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LU Petit Beurre factory in Rue de la Biscuiterie (yes, really!), Nantes

These are our 160th weeknotes! Looking back it is just incredible how many projects the team has been working on and there is more to come!

Let's start by saying 'farewell' to our colleague who is leaving us but moving only a bus stop away so we can still meet him for lunch.

While Denise has been working on chapterisation/segmentation using metadata about "interesting bits", Yves has been writing up his notes for and following up on few contacts made there. He spent most of his time working on the initial COMMA algorithm, an integrated version of the algorithms used within the WS archive. As part of that he built a big ElasticSearch index for all DBpedia URIs, which might prove useful outside of COMMA.

Libby, Chris Newell, Theo and several others attended the collaborative design workshop facilitated by Andrew N, planning the next phase of work on the ViSTA-TV second-screen application and thinking about the dimensions of what we could do. Andrew N. did also some exploratory work on the Frankenpins library, adding support for LEDs (both single- and multi-coloured) in order to indicate what a RadioDan is doing - apart from playing audio.

Chris Needham has been looking at the W3C as part of the MediaScape work on device discovery and pairing. This allows various discovery mechanisms to be used in the browser, e.g., and .  Chris has also been working on a plug-in architecture for egBox allowing us to easily add new functionality into it, and migrating all the existing functionality (TV Tag, smart remote, etc) into plugins. Plugins are implemented as packages. Somehow he also found time to publish a blog post on the .

In Nantes, Barbara gave a presentation at on the FI-Content 2 and sat in windowless rooms for days during the project's plenary meeting. Good discussions, some useful outcomes from the session she ran and she also discovered the original Petit Beurre biscuits were actually made in this amazing factory.

Thomas attended the Mozilla Festival at Ravensbourne College over the weekend as an attendee and facilitator. is an elevator simulator which lets you control how floor requests are served. There is an increasing level of difficulty. The goals were to let people think about how to solve the problem and then reveal the flaws in thinking by implementing their ideas quickly. Thomas also attended some workshops about journalism and open data and has been selected for one keynote and one workshop in a French JavaScript conference named  at the end of November. He'll be talking about the Â鶹ԼÅÄ News frontend tool refactoring he's worked on this summer and hopes to get people hands on .

While Tristan was fighting a nasty flu and doing lots of reading, Olivier gave an abridged “rusty web” presentation to the Â鶹ԼÅÄ’s prototyping interest group and planned for his upcoming week of W3C meeting in Shenzhen.

Interesting links

• : a PDF scraper to extract tabular data and make it available as JSON and CSV
• : how words and UPPERCASE in Facebook stories triggers reactions among readers
• the same as above but for the Boston Globe journal
• with brilliant demonstration of how an automated machine should work
• is a nature-inspired way to display realtime data evolution by relying on the generated feeling
• : interesting look at some new writing tools and CMSes
• of the World Service archive in "The Lady" magazine!
• : a platform for predictive modelling competitions
• : a great talk by Bill Buxton
• Phonebloks: modular smartphones
• - a browser extension which “allows seamless navigation from a Web resource to its prior/archived versions available elsewhere on the Web'
• : a search engine for tables on the Web
• A by Ed Summers (Library of Congress) on our World Service archive prototype
• : this robot delivers internal mail in the Canadian Broadcasting Corp