Thing are getting frantic here at the European Hack HQ with last minute schedule shifts, ordering of food and drinks and making sure we have all the gear and infrastructure in place.
Almost 400 people have signed up and we're getting all the goodies ready for those about to hack.
In the meantime, check the Open Hack Day London 2009 Wiki for all the latest updates and info.
See you soon!
Namaste!
You didn't think being in Bangalore once was enough for the Open Hack Day, did you?
We're back and we're ready to see what creative hacks the Indian developer community can come up with.
Where?
The Taj Residency, Bangalore
When?
The weekend of 14th and 15th of February
Want to come?
Register either for only the presentations (weak) or for the full hack day (good) at the Open Hack Day India 2009 registration page.
This is the only official signup for the event, you need to get your free ticket there!
Detailed Agenda:
Saturday Feb 14th
8am – Registration Begins
9am-1pm – Technology Presentations
1pm – 24 hour Overnight Hacking begins
7pm-10pm – Special Valentines Entertainment for Hackers and 1 Guest (Details To Be Announced)
Sunday Feb 15th
12pm – Hackers Last Hour Call – Start registering your hack for Demos
1pm – Hacking Ends – Lunch
2pm – Hack Demos begin
6pm – Judging & Awards
7pm – wrap-up & disperse
Other resources:
See you there!
Oi! Open Hack Day Brazil is being hosted in a beautiful auditorium on the campus of SENAC university in Sao Paulo. Before I continue, I should note that the food here has been delicious, diverse, and refreshed every couple hours throughout the night. My favorite item so far was the fresh-squeezed pinapple juice with mint leaves served this morning ... mmm, delicious ... ok, back to the update :)
Even after a long night of hacking, the crowd here is still enthusiastic, and racing for the finish line. YQL and BOSS have been huge points of interest so far, but I've seen some unique projects in the works: one group is using the Social API SDK from within Blueprint and another has two $100 laptops and a breadboard wired with LEDs, so I am unsure just what kind of hacks to expect. The tenacity and passion of the participants is impressive: they were lined up at 8 yesterday morning and went to work immediately after the doors opened. Debugging technical challenges, like authorization flow, across a language barrier has been daunting at times, but we've had fun all along. In the middle of the night, we were treated to unexpected delights: "Freebird", an homage to the recent Open Hack in Sunnyvale, a clip from Monty Python's "The Holy Grail", and "Iron Man". Throughout, a wonderful, varied selection of music (trance, R & B, rock, alternative, hip hop, and whatever genre includes Pornophonique, a guitar/Game Boy duo Christian Heilmann introduced us to) helped maintain a superior hacking environment.
Credit must be given to the Sao Paulo and Miami teams for organizing such a well-run and enjoyable event. The classes were casual (bean bags along the front row) but punctual, with staff on hand for translation.
I should also note that Sao Paulo is a beautiful city, with expansive areas of verdant lawns and tropical foliage interspersing urban development on a staggering scale. We have very much enjoyed your stay here. And the food is amazing.
Now, we are going into the awards ceremony.
Tchau.
Erik Eldrigde
Yahoo Developer Network
Carnegie Mellon's 2008 Hack Day was our largest and best-attended University Hack Day ever. We wound up with 29 entries and a very full house for demonstration time, thanks to the inclusion of Hack Pitch--in cooperation with the Tepper School of Business--in which hackers teamed up with MBA students to produce business plans based around working hacks.
Because there were so many entries and so much enthusiasm throughout the night, the judges conspired to add a few Honorable Mention awards not given at other events. Here they are:
Hackiest Hack:
Susan Blog, by Edwin Shao and Susan Lin. This hand-drawn travelogue captured our hearts and brought in many interesting images from Flickr, and the presenters learned an important lesson about not assuming that everyone's screen runs at the same resolution that yours does. Especially the projector you're going to present your hack on. :)
Head First No Prisoners Award:
Local Event Mapper, by Derek Kozel. The author had no programming experience of any sort, or even a laptop to hack on, and yet he managed to quickly glean enough knowledge to bring local events from many different services onto the same map, courtesy of the biggest, most complicated set of Yahoo! Pipes we have ever seen. Ever.
Guts and Determination Award:
Upcoming++, by Ashutosh Chauhan. Before the presentations start, you really want to make sure the machine you're going to present on will talk to a projector. After five (count-em FIVE) attempts, Ashutosh's effort--an interesting mash-up of Upcoming and Maps--finally came alive, to rousing applause.
Category Awards
Search Monkey Prize:
TwitterSearchMonkey, by Paul Shen. TwitterSearchMonkey amplifies the search result for a Twitter user's profile page, including the user avatar and ten most recent tweets in the advanced search bar.
http://gallery.search.yahoo.com/application?smid=Uld.s
BOSS : How We Like, by Kyle Sun and Ruojian Yu. This hack used BOSS to run multiple searches on a person's name, analyzed the results for emotionally-charged terms, and gave a percentage of "how we like" it. Running it on the judges' names during the demonstration was a brave--and highly amusing--move that helped to seal the deal.
Sorry, no URL available.
Hack for Good: Panorama, by Donald Cober and Nirava Patel. Kids around the world are beginning to acquire One Laptop Per Child machines; this hack makes it simple for them to create a 360-degree panorama of where they live, stitch it together, and upload it to Flickr. The vision is to allow children around the world to share their surroundings with each other. If you visit the hack's page, you'll see the actual image the authors captured when they demonstrated their hack:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Panorama
Overall Winners
Third Overall: GeoComments, by Steven Hillenius and Sam Hashemi. Even though this one used (ahem) a competitor's map API, we could not ignore the technical sweetness or the bright idea: a simple implementation of geo-located discussion to find the best food in the area. Click the map to visit a spot near CMU; add comments or read those left by others, or click the magic Food button in the top right to see where to eat on campus. Steven and Sam even had a portable version which ran on a jailbroken iPhone, which used your current location to instantly find food near you.
http://geocomments.res.cmu.edu/hack/
Second Overall: Eagle Eye, by Mattt Thompson and Dan Sibley. Eagle Eye was a very nicely-done interactive photo scavenger hunt, using FireEagle, Flickr, GeoPlanet, and Yahoo! Maps. Players see photos and do their best to come closest to the spot where the photo was taken, by uploading a matching geotagged picture.
Sorry, no URL to share, but we hope it will be along shortly.
First Overall: The Inhabited Web, by Chris Harrison, Bryan Pendleton, Julia Schwarz. This hack took top honors for several reasons: it was a technically sweet implementation of one of those slap-your-forehead-it's-so-simple ideas: a real-time visualization of how many people are currently browsing the same page you're on, and approximately where they are. The demo is currently live here:
http://inhabitedweb-demo.geekdom.net/hacku.html
... but we imagine it will be visible everywhere soon, since it also took first place in Hack Pitch.
Thanks to all who participated ... next stop, San Diego!
The week started off with Paul Tarjan's Search Monkey Brain Jam. We had over 70 students attend and some excellent questions, and wound up with SearchMonkey in four out of our six hacks.
On Tuesday we hosted the CS Faculty and Student appreciation barbecue, which was a big success and a great way for Yahoo! to kick off the year at Stanford. Over 160 students and faculty came out to enjoy the beautiful weather, food and conversation. We received tons of thank-yous and many of them stayed after to hear more about our new open technology push from Rasmus Lerdorf and Dav Glass.
We had two days to cool down, and then on Friday we crammed in a room for the final hack hours before the judging. In keeping with our tradition, we hacked along with the students. Dav and Paul took the YUI documentation system and added RDFa markup to the HTML output. We didn't know of any other vocabularies for marking up code structure, so we made out own. Soon, any documentation generated by YUIDoc will be part of the semantic web.
Two-time defending champion Michael Fischer showed off a pair of hacks, his "what if they mated" hack from OpenHack 2008, and a new hack that builds a social graph from your email correspondence, and then sends you text messages when "important people" send you an email.
The SearchMonkey prize went to Lucas Garron, who amazed us not only by solving Rubik's Cube in 19 seconds but also with his SearchMonkey infobar for the World Cubing Association. Now Lucas can easily keep an eye on his competitors and their records in various competitions.
Third place went to Bob Lantz, for Conference-O-Matic, a new way to look at the Association for Computing Machinery's conference database. Bob's hack scrapes the content from many different ACM pages and then uses YUI to present an easily-navigable file browser pane.
Second place went to Stefan Krawczyk, for his VTA Bus View SearchMonkey app. Stefan usually uses a search engine to find his bus routes, and by embedding the data right in the page he can now save a click. We've asked him to extend his plugin to other bay area transit options, so soon we might have our transit options all in Yahoo! Search.
First place went to Diana Gentry, for her cross-site Book Info Grabber. Diana's SearchMonkey app provided helpful links to other sources of information based on the book's ISBN number. Users can look up the availability in their local library, or comparison shop across multiple sellers. Book Info Grabber currently works with Amazon and Barnes & Noble, but Diana plans to extend it to any page that has an ISBN.
Onwards to CMU!
First prize over all went to an impressive hack by Addy Cameron-Huff named HackDemocracy:
http://yahoo.summerhilldesign.com
Addy managed to organize an incredible amount of data and put an easy-to-use and very polished UI on top of it. In the end what we get is an incredible political research tool that allows us to dig into how your local MP has represented you by looking at what he/she has said on-record in Parliament. You can see see the excerpt about the topic you care about or the entire speech. You can also see how the parties stand on issues you care about based on how often they talk about those issues. And finally he added a simple RSS API for you to fetch the text of speeches by topic to let you build off of his hard data ming work.
Second place went to Flare by Michael Campagnaro and Niall Wingham:
Flare is a semantic markup tool written in Javascript. Flare currently only supports RDFa, but we really hope Michael and Niall continue working on it and add eRDF and all the popular microformats to it. Anything that helps push the web towards semantic validity is very important.
Third place went to Globami, by first-year studenut Renaud Bourassa:
http://globami.rhinosphere.com
Globami is a friend visualizer that lets you easily see where anybody's friends are on a couple of different networks, either through a nice Web UI or in a SearchMonkey info bar. Not bad for three weeks of instruction!
In the BOSS category we selected Clustr, by Alex Leong, Nick Engelking, Danielle Alessio, and Josh Lamontagne:
Clustr does a number of BOSS searches to determine the relationship between search terms, finds images to represent each and gives you a graphical cluster where the size of the images and the distances between them indicate correlation.
In the BluePrint category we chose Mobill by Chong Su, Toshio Wang, Carol Yu, and Jason Cham:
http://beta.m.yahoo.com/w/devtest-chongasu-mobill
Mobill keeps track of your expenses, giving you some nice sorting and graphical visualization tools right on your phone. It also includes a Web service where you can download your expenses into a spreadsheet.
In the SearchMonkey category we chose Jeff Pound's API Monkey app:
http://gallery.search.yahoo.com/application?smid=09H.s
API Monkey provides language-specific reference help for a number of languages. And it does a really nice job of showing the most relevant parts of the various reference docs.
Honorable Mention:
Jimmy He's Tiny Vector Graphics Editor, which brought back memories of Logo and Turtle Graphics for me, and is great fun to play with.
We also liked the ideas in the CalendrViewr2.0Beta hack. Are they perhaps trying to poke a little fun at Web product names, numbers and everlasting beta cycles with that name?
MaybeNotSpam gave us an interesting way to give messages in the spam folder on Yahoo Mail or GMail a second chance at the In box.
Edgar A. Bering gave us a fascinating lesson in quantum computing and Scheme that we ... didn't quite grasp a word of. :)
Other highlights included a mobile RSS reader written using the BluePrint API called Feedy! and a Web directory index enhancer simply called DIR.
We also saw another stellar batch of SearchMonkey apps, the simplest and funniest being the "Canada Eh?" app that added an "Eh?" to the end of all Canadian URLs.
Also in SearchMonkey we saw a nice combination of IMDB, Torrent searches and Last.fm apps, along with a tv.com app, a World Of Warcraft app, and a very nice Map Infobar with driving directions from your location, derived from GeoIP.
Photos from Waterloo are on Flickr, here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/70883693@N00
Onwards to Stanford!
Best Overall
First Place - Pastee, by Matt Sparks
https://pastee.org/
A secure combined pastebin/tinyurl service which was very polished. We actually ended up using it during the judging. First place gets Matt a trip to Sunnyvale for the finals; we can't wait to see what he comes up with next. More on Pastee here: https://pastee.org/about.
Second Place - Speakli, by Rahul Malik, Dave Paola, and Nathan Lawrence
Speakli is sort of like Ning for Microblogging sites. A bit like Yammer, I guess, but with a different focus. You can create your own Microblogging site with a few clicks complete with a full-featured Mobile widget version of it which was very slick.
Third Place - Internet Archive SearchMonkey App, by Alex Lambert
http://gallery.search.yahoo.com/application?smid=k4O.s
Infobar finds all old versions of a site via the Internet archive.
Alex also enter a pair of other really cool Search Monkey apps, RetailMeNot, which shows coupons related to the result, and BugMeNot, which we should probably not link here. :) Here's RetailMeNot:
http://gallery.search.yahoo.com/application?smid=ztq.s
Best BOSS Hack - The Perfect Search, by Alex Lambert
http://dev.quickfire.org/perfect/
Alex is a hack legend at UIUC; his hacks are eclectic and thought-provoking. In this one he paints a picture of what the Web would be like if everything had to be perfect. What if only sites that validated were indexed? Try doing a few searches on The Perfect Search to find out.
Best SearchMonkey Hack - Gist, by Andy Schmitz
http://gallery.search.yahoo.com/application?smid=IyE.s
Annotating web results or letting users improve the description of a site has been bounced around for a while, but you always have the Wikipedia problem and the spam problem. I thought Gist had a nice idea in that it only allows you take copy complete sentences found on the actual site to create a better blurb/description of that site. He had a cool Javascript hack combined with his SearchMonkey app to implement this in a rather slick fashion.
Best BluePrint Mobile Widget - Speakli, by Rahul Malik, Dave Paola, and Nathan Lawrence
http://www.speakli.com, described above.
Honorable Mention
Other highlights came from Will Duff (last year's UIUC winner) with Yahoo Mail file storage app, at http://williamduff.name/YMFS/, and Dan Barry, with the Map It SearchMonkey App, at
http://gallery.search.yahoo.com/application?smid=oXL.s.
Onwards to Waterloo!
Here we go:
It was awesome; see you for the next one!
Hack Day demos are on right now; see live coverage on http://live.yahoo.com/hackday.
Here's your list of entries:
We're seeing a fair number of requests for invitations, and some very creative 140-character haikus and limericks. (No palindromes yet, but there's still time.) As before, space--especially camping space--on the Y! campus is limited, so please get your requests in soon, if you have not done so already.
For those who've already replied to their invitations, final instructions are being written now, and should be out to you shortly.
Other places you might hear about Hack Day include:
... but please keep in mind that no matter what you might read out there, the only way to get a genuine invitation to Hack Day is to sign up at hackday.org. Thanks!