Author Archives: Darren Shaw

Hursley Car Show

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Hursley has many active clubs, catering for pretty much everyone’s interest, from model railways to yogalates (I don’t know what this is, but they have it on the OC so it must be good). I’ve never really taken that much interest in any of them, but you couldn’t help but see the Hursley Motor Club this morning, as they were running a mini car show for classic and handbuilt cars in front of the lab.

Hursley Cars

The best one has to be Emerging Tech’s, Andy, who custom built this bike from scratch. He assures us it has some unique features such as “single-sided anti-dive front suspension”. I think he was an original maker before makers even knew they existed. If you know where to find them, there’s someone, somewhere in Hursley who has done anything you can think of.

Andy\'s Bike

IBM Blog Map

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I’ve been playing with doing a Google Maps mashup on IBM’s internal blog system, showing where all the bloggers are posting from. It actually turned out to be pretty simple. We have an LDAP directory (called Bluepages) which stores information about all employees, including their work location. Another system stores information about each work location, such as longitude and latitude of the sites. That means I can get a grid reference for every user’s base location and plot them on the map. It’s not perfect, some people don’t actually work at their base location, but it gives a good approximation.

Blog Mashup

Clicking on the map pins lists all the bloggers who have recently posted at that location. I’ve got a few ideas of how to improve it and eventually I’d like to publish a live version of it outside the firewall. I don’t think there’s anything confidential in it, as I’m not going to show any blog content, but there may be some privacy issues around people’s IDs. I think it’d be nice to show IBMers activity throughout the day though.

More IBM Blog Visualisation

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A few months ago I wrote about a visualisation of IBM’s blog social network. Using information about who commented on who in our internal blogs, I generated data for a social network diagram. It was kind of interesting, but not very user friendly. It quickly developed into a complicated diagram (as the nodes and links built up) until it became hard for a normal user to tell much from it.

So, I decided to play around with a new way of visualising the same data, showing pictures of the people commenting, scaled to represent the strength of the link between that person and the blog. More comments, in both directions, strengthens the relationship and makes the picture bigger. It’s also more personal, as each IBM blogger gets their own page with pictures of all their connections. Apart from the information contained in the image scaling, it’s nice just to be able to see on a single page what all your blog contacts actually look like.

Blogometer

– Darren Shaw (Emerging Technology Services, IBM Hursley)

Geeks in Florida

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A lot of the work I do within Hursley’s Emerging Technology group is around advanced collaboration. With industry taking blogs, wikis, instant messaging and social networking seriously, it’s an area where expertise has become more and more in demand. One of the big collaboration events that takes place is Lotusphere in Orlando, Florida, which kicks off today.

Last year I was there to demonstrate some of the social network visualisation and analysis applications we’d developed in the lab. I’m not there this year, but I’m still planning on keeping up to date with events. Kelly Samardak is there and her Lotusphere Blog will no doubt present a different and much more interesting and personal spin on what’s going on there. Don’t expect any corporate waffle from Kelly, but she works in an IBM team that has done a lot of our best collaboration work so is in the best place to get the inside story.

I know there’s going to be a few very interesting annoucements, so it’s something worth keeping an eye on.

IBM Battle of the Bands

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IBM has a “Battle of the Bands” competition going on at the moment. Using our internal podcasting system, people working in IBM, who also have some musical talent can submit their performances. Everyone then gets to vote for which band/singer they liked best. I’ve been amazed at the quality of the musicians working their day job at IBM. A lot of the bands are quite serious and sell/perform their music regularly and have their work professionally recorded.

A couple of the favourite IBM bands I’ve heard so far are: Seven Ender and Lisa Swain.

Hursley’s Pervasive Lab

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Here in the depths of Hursley’s D-Block we have a pervasive lab. The lab is used to show lots of cool bits of technology that’s normally carried, attached to, or embedded in people and sometimes even animals. The clever bit (and the thing that makes it different from lots of other pervasive technology labs) is that it’s all connected together via some of IBM’s middleware software. That means that new bits of kit can be integrated into the lab really quickly. It’s normally a matter of configuration rather than development.

The lab had been overflowing with toys and needed room to grow. So before Christmas, some new furniture arrived. This meant that a big tidy and a rebuilding of all the kit was in order. Mid-clean, the lab kind of looked a little messy, I hadn’t realised how much stuff was actually in there.

lab before cleaning

By the end though, it was starting to look pretty slick. We have some snazzy new signs and benches. All the kit will soon be up and running and I’ll try and write about some of the stuff we have in here.

pervasive lab

Hursley’s Japanese Garden

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If you’re working in Hursley, sat a couple of centimeters in front of your screen, coding away all day, where do you go for a break? Well, Hursley has a Japanese garden, with a fish pond, fountain, trees and bits of modern art. It’s a cool place to get away from the technology and a bit of peace and quiet.

hursley\'s japanese garden

Here’s a quick video clip of the garden.

– Darren Shaw (Emerging Technology Services, IBM Hursley)