many little problems (Did the postman come while I was away at work? Did I lock the door? [I'm not sure it can solve that problem] How can I indicate to my friends / family that I'm at home?). Being able to interoperate with it via something simple like Jabber is a must. If they can do that and the rest of the system is pretty open I'll almost certainly get one. Early adopter pricing was mentioned, but I don't know if that information is allowed to be public so I won't mention it here.

The talk on micro controllers was interesting too. I've never programmed a microcontroller before. The guy who did the talk showed how he's come up with a simple piece board and software set that allows you to just plug in a chip and then easily connect GPS / RFID / etc devices to it. Once you've done that you just plug the thing in to your computer via usb and copy the software you've written over to it. A library for micro controller related stuff seemed to make doing moderately difficult tasks (like reading from GPS / outputting to serial etc) pretty damn easy. He said he wants people to be able to make their own little devices (possibly that could interoperate with AlertMe.com). The kits are going to retail for about £50 which seems pretty reasonable to me.

The ndiyo.org presentation was about how to reduce the cost of computer use in the third world. Their idea is that computers are expensive and use a lot of electricity, so rather than having one computer per user it would be better to have many (10-30) users per computer. With Linux this is pretty trivial to do except for one part, the display. Multiple multiple headed graphics cards only goes so far, and the range of VGA / DVI is pretty limited. Their solution is to compress the video using RLE, then output it via ethernet to a NIVO device. This allows you to have a display hundreds of meters from the 'server' computer, and to have a large number of inexpensive displays exported. Keyboard and mouse could be exported back over ethernet too.

Their solution was pretty brilliant I thought. It doesn't work well with video or 3D graphics (due to bandwidth limitations), but for the problem they're trying to solve I thought it was ideal. If I were setting up a school or something like that I think I'd be knocking on their door to have a few units to try out.

They also could provide the same solution over USB, and showed a number of manufacturers now sell (normally priced) TFT displays with this technology over USB built in. All pretty shiny. The price was slightly off putting (over £100 per NIVO), but then I'm a cheapskate ;-)

I chatted to various interesting people (like the author of Papers), some of whom work in my building. Some people mentioned SciComp Cambridge, a group that I'd thought would only be interesting to scientists, but it turns out they have presentations that would be interested to a non scientist such as myself. I hope to go along to their next meeting.

Tags: alertme, barcamb, compsci, geek, interesting, my life, scicomp
Current Mood: sleepy