Fran's Blog

It’s 1am and I really should be going to bed. I received my Arduino board today which, for me, is very exciting. I had a few problems setting it up (nothing more than user error, by not selecting the right board). First stop was to get the light flashing, which I did, then to make a simple circuit with a button to light an LED. I then customised it up a bit to play about. And here’s where I got to.

I’ll finish here, it’s quite a thing re-learning stuff you learned at school roughly 16 years ago. Looking at ohm ratings for resistors, but the fun is all there! Just a nice little hobby to pick up, start from the start and then be able to get some decent little projects going once you’re a bit better at it. At this point, it’s just me and the learning curve.

I went to Open Hack London by Yahoo this weekend. Anyone who likes programming will probably love this event. As it is a Yahoo event, there is a slant towards PHP which is good and bad. But the main thing is to see what is coming out of the programming community at the moment! I always come away feeling refreshed and with too many ideas to actually execute. A curse about working with computers is that they are always changing, the revolution battles on. The blessing is they are always changing and it is great to be part of the revolution.

Anyway, it isn’t hacking as in cracking machines and making them do your bidding, this is the old style hacking. It is, however, taking every day objects such as a sock to platforms like the web and making them do something. You get an idea, get a team together and work through the night eating sweets, drinking beer and listening to music. I feel like a bit of a fraud as I was one of the guys who went purely to watch the talks and see people like Rasmus “I wrote PHP I did” Lerdorf do talks. Next year I will try to get myself in gear, find a team, and get the hack on! Why not!

And if you want to see some truly happy geeks see: http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=openhacklondon&w=all&s=int. I’m in there somewhere.