At FOSDEM we also announced a competition for the coolest hack using RDF, SPARQL and Tracker with the prize kindly sponsored by Codethink. The prize is a Google Nexus One.

After some discussion we’ve decided to open up the competition to everyone and extend the deadline to the 15th of March. So if this tutorial inspires a great idea, get it coded up and submitted! On #tracker on GIMPNet there are great bunch of hackers who can help you get your idea up and running.

There are no hard rules for the competition, we just want to see implementations of cool ideas. The code doesn’t have to be perfect, the only requirement is that the judges can check it out and run it on their systems. All entries should be submitted to tracker-competition@codethink.co.uk by the deadline.

RDF Beginner’s Guide from Rob Taylor on Vimeo.

Update!
Looks like I hit a bug in PiTiVi that caused the render to get mangled. I’ve rerendered and it should all be good now. If Vimeo is being slow for you , you can download the ogg here.

Edward, I promise to log a repro as soon as I can!

We’ll be digging behind the buzzwords, explaining what it’s all about and most importantly showing off cool real-world apps using this stuff. We’ll also announce a competition for the coolest app using Tracker and RDF, for which Codethink will sponsor a prize.

See you all there!

I’m looking for a streaming video provider that Codethink can use for streaming demos, talks etc. I want it to use HTML5 video with ogg or x264 if available and if not, fall back to Flash. Good quality streaming is a must and HD would be good. I’m happy to pay for the service.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks!

Over the next two weeks the Codethink team will be talking about and making releases of our R+D sprint. I think we’ve come up with some pretty exciting technologies, but I shall hold my tongue for now and let the team talk about it…

I present you the new Codethink website! My favourite new feature is that we aggregate blogs and tweets of all of us Codethinkers and dynamically weave them into the site, so it’s never stale.

Many thanks go to the awesome Raw Design Studio who designed our new logo, visual style and built the website and to our own Pete Charlton for the words.

In other news Pete has also had a promotion to Sales and Marketing Manager. Well done that man!

Mark Doffman
Mark has been consistently working on transforming AT-SPI (the GNOME Accessibility and UI automation technology) into a D-Bus based cross-desktop project. From nothing a year ago, working with Mike Gorse from Novell, he s now got something that more or less works and it’s getting a lot of focus and testing as we plan for GNOME 3.0. I’m looking forward to a brave new future for cross toolkit accessibility on the Linux desktop.

John Carr
John came to us from working on Conduit, and he s continued on his dream of making all the devices and web services of the world talk seamlessly to each other. John’s been in charge of pushing the Wizbit project along and now the core of this is pretty stable, he is going to be turning his eye to working on using Wizbit for synchronisation.

Jürg Billeter
A stunning hacker who needs no introduction! Jürg’s been continuing to hack on Vala and it s getting more and more mature each week. His main work, however has been on the stunning tracker-vstore, a branch of tracker that brings full RDF capabilities, which Philip van Hoof has been blogging about. I’ll be writing a biggish blog post on this soon and what RDF could really mean for the desktop experience.

Karl Lattimer
Karl came to us from working on UI at Nokia. At Codethink he’s continued to focus on graphics technology and user experience, bringing his keen eye to Wizbit, amongst other things. One of the most impressive things I’ve seen for a while was Karl s kinetic scrolling widget for the Wizbit timeline view. I m hoping we can turn this into something more general in the future.

Ryan Lortie
Another hacker who needs no introduction, Ryan’s our low-level infrastructure guy. He s been working on GNIO, a library to do network operations using GIO stream abstractions and continuing to hack on DConf, which is gradually coming together. He s also been helping Jürg out with Vala.

Mukund Sivaraman
I knew Muks from his GIMP work, and his work on Herb is really impressive. Muks is mostly working on top secret stuff that we can t talk about, unfortunately!

Peter Charlton
Our documentation guy. This guy knows how to write and knows how to take something vague and unintelligable and turn it into crystal clarity. Invaluable!

Of course, through all this I’ve been here, dancing about architecture and generally doing the best I can to hold the whole shebang together. I’ve been mostly working on some top secret stuff which hopefully will be getting opened up soon. I’ll dance about that then.

Update
Looks like my blog got hacked and this post was replaced by spam. Wordpress now upgraded and I’ve recreated this post, updating some of the links.

If you’d like to just chat about this or anything else relating to Codethink, I’m reachable on IRC (GIMPnet and Freenode with nick robtaylor) and on XMPP and plain old email at rob.taylor@codethink.co.uk.

I hope identi.ca gets SMS support by next time. Either that or maybe just one conference where the network doesn’t keel over and die at the sight of a few hundred developers.

I was kinda surprised to find quite a few people who didn’t know about stow. If you ever need to make install something, use this.

The sides from my talk are now up on wizbit.org. The wiki’s pretty empty at the moment, but we’re slowly filling it up…