This Saturday my friends and I will be doing 24x24 for the 4th year. Watching 24 Season 4 in real time. This year obviously starts at 7am, which is going to be quite hard. The last time we had to start in the morning, Season 2 starting at 8am, we made the mistake of staying up far to late the night before. It was very hard to make it all the way through.
That will be a nice end to a manic few weeks. Yesterday we delivered the most recent piece of work to one of our main clients, MLA (the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council). We've been building an Institutions Server, a central database of institution contact details. It has several Web Services and an OAI Harvesting interface so that the data can be shared between several other MLA websites. The Institutions Server, while a relatively small project, will have quite a reach within this sector so I am very excited to see it finally out there and being used.
We have also started up the developer research days again, now that things are calming down. This is based on Google's model of ring fencing some time for everyone to do work that interests them but that might not prove to be commercial to the company. Each developer is supposed to do one day each month on something, although this tailed off for while during our busy period. Over the last few years we have ended up with some very commercial code out of these days, and it is always nice to take a break from the usual projects for something a little different.
Now that the Institutions Server has been delivered I will finally get round to mine next week. Still firming up what I will do, but looking forward to it a lot.
So that's what I've been up to recently and what's coming. Finally there are a few websites that I wanted to let you all know about.
1) The Clerks 2 Production Diaries
Much like the King Kong and Superman production diary videos, just with a lot more swearing and the wonderful Kevin Smith view on the world.
2) The DARPA Grand Challenge - or the modern Wacky Races
With $2 million up for the autonomous vehicle which completed the 140+ Mile course the quickest the competition this year looks a lot better than last, during which the furthest anyone got was a little over 7 miles. The event itself is on the 8th when the link above will cover everything. Unfortunately my favourite team, the Blue Team, who in a moment of madness decided that they would do it with a motorbike instead of a car, look like they won't make it through he qualifiers. But do go to their website and check out the videos of the riderless bike!
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