Inspired by Jeff Kreeftmeijer’s node.js demo site (which shows every other visitor’s cursors in realtime) and Ron Winter’s Flash drum kit, I set about making a supercharged collaborative drumkit: JamBox.

JamBox’s premise is simple – each time you press a key, a sound plays, and everybody else on JamBox hears it. There are drum sounds, an extremely cheesy lead synth, a chunky slap bass, and various percussion noises (cowbell, bongos, DJ scratches, a dog woofing), so multiple users can play together and coordinate an actual jam session.

(If you can't afford a real 808, JamBox is probably the next-best thing.)

First, I wrote a single-user JavaScript drumkit – each sound is preloaded in the browser, and the keystroke listeners are bound. I then drew from Mr Kreeftmeijer’s sample code to write the multi-user functionality. Crucially, I had plenty of time at the end of the hackday to spend in front of my favourite music-making tools, picking the right instruments and sampling them to perfection.

A downside is that JamBox relies on WebSockets, which aren’t supported by many browsers – not to mention, only a few browsers support .mp3 playback. As a result, JamBox has an “only works in Chrome/Safari” warning. Eventually I’d like to rewrite it to use the non WebSocket-specific socket.io library, and to switch between using .ogg/.mp3 files depending on the browser’s capabilities.

Another challenge was posed by the JamBox process’s tendency to stop running. Thanks to some sample code (again from Jeff Kreeftmeijer) I configured a God process to restart JamBox whenever it crashes.

All in all, I’m very pleased with the JamBox experience. I had a lot of fun making it, and even more fun making phat beats with it. Many thanks to White October for letting me build JamBox on company time, Jeff Kreeftmeijer for providing inspiration and generous sample code, and to my coworkers for helping me test and showing their musical talents.

(crossposted from Sebastian’s personal blog )

I went to four talks on four very topics, which is perhaps a little surprising considering the focus of the day: Non Profits and Tech engagement

Social Monitoring

This was a two part talk with the focus being on monitoring information within social media. This could take the form of following discussion on a topic relevant to a charity’s engagement, or could equally be applied to monitoring a brand activity. I noted two tools in the first half which I thought could be of use. The first was Social Mention, which is best used for tracking social sentiment on the various social networks (Twitter, et al). The second was Board Tracker, which can be used for checking various forums for keyword mentions. There was also discussion of using the advanced mode of Google search. The second half was a brief discussion of a theoretical Twitter filter that would allow someone to summarise the important points of conversation using an quasi-AI approach. The interested parties of which broke of into a group to discuss the implementation of the project.

FLiP

This was a talk given by my boss Dave Fletcher. I was involved in the projects inception at the Jailbrake weekend hosted by Social Innovation Camp, so I was very interested to see how the project had progressed. I was pleased to hear that even after talks with various authorities and forthcoming pilot runs, the project had retained its original good ideas; to get friends to help you identify your key skills in a structured and playful format which will hopefully aid you in gaining employment. This is such a promising project and I feel really proud for even the small part that I played in its creation.

Giving What We Can

Well this talk absolutely blew me away. It was one of those ones that starts interesting and makes you chuckle and finishes with you feeling shocked at what you’ve learnt. The presenter, Toby Ord, has actually appeared in various mainstream media publications discussing his project, but as he readily pointed out, it isn’t a message designed for the 140char social conversation. I think it would be difficult for me to do him justice. This is a man who has such belief in the difference he can make to so many peoples lives that he is pledging to donate a significant portion of his income for the rest of his life. His argument is convincing and I sincerely hope you will visit his site, givingwhatwecan.org and take the time to read what he has to say.

Music, The Ultimate Non Profit

The last talk I went to was actually more for fun than engagement, but considering my rock background I really can’t be blamed :) This was Ben Walker of Twitter song fame discussing his life as a niche geek semi-celebrity. Fun and quirky.

All in all, I had really fun and interesting time. I will certainly be going to another Barcamp at my next chance. Barcamp Non-Profits will be coming back, perhaps in spring and probably in London next time. You can find out more by going to barcampnonprofits.com or by following them on Twitter @barcampnfp. If you get the chance make sure you go.

Cross post from skinofstars.com

The Open Data Hackathon is a worldwide event with the aim of writing applications using open public data to show support for and encourage the adoption open data policies by the world’s local, regional and national governments.  The availability of publicly funded data has already developed a thriving industry in the US, as well as seeding many of the very useful and interesting data visualisations we have seen of late.  In the UK we are now seeing a far greater degree of data transparency.  There are also some good deal of local information now becoming available.  It is with this in mind that we consider it our duty to create something awesome with it.

Though the sharing of publicly funded data sets is sometimes a slow and painful process, there are already many good sources of data out there.  Here are some examples to whet your appetite:

data.gov.uk -
Data.gov.uk is home to national & local data for free re-use.

Police API http://policeapi.rkh.co.uk/ -
Provides information about nearest police stations, neighbourhood team members as well as crime levels & statistics.

http://opencharities.org/
A new project to open up the UK Charities Register

http://openlylocal.com/councils – provides list of Councillors, Committees for many councils including Oxford.

http://www.planningalerts.com/
A free planning application service that searches as many local authority planning websites as it can find.

A few of us from White October have met with Tim Davies, an Oxford based independent consultant, researcher and serious data-head.  Together we’ve bashed out some possible ideas:

Improving Oxfordshire Scrapers – check out how well the scrapers providing data for OpenlyLocal.com and PlanningAlerts.com are working for Oxfordshire Councils and spend time improving them. (Planning alerts uses ScraperWiki to gather data).

Journalism Hacks – exploring the possibilities to use data to generate local news stories.

BikeSafe – can we get data on cycle thefts?  Could it be used to find the best and worst places to leave a bike?

Of course these are just some of the ideas that we like today.  This is exactly the sort of thing that makes almost everything you read give you an idea!  What we really want is to hear your ideas and to help you make them a reality.

So are you interested but your not sure how you could help? Well this isn’t just a hacker event!  This is for designers, bloggers, activists, project managers, for anyone with ideas and for people with issues in need of hacks.  We are hoping to create the seeds of some really useful and interesting applications and it would be great if you could help us.

So here we are, the call for you to get involved!

If you’re thinking of coming then a good place to start is to sign up to the Oxford Open Data event, this will help us gauge numbers so we can leave no-one to want for anything.

If you get an idea or know of an interesting data-set then we’d encourage you to add it to the Oxford Open Data wiki page.

If you’d like to sponsor us and help us fund things like prizes, pizza or  t-shirts then please get in touch with either myself kevin@whiteoctober.co.uk or elucas@whiteoctober.co.uk

If you have any other questions about the event then please don’t hesitate to contact tim@practicalparticipation.co.uk or any of us at White October.

I took a mini-break to New York last week, and had the chance to pop into the Apple store on 5th Avenue (I love how awesome that sounds). Obviously then I had to try out the iPad first-hand. It was clearly the most popular item in-store as the gorgeous MacBook Pros and large iMac demonstration areas were practically empty, with large crowds around the iPad areas.

It’s a nice device, if a little large for my liking, but very responsive, particularly with regards to the keyboard. Positioning the iPad horizontally on the provided slanted stand allowed for typing on the on-screen keyboard at the same speed as you would a normal computer keyboard, and was extremely nice. I was personally quite sceptical back in January when the product was announced, but I did find myself experiencing iPad-envy after playing with the device; travelling back to our hotel on the subway, I noticed about 4 people using them for various activities including reading books and browsing the web. Suffice to say I restrained myself and didn’t purchase one sadly!

It’ll be interesting to see the UK release; by then hopefully all the little niggles will have been ironed out and we’ll have a solid product. Watch this space :-)

Oh, and I also came across a stack of paper versions of The Onion hidden in a subway corridor. Very bizarre!

The White October and Nonsense team (with a few ringers) teamed up with Common Ground and Itamar Ferrer to develop FLIP.  The idea behind FLIP evolved on the day, but put simply it is a Facebook application that gives friends the confidence to begin the process of identifying and developing their skills to find employment.

With about 12 hours in total to develop the application, we had our work cut out for us, particularly since none of us had ever developed a Facebook application before.  But by 2:00pm on Sunday we had  managed to create a functional Facebook application that allows friends to tell each other what they think they are good at, posting this to their wall, and encouraging them to begin to identify other skills.

Rating your friend's skills on Facebook

Facebook notification from FLIP

The FLIP facebook profile

An idea of what a profile page available to employers might look like.

We were lucky enough to be joined by Zoltan Ray and Matteo Menapace who, under the art direction of Itamar Ferrer put together the amazing designs above.

Much like 24 hour Startup the day ended with a lot of frantic coding from Rich, and fretful pacing from Dave.  We then presented to a few hundred fellow JailBrakers and interested parties where, despite not winning the competition, we were met with overwhelming enthusiasm for our ideas, and astonishment from fellow developers at what we had achieved in such a short amount of time.

UPDATE : Here’s our presentation from the day:

The idea behind JailBrake was that the projects conceived over the weekend, would be taken forward by their owners and some might become fully fledged social enterprises in the future.  With the rest of the FLIP team we’re going to be putting serious thought into how we can do this with our project which oozes potential whichever way you look at it.

The bros and their mos have been through a lot over the past month and I think it’s fair to say we’re all proud of what we’ve achieved. On the 1st of Movember, we were innocent smoothies, now we’re a seriously mean looking gang of four.

Sure, there have been funny looks from folks all over the place, but those people are fools who just don’t appreciate the sheer awesomeness of a hirsute upper lip. For true messages of appreciation, let’s turn to some ‘randomly’ selected comments from our generous donors:

• “I have my suspicions that you’re dying your mustache but nonetheless I suppose your efforts deserve some kind of reward!”
• “I sit next to Dave and I can vouch for the fact that this is all his own hair. All 17 strands of mo.”
• “not too impressive on day 10 – you need to try harder! mum” [thanks Mum]
• “Looking good! you should keep the look!”
• “Argh! No, stop it! Here’s my money…”

And the question on everyone’s (top) lips: are we going to keep them? I suspect that the answer is a resounding no. But watch this space for the post Movember news, including the final cut of what the critics are already calling “A sizzling extravaganza of 4-way simultaneous mo-growth action” (our timelapse video).

Oh, and one last thing. A massive thanks to all who have donated so far and a huuuge thankyou to you. Yes you. You haven’t donated yet, but it’s clear to see that the e-mo-tion of this final day is too much, and you’re reaching for your wallet and pushing your mouse towards this link:

https://www.movember.com/uk/donate/your-details/team_id/13289/

I can’t speak for the other chaps, but mine feels like its stabilised a bit now. But stabilised in a state where it itches like mad and looks absolutely terrible. Surely only the addition of bad aviators from Boots could make me look any more of a fool.

We’ve started debating shave off times and tactics already. The general consensus is that the 1st of December is when they’ve got to go. Rich seems keenest to ditch, asserting that “12.01am monday night/tuesday morning” is when his ‘tache meets its maker.

The mo bros will be converging in London for the first all-White-October-Mo-Bro-meetup tomorrow. As well as admiring each others mos and parading them proudly around the city, we’ll also be doing some kind of secret activity (I would imagine we’ll be blogging more about that here or somewhere else once we know what on earth is going on…).

Oh, and here’s another one of those mo over time videos that we’re still working on. Here are my first 20 days:

If you’ve been following along but haven’t yet donated, now’s the time:

https://www.movember.com/uk/donate/your-details/team_id/13289/

And stay tuned for the big mo finale in 5 days…

There’s been some discussion over the gap in the middle of some of our mos. Most notably mine. Apparently it’s a known style but I think it’s just rubbish. Maybe I should refer to what is surely the best mustache reference found so far: The Complete Ukulele Guide to the Moustaches of the World.

We’re getting more comfortable out and about now, striding forth with our mos thust proudly aloft. Dave even took his to a multi-Michelin starred restaurant where, as it turned out, it was right at home.

And some mo themed merchandise arrived at White October Towers this week. The favourite has to be the “White Movember Flocked ‘Mo’ Shirt” (that’s a mighty long URL) with its beautiful textured velvety mos. Mmm.

So, with only 10 days to go until “the big mo”, now is the perfect time to sponsor us if you haven’t already:

https://www.movember.com/uk/donate/your-details/team_id/13289/

And don’t forget to join in with the Movember, Mo Madness playlist fun. It’s the craze that’s quite literally not sweeping the nation.

But to keep you in the mo mood, why not start Spotify up and join in with the Movember playlist madness?

The idea is simple – find some tunes that either have “oh”, “no” or “know” in them. They should be catchy singalong numbers (for reasons which will become clear). Add the tunes to the playlist. Now, as you’re playing the awesome movember playlist, you should sing along but replace “oh”, “no” or “know” with “mo”. That’s it.

Here’s the linky: spotify:user:bouncingdan:playlist:5S4xtGeYYGRK1UKXo3wWM3

Join in and enjoy. Obviously I reserve the right to autocratically throw non-catchy or off-message songs off the playlist. Or shut the whole thing down if it descends into farce / abuse.

Dave (El Muchacho) is still looking pretty mean. But Ed (Spurlock) is clearly hot on his heels for the title of The Baddest (i.e. waaay goodest) Mo. Rich needs reintroducing to his razor and I feel as though I really ought to try to prise my finger away from my chin in these photos.

There are signs that we may be feeling the strain of a mo in public:

Even though I’ve arguably got the least impressive mo, I’ve notched up more sponsorship than everyone else (I think donor error may be a factor here, alas). Go me! But however it gets here, we should be proud to have raised more than £200 so far. Thanks and keep it coming people:

https://www.movember.com/uk/donate/your-details/team_id/13289/

Come back in five days for the next mo update…