Howdy folks, roll up! The Great Cogapp Codeo rolls into town, YEEEHHARR!

Welcome to the very first Codeo challenge. Get coding, and win yourself 100 big shiny pounds. For the very first challenge we thought we’d start with a level playing field, so today we’re talking….Scratch.

Scratch was developed at MIT, as a way of teaching programming to 8-16 year olds. It’s a bit like programming with Lego, it’s great fun, and we at Cogapp love it. It’s free and it runs on Mac, Windows and Linux. Read more about it, and download it here.

So, the first challenge is:

*fanfare*

‘Create a Wild West themed game in Scratch’

For starters, here’s my pathetic effort:

(you’ll need Java installed to view this, go here if you need it)

And here’s the source to download and see what’s going on.

You can do better than that. Come on, blow us away! See how far this stuff can be pushed. Make us weep with respect for your genius!

You can either send us the .sb file, zipped up, or point us to a webpage displaying your creation (you can get yourself an account on the Scratch site, and upload it there). Email your entries to codeo@cogapp.com by 22nd of October. Don’t forget to tell us your full name, university course and year.

More info about the Codeo here. Full terms and conditions here.

Cowgirls drawn by Helle Sorensen

Attention, budding programmers!  This week, Cogapp is pleased to announce the launch of Codeo, a monthly coding competition for students in the Sussex area. Challenges will range from mini-games to programming puzzles, and a cash prize of £100 will be up for grabs for each winning entry.

Codeo is designed to put Cogapp in touch with some of the most talented students in the local area and improve our links with the universities.  It’s intended to be more than just a competition – with any luck, we hope it will inspire and motivate student coders and help support the development of digital media in Sussex. Details for each month’s challenge, starting from the 1st October, can be found at www.cogapp.com/codeo alongside the terms and conditions and instructions on how to enter. So get codin’ pardners!

How did People Pong come about?

We’ve been playing around with Computer Vision for some time now at Cogapp. It started with our experiments with Augmented Reality and multi-touch tables. These systems use various techniques for blob detection, one of which is the OpenCV library .

The Open Computer Vision library was originally developed by Intel, and open sourced under the BSD license, and used by Stanford and VW in their winning entry for the DARPA Grand Challenge. It’s one of those technologies that’s so cool, it appears to be using magic. You throw images at it, ask it to find the faces in the image, and it just does.

The library can be trained to detect objects in images. The classic example of this is human faces (note, this is face *detection*, not recognition, although there is a ton of interesting research into this area too). If you throw a ton of images at it, saying “these are definitely all faces“, and then you throw a ton of images at  it saying “these are definitely *not* faces“, then somehow it learns what makes up a face. The same process can be applied to anything, e.g. cars, plates, girls, or spinning leeks.

And eyes…which is where People Pong comes in. Every other Tuesday, the mighty Cogapp tech team amass in the meeting room, get some lunch in, and geek out for an hour. These tech-tuesdays take a variety of forms, one of which is a coding Dojo, where we plunge into the unknown and attempt to create something out of nothing. This particular week we chose to create a game of Eye-Pong using openFrameworks.

What is openFrameworks? It’s a collection of cool and powerful C++ libraries (one being openCV), all bundled up in a nice easy to use format. Not used to compilers and low level languages? No worries, OF takes up most of the strain and offers the user something more like a scripting language. Think Flash, or Processing, but with a lot more grunt. I’d been tinkering with OF for a while, creating a face swapping app (that produced some truly ungodly results), so briefed the team, and within an hour we had a rudimentary People Pong up and running.

The rest was just tinkering and a slap of paint. The results weren’t perfect (the eye detection only really works with your face straight on, glasses don’t work well, many faces in the crowd confuse it), but overall we we were happy with the outcome.

We ran it at our dConstruct stand last week, and it seemed to go down well…

This weekend saw Brighton’s third barcamp, held at the Students’ Union building at the University of Sussex. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, barcamp is an ‘ad-hoc unconference’: a whole weekend of talks provided by the participants themselves. Every one who attends has to talk, and the schedule is created simply by people writing down their details on a piece of card, and then pinning it up in an available time slot.

Photo credit: Jessica Spengler

And that is why they are great: the ‘you must talk’ barrier to entry means that barcamps are generally where you find the most committed and passionate geeks. You also get a great range of talk topics: from grindingly technical, highly-focussed explanations of specific pieces of software, to far-reaching group discussions on very broad topics. It’s this very quirkiness and unpredictability that makes a barcamp so entertaining.

Anyway, back to what happened: each day was taken up by presentations, interrupted only by breaks to eat and drink (Cogapp sponsored the lunch on the Saturday).

Then the evening and night-time gave way to mass social activities such as drinking, playing Werewolf and ‘War on Terror- the board game‘ (here’s another reason I like barcamp: it has the distinct feel of ‘lunatics taking over the asylum’)

I gave a talk on Scratch, the drag-and-drop programming language for children. It was something we played with a while ago here at Cogapp, which I then went on to use with my 6 year-old son (he shouts out how he wants each game to work, and plays it, while I frantically try to implement all of his feature requests). I gave a live demo, creating a game of pong in under 10 minutes, followed by showing how you could make your own giant joystick and link it up to Scratch using the Picoboard sensor board.

Photo credit: Jez Nicholson

In the spirit of ‘eating my own dogfood’ I created my presentation using Scratch itself rather than Powerpoint or Keynote, and you can see it on the Scratch site.

I didn’t manage to spend as much time there as I would have liked, but some of the interesting talks I saw included:

• How social sites deal with death by Paul Silver
• Lillypad Arduino by Marrije Schaake (view presentation on Slideshare)
• Stackoverflow by Jon Linklater-Johnson
• The A to Z of Game Design by Cennydd Bowles
• R3 by Steve Marshall

Honorable mention must also go to all the switched-on people I chatted to over the course of the weekend. Including but not limited to: Ant Miller (the BBC micro, power-sensing microcontrollers), Ian Forrester (BBC Backstage projects), Nigel Crawley (Arduinos and electroluminescent wire), Jez Nicholson (agile programming and zombies).

Further info:

• Barcamp Blog
• Backnetwork
• Photos on Flickr
  

Last week I went to a Werks event, organised by the Whuffie club and sponsored by Cogapp, called ‘Grow you Wiki’. The talk was given by Stewart Mader, a full time wiki evangelist. He has written two books on wikis, and travels around the world telling people how best to use wikis at work.

Mader started the evening off by discussing the limitations of email. He pointed out that email isn’t the best way to share and store information. It is not archival; others cannot find and access the knowledge within an email. If a document is sent out to a number of people, those recipients aren’t communicating with one another, only with the sender who bears the responsibility to make changes suggested by any number of the recipients.

In contrast, a document on a wiki pulls people in to share the content. Collaboration can happen in a shared space, between as many people as have access to the wiki.  Contribution can happen at different times and in different places, and the wiki brings these contributions together in context.

Mader suggested the first use of a wiki within an organisation could be to record meetings. Instead of taking the more standard approach where one person in a meeting takes the minutes, therefore contributing minimally and probably struggling to record accurately everything that is said, a wiki could be set up specifically to document the meetings. Each member of the meeting can add to the wiki, meaning all members can actively contribute to what is being said - both during and after the meeting. Mader has found that recording meetings in the this way gives a much more thorough and accurate reflection on what actually happened - people are keen to make sure their suggestions or viewpoints are documented accurately and in detail.

A wiki should encourage sharing, which will develop new knowledge, new ideas. Mader suggested to ’share as much as you can, restrict only what needs to be private’. I like the idea that a wiki allows people to contribute an idea or an opinion to something that otherwise they wouldn’t have had the chance to provide their input; to open up knowledge to everybody within the company, rather than just those who are able to attend a meeting.

I’ve noticed after a brainstorming session at Cogapp, a great flurry of emails get sent after the event that are full of ideas, links to inspiring sites, videos and pictures. It would be great to be able to record all of this in one central area that everybody in the company could access, at a time that suits them. That way not only those with deeper knowledge of the project could contribute and keep adding thoughts, but those who don’t know as much about the project can see exactly what’s happening, and see the project with a fresh pair of eyes. It would-
•    bring a more diverse range of ideas to a project
•    keep everyone aware of what’s happening within the company
•    encourage connections, participation and sharing
•    act as an archive for the early development stages of a project.

Could there be a good use for wikis in your organisation?

We’ve recently been playing with Open Frameworks (our first test project will show up in a blog post very soon) which is a C++ library that aims to provide people with some of the power available from a low-level programming language, while lowering the bar for entry.

There’s a small but ever expanding group of people making beautiful things with code, using similar tools to Open Frameworks.  I’ve always found this kind of work inspiring - it’s a great way for beginners with creative leanings to get into code.

Here’s a little rundown of some of the tools you can use and some of the work that’s inspired me:

Adobe Flash - at one time Flash seemed to be only tool that let a newbie play with throwing graphics around the screen while learning a little bit of programming.  Now it’s all grown up which means a great development environment (Flex Builder 3) with an excellent language (Actionscript 3) and a powerful player (Flash Player 9), but a higher barrier for entry for new creative coders.

Here are a couple of golden oldies (from around the year 2000):

Soulbath  (see http://www.hi-res.net/ for recent work)

Yugop (beautiful new interface here )

Processing - the granddaddy of easy access computer generated art.  Initiated in 2001 by Casey Reas and Benjamin Fry, former students of John Maeda at the MIT Media Lab.  Specifically designed for graphics while hiding coding complexities (although you can get to them if you want), and a lot more powerful graphically than Flash (at least until Flash Player 9). An easy to use subset of Java.

Interactive video for House of Cards by Radiohead

Videos by Flight404

Open Frameworks - the young pretender, possibly with the most power. It’s a C++ library that gives you lots of simplified methods for doing things that can get quite complicated in C++/OpenGL (such as loading images/sounds/movies). Also comes with a bunch of add-ons including the OpenCV (see some examples here) library which is an Intel library used for motion detection.

I Want You To Want Me by Jonathon Harris

A few other tools:

Nodebox - Mac only Python based 2D graphics tool.

Quartz composer - node based Mac only tool (similar to vvvv or Max). I find this way of working quite crazy, but you can get beautiful results very quickly with little or no code (whether you can get the system to do exactly what you want is another question though).

Silverlight - Microsoft’s interactive, ‘cross-platform’ offering.

Tons of stuff happening in Browserland over the last couple of weeks.

Biggest news is Google unveiling their very own browser, Chrome (Windows only currently, Mac and Linux versions on their way). Based on Webkit, like Apple’s Safari and iPhone browsers, seems Google are putting their money where their mouth is, and producing a browser stable enough, fast enough and secure enough to run their vision of the next iteration of the internet; bigger and more complicated online apps, more time spent in the cloud, less time spent on the desktop.

They’ve written their own javascript engine from scratch, which is all open source and free to use. And interestingly they’ve borrowed a ton of code from Mozilla, whilst simulataneously becoming one of their main competitors (although Mozilla insist that they aren’t).

Find all about Chrome in comic form, or good old youtube vids.

Meanwhile, Mozilla haven’t been sat on their hands. Announcing their all new javascript engine, Tracemonkey, which offers a huge improvement over the existing Spidermonkey engine.

But more interesting is Ubiquity, which is perhaps best explained by watching this video:

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

And lastly Microsoft are still keeping on the ball, by releasing IE8 Beta2, which actually takes up more resources on your computer than XP itself, consuming “380MB of RAM and spawning 171 concurrent threads during a multi-tab browsing test of popular Web destinations”. Nice!

It’s the fastest growing type of waste: computers, phones, televisions, iPods and all the rest. The flip side to rapid advances in technology is that electronic products are becoming obsolete at an alarming rate, and the fate of much of the millions of tons of e-waste generated every year in the West makes for very grim reading.

The bad news is this: our favourite electrical items contain highly toxic materials which are harmful to humans and our environment. The problems really start when it comes to disposing of our used technology. A large proportion of the e-waste collected for “recycling” from the USA and parts of Europe is actually shipped to less developed countries, where the products are dismantled and separated using primitive technologies that expose workers to deadly levels of chemicals as they extract the metals, toners and plastics from computers and other e-waste.

“A sea of television housings, cathode ray tubes, monitors and other imported electronic waste not salable at the Alaba market in Lagos, Nigeria, is dumped here in a nearby swamp” (c) Basel Action Network

What to do? Read the rest of this entry »

Following the launch of the new Letsema Mapping Interface, I thought I’d write a little about how it works and how Letsema are hoping it will benefit them.

“The Letsema initiative is committed to fostering co-operation, collaboration and communication between all funders and aid providers in Lesotho”

Using a combination of geographic coordinates, overlay images and a filtering system we have taken advantage of the Google Maps API to create a map pinpointing the location of organisations and amenities in Lesotho.

Here’s an image of the map with everything (so far) switched on:

The filter system allows the user to toggle the visibility of the organisations/amenites. It also doubles up as the maps legend:

Each filter type can be expanded, showing all of the individual places under that heading. These can then be clicked and the map will zoom to the respective location:

New organisations who wish to provide aid in Lesotho can use this map to work out where their aid may have the greatest impact. The aim is to work out where there is an imbalance between town/village populations and the density of organisations.

Feel free to give it a try at: http://www.letsema.org/html/atlas.php

While watching a video about the UK Museums and the Web Mashup Day, I came across ManyEyes.

ManyEyes is an IBM service for data visualisation. You can upload data and then visualise it in dozens of different ways (one of the nicest of which is Wordle).

For example, here is a clickable tree of the text on war memorials (data from the National Maritime Museum):

Or, one I created myself, a Wordle of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: