Fortnightly updates from the Internet Research & Future Services team in ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ R&D, making new things on the internet. You can follow us on Twitter at .
The Walls Have Eyes
As mentioned in our last , the is going to be exhibited at the Design Museum soon. Libby, AndrewN, Jasmine and Dan have been putting together a new configuration of the installation, upgrading some of the software and components and presenting it at QCon in London.
Archers/ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔfront explorer
Work continues on the Archers/ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔfront explorer project.
This fortnight's highlight was a visit to studios in Birmingham to have a proper kick off meeting for the ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ Front Explorer - with Zillah, Malin, Andrew, Michael, Ciaran (production team), James and Richard (freelancers).
In particular this will be based on the Archers Explorer prototype but will have some significant differences. The audience is different - we're aiming it at people that don't necessarily listen to radio drama at the moment, the episode and scene structure is different, the amount of audience-facing content we'll have is much greater (3 seasons, 68 characters, 120 episodes), all audio is publicly available, there are many historical links, we have a desire to have it heavily illustrated.
Atomised News
The Atomised News project is still in its early days, and that means a lot of reading, writing and sketching about news, cards and atoms. And so here's an early conceptual diagram.
Meanwhile⦠Anthony and Tom are actually building these things in HTML and iOS.
The CLOUD!
Gareth and James have both been deep in infrastructure.
Gareth says βMy main interesting thing this fortnight is how familiar I've been getting with the Amazon Web Services SimpleWorkflow API. Through our work analysing vast amounts of articles we've been poking around the limits of what it can do, especially with respect to rate limits, and I've had to dive down into the API code to start optimising the way we call it. Luckily this has left me with some useful utility classes which it wouldn't be hard to extract for other uses.β
James, meanwhile, has been working on R&D's new public cloud infrastructure, investigating how to lock down hypervisors and other components with SELinux and other tools.
He has also been talking a lot to our Research Platforms colleagues in R&D about networking in the cloud, and how we can build something that scales up nicely; this is harder than you might think, as we're going down the path of fully software defined network infrastructure, which gives us great scalability and performance at the expense of added complexity.
We're also looking at how we manage deploying, updating and upgrading infrastructure components over time so we can continue to improve the platform once it's live without breaking everything too often. Next week, James is off to a couple of cloud-related events to talk to vendors and see what our options are.
CPA and MediaScape
Busy times for those working on Cross-Platform Authentication (CPA) and the Mediascape project. Lots of conference calls, and Sean has disappeared for a few days, writing deliverables. ChrisN has also been continuing work on the VLC player interface for Radiodan, and is currently looking at the event messages it should generate, to notify when things like a new track is added to the playlist, playback starts and stops, etc.
Guests
The team enjoyed a presentation of the "" by Richard Birkin and Tom Armitage at our recent team show and tell. Libby summarises it best: βNice to see some non-dystopian stuff sometimes :-)β
Links
- Ant shared two links with me: and
- This fortnight I stumbled upon by internet favourite Jeff Jarvis. The quote βDo what you do best and link to the restβ certainly resonates with some of the work our Discovery Team has been doing.
- Tristan also found a few gems: , by our colleague Emily Heath, and . And this was a good read on .
- And finally . Because.