During the past couple of months I've been working on this Poke project for Orange. It's an amazing feat of web technology where you can record your own sounds and have them mashed up with your friends into songs.

We built this project using a Django backend, Sox, lame, ffmpeg and aubio for audio processing, amqp-js for realtime communication between flash and the server, red5 and an IVR system for note recording and lots of glue in the form of RabbitMQ.

For the song playback we use Standingwave, an open source AS3 library for sequencing and synthesising sounds.

Be sure to check out the auto tuner and phone recording, it's special. =)

Here's my incredibly silly attempt on Ting tings - That's not my name:

This is the original

I dare you to go make a better one! The Sound of Orange Rockcorps

My desk buddy Jamie had an idea to create a wordle out of your twitter stream. I know I'm late to the game with this one but I liked the outcome of mine. Going Just Awesome.

Yesterday we installed Bakertweet at Albion right across the road from work.

It's a little Twitter box hanging off the wall telling followers when fresh bread is coming out of the oven!

@aszolty did a great job with the arduino that talks to our bakertweet website, that in turn syncs the freshly baked croissants to twitter.

If you like your buns hot, and are stationed around Shoreditch, go to Twitter and follow @albionsoven.

There has been a lot of writing about how you should never give your email password to anyone. Usually it's the social networks that say they want to help you find your friends etc. I quite like OAuths restaurant analogy:

Giving your email account password to a social network site so they can look up your friends is the same thing as going to dinner and giving your ATM card and PIN code to the waiter when it’s time to pay.

I recently got an invitation for the location based social network Brightkite, and they had a quite elegant solution to this problem.

Since this is all publicly available information, I kind of think it's alright for them to do. (The question whether Twitter should expose this data about me is a different story.)

What Brightkite gets here is a map between their users and their Twitter accounts. And using the twitter API they can match my friends at twitter with other Brighkite users that has optionally supplied their twitter names.

This way I don't have to enter any password at all. Sure it only works for the networks that exposes my user friends lists publicly, but quite often this is the case anyways.

I think this idea could be pushed even further. Given that most users use the same usernames for all their social networks, Brightkite could actually just go to the Twitter API's and get see if there was a user named username and if it exists, ask me whether it was me. Here are some API's that could used:

• Twitter
• Last FM
• Flickr
• Digg

On the other hand, it is a bit creepy knowing that all this information about me is out there for anyone to read. I also think that anyone who uses these API's to get data about users need to make it in a transparent way so not to give the feeling that they are snooping around.