Say Cheese is a small library that makes it easier to integrate webcams into your website or app, using the recent getUserMedia API. It opens up a whole range of opportunities for web developers, provided their users run modern and up to date browsers (sorry Safari, IE).

One such opportunity is working with the user's webcam stream on the server side. This could be as simple as sending a single frame (what SayCheese calls a snapshot), or pushing the entire stream itself with, say, websockets. I'll start simple and show how you can send a 'snapshot' to the server via AJAX, and then do something interesting with it.

Read more...

After two successful drinkups, we finally held our first london d3.js meetup.

Special thanks to @timruffles, @CiaranR, and Skimlinks people for providing the venue, pizzas, beers and a talk.

Here is the list of topics we mentioned during/after the meetup.

Introduction and Announcement.

• In December, we are going to have a joint Xmas party with other meetup groups.
• Register Google Group or check Lanyard for meetup minutes and future announcements.

Read more...

I had a pleasure of giving a presentation about dRuby with Masatoshi Seki, (I call him "Seki san") the author of the library, at this year's RubyConf, and I would like to take you through the journey we've been through.

In this blog post I will talk about

• How to prepare talk proposals
• Being inspired by other speakers to strengthen your talk
• Learning by coding

I hope this blog post gives you an overview of the conference from an angle of "Distributed and Parallel computing in Ruby" and also inspires you to submit a talk proposal of your own at next year's RubyConf in Miami.

Read more...

(Co-Authored with Claudio Ortolina.)

Here at New Bamboo no one enforces the use of specific development tools: team members choose their own text editor, shell and whatever else they feel can help them get their job done. Some of us have been working entirely in the shell for quite some time, using tools like Vim, Emacs, Screen and Tmux. We enjoy the freedom and flexibility this offers, but we recognize that switching to a text console can be painful, especially for people who have always used a graphical environment.

Read more...

During our last Londinium MMXII Hackathon some of the participants used d3.js, a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data.

Here are a couple of examples.

• Olympic Records Evolution = Olympic Medal Count vs. GDP Per Capita, by Year
• The Gap = The Gap between Gold and Silver medals

D3.js is different from other JavaScript graphing libraries (such as Raphael, Google Chart, Protoviz, etc) because it's not a graphing library! Instead of offering an abstraction layer of graphing components, it offers jQuery-like DOM manipulation and an easy way to bind data to DOM. The biggest advantage of this approach (in my opinion) gives flexible way to animate between different visualisation layer or dataset. Here is one amazing example.

Read more...

Many of us join the game as spectators, but a group of web designers and programmers decided to stay together in the centre of London to participate App making marathon called Londinium MMXII Hackathon.

“Hackathon” is the combination of “Hack” + “Marathon”. "Hack" does not mean attacking the Olympics website, but means to make some "Cool Apps", such as data visualisation, geo mashup, games, and even some gadgets. Since this is called "Marathon", these technologist gather for a whole weekend, and some of them stays over the venue with sleeping bags to work on their apps in a theme of London and summer of sports.

Read more...

Olympic Medal Rivalry

Introduction

Whether you bought many game tickets or are ready to pack your clothes to fly away from chaotic London, there is one thing you can not ignore during the Olympic game period: the medal counts race among countries. The IOC states that the competition is among individuals, not countries, but that's what most people get excited or emotional about.

I analysed the past Olympic data from various angles and created a few data visualisation apps. You can play with the apps so that you can find answers to the following questions everybody is curious about:

Read more...

New Bamboo's culture is about making ourselves and our clients happy, but we just don't stop at that. Recently, I joined an initiative to teach kids how to program. During 5 weeks, I joined Yali Sassoon and helped him hosting after-school programming lessons at Burlington Danes Academy School.

Once a week, we would get some brave volunteers (that's the kids!) who would let us introducing them to the wonderful world of computer programming. I had been for some time interested in the topic, and wanted to share my love for my trade with others. This was the perfect opportunity for me.

Read more...

Introduction

In the past, I've written a few blog posts about Japanese Ruby community and its cultural and language barrier from the rest of the world. As the country that gave birth to Ruby, there are a lot of interesting resource about Ruby. Here are some of the interesting books written about Ruby in Japanese.

• The world of Code = A book written by Matz about his view on programming
• Ruby Hacker's guide (RHG) = Page by page guide to Ruby internal source code.
• Write your own esoteric language in Ruby
• Garbage Collection - Algorithms and Implementations = Detailed explanation about various garbage collection techniques, coauthored by Narihiro Nakamura, the contributor of Ruby 1.9 GC

Read more...

Can you create a working application in 15 minutes?

I believe that yes indeed you can do that. The questions are: How?
What are the downsides?.

The how is pretty much using right tools for the job. For most of my
projects it means this:

-Ruby 1.9.2
-RVM
-Ruby on rails 3.1 +
-Bundler
-Devise
-MySQL
-jQuery
-Twitter Bootstrap
-ActiveAdmin
-Airbrake
-SendGrid
-Capistrano
-Ubuntu on a remote server

Read more...