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| Photo by Alex Barlow |
Join us for Tea Night at 7:30pm on Tuesday, 19 January 2010 in our space. There will be demonstrations of gongfu tea ceremony and Japanese tea ceremony, and if you’d like you’re welcome to bring an interesting or favorite tea of your own to share. This event is free and open to the public, no RSVP needed.
Last week, the phone application start-up Twilio obtained a nice little bundle of press for its announcement that it had obtained $3.7M in funding from Union Square Ventures.
To a couple of us at HacDC who have been playing with their product for a few months, this was not so surprising. They have built a clean and intuitive API for rapidly building phone applications using web services.
On Thursday, January 14, at 7:00PM at HacDC, Todd Fine and Darius Roberts will introduce the Twilio API (HTTP requests to dynamic XML), demonstrate two applications built using Python and Ruby, and finally lead a brainstorming session about other creative and artistic possibilities using the Twilio platform.
The first application is a distributed microphone for group-created ambient soundscapes (tentatively titled “Spacerad”). Twilio’s platform can record audio over the phone and offer a callback URL for the saved WAV file. Using XMPP (the instant messaging technology used, for example, in Google Talk), this URL is immediately sent to a Python script running on a local machine which can interact with a number of audio environments Todd likes to use (Pure Data, Supercollider, and, hopefully, Ableton Live). Hence, even a large audience, with the ubiquitous cellphone, can provide the samples for an open-ended and cooperative musical experience.
The second application is based on a classic phone application of the tape answering machine era. The creative band They Might Be Giants once had a Brooklyn local phone number, popular in the eighties and nineties, that would play some of their songs off an answering machine. While this service was “always busy, often broken,” with Twilio’s API, we can create a service serving TMBG songs that far surpasses the original Dial-a-Song in functionality, hopefully without losing its charm. Darius will present his Ruby-based version of Dial-a-Song.
This event is free and open to the public, and we encourage anyone interested in Twilio, Python/Ruby, Soundscapes, or even They Might Be Giants to attend!
When: 7:00PM-8:30, Thursday, January 14
Where: HacDC Space, 1525 Newton St NW, Washington DC 20010
Cost: Free and Open to the Public!
What’s new:
Inside HacDC has been updated such that if @insidehacdc is following you and you direct message @insidehacdc then your message will appear on the web portal.
In case you don’t already know, “Inside HacDC” is a location-based (of sorts) web application portal to Twitter that answers the question: “What are you doing at the HacDC space right now?”
The web portal, located at https://inside.hacdc.org , is accessible from anyone that is connected to the HacDC space LAN. Therefore anyone with a laptop, connected to the HacDC LAN, can post to this Twitter account without using their Twitter client. What you post, will appear on https://twitter.com/insidehacdc
We created the web portal you can follow https://twitter.com/insidehacdc and get status tweets from people at HacDC space. Also if you’re at the HacDC space you can tell people know how long you will be at the space and/or what exactly you plan to be working on. The idea is to attract people to drop by the space and increase our space usage.
Next time you are at the HacDC space and you’re connected to our HacDC LAN, please access https://inside.hacdc.org and post what you are working on or what ever is on your mind.
Be sure to tell your friends to follow @insidehacdc so they can follow what is going on at the HacDC space.
If you are interested in extending the functionality or capabilities of this Twitter gateway, please join the Software Projects forums on our Projects Server located at https://projects.hacdc.org and feel free to post to this software project forum “Project InsideHacDC”
The second iteration of the HacDC Lightning Talks was a blast, featuring a bunch of top notch talks on subjects like space based lidar, local and Japanese cuisine, open source rapid prototyping, DSPs, websites as unix, DIY panoramic photos, light synths, Firefox extensions, XMPP, GPGPU brute forcing, web markup parsing, and x86 disassembly.
Many improvements were made over the first talks including more seating room, video recording, flatter cookies, and better talk transitions with Q&A. Afterward a dozen or so attendees had fun mingling at a local pub. Big thanks to the speakers and folks who helped set up and run the event. Next talks coming up in late January 2010 and we’re now accepting talk proposals, so start thinking.
For more info visit the wiki
