zedzdead

I’m at dev8d.  Its a conference for developers, so its all beards, laptops and geeky games.  Yesterday afternoon I was treated to a full demonstration of Yahoo Pipes.  I can see what can be created but all too often the data that pipes scrapes or tries to scrape, is a little flakey.  The demonstration used a wikipedia page to scrape a html table of content for the medal tables at the 2010 Winter Olympic games.  Little hacks had to be applied to get the thing to work, because the structure of the data table had changed.  Of course, you want the data to be updated regularly, otherwise what’s the point. I was impressed enough though to consider building some of my own in the next few days. Watch this space.

This morning I attended an arduino workshop.  I felt like a kid with his first set of lego.  Because of last night’s beer mixing, I still have a headache, but it didn’t stop me and my arduino buddy from making a traffic light, fading lights in sequence ad a whole bunch of other stuff.  I never really understood electronics, but now I want to go and buy and arduino kit and get Boba to give it a try.