This blog has been gathering dust for quite a long time, but fear not, for these are good news... they may not be good news for you blog readers that haven't had a mind-blowing article to read in a long time (oh, the unhealthy ego :P), but they are great news for us, because we have been very busy, which made the blog drop to a lower priority for a while. Busy with what you may ask... I can't tell you... not yet... but I can let you in on some miscellaneous stuff that's been happening at Hive.

Luigi, Mario, Berlusconi, Panzerini!

In no particular order of importance, let's start with Panzerini. No, it's not a sandwich, it's a multiplayer artificial intelligence robot battle game. Where's the money in that, you may ask. It ain't in our pockets that's for sure, but that doesn't mean it wasn't worth it.

Long story short, we went on a roadtrip to Lisbon to participate in Sapo Codebits 2010 in the 48 hour programming competition. We needed a nifty Colony demo to use when we officially launch Colony, but we never really had the time to do it, so this seemed like the best opportunity to make a sprint and create one.

The idea was simple. Create an online arena where people can drop robots developed by themselves and watch them fight against other users' robots. The whole project was to be developed in Colony from the ground up, robots would be Colony plugins that could be dragged and dropped into the arena, which would be a simple HTML5 page (no Flash, no Canvas).

With Colony in hand we went on a road trip to Lisbon to participate in the competition, and arrived at the spot, only to find that there were no places to sit down or electrical outlets to power our laptops. This was a great opportunity to honour what sometimes appears to be a Portuguese tradition, and just blame the organization and quit the competition... but we were on a mission! We managed to get access to a small office, inside a garage, got an unprotected wireless network from some neighbour, and started coding.

Fourty-eight hours later, with very little sleep, and after eating a lot of chicken (it was near, it was cheap, and it was the only available food in that restaurant at that time), we had a functional version of Panzerini.

It ended up quite good for the time we invested in it, so we went quite confident for the presentation, only to land on our faces in the end. Turns out the competition was more of a stand-up comedy show, which was a great lesson for us, to remember to always understand the audience first. At the end of the day, every successful interaction is an exchange of value, be it in whatever shape of form. Even if you have something great to offer, it's worthless if it's not valuable to the receiver, and value may take the shape of something as simple as making that person laugh, as was the case of some awarded projects. Regardless, the first three places or so, went to great projects that truly deserved it, and in the end we walked out with a Colony demo in the bag ;).

The Hive Crisis Center

We had a big LCD television stuck in storage for over two years now. We used it in an exposition a long time ago, and never touched it again. After trying to drill holes in the wall, having to change drill bits, making a mess of the whole office, having to run to the electronics store a couple of times, and having to struggle with the TV provider's front-line support to make them come and replace a Set Top Box that was stalled for two years and couldn't update itself because the firmware was too old, we managed to hang the television in one of our walls and turn it into a Corporate TV, with our very own home-brewed company dashboard.

It is now being used to show statistics about the company, like number of commits, upcoming calendar events, ticket status changes, alert messages for when something bad happens, like one of our servers to stop responding, or simply broadcasting a video for everyone to see.

Just imagine how cool it is to have a live dashboard with your company's heartbeat, giving you an applause sound as it tells you are currently the top commiter of the day, or that a bug as just been closed, or to hear the sound of a siren as it alerts you that a server is down. At the very least, it makes you feel like you are working at the Pentagon.

For now I can't tell you much more about what's going on, mainly because I also have get some work done today... I'm sorry... but in case you are disappointed with the few revelations I have done in this post, here's some cuteness overload as compensation:

P.S: This is a photo of Luis Martinho's dog ;).

Pack your bags folks! The world is about to end, the Mayans were off by a year or so, and I don't think even them could foresee our end as "death by IP address shortage" at the time. Why the media hasn't picked up on this one as the soon to be apocalypse yet, is beyond me, but by the end of next year we will be running out of IP addresses to assign to stuff, which is kind of an inconvenience, since following the current trend, even my boxer shorts will be pingable any time soon.

If we do live to tell the tale, and IPv6 has indeed saved us all, we will have a gazillion of IP addresses to use, apparently more than enough for all the sensing and computing devices we are decorating our planet with. If you think we are in the era of information overload, you ain't seen nothin' yet. We are about to be sh*tstormed with a tidal wave of information the likes of the world as never seen. Twitter has done a marvelous job of flooding our beloved Internets with arguably valuable data, by dumping what's on everyone's mind, however irrelevant, onto the Web. It won't be long before everything is "tweeting" every single piece of relevant and/or irrelevant information to the Internet, from GPS devices, to cell phones, to toasters.

Web 3.0: Now with 532452% more Data (and peanuts, hopefully...)

We will have a lot of information on our hands and very little to do with it, or what we will able to do with it, will be with great effort. A paradigm shift is in order, and such is the promise of the Semantic Web, that of switching the Internet from a worldwide file server to a global database.

The problem with the Web nowadays, is that it's fine and dandy for retrieving information, but kind of sucks for retrieving knowledge. For example, I like to travel, but the planning and booking I have to do beforehand is always a huge pain (am I not an ungrateful bastard?). What I want is simple: I want to go to one or more locations, in a certain time range, with the cheapest transportation available with the shortest trip time, be accomodated in easily accessible spots, preferably near the center, with best rating for the lowest price. I know what I want, but here's what happens when I type that in Google:

What the hell am I supposed to do with these results? Read them, extract the information, cross reference it, apply my constraints mentally and hope to find a match? No friggin' way, I'm too lazy... especially when I know that this is a feasible query, that it's possible to compute my query and get a decent answer, if only data was described in a standard way. I was a Semantic Web atheist, as I always saw the concept as something invented by pot-smoking hippies from academia to keep their paper flow steady... but in May 2009, Wolfram|Alpha opened my eyes.

Couldn't See the Forest for the Trees...

Wolfram|Alpha is scaringly awesome, you can give it the most insane questions, and it will give you a decent answer most of the time. Like, hey, I wonder where the International Space Station is right now:

And the list of cool questions you can ask it just goes on and on:

• Big Mac + Coke
• What is the average speed of an unladen swallow?
• What is the weather for next sunday?
• How much would would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
• What was the population of Portugal in 1984?

Wolfram|Alpha accomplishes this by working on structured data sources, instead of flat pages of unstructured data. This way, it knows what the data is, what it means and what it's associated with, and can therefore cross different data sources to extract new knowledge. Imagine if a similar knowledge engine had access to every single piece of data on the Internet in a structured way. A lot of incredible things would be possible, and one of them, would be to get an answer to my god damn query. What if travel booking was as easy as asking a question like that and clicking the pay button? I stress, that this is more than possible, so there is no reason not to dream that high (or that low...).

Heigh-ho, Heigh-ho, Semantify the Web we Go, Tralalalala...

The question is, how to go about making the Web semantic. That's where the going gets tough... In order to annotate data with semantics, W3C proposes its Resource Description Framework (RDF) family of specifications. Basically you're supposed to use these to annotate your data so that it can be understood by computers. For example, if you had a travel agency website, annotating it in such a way, would bring my holy grail backpacking online service one step closer to reality, since its travel plans could be used as a data source. The huge problem is that producing this data is humongously painful, and there's little to gain from it from the point of view of who's annotating the data. Therefore, from my point of view, this bottom-up approach to the Semantic Web is just a fairy tale acid trip.

The solution is cleary top-down, this data has to be at least initially produced by machines, and later fine-tuned by humans. This is the approach used by Freebase, an open database of structured information, which was recently acquired by Google. Freebase initially harvested its data from unstructured data sources such as Wikipedia, and now relies on crowdsourcing for collaborative fine-tuning.

So what's my point? I honestly don't know... just want to shout out to my homies that the Semantic Web is "for reals", it's not a pipe dream, and it will come about faster than you expect, just still not sure in what shape or form, but definitely the one that offers the path of least resistance. Which I may speculate to be in the form of a killer Semantic Web Application that leaves huge amounts of open structured data in its trail, like a semantic "googlish" search engine that is incredible enough to break the muscle memory imprinted habit of using Google after every question mark that pops into one's head.