Two years back I posted an entry listing the science companies I knew around Brighton who are involved in high-tech software (i.e. not science companies who make physical products). The list has changed a bit with some nice additions so I’ve updated it below. If you know of one that I’m missing do send me an update. I’m interested because I’m an A.I. researcher for industry by trade.
PANalytical at SInC (one of my current employers for interesting A.I. work – I work on CUDA for parallelisation and pattern recognition and optimisation for solution finding, Prof. Paul Fewster is the head of the R&D team)
Qtara (a new employer of mine creating a cutting-edge Intelligent Virtual Human)
BrandWatch in the BrightonMediaCentre (a social metrics company using natural language processing)
SecondLife in the North Laines (this office is a big part of their European presence)
Ambiental at SInC (great flood-risk simulations and modelling, I help them with speeding up and improving the science behind their flood models, Justin Butler is the founder)
Proneta at SInC (very small company, John Hother sometimes has A.I. related questions)
Observatory Sciences at SInC (Philip Taylor is the main chap here, they use EPICS and LabView)
Ricardo in Shoreham (a big engineering consultancy)
MindLab at SInC (they do non-invasive brain monitoring)
Animazoo in Shoreham (they build motion-capture suits for dancers and actors)
BotBuilder in Brighton (a robot focused design and build company)
Another nice addition to Brighton is the BrightonHackerSpace, a collective of like-minded souls who build new electronic devices and pull things apart to understand how they work. This HackerSpace has spawned BotBuilder (above) and I’m looking forward to seeing a few more created.
Ian produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook, programs Python, researches Artificial Intelligence (Mor Consulting) and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.
ImportError: Settings cannot be imported, because environment variable
DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE is undefined.
then the fix is simple (I’ve been hacking away at an idea whilst at IUI2010 – thanks Rob for the fix).
To replicate the error run:
from csc.nl import get_nl
en_nl = get_nl('en')
en_nl.is_stopword('the')
The fix is to run:
import csc.conceptnet.models
which sets up Django, the call is_stopword again and all is fine.
Ian produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook, programs Python, researches Artificial Intelligence (Mor Consulting) and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.
I’m at IUI 2010, this is a mostly academic conference focused on using new techniques to make intelligent user interfaces. I’ll update this entry as the conference proceeds.
Day 1 (Sunday) – Workshops
I’m in the Eye Gaze for Intelligent Human Machine Interaction workshop, there’s a full breakdown of this session’s talks here. The talks focus on the use of eye-gaze tracking tools to let humans interact with computers in an intuitive and easy fashion.
Two talks have really caught my eye. Manuel Möller has presented “The Text 2.0 Framework – Writing Web-Based Gaze-Controlled Realtime Applications Quickly and Easily” (via here). Text20.net is the background site, they’re offering a browser plug-in (Safari at present, Chrome/Firefox to come) that augments your browsing experience if you’ve got a head tracker. They’ve added some new mark-up tags like:
OnGazeOver – like OnMouseOver but fires if your gaze goes over the element (e.g. to make an image change or high-light)
OnPerusal – if you quickly scan a piece of text then this would fire
OnRead – only fires if your start to properly read the text
They propose using a site like DBPedia to augment your browsing experience – perhaps bringing in additional text if your gaze rests on a block of text, bringing in alternative images if you look at an image or translating text that you re-read if it knows you’re a foreign-language user.
The above is only useful if you have a gaze-sensing device and these are a bit pricey (think: $10,000-$20,000). However…
Shortly before Wen-Hung Liao presented “Robust Pupil Detection for Gaze-based User Interface” (via here) where he described a $60 device (the $60 refers to the cost of a standard 640×480 30fps webcam) that gives reasonable eye-gaze tracking on a desktop computer. Pretty much he’s describing a way to replace $20,000 work of high-end eye-gaze tracking tools with the webcam in your laptop.
The resolution achieved is around 40×40 – pretty low but enough to support a lightly modified web browser that allows eye-gaze control. The modification is a zoom whenever the user’s gaze rests on an area – that section zooms so you can more accurately select a link.
Here’s a demo showing “eye typing” (see some more under VIPLpin):
There is a downside – natural light washes out too much detail (and casts shadows and reflections) so the camera needs a simple modification. By popping out the normal lens and using an IR lens the camera senses light in the infra-red range – for this algorithm the input is far cleaner. It is quite conceivable that we’ll have a second (IR style) webcam in our laptops and this second device could give us simple gaze control on our machines. This algorithm runs comfortably on a dual-core machine at 30fps (previous generation algorithms are laggy as they’re too CPU-intensive).
What happens if we combine this $60 device (free for me – I have a good webcam in my MacBook that could be modified…) with the Text 2.0 plug-in? I can probably navigate web pages when reading wikipedia purely using gaze. If the gaze is getting to the bottom of the screen then it could auto-scroll and I’d certainly like annotations from sites like wikipedia augmenting my research experience.
The workshop is over and we’ve ended up having a further chat about Pico projectors costing $350USD (apparently a bit dangerous – they’re laser-based and can burn the retina) and augmenting reality with said devices as you wander around (imagine strapping one to your chest).
In the poster session that followed Stylianos Asteriadis showed a head pose detector that works using a desktop webcam using a published algorithm – this could be used in gaming and for hands-free control. It detects the attitude of the head on 3 axis by investigating a bounding box around the head and the location of features like eyes and the mouth. See examplevideos and publications.
The first talk of the day was Cortically Coupled Computer Vision by Paul Sajda. The intent was to speed up search for a target image from a large database using fast brain recognition techniques. The user has a target image in mind, they throw 10s of images at a user showing each for 100ms. By recording brain activity using non-invasive techniques like EEG and a custom labeling approach the they were able to significantly improve precision and recall in search problems.
This was followed by the 1-minute madness session where 20 or so speakers introduced the posters that would be shown at the banquet the next night. Two that caught my eye were Henry Lieberman’s Why UI (he’s one of the creators of ConceptNet) and another chap’s $3 Gesture Recognizer (based on Android and Wii devices):
Amy Harrison gave an interesting talk on Automatically Identifying Targets Users Interact With During Real World Tasks. Given my background with screencasting and interest in scripted (automatic) screencasting, the ideas around taking screenshots and identifying screen targets (like buttons, scroll bars etc) to extract additional information was very interesting. Her techniques using CRUMBs identify 89% of user interface features vs 74% for the Microsoft accessibility interface.
Day 3 (Second day of conference and Demos)
In “Intelligent Understanding of Hand Written Geometry Theorem Proving” a technique was displayed that lets a student draw geometric diagrams along with annotations using standard geometry algebra – the system then recognises the diagram and the annotations and tells you if your annotations match the diagram. They developed new visual recognition algorithms with 90% accuracy (an audience member pointed them at existing algorithms that offer 95% accuracy), with similar accuracy for the hand-written annotation recognition. I could really see this being developed into a tool to help students learn geometry – fab stuff:
“Usage Patterns and Latent Semantic Analysis for Task Goal Inferences” looked at the use of a multi-modal interface (speech and pen in this case) so the user could speak a question like “How do I go from here to here?” whilst drawing the locations on the map. The system learns to recognise various types of drawing (e.g. points, circles and strokes) that are coupled with various question types:
The demo and poster session was very interesting! Everyone migrated upstairs for the rather excellent food, drink and a mix of live demos and posters.
The Nao (wikipedia, video demo) humanoid robot was very cool – it was dancing to Thriller and doing Tai Chi for us. The robot has complex joints, can balance, has dual cameras for vision, an on-board Geode-based AMD CPU (a mini PC), support for off-line processing, vision and speech recognition on-board and 30-60 min battery life.
Sven Kratz was demoing his accelerometer-based gesture recognition library for the iPhone. The work is based on “Gestures without libraries, toolkits or training: a $1 recognizer for user interface prototypes” and is called “$3 Gesture Recognizer – Simple Gesture Recognition for Devices Equipped with 3D Acceleration Sensors”. I got to play with the demo, it recognised some of my gestures on an iPhone 3GS and Sven explained that a newer version is significantly faster and more reliable. One interesting feature is that it can recognise gestures even if the phone is turned e.g. upside down.
Rush (no photo but I do have video 1, video 2) is a novel iPhone interface for music preference selection. You move your thumb around and it selects paths through music options – watch the videos for details. The slides from the talk are also available, I really should have taken a photo during the demo.
I had a play with a haptic interface with augmented reality that acts as a dental trainer. Without augmented reality I could see a virtual tooth on a screen and using the pen (which is mounted in the grey haptic feedback device) I’d get force feedback whenever the pen tried to push ‘into’ the virtual tooth. If I pressed the pen’s button I’d activate the ‘drill’ and grind away some of the tooth, the feedback device then let me move into that grove. The force feedback was rather cool:
In addition I tried the augmented reality environment – using a pair of goggles and looking at a special card I could see a 3D (real-world) version of the tooth, the haptic interface again let me ‘feel my way’ around the tooth:
I also had a go on a simple game that uses a sensor strapped to the waist to measure ‘jumps’. In this open-source game you roll your marble to collect coins, when you run out of time you jump up and down to gain seconds. The project aims to encourage fitness through gaming, they measured improvements in users’ aerobic fitness compared to a non-jumping control version of the game.
In Agents as Intelligent User Interfaces for the Net Generation avatars are controlled by the user to train autonomous agents to solve tasks. I believe this is a part of Miao Chunyan’s work (e.g. “Transforming Learning through Agent Augmented Virtual World“).
In this example you teach the avatar how a plant’s internal processes work – the aim is to enhance the user’s understanding by forcing them to clearly explain the processes to the avatar so it solves certain tasks:
Professor Tracy Hammond was demonstrating some of the work from her lab in sketch recognition – for this poster she explained their tool which uses an off-the-shelf face recogniser to help sketching students learn to draw better faces. The system performs facial recognition on the user’s sketch and compares it to the target image so it can give feedback on areas that are wrong.
Tracy is also the creator of the tech behind all the sketch-a-car-and-watch-it-move physics demos that appeared in the last year or so, see a video of her original approach here.
Peggy Chi’s poster talks about Raconteur, a system that helps a user construct a story using media elements with annotations using natural language. One of the tools underneath it is the common sense reasoning system ConceptNet. A focus of the software is the search for analogies between elements of the story or independent stories:
Henry Lieberman’s poster also uses ConceptNet, they’re mapping how people solve tasks by performing natural language processing at 43Things to build networks of goals. The goal is to automatically extract the steps required to solve goals by analysing existing stories:
Day 4 (Final day of conference)
“A Code Reuse Interface for Non Programmer Middle School Students” was interesting, they’re using a visual programming environment where non-programmers create animated sequences. Animations can by copy/pasted between stories so the underlying code segments can be re-used. The goal is to teach non-programmers to re-use and improve existing code.
Conclusions
The topics covered were varied (some far too far from my own interests) but many contained interesting ideas – the real gold for me has been in the meeting of experts in the various fields I’m interested in. The organisers certainly did a fine job – the food was rather excellent, the service great and everything ran to time. Overall this has been a very good conference.
Ian produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook, programs Python, researches Artificial Intelligence (Mor Consulting) and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.
I’ve just started to play with pyCUDA which lets you run parallel math operations on a CUDA-compliant NVidia graphics card through Python.
CUDA stands for Compute Unified Device Architecture – it is an architecture that lets us program the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) on a high powered graphics card to do scientific or graphical math calculations rather than the usual texture processing for games. In essence it is a mini supercomputer that is specialised just for fast math operations – if you can figure out how to use it.
The goal is to off-load the CPU-intensive calculations for two of my clients (a physics company and a flood modelling company) to achieve 10* to 100* speed-ups using commodity graphics cards.
pyCUDA makes it easy to interactively program a CUDA device rather than hitting C++ code with the slow write/compile/debug loop. Recent MacBooks (mine was bought in January 2009) have NVidia cards with CUDA-compatible devices built-in (mine is a 9400M). For my desktop computer I have a 9800 GT (costing £100).
It turns out that this is bleeding-edge stuff – getting pyCUDA compiled on my MacBook and Win XP machine took sometime (forum posts for Mac and Windows issues) thankfully the group is helpful and the wiki has an installation section for Windows, Mac and Linux and some reasonable documentation.
Right now I’ve got as far as running some of the demo code on my MacBook (showing a 5* speed-up over the CPU) and my desktop (showing a 30* speed-up over the CPU). I’ll report more as I progress.
Update – I don’t have OpenGL working for gl_interop.py but as noted here you need “CUDA_ENABLE_GL = True” in siteconf.py and you need PyOpenGL installed. When rebuilding my MSVC threw a hissy fit, it isn’t essential to my work so I’m skipping this demo.
Update – I’ve submitted a patch and two examples to the wiki (SimpleSpeedTest, Mandelbrot). I get 200* speed-ups on the speed test (using a for loop on a sin() calculation) and 5 to 20* speed-up on Mandelbrots (it seems to scale very well vs numpy with increasing dimensions).
Update – There are lots of interesting papers for CUDA surfacing like this one showing a 3* speed-up for voice recognition tasks (using CPU and GPU together) and yet another way to improve fluid dynamic simulations. This Tom’s 3D article gives a great write-up (starting with the history of audio cards) on where 3D is right now and how NVidia is beating ATI for scientific computing.
Ian produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook, programs Python, researches Artificial Intelligence (Mor Consulting) and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.
On January 27th here in Brighton I’m co-running a SkillSwap evening, I’ll spend 45 minutes teaching screencasting (based on a Mac) and Andy White will spend 45 minutes teaching podcasting. We’ll cover planning, recording, editing, distributing and mics between us.
We’re both aiming the talks at freelancers (so they can communicate better with clients) and small companies (for training, marketing and demos). We’re also the authors of The Screencasting Handbook and Podcasting Unleashed.
I’ll cover at least these topics:
Free and commercial tools on a Mac (and Windows/Linux if requested)
Recording your first screencast with Jing and hosting it on the Web
Planning your screencast so it meets the needs of your audience
The differences between a sales/marketing screencast and a tutorial
Using ScreenFlow to record, edit and produce a screencast and then upload it to YouTube
Hosting your own screencast and other distribution options
If you bring a laptop then I can get you started with the free Jing so you can walk away with a recording and hosting solution for Mac and Windows.
If you’re in Brighton then the event is free, see details in Upcoming and sign-up on EventBrite. SkillSwap has been running for years – cheers to Nat and James for finding a spot for us.
Madgex will be sponsoring beer and nibbles, the atmosphere will be relaxed and friendly. Nat is recording the audio for a podcast and I intend to record a video of the evening for distribution via Vimeo (but of course that won’t be the same as being there and being able to ask questions!).
Ian produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook, programs Python, researches Artificial Intelligence (Mor Consulting) and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.
I wanted to play with text to speech, I’ve been looking for a cross-platform open-source solution that sounds reasonable. I’m really impressed with the festival project, the web demo lets you enter your own text.
Festival is cross-platform but compiling it on a Mac takes a touch of effort (it looks like it is easier on Linux and Win).
This article shows you how to use it and how to web-enable it with some php. For the simplest demo I used ‘bin/text2wave input.txt -o output.wav’ with input.txt containing a sentence.
It ought to have been as simple as ‘make clean; make’ but there’s a few changes to make first. First we need this fix or we get a compile error in macosxaudio in kAudioUnitProperty_SetInputCallback:
If you add
#include <AudioUnit/AUNTComponent.h>
after the include block on lines 45-48 in audio/macosxaudio.cc the
problem should be solved.
By the way, remember to change the byte order if you have an intel
mac, i.e. on line 131:
waveformat.mFormatFlags = kLinearPCMFormatFlagIsSignedInteger
| kLinearPCMFormatFlagIsPacked;
// For Intel | kLinearPCMFormatFlagIsPacked;
// For PowerPC | kLinearPCMFormatFlagIsPacked |
kLinearPCMFormatFlagIsBigEndian;
The following was a trickier error to solve:
g++ -c -fno-implicit-templates -O3 -Wall -I../include sigpr_frame.cc
sigpr_frame.cc: In function
‘void lpc2cep(const EST_FVector&, EST_FVector&)’:
sigpr_frame.cc:318: error: ‘__isnan’ was not declared in this scope
make[1]: *** [sigpr_frame.o] Error 1
make: *** [sigpr] Error 2
The fix was known but the relevant archive was missing, some googling for ‘__isnan mac‘ results in this cached 2006 page:
--- ../test/speech_tools/include/EST_math.h 2006-08-03
08:49:35.000000000 -0500
+++ include/EST_math.h 2006-08-17 17:53:33.000000000 -0500
@@ -43,7 +43,7 @@
#if defined(__APPLE__)
/* Not sure why I need this here, but I do */
-extern "C" int isnan(double);
+extern "C" int isnan(float);
#endif
/* this isn't included from c, but just to be safe... */
@@ -101,7 +101,6 @@
/* Apple OSX */
#if defined(__APPLE__)
#define isnanf(X) isnan(X)
-#define isnan(X) __isnan(X)
#endif
/* FreeBSD *and other 4.4 based systems require anything, isnanf is
defined */
Compiling festival-1.96-beta.tar.gz
Once speech-tools is compiled, getting ‘festival-1.96-beta.tar.gz’ compiled is as easy as ‘make clean;make’.
Python’s MacSpeechX
I also had a play with the macspeechx module which ties Python to the Mac’s voice-synthesiser. See list_voice_name() in macspeechX.py for an example of how it all works.
It works to power the speech synthesiser but it doesn’t appear to let you record the speech to a file (unlike festival above).
Ian produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook, programs Python, researches Artificial Intelligence (Mor Consulting) and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.
I’ve just launched my second Twitter bot – @ConceptNetDaily takes a random concept from the A.I. site ConceptNet and posts it to Twitter with a link back to the site. A tweet looks like:
The aim of the site is to build a large repository of common-sense knowledge, exactly the kind of knowledge that humans take for granted and never write down as statements for a computer to understand. Currently it tracks over 1,026,553 statements.
Using the link you can vote on the concept. Vote up if the concept is solid (i.e. something a human would say is ‘right’) or down if it is wrong, silly or erroneous. The site supports OpenID which makes starting a touch easier.
My goal with this bot is to remind people every day to vote on the concepts and to add new knowledge. If a concept has many votes then we can have faith that it is ‘common-sense knowledge’. If a concept is voted down enough then we can have faith that it is ‘unhelpful or wrong’.
You’ll find a searchable list of Concepts and some random examples on the English homepage. For good examples see all the information that ConceptNet knows about humans, chess and girls.
Details:
I’ve written the bot in Python using PyYAML, Python-tinyurl and Python-twitter. It runs every day via a cron job. It works by guessing a random id for a raw_assertion and checking to see if a concept lives at the URL. See this XML example for id 143313, I extract the .yaml version via PyYAML but the .xml version renders nicely in your browser if you want a peek.
ConceptNet’s web API is well documented. ConceptNet itself is written in Python using Django but I’m not using the downloaded version here, just the web API.
My first Twitter bot – @BrightonJobDoom:
Just in case you live here in Brighton you might want to track @BrightonJobDoom to see how healthy (or…not) the job market is in the UK during this rather wobbly recession I wrote this bot for our £5 App’s 5k coding competition.
Ian produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook, programs Python, researches Artificial Intelligence (Mor Consulting) and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.
A month back I tried to build an Ubuntu-based Eucalyptus cloud/cluster environment for a client for a parallel processing research project. The project was thwarted by an overly aggressive corporate firewall and my lack of understanding of low-level network config-fu.
I’ve revisited the project using the same machines but with an external public internet connection (no firewall – yay!).
Grub2
On the node machine I still needed to dual-boot to Windows. Unfortunately whilst reboots to Linux are fine, if Windows is booted it ‘does something’ to the MBR and the machine is unbootable. I delved into the boot-loader and had to learn some Grub2-fu.
Grub2 was introduced in Ubuntu 9.10, it replaces Grub which in turn replaced boot managers like lilo. The wiki page is pretty good for recovering a boot-loader using an Ubuntu LiveCD but it didn’t work quite to plan.
The step for ’sudo chroot /mnt’ fails as bash or sh can’t be run from within /mnt (which at this point is looking at the originally installed hd). There is something odd going on with the LiveCD, much googling didn’t seem to reveal the answer.
To run grub-install on the hd, rather than via the CD (because chroot fails) I used ’sudo grub-install –root-directory=/mnt /dev/sda’, it reports that ‘(hd0) /dev/sda’ is installed.
Sidenote – on later attempts somehow a reference to (fd0) got involved and this broke the boot process. I edited /mnt/boot/grub/device.map to remove the fd0 reference, leaving the hd0 reference. I ran grub-install again and all was fine. Now the machine can boot again.
Mounting a USB memory stick
Whilst a 8Gb memory stick was recognised, it didn’t get mounted. I had to edit /etc/fstab and add:
/dev/sdf1 /mnt/stick auto umask=0,user,iocharset=iso8859-1,sync,codepage=850,noauto,exec,users 0 0
After this I used ’sudo mkdir /mnt/stick’, ’sudo mount /dev/sdf1′ and it mounted just fine.
Installing Eucalyptus
The install process this time around was much the same as before, except this time without the firewall it all ‘just worked’. Seeing the fnords part 1 took me through the basic install.
I got the feeling from later steps that the cloud controller needs a static IP so I switched the cluster controller from DHCP to a static IP and rebooted.
The discover nodes process (’sudo euca_conf –no-rsync –discover-nodes’) for euca_conf also required that I’d setup ssh keys on the Node, step 6 in the NodeInstall doc has the instruction. Typo note – if you spell ‘eucalyptus’ wrong you’ll go round in circles trying to figure out why the password won’t work!
Sometimes I couldn’t get ‘euca-describe-availability-zones verbose’ to work, it’d just report ‘No route to host’. It seems that a reboot of the CC and Node are required, plus a minute or so of patience after boot for Apache to sort itself out, before this problems just goes away.
Using the Ubuntu Store
Having installed the CC and registered a Node, next I ran the web interface via ‘https://10.0.0.4:8443′. Note ‘https’. If you visit the website too soon after a reboot (i.e. <1 minute) then the webapp won’t respond or maybe it won’t recognise the admin user. Having logged in, the first login forces a password change.
Next check the ‘Configuration’ tab and verify the IP addresses. For reasons beyond my understanding our switch rebooted during my first attempt to setup the cluster and it switched from the ‘192.168.x.x’ address range to ‘10.x.x.x’ – this royally barfed my configuration. I chose to re-install the CC from scratch (I was plagued by ‘no route to host’ problems no matter how much tweaking I tried).
Next visit the ‘Store’ tab and download an image, I’m using ‘Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala (i386)’. Today this works – I’ve spent 2.5 days building and re-building the cluster to get it to this point. Often the Store would download an image and then report ‘no route to host’. This process is pretty darned frustrating and seems to lack useful error messages.
But ultimately – no cigar
Rather frustratingly I can’t get my Node to run an image. I can see that the Node exists though ‘euca-describe-availability-zones verbose’ shows that a Node exists but doesn’t list its IP address which is odd, the online docs say it should be shown.
If I run an image then it enters the ‘pending’ state and then the ‘terminating’ state. Digging around in Google shows that other people currently have the same problem, it might be related to the lack of Hypervisor instructions on my Node machine (though they’re not supposed to be required…). Possibly also the current build in unstable, there’s a lot of bug-fixing going on.
Eucalyptus should give you an EC2-like cloud that runs on your own machines, using an EC2-compatible API so you could move to the cloud when you want to scale up or are less concerned about the privacy of your data. Currently I can’t get it to work but others do have it working – it seems to depend upon your hardware. It also lacks clear error messages so debugging is hard – I resorted to clean installs on three occasions.
Ian produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook, programs Python, researches Artificial Intelligence (Mor Consulting) and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.
I’m using WingIDE on my MacBook and I couldn’t get copy/paste to work between WingIDE (running in X11) and native apps. This meant copying URLs and code snippets was impossible…hugely frustrating!
There is a simple fix, as outlined here just run the Property List Editor, open the specifed .plist, tick the 5 checkboxes, save, restart all of X11 and then the clipboard is shared between X11 and native apps. Phew.
Ian produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook, programs Python, researches Artificial Intelligence (Mor Consulting) and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.
It was fab! John and I had a fab time organising things and watching the night run so down-to-earthly – itseemsthatmanyothersdidtoo. I particularly like:
“I bloomin’ love £5 app! The event that’s happy to be itself, and is more rewarding for all as a result. Here with @ribot & @lastminute teams” – ribotminimus
The event was organised through Philip and Declan of PlayGroup, they use Hector’s House for arts and science gigs (thanks BuildBrighton for the connection!). Cheers chaps, it was exactly the space we needed!
“Seb’s Slightly Failed Music Career”
Seb spoke on the highs and lows of forming a band, showed previously-unseen footage and generally gave the lowdown on how it all works. Rick-rolling was included. Seb has his own write-up.
Sadly Seb’s hard-drive died after the talk taking all his transcoded footage but on the flip-side Seb inspired Simon to share footage from his old cover band.
Paul Silver took a video of the ThereThing in action:
Sadly the ThereThing is slightly out of shot during the video of the talk but you can hear Toby and see the screen just fine (and the ThereThing link shows it in detail).
“Jim – Mrmr/LiveAPI guitar-mounted iPhone ableton live interface”
Jim Purbrick showed Mrmr, the LiveAPI guitar mounted iPhone Ableton live interface. Jim’s also the head of Second Life (UK) and is known for building robots.
After the talks finished Jim Purbrick and Max went on to play live n’loud as 100 Robots.
2010 and beyond…
If you want to keep in touch with future £5 App events then join the £5 App Google Group – it is very low volume and is mostly there just for the announces.
We’ll probably run some more competitions next year, the 5k competition went very well and John wants to do more around that idea and I want to play with some open-source A.I. kits. Details to follow.
Ian produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook, programs Python, researches Artificial Intelligence (Mor Consulting) and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.
I wrote this bot for our £5 App’s 
