Some good news, and I am officially happy at the moment. My Yahoo Mail account has been reactivated.

The reason why it has been such a hassle to do is because my Yahoo email address is actually a Rocketmail email address, and this can not normally be reactivated after long periods of not being used. I have moaned about this problem before and it is something that has been niggling me for years.

I would love to tell you how to recover your Rocketmail account if you have one, but I am not really certain why it was done this time. The customer care were able to “reactivate it on an exceptional basis” so I guess it is not a change in policy, just that I was lucky.

Update: I can not receive email yet, but it is sending fine and I presume it will just take a while for everything to sync up.

Update 2: Over a week later with many emails to support and it is still not working. :-( I guess I will never have Yahoo! Mail again, but at least I can play with the API now.

Update 3: Two months later and still not working, but lost of emails saying that they are still working on it.

Update 4: Over 4 months and guess what, still not working. :-(

Should I go to d.construct 2007 in Brighton? A simple question, but I don’t really know if I should and registrations open tomorrow.

I have not been to the event before and I am not certain if I would benefit or not. I will also need to pay my own way (£85+VAT entry, plus transport, plus accommodation) so it will not be cheap for me.

The reason I am considering this is that there is a BarCampBrighton being organised that looks likely to be a good one because of the fellow attendees, so I may be around Brighton anyway if I can get a place.

So do you think I should go?

Update: In the end I decided not to go this time round, although I have pencilled it in for 2008. I will be listening to Jeremy Keith’s d.construct podcast.

Recently Google purchased FeedBurner, a service that processes RSS feeds for computability with most readers, compiles statistics about who is using them, and does some fancy trickery to make podcasts easier to publish.

I have used FeedBurner for a long time now and love the service. Being someone who likes to keep control of my feeds I have the feeds URL on my site (http://blog.agm.me.uk/blog/rss.xml and http://blog.agm.me.uk/blog/atom.xml for example) and then use a temporary redirect to pass the user to the FeedBurner domain (http://feeds.feedburner.com/agm in this case). Now that Google are at the controls the MyBrand service has become free allowing me to use a domain of mine instead of the FeedBurner one (http://feeds.agm.me.uk/agm). You will hopefully not notice any change, but if you see a few old posts reappear then this is why.

One closing thought is that now I see no reason why you should not start using FeedBurner today for the benefit of the people reading your blog, listening to your podcast and you.

Well, guess what, we won the best hardware hack with our blimp. We don’t actually know what we have won yet, but I suspect it will be one subscription to an O’Reilly magazine publication between five of us, so it is probably academic. Prizes are good, but the recognition does mean more to me so I am not upset in the least. Also knowing that I can create a Pascal HTTP server in under 10 hours (just don’t ask), and that I can learn the Yahoo Maps API and produce a mashup in under 3 hours is is also rewarding, and slightly concerning. The part of my brain that should deal with spelling has obviously decided it prefers coding. :-)

One thing I did forget to mention in my prior posts was that I did go and see what everyone else was working on through the night, and this was most enjoyable. Everyone was happy to show what they were doing, I learned quite a few things, and got to chat with a lot more people. Thank you for letting me interrupt your work. Personally I got very little from the 90 second presentations on Sunday, but this made up for it.

After the event, that was running ahead of schedule, there was a live performance by the Rumble Strips (with a strong Dixie’s Midnight Runners influence IMHO) that I intended watching, but despite the offers of free beer I was just to excused to enjoy it and plodded home.

Just a quick update on the beanbag front. I managed to grab a spare beanbag from the hall after the presentations, and (as a little bird told me) we were able to take them home after the event. I did later see my original beanbag across the entrance way one last time, and am pleased to see it is going to a good home. :-)

We are still here at hack day London sitting thought people presenting there hacks of the event. I am a little annoyed at the moment because my beanbag, that I have been sitting and sleeping on since the lightening strike (mentioned in yesterdays blog), has been nicked while we were waiting to do our presentation. If you are reading this now and have a black bean bag with a loop of string attached to the zip I would appreciate you bringing it back to me at the blimp.

Now, on to the the blimp. We have had a few technical difficulties. We did run out of Helium, not helped by certain people using it to make there voices squeak late last night. Fortunately the people concerned were able to track down a local supplier to fill the balloon for us in the morning. We needed to loose the camera that was going to upload for flickr and Shawn helped us out by replacing the PDA with a microcontroller because of weight.

As we needed to have a link to a Yahoo or BBC service to qualify for the competition, and now the flickr link was dead, I decided to take the requests sent to the blimp and mirror(ish) the action on a Yahoo map. This could also demonstrate the system should the blimp fail.

We were up against the clock, not helped by being told we may be moved up the running order, and being bothered by TV and radio reporters. In the end the microcontroller could not cope with the 250 bluetooth devices that were in range so we had to carry around the laptop with the blimp to demo it. Another problem was that BTClosedZone let me down again while waiting next to the stage so we used Niqui’s laptop on stage and I ran to the back to run a required service. The presentation went okay but it could have been so much better if the technology held up. On the positive side many people in the audience voted for where for drive the blimp in the presentation and yesterday’s Pascal server code coped with the many hundreds of votes without a problem.

I will pack up now as it is dark, there is nowhere to sit, I am tired (only having a couple of hours sleep this morning), and I am just not enjoying the demos (that would be so much better and enjoyable if they were presented in less formally IMHO).

Just a quick note to say thanks to the blimp team of Thom (blimp hardware), Miqui (Flash front end), Stephen (testing and decoration), Shawn (microcontroller) and the helium testers (for consuming and replacing the helium, and giving us beer). Also thank to all the Yahoo and the BBC team for making the event happen. Granted it was a little overly “commercial” for my liking, but we still had a great weekend and was made so by there efforts.

Finally it was great to catch up with everyone again, and sorry for not catching up with you if I did not. There are several people I did want to say hi to, or continue a conversation with, but I just can not find then, so see you next time.

Today I am at Hack Day in London. This in it’s self is against the odds as I traveled down yesterday when the A1 was closed at Catterick and I needed to improvise on local roads, but that is another story.

The purpose of Hack Day is for a group of geeky programmers and the like to get together, attend a few seminars and then spend a day coding software together and create something exciting. I have joined Thom’s team to control a blimp by using online voting. I am working on the server end that collated the votes and passes them to the blimp’s PDA controller.

The day has not gone overly smoothly. The first problem was that a rogue p2p wifi network called BTOpenZone that was propagating on Windows laptops and causing problems. This was apparently fixed, but then there was a big bang, skylights in the roof opened, and the rain started coming in. What had happened was the building was struck by lightening, the fire control system was triggered (and partly fried) and the smoke vents opened automatically.

We were okay for a short while, but when a second shower arrived the power needed turning off and we needed to move in to the entrance hall. While here we started to mashup some code. A while later we were able to return, but the wifi started to fail as bits of the hardware died because of the power surge. For reference I have now used BTOpenZone twice and it has failed dramatically both times so I am now calling it BTClosedZone. This lack of connectivity is why, and this might seem a little weird, I did not code server in PHP but wrote a full HTTP server in Pascal. Look, it works, it’s secure, and it was created without the need of an SQL server (that we could not download) or online reference (that we could not access).

Anyway, it has been an interesting day and although nothing has gone to plan the Yahoo and BBC teams (who are running the event) have done a stunning job.

Just a final note for now. While I was writing this the blimp’s tether broke and we needed to retrieve it from the roof of Alexandra palace. Fortunately with two smaller balloon, a length of string and some tape we were able to retrieve it.