I've been d.construct-ed (My trip to d.construct06) part 1

It's been about a day since I've returned from Brighton and I'm still slightly reeling from from the whirlwind of web-wonder that was d.construct06. It was a great chance to meet a whole load of web people, drink, learn about some really interesting stuff (web related of course) and then meet more people and drink some more. What more could you ask for!

It all started well with a pre-conference knees-up at the supperfiacially gothic "Heist" bar on Thursday. There, my comrade from NEP/A.N.D. Duncan and I met some great people within minutes - including Phil Winstanley, Dave Sussman and Dave Verwer. For starters, most of them were Microsoft developers and mostly from up North! So, at a conference where the most common latop was an iBook/powerbook we weren't alone. We had a few beers and good gas about techy and non-techy things - including me blabing on about the wonders of Reveal Records (in Derby) and the mighty Tunng - sorry guys! Even though I lightweight-ed and left pretty early I still woke up feeling pretty damn rough the next day!

So, we trundled round the corner to the Corn Exchange, only to be met by a queue of eager "geeks" - some already clutching their goody bags. The anticipation mounted and the queues lengthened. When inside the pretty spatious, laden with the said bags of stuff and refreshed by tea/coffee the real thing started, so here's the real review:

Session 1 : "Web Services: Fuelling Innovation and Entrepreneurship" by Jeff Barr

This was largely about the various Amazon Web Services. Most notably:

• The Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) - Essentially a huge online, distributed binary storage facility that you can use to store almost anything and get it back easily.
• The Amazon Mechanical Turk - described as "Atificial Artificial Intelligence". The idea is that you have a task you want a real human to do, you submit it into the "turk", someone (anywhere in the world) does it, sends the results back, and (if you're happy) you pay them. Brilliant!
• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) - basicly, lots of computing power for hire.

Mr.Barr's session was pretty interesting, despite largely being a sales pitch for Amazon. It's unlikely many us there would have access to the raw computing power needed for applications at that scale, but there's a few possible ideas and a few wow's to be had in looking at them. Also, the brilliant Sheep Market project - a collection of 10,000 (count them!) drawings of sheep gathered using the Mechanical Turk!

Whilst this was going on I managed to make use of the free wireless internet access to upload my first batch of pics to Flickr. As has been noted elsewhere the laptop of choice was of the Apple brand - so I guess I was in the minority there! But it was great to have this facility.

So far, so good, and my head was starting to clear!

More fun in part 2 later...

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